There's no way you can defend the Iranian leadership. Toppling them is not shameful, just like ousting Saddam Hussein was IMO reasonable. The problem is what happens afterwards.
And you think the US, now currently sliding into authoritarianism itself, will install an enlightened democracy upon the Iranians?
This is WW3 in slow motion. The goal is to takeover Eurasia and contain the Russian-Chinese alliance by eating away at the edges and removing all unaligned or hostile energy sources.
Remember how much toppling Sadam Hussein, killing a million Iraqis, rounding up and torturing thousands of random Iraqi civilians, destroying most of the country's vital infrastructure, and selling their oilfields to American companies at bargain prices helped Iraqis? It's going to be the same for Iran. There's going to be massive suffering.
But at the end of 1 milion deaths (est.) Iraqi oil was dollarized.
Saddam had been selling dollars for euros and talking about shifting his oil to other currencies for years. 2003 put an end to that - it was literally the first thing that was done by the provisional Govt. was to make sure all Iraqi oil was sold in dollars.
The Petrodollar was not in jeopardy anymore, and for the post-1971 system, that was essential. Same thing is now happening with Iran and Venezuela. The real goal is - China must not be allowed to have substantial sources of energy that are not priced in dollars.
Except not, the Iranian revolutionary system is very much designed around the desire to be able to rapidly replace people. The list of targets for a decapitation strike might just be way too long to be feasible.
It's the biggest military buildup since 2003. Kinda looks like they plan on overthrowing the regime. Which would be amazing for world peace considering Iran is building drones for Russia and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. But we'll see...
Yeah -- it only took a world war, massive global alliances, and tens of millions of deaths. Also, I’m not sure how political and military competence from about a century ago has any relevance to today.
> 30,000 in 2 days - half the 2-year death toll of Gaza ; With no artillery , air-strikes or heavy weapons, without million-man armies facing off in pitched battles, without health system collapsing with 100s of thousands of injuries in 48 hours, photos or satellite imagery of mass graves and bodies littering the streets
A lot of them were armed as well based on the death toll for security forces. Again where is the evidence for all this. The Iranian government published the names and details for the 3000-odd death-toll they claimed. The 30,000 number is from diaspora, citing 'anonymous health and government officials' - Who all seem to be linked to Pahlavi, Israel and US-backed sources all trying to manufacture a case for the war they are now waging. If the real number is > 10x then giving names should be very easy for CIA and Mossad.
All this is just a excuse, when this whole war is about Israel's national security interest and hegemonic ambitions. The "negotiations" were entirely over the Nuclear program, ballistic program and proxy forces - The protestors, human rights, democracy none of it were even mentioned. Netanyahu didn't visit the White House 6 times over the last year to advocate for the protestors.
I can vouch for people still there. I’m a Brit who married an Iranian who still has a large family in Iran. With the exception of one religious aunt who is married to a military man, all the Iranian family and friends we know have been hoping for intervention. We've had emotional messages from my wife’s cousin (a new mum) describing looking out of her apartment every night for the past month praying for planes overhead. Take that anecdata for what it’s worth.
1. Not everybody lives in the direct nearing of the bombing/conflict hotspot
2. They weren’t doing that great before anyway (because, you know, the islamic totalitarian theocratic dictatorship)
3. They haven’t been doing great at all lately (because, you know, protests and turmoil and the violent repression from the aforementioned islamic totalitarian theocratic dictatorship)
Agreed. I had an Iranian colleague also reach out who was ecstatic about this news. The hacker in me is curious to see how it all unfolds, as well as to see all the curious discussion that arises on this forum.
wild, and probably incorrect, assumption. as any moderately educated italian know, it’s not like italy lacks groups that push similar events on a semi-routine basis, perhaps even inspired by the “délégation inattendue” of french anarchists who carried out a comparable action in France around the olympics.
Such groups are manipulated. Easy enough to do, especially if you provide money in exchange for doing things. Russia has been caught doing it in Ukraine, why in the world would you think it couldn't happen elsewhere? There are enough desperate suckers out there.
yeah, but no credible connection has been revealed or proven. there might well be a teapot orbiting the Moon, but without evidence it’s just random speculation
With social media encouraging and promoting divisive bullshit it’s really not hard for a hostile power to influence local groups to do their bidding.
Social media should be the main target of all these defense groups, but sadly politicians themselves derive their power from it so it’s unlikely anything tangible will be done.
The bad actors here are the social media platforms who host and promote divisive content since it generates more engagement thus ad revenue. Those are very much in reach of law enforcement and regulations can be passed to forbid such engagement-maximizing behavior. Simply moving back to chronological feeds of accounts the user explicitly chose to follow would be a big first step in curbing the spread of propaganda.
But this imposes an effectively impossible burden on them. You can't build a platform with anything resembling free expression without inherently creating a platform that can be used for evil.
take my website for example mrtno.com - it's hosted in europe, ok. but under what legislation the domain register is based? and where is the dns server?
those a crucial information. and they are missing.
people are so fucked up by consumerism that they expect to be just consumers also in their sociality... like they expect that social relations to be like commodities.
in consumer societies people flee real freedom's anxiety by conforming to market ways, treating connections as consumption not production. lasting bonds need effort patience vulnerability, all anti-consumer virtues.
Fromm said that in market societies love and relations follow the commodity and labor market exchange pattern. they want low-effort replaceable humans. So they became low-effort replaceable humans.
absolutely, the capacity of the US and their useless european minions to side with evil while cloaking geopolitical violence in the language of human rights is not hypocrisy by accident but policy by design, activated selectively when victims are convenient and ignored when perpetrators are allies. i am very sad for iranian protesters, but the west does not need to instrumentalize their suffering.
please, can somebody in the US or Israel have an "are we the baddies" epiphany?
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