261–270 of 1001 posts
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That's your money that's being Squandered yet you have no say in the decision to wage this war, nor your representative.
There was an election in 2024.
And if a choice between 2 people that have been thoroughly vetted by elites is your definition of democracy, you have a sad sad view of what's possible.
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Google isn't reliable. They'll present you whatever the current thing dictates, without any nuance whatsoever. Sure you can hunt down some exceptions here and there but post 2020, most publications are inviolacy captured by various interests that aren't yours or mine. But of course there are regime critics but apart from those already captured by US/Israeli intelligence are either people without any perspective or th…
Yeah Iranians who don’t want to be oppressed have no agency or human dignity, or deserve to decide their own faith. They must be either captured by US, lack perspective or not smart enough. That’s some 19th century imperialistic attitude right there. You might want to reflect on that.
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Great, but that is nit-picking---I'm describing a cultural trait present in Iran which makes certain decisions seem irrational to Westerners.
I’m suggesting by referring to Iran as an Arab country, you have demonstrated you know very little about the Middle East.
The Iranian diaspora around the world is celebrating. Here's the scene in Berlin: https://youtu.be/NSbx_0mtk80?si=MJ_Bfvx8gVd1P1mm They've waited a very long time for this moment!
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Wikipedia:
"Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
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Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.
Plenty of people died under Saddam, too. Do you think the average Iraqi would choose to go back and live under Saddam?
I wonder how old the rest of the commentators are. I watched the Shock and Awe campaign. I watched Saddam fall. I remember thinking this is great. Years later, I understand it was a complete folly. Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.
Every new generation in America learns this same lesson the hard way. You and your children will be paying the bill for this war for the rest of your life. Oil and defense companies will get richer. Nothing will change in the middle east.
Iranian regime-allied forces were a big part of why Iraq was such a quagmire.
The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting from the Sunni~Shia schism that it once was.
Most of the remaining powers are willing to actually engage in diplomacy with Israel & prefer secular groups to Islamist groups.
There's still personality conflicts, such as the one growing between the heads of Saudi Arabia & the UAE, but the general trend seems to be very promising.
I wonder how old the rest of the commentators are. I watched the Shock and Awe campaign. I watched Saddam fall. I remember thinking this is great. Years later, I understand it was a complete folly. Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.
One thing I notice on here is very few people understand counter intuitive stuff. As you said.. plenty of evidence where on the surface it seems good. But in reality it turns out to make the people in the region worse off.
And we see this across the board. A canonical one that remains prevalent: "If only people would've come out and voted for Kamala in 2024, we wouldn't be in this mess". But then if you follow the pattern, with the candidate she was and what she would've done, this would've secured an ultra-MAGA victory in 2028 (and likely already by 2026 midterms). One more extreme, more devious, more intelligent from the get-go than the current one. People like to cling to "but you don't know that for sure", which is true, but we do know that with about 90% certainty. Betting on 10% is an awful idea and is indeed what has gotten you to where you're at.
It's the single biggest reason for the huge power shift from the US to China. Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. Pain today for gain over time. Of course there are counterexamples, but by and large this holds.
In this case, sure, many Iranians will be happy for a day - especially overseas. So that's what people focus on. People have entirely lost the ability to think realistically in years. Of course part of this is biological, we're monkeys. But there are many reasons to believe that this ability has greatly declined over the last 50 years, particularly in the West and especially in the US.
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That's your money that's being Squandered yet you have no say in the decision to wage this war, nor your representative.
There was an election in 2024.