He doesn't need anyones permission to do so, go ahead no one is stopping you! If you feel so strongly about it, lead by example. Perhaps others will follow, maybe even China. Regardless backup your sentiment with actions!
There is a specific, unilateral action that he is taking described in the article.
And the "why are they developing AI if they think it's so dangerous" argument is neither new nor persuasive. They're developing it because (1) they think the potential benefits are as great as the potential risks, and they know that if they aren't one of the actors on the frontier (2) they won't be able to propose meaningful solutions and (3) their opinions won't be taken seriously. Amodei is in rooms with powerful people to propose these things because Anthropic is successfully developing frontier models. The heads of various NGOs and advocacy groups that are concerned with AI safety but not themselves working on those systems are... nowhere, writing pamphlets and blogs that not you nor I nor anyone in Congress will ever read.
The Houthis also explicitly allow Chinese vessels and Chinese ships have been able to traverse the red sea without issue. Which means China actually has more ability to access oil than other countries right now.
I suspect the Chinese won’t be happy with the pipeline and refinery attacks on Saudi Arabia but i also assume that there will still be plenty of Chinese bound oil for the foreseeable future.
China has a backdoor for oil from Russia and Iran (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-ax...) which is part of what feeds their massive reserves. Russia and Iran have an interest in continuing this trade since they're sanctioned by the US and most crude is priced in USD. It's not a major source of their oil due to threats of sanctions from the US, but in a pinch they can ramp it up if needed.
Yeah Chinese oil reserves were much larger than was publicly known. They immediately cut imports by a massive amount as soon as the war started and have been able to keep it up for months. Without that the economic fallout would have been far greater.
Not that they are doing it for this reason, but they have done a lot to shield trump from the consequences of his stupid war. But those supplies can only hold for so long; things can get much worse for the world economy in the near future.
China took 5.5 million barrels per day of demand off of the table overnight. A quarter of what went through the strait. They single-handedly stopped catastrophe by months.
Even with that, global strategic petroleum reserves are quickly draining. Last I looked, the US was down to ~290M. There is a legal limit of 250M (though laws don’t matter anymore). The structural floor is also estimated to be somewhere north of 200M.
The world is about to not be able to meet all oil demand for any price.
20+ years of preparation does a pretty good job though.
I often wonder about the world we would live in if the Brooks Brothers Riot had not succeeded. That appears to have been the turning point for the fall of the USA, and even more sadly, humanity.
Don't think that's 100%. They do have a ton of stockpiles and timed additional buys very well, but their reduction in oil imports (9%?) appears to be actual usage drops rather than running down stockpiles. They're at much higher levels now than when this kicked off.
Which if correct is a crazy display of flexibility in the economy
> Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. It's an intolerable premise and if the price to be paid is global oil catastrophe it's a price well worth paying
Says you.
All other nuclear nations behave (even Pakistan and India, which are at each other throat all the time). What makes you think that Iran won't? It will also have Russia and China keep a lid on them, same as North Korea. And I don't buy the "Iran is different" gospel. North Korea and China have completely different mindsets than the western world and still play ball.
Additionally, if Iran really is that adamant in getting nukes, I can see them asking some enriched material to Russia as a payment to the 100s if not 1000s of drones they are giving them. They share a "land" border through the Caspian sea and smuggling a few 10s of kilos of enriched material would be relatively easy.
Finally, it is not a good proposition if the hypotethical benefits will be reaped by US/Israel while the suffering is globally spread.
Russia, China, the U.S., North Korea, Israel. These are all countries that absolutely do not behave. Each commits atrocities on a regular basis. Them having nukes makes accountability much more difficult.
Just to be clear: the current situation is a huge mess caused by one deranged leader.
> Just to be clear: the current situation is a huge mess caused by one deranged leader.
Agreed. The situation is worse than before the U.S. attack.
Iran has proven they can control the straight, threatening the world's energy supply. This is a more powerful weapon than a nuke (which multiple agencies, including U.S. intel, said they didn't have when this all started). New leadership in Iran is more galvanized against the U.S. than ever.
The U.S. already lost this war. Iran is dictating terms. Allies in the region have seen that the U.S. cannot protect them, and are making other accomodations, reducing U.S. influence in the region and beyond.
And you're getting downvoted because the truth is too unpleasant.
Everyone else realized that the world wasn't ready for anything but appeasement, our idiot didn't understand and pushed it into open conflict. Didn't change the basic situation, though.
Trump sure is an idiot, but it seems somewhat likely that Netanyahu pressured him to perform this particular idiocy that is also against his previous anti-war attitude - one of the few things that was good about his first term.
> Trump sure is an idiot, but it seems somewhat likely that Netanyahu pressured him to perform this particular idiocy that is also against his previous anti-war attitude - one of the few things that was good about his first term.
Turns out the last 6 or US presidents were presented the same stupid pitch and guess who finally fell for it...
> The U.S. already lost this war. Iran is dictating terms. Allies in the region have seen that the U.S. cannot protect them, and are making other accomodations, reducing U.S. influence in the region and beyond.
Let me break it down some for you, and anyone else who may be interested:
1) Iran is dictating terms
Look how often Trump has changed his story on how long the war will last [0]:
> March 2, We will easily prevail. We're already substantially ahead of our time projections
> March 9, We're ahead of our initial timeline by a lot. I would say that we probably would not have thought after a month we'd be here
> March 17, We'll be leaving in pretty much the very near future
> March 31, I think two or three weeks
> April 1, I'm pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion
> June 11, We just made a great settlement of the war with Iran
> Aug. 6, I think it's going to end pretty soon
Now he's sayign the war will be over right after the midterms [1].
Then there's all the times he said the straight was open, when Iran still was able to strike ships trying to transit.
Does that sound like someone who is in control of events? I've never heard a U.S. president who was wrong so many times.
2) Allies in the region have seen that the U.S. cannot protect them
> During the conflict, Iran reportedly carried out attacks or hostile actions against multiple countries and targets across the region, including Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman—where specific incidents involved ports and ships—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, the British overseas territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, and the West Bank. Additional alleged activity was reported in Azerbaijan, while maritime targets included vessels of the United States Navy and Thai-flagged ships operating in the region. [2]
The above page includes a detailed list of all of the above attacks [3] and caulaties [4]. More ally citizens have been killed than U.S. military personel.
Trump even threatened to bomb an ally at one point:
> President Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Oman - a US ally - if it "gets in the way" of his administration's own talks with Iran, Fox News reports. [5]
And now the war is expanding, with the Saudis, a U.S. ally, being attacked:
> Yemen's Tehran-backed Houthis attacked four cities in the south of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, wounding more than 70 people and setting oil installations ablaze. [6]
The Saudis and even some of our European allies are restricting U.S. air traffic [7]
3) and are making other accomodations
Regional powers are making alliances amongst themselves, alliances that do not include the Unites States:
> The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, formally the Mecca Defence Alliance, is a defence pact between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed into force on 7 August 2026 [8]
4)reducing U.S. influence in the region and beyond
China is using this as an opportunity to increase their influence in the region:
> Iran expresses willingness to continue diplomatic negotiations but vows to defend its sovereignty firmly, appreciating China's role in regional peace and seeking deeper cooperation with China. [9]
The U.S. has shown itself as incapable of securing shipping in this straight, and, by implication, other strategic straights. Countries have seen how having U.S. bases in their territories become a liability, drawing enemy fire, enemy fire that the U.S. is not able to intercept. This will echo for a loong time.
A large part of U.S. influence, and related military and economic power, was build-up over 80 years. Eighty Years of alliances and goodwill. And all that is very much in decline.
> Just to be clear: the current situation is a huge mess caused by one deranged leader.
Sorry that's just dead wrong. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. I mean you could simply add Netanyahu and make your statement incorrect here. Nevermind all the other actors, Iran's deranged death cult, and more.
my reflex was to think that sounds like a lie israel would tell to get trump to go to war with iran, but i realize my reflexes aren't always right, so i looked it up and it turns out, yes, it's obviously an israeli lie and the only reason you'd believe it is because you really want to.
Hamas is claiming a total of around 70k. Israel is claiming a total of over 20k combatants. Thus at most Israel killed something under 50k innocents, and probably a lot less.
Not every, but I hope it is hard to deny that concentration of radicalized members of Hamas is very high in that area, they historically use civilians as human shield, thus casualties.
> They share a "land" border through the Caspian sea and smuggling a few 10s of kilos of enriched material would be relatively easy.
I'm not a nuclear weapons expert but from what I understand the United States and others are pretty easily able to identify where enriched material comes from. Also we probably have eyes on the material in general and can see where it is being moved. It has to be stored in places, put into a missile, &c.
But if your argument were to be taken to be correct you're also highlighting the problem with the JCPOA. Well, one of them at least.
Well that's a big IF. Iran wasn't allowing inspections, also we shouldn't need a special deal with Iran or else they build nuclear bombs and try to kill people.
But what I meant was that if a weapon was used we'd be able to identify the signature of the material used and pinpoint the exact location on earth that it came from. In other words, if Russia "easily" (again that's an another feather in the cap agains the JCPOA) sent material to Iran and they used it and built a bomb and used it we'd know it came from a Russian mine. Of course they could maybe steal material from somewhere else and then Russia could transport that but hey, look where we're at. We've got Russia who invaded Ukraine supplying nuclear material to Iran to build a bomb. Maybe we shouldn't be on team Russia/Iran yea?
Sorry I can't view the article b/c of the paywall also because Jeff Bezos sucks.
But the Iranians aren't stupid, they just moved the research to "military sites" and then denied access. Sometimes I think the UN and some of these agencies are run by people who grew up in very manicured gardens with their fancy law degrees and filet mignon and can't use their imagination to understand how someone might deceive them lol.
But this still begs the question - why do we need to have some sort of deal in the first place? Why does Iran of all countries need to have this special treatment where they threaten to build nuclear weapons unless we all do or give them something. Other countries don't do that.
> why do we need to have some sort of deal in the first place? Why does Iran of all countries need to have this special treatment where they threaten to build nuclear weapons unless we all do or give them something.
Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty ages ago which put certain limits on what they could do. Other countries had growing concerns that Iran wasn't living up to that treaty, and those violations (plus some other stuff) resulted in a bunch of sanctions being placed on Iran.
Eventually Iran got a president who requested an international agreement that would ease both the sanctions Iran was under and the fears other countries had over their nuclear program. After lots and lots of negotiations they settled on the Joint Plan of Action which did a pretty good job.
I don't think Iran was being treated as all that special here and we'd see similar events play out if any country under the NPT started building up its nuclear program, especially if other countries thought that country was unstable/terroristy enough that the idea of them having a bunch of nukes was extra scary AND they also felt an agreement could be reached that would help make them less frightened.
Sorry I do not follow this line of reasoning at all. Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Then they started a nuclear program, then they wanted some sort of special treaty, and yet they aren't being treated specially or differently than other countries?
Iran signed a treaty that let them have a nuclear program but with rules. Iran didn't follow the rules so they got in trouble. New president comes in and agrees to follow rules if it means they won't be in so much trouble anymore and works with a bunch of countries on a new agreement. That's pretty much just the standard treatment isn't it?
The new agreement itself was kind of impressive in some ways. It's really long. There's lots of special provisions for making sure Iran does what they're supposed to do and detailing what would happen if they don't because they had a sketchy history, but otherwise it just meant that Iran followed rules just like other countries do and they weren't punished like other rule following countries weren't. It took a new agreement to get there, but things were basically back to normal
If it's just standard treatment can you name the other countries where they agreed to the rules, didn't follow them, and then wanted a specific treaty in order to keep them following the rules?
Why not just not have a treaty and they just follow the rules? I think you're jumping through some hoops here to justify the need for the JCPOA when at the end of the day Iran needs to simply acquiesce to the international community and no longer pursue nuclear weapons. Of course they also need to stop murdering people throughout the region too. Nuclear disarmament is just one step.
Iran themselves said they enriched uranium up to 40%-60%. The US offered "free nuclear fuel forever" to get them to stop and they also refused. I can find sources for you if you'd like but both of these were widely reported.
> can you name the other countries where they agreed to the rules, didn't follow them, and then wanted a specific treaty in order to keep them following the rules?
First, keep in mind that Iran is very different today from when they signed that treaty. It was signed before the Iranian Revolution. A lot happened between the signing and when Iran approached the international community. By comparison, North Korea violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty too, and sanctions were put them as well, but they never came back to the table to reach a new agreement with the rest of the world (although they do have some kind of deal with russia I think)
Iran also didn't even want to "just keep following the rules". They accepted extra rules because at that point other countries didn't trust them. We don't monitor other countries like we did with Iran under the JCPOA. Iran wasn't demanding that we give them a bunch of free stuff either. They wanted sanctions lifted, but not even all the sanctions Iran wanted lifted were agreed to.
Other countries don't get to just tell other countries what to do. All we can do is encourage them to do the things we want by making offers or punish them for not doing what we want through things like sanctions. I mean, technically we can also use the CIA to interfere in their government but we already did that in Iran and it hasn't worked out so well for anybody.
Iran had reached a pretty good agreement with the world on the future of their nuclear program. It wasn't perfect for anybody, it was a compromise after all, but Iran followed the new agreement. Then Trump threw it all away because he was convinced that he could make a "better deal" and that was when the US offered Iran weird things like "free nuclear fuel" as part of Trump's new deal. I guess Iran just felt that Trump's deal was garbage even with the random extras Trump tried to use to entice them to go along with it. Frankly, considering how often Trump cheats people, I wouldn't agree to a deal with him either.
> Iran also didn't even want to "just keep following the rules". They accepted extra rules because at that point other countries didn't trust them. We don't monitor other countries like we did with Iran under the JCPOA. Iran wasn't demanding that we give them a bunch of free stuff either. They wanted sanctions lifted, but not even all the sanctions Iran wanted lifted were agreed to.
I don’t want to go in circles here so I’ll pull this piece out because it’s the crux of the issue. Iran should not pursue the development of nuclear weapons. There is no need for a treaty or special treatment. They should simply not do it. That’s it. We don’t need to have a pretty good agreement. They just don’t do the action. The world distrusts them because they’re earned that distrust.
It's funny reading literature from the mega hawks in US politics during the Cold War.
Descriptions of the Soviet leadership basically word for word use the same apocalyptic terms used for the ayatollahs/IRGC by current neocons about Iran. Just swap in "Islamist" for "Communist" as the current ideology that makes any kind of realpolitik impossible.
"These leaders aren't rational like previous adversaries, they don't fear annihilation, in fact they want catastrophe to prove their own fatalist belief system. There can be no negotiation with this sort of enemy, their singular goal is our destruction even at the cost of their own lives."
It's always different this time, and all assumptions about self-serving human nature need to be thrown out the window. Anyone who thinks force isn't the only solution is a naively deluded suicidal peacenik. All out war right now on our terms is the only rational way to avoid world destruction.
I keep wondering about this western worldview where they keep equating a militant failed state with the largest democracy in the world. I can't fathom why they do it.
And you think Iran will get a bomb and be peaceful? They're already backing multiple genocides. A bomb is immunity from retaliation--until Israel can't tolerate the situation anymore and blows them off the map.
> Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. It's an intolerable premise
Actions have consequences. The continual attack on the sovereignty of countries around the world has made nuclear weapons one of the few ways to avoid being a client state of the US at the expense of your own population. Iran has figured out another method it seems.
This is blowback. The simple lesson that we refuse to learn.
They don't announce their secret nuclear weapons programs before they are complete (though they are sometimes discovered), but some countries have violated international law and developed them, precisely to protect their sovereignty:
- North Korea
- Israel
- India
- Pakistan
All retain their sovereignty, though I can't prove any causal effect and certainly nuclear weapons isn't the only cause.
Others have pursued them, includng Libya, South Africa, etc. Libya agreed to surrender their program, and then their government was deposed with Western help. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons (left over from being occupied by the USSR) in exchange for peace from Russia, and you can see what happened. That doesn't encourage the next person to give up theirs.
India and Pakistan both rushed their programs back in the 40s/50s ( or maybe later I can't recall off the top of my head). Libya and South Africa were negotiated away. That leaves Israel probably from the, what, 70s or 80s? And North Korea was supported by Russia and China. I'm not sure you could consider any of those countries to be "pursuing nuclear weapons" today. Plus by that logic you'd have to throw in the US, UK, China, Soviets, and France too.
So when you sort of set aside countries from prior to, idk, 1980s ish you don't really have anyone at least publicly (to your point) pursuing nuclear weapons. However it's not just the enrichment of uranium which is tightly controlled it's also the missile technology to deliver the weapons. Keeping a nuclear program secret these days I think is quite a bit more difficult than in the past.
So when you look around today you've got Iran that we know of pursuing a nuclear program. I'm not sure anyone else is by virtue of how difficult (I think?) it would be to do so undetected. Though there are countries (Japan and Korea come to mind) who we think have the ability to scale up a program very quickly.
Japan and South Korea literally have 100s of American military bases on their territory. You really think they are sovereign nations who can pursue an independent nuclear program?
> You really think they are sovereign nations who can pursue an independent nuclear program?
Yes? Are you really sitting here telling South Korea, Japan, Germany, and more that they’re not sovereign nations because they choose to have American military bases on their home soil?
> India and Pakistan both rushed their programs back in the 40s/50s
India worked on them on and off for decades and first tested one in 1998, and IIRC Pakistan matched them soon after.
North Korea was in the 2000s.
> So when you sort of set aside countries from prior to, idk, 1980s ish you don't really have anyone at least publicly (to your point) pursuing nuclear weapons.
I'm not going through the comment correcting all of it.
Yes supported by Russia and China they got the keys they needed for the delivery mechanism (ballistic missiles). But the problem with North Korea is they threatened to kill hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea if anyone stopped them from building their bomb. South Korea didn't want that to happen and China would have fought against American forces had we tried anything in North Korea. Not much we can do.
For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, I encourage them to lookup when India, Pakistan, and North Korea developed nuclear weapons - you will find the answers in an instant.
> Ukraine never had nuclear weapons. Russia is the sole legal successor of the USSR and these were all Russian nukes on Ukrainian territory.
Structuring the breakup so that the nukes are Russia's is not really different than Ukraine giving up the nukes on its territory.
Where did they draw the line? Obviously not all USSR assets are now Russian assets, as Ukraine still has (or had) its own stockpile of Soviet era weapons, and other things like Soviet era airfields.
This is over simplified to the point of being misleading/wrong. Russia was the legal successor of the USSR for purposes of diplomatic continuity, but the other Soviet successor states divided portions of the Soviet military/equipment, split Soviet debt obligations, etc on a case by case basis.
Oh, those magical "Nuclear launch codes" - that turned out to be set to 0000 in the US or used a bike key in the Brtisih case ? Turns out being able to actually use the weapon in an emergency tops the codes not working.
That in the end it depends on the crew launching the nuclear weapon & the chain of command instructing them to do so. Having some codes is not sufficient - a whole complex process with many safeguards has to run to the end for things to happen.
Points 4 and 5 mention and are about use of nuclear weapons.
I think the memorandum was intended to be a security guarantee to Ukraine after they (and Belarus, and Kazakhstan) joined the NPT and transferred formerly-Soviet nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation. I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise.
There is no large country left which is not an American client state to pursue nuclear weapons . India was in the 90s, and they pursued nukes, tested them and got sanctioned by the west.
How are you defining large? Geography? Population? Certainly you've got countries like Brazil or South Africa or Indonesia. I'm sure we could think of a few more.
If we accept your premise, the current war has made us less safe, because we've had previous, stronger nuclear deals that have now been torn up in a failed attempt to replace their leader with someone more favorable to the US.
Iran probably wasn't following the JCPOA, denied inspectors access to certain sites, and you'd also have to say you 100% trust American intelligence to verify that Iran isn't building a nuclear weapon in secret and if you want to do that I've got a war to sell you in Iraq.
Separately that doesn't resolve the other issues, funding militant groups, &c.
Using your reasoning, you can basically throw out any structured system that doesn't comply with your own untrustworthy feelings of security.
You can essentially point at any shadow within the borders of Iran and claim there are hidden actors conspiring towards your undoing.
What aside from their total annihilation or subjugation would ever convince you of your (Israel's) safety?
But using your own reasoning then Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so they are also throwing out a structured system that doesn't comply with their own feelings.
I think they are more motivated than ever and other countries will follow. North Korea shows that Trump will kiss the ass of countries that have nuclear weapons, no matter how bad they are. And he will kick around countries that don’t have them. If I were Iran, I would put every possible effort into obtaining nuclear weapons. Probably from Trump’s best friend Kim Jong Un.
You sound gleeful about the idea of nuclear proliferation. It's unfortunate that so many have stopped caring about the institutions and liberal world order we created. Oh well.
If/once Iran gets one we'll give one to Saudi Arabia at least and make sure Israel's program is well supported. Then we can make sure Germany has them and Poland too if they want them. Korea and Japan will also get the green light. Anyone who opposes China/Russia will can get access to then and we can add a dozen or so countries to the nuclear armed states list. Why not?
Most of the countrues you name would be totally insane if they are not already running clendestine nuclear wepons programs, especially South Korea & Japan. They are not going to wait for uncertain handouts in the future.
I am not gleeful at all about nuclear proliferation. Quite the opposite. It looks to me like the world order that has kept the western hemisphere peaceful and prosperous over the last 70 years is falling apart. And if AI and robotics take off, it's possible our capitalist model will also fall apart.
Re: nuclear weapons. If the US gives up the role of protecting other friendly nations and NATO isn't viewed as reliable anymore, it makes sense to develop nuclear weapons. As a German I am starting to wonder if we should develop our own just in case Putin gets some ideas. And I am sure Japan and South Korea are having similar thoughts.
> I am not gleeful at all about nuclear proliferation. Quite the opposite. It looks to me like the world order that has kept the western hemisphere peaceful and prosperous over the last 70 years is falling apart. And if AI and robotics take off, it's possible our capitalist model will also fall apart.
Part of that preservation means a safe and stable Middle East and more countries not acquiring nuclear weapons.
You simply cannot “negotiate” with Iran here. It’s no different than when Europeans (rightfully in my view) say there’s no negotiating with Putin and then go and complain about the US sending delegates to Russia trying to figure something out no matter how half-brained the Trump administration might be.
Likely not any more, not since Trump tore up US participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
One bad faith act destroyed concerted effort by multiple countries that would have seen greater Iranian integration into the world and the falling off of internal extreme influence.
Negotiation demonstrably worked, in the past, trust was destroyed .. who did that?
You're focusing on the JCPOA and what is clouding your judgement here is you are forgetting that even with the JCPOA Iran was loading up on ballistic missiles and drones, arming militias in Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon, and once Russia invaded Ukraine they immediately started working with the Russians to evade sanctions and supplied them with military hardware to prosecute their war.
Are those the actions of a country that is really following the JCPOA? This is what a "negotiation" got us. The fact that Trump tore up the JCPOA isn't relevant because they shouldn't need to have an agreement to not build nuclear weapons in the first place! Is Vietnam or Brazil funding militias and loading up on military hardware and threatening to build a nuclear weapon unless they get some sort of special agreement to not do it?
It wasn't "one bad faith act" there never needed to be an act in the first place and you're ignoring all of Iran's actions that themselves were bad faith!
There's zero evidence its less possible, including counter evidence it remains possible because we keep being told we have to attack Iran to prevent them from attaining a nuclear weapon.
So apparently, we've yet to do anything to prevent them from doing it.
They killed more than 30,000 of their own people including children and support terrorist regimes in multiple countries that also kill children.
> There's zero evidence its less possible
On the other hand we bombed the nuclear facilities so what increase in nuclear weapons capability do they have that you are thinking about here? If there's something that has changed I'd be curious to read about it or your thoughts since that would change my opinion.
So your argument is its cool that we killed children because they've also killed children? Hell of a take.
The evidence we bombed their nuclear facilities is essentially this administration telling us we bombed their nuclear facilities.
This administration does not have a track record of providing the public with honest assessments of their success.
If we've successfully stopped them from developing a nuclear weapon, which was stated as the point of our preemptive aggression, I'd need a very good reason why we continue to spend billions attacking them.
> So your argument is its cool that we killed children because they've also killed children? Hell of a take.
No my take is we do it by accident and they do it on purpose and at a much larger scale and instead of pearl clutching about the US doing it on accident you should be pearl clutching about Iran doing it. I didn’t bring it up, but anytime someone brings up this whole “US killed kids” I’m happy to remind everyone that Iran is far worse.
> The evidence we bombed their nuclear facilities is essentially this administration telling us we bombed their nuclear facilities.
So? Do you not believe anything anyone says unless you see it for yourself?
> If we've successfully stopped them from developing a nuclear weapon, which was stated as the point of our preemptive aggression, I'd need a very good reason why we continue to spend billions attacking them.
Stopping the development of a nuclear weapon is an important goal but not the only one. We keep defending ourselves because they keep doing things like launching rockets at Kuwait, or shooting at American ships, or supporting those committing genocide or murder in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen.
There is a very simple solution. Iran stops funding these groups, stops murdering their own people, stop launching rockets, and stops trying to build nuclear weapons. Once they do that and behave responsibility like just about every other country on the planet there aren’t any problems.
Why is it that they can’t just stop doing these things?
We didn't just do it by "accident". We did it through incompetence. This wasn't the unfortunate result of a necessary attack on a valid target. This was the result of stupidity.
"Hey, we're not as bad a literal terrorist regime!" is not a metric by which I think we should measure our own country.
I'd believe we'd actually accomplished our goal of stopping their nuclear program if this specific administration hadn't told us, before this attack, we had successfully stopped their nuclear program with a previous attack. Once you've lied to me once, my standard of evidence is a great deal higher than "trust us, bro." and this administration has already shown incompetence at judging the effectiveness of their attacks (or shown a willingness to lie to us about it).
The entire problem with this strategy, from day one, was the completely ahistorical belief that we could punish a country into behaving exactly as we want, in a way that specifically aligns with our interests.
Bullying nations has a tendency to harden them against cooperation and negotiation, as we've seen with Iran.
> We didn't just do it by "accident". We did it through incompetence.
Ok and they did theirs with malicious and clear purpose. Yikes!
> This wasn't the unfortunate result of a necessary attack on a valid target. This was the result of stupidity.
No. Iran and their militant proxies know that we don't attack civilian targets on purpose. That's why they set up facilities, military equipment, or hide combatants behind children or in hospitals and such because they know we don't want to kill innocent people. Hamas or Iran will tell you this as part of their doctrine.
So think about it. You've got the US and allies, Hamas, Hezbollah or whatever, Iran, and they're all saying "The US and western allies don't intentionally kill innocent people" and then there's you who is like sitting here complaining about it and now it's just "incompetence". Give me a break.
> "Hey, we're not as bad a literal terrorist regime!" is not a metric by which I think we should measure our own country.
Nobody is using that metric except you. The US admitted the mistake and apologized at a minimum. I believe there was some talk of compensation though I'm not sure where that has landed. Probably tough to do because the Iranian regime would steal any money we gave to the families.
But hey I do agree with you, Iran's government is a terrorist regime.
> Bullying nations has a tendency to harden them against cooperation and negotiation, as we've seen with Iran.
Well sure but they were never cooperating anyway. If they were, they wouldn't have been taking the actions they've been taking. What does cooperation look like? It looks like not murdering tens of thousands of your own people, it looks like not pursuing nuclear weapons, it looks like not funding militant groups who murder innocent people throughout the region, and it looks like not building up gigantic stockpiles of missiles and drones and then launching them at every country around you.
Iran is the only country doing this stuff. Why aren't they cooperating with the rest of the world peacefully?
It was admitted incompetence in target selection, potentially due to misuse of AI, acting on out of date intelligence.
This has been heavily reported on and no counter-story has been proffered.
You introduced a whataboutalism. I pointed out whataboutalisms are ridiculous when it comes to dead children.
The frustrating part of all of this is we had a working agreement with Iran, with numerous mechanisms to ensure compliance, that was torn up because this administration, without any offered evidence, said Iran wasn't in compliance. And this was despite multiple international partners disagreeing and saying they were absolutely complying.
> You introduced a whataboutalism. I pointed out whataboutalisms are ridiculous when it comes to dead children.
Sure, but you should be talking Iran killing people since they killed many more and did so on purpose instead of on accident. You keep using the term incompetence because you have an axe to grind. Actions matter but intentions get a say too.
> You introduced a whataboutalism.
Well I'm certainly not going to, where I see it happen, let people just dance around talking about US "incompetence" and ignoring Iranian purposeful murder as they try to denigrate my country for their own political aims. These people shouldn't be your political football and you should be more focused on Iranian action.
> The frustrating part of all of this is we had a working agreement with Iran
Why do they need a special snowflake agreement else they build nuclear weapons? Weren't they signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty? Should other countries start building nuclear weapons so they can get some sort of concession from the United States? Why does the US have to give these concessions and not the entire world since it's in everyone's interest that we don't have every country on the planet building nuclear fucking bombs and maybe using them? Did we forget we don't want that or something?
At no point have I said Iran is a good country doing good things.
I have no control of, or say, in how Iran operates.
I am a US Citizen who votes in the US and who is concerned with the actions my government takes on my behalf.
If Iran shouldn't "need an agreement" not to build nuclear weapons, what exactly is our current aggression seeking to accomplish? How does it end? How do we know its over?
> At no point have I said Iran is a good country doing good things.
I didn't say you did. I'm just focused on their wrongdoings and I'm not interested in some accident that the US was involved in. We accidentally blew something up? Dang that sucks. Let's talk about how awful Iran is instead and focus on that because that's what matters.
> I have no control of, or say, in how Iran operates.
What does that matter? You also have no control or say of how Israel operates. Therefore you can't criticize them or be concerned with their actions? You also have no say in Ukraine or Russia.
> If Iran shouldn't "need an agreement" not to build nuclear weapons, what exactly is our current aggression seeking to accomplish?
Sorry I'm not following. They shouldn't need an agreement to behave like the rest of the signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, yet they want an agreement special treatment, and still develop nuclear weapons in secret. Partly what our defensive operations are seeking to accomplish is to stop them from building nuclear weapons because... they're trying to build them, aren't honoring the NNPT, are murdering their own people, and murdering other people throughout the Middle East. Like why are you so confused about this? Are you unaware of these activities or something?
How about this, can you walk me through what your understanding of Iranian funded militias in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon is? Just at a high level how do you understand those various situations?
> How does it end? How do we know it's over?
Who knows?
> When there is no longer a single person in Iran?
> We didn't accidentally blow something up. Our military murdered 170 children due to incompetence.
You’re calling it incompetence because you have an axe to grind. The US military simply does not intentionally murder children. Everybody knows that including Iran! That’s why these guys put their military equipment next to civilian infrastructure. Why is that I’m telling you this, the military tells you this, European militaries would tell you this, Iran tells you this, and yet you alone are insistent that it is incompetence and not an accident?
> I am aware of Iran's activities. Everyone is. The regime is murderous, and hostile to our allies in the region.
Good let’s focus the conversation there since that’s what is important.
> And absolutely nothing we are doing, right now, has changed or will change that.
I don't know how you got to "Iran probably wasn't following the treaty", when their adhereance to the JCPOA was certified by the U.S. (twice by the Trump administration [0][1]), until Trump wanted to renogiate, withdrawing and re-imposing sanctions in 2018. Everything I found says that the Iranians followed the treaty until they withdrew in 2021.
You mentioned military sites... I wondered if the IAEA ever requested access to military sites? They were entitled to do so, under the JCPOA. I couldn't find anything in a quick search I just did.
In your response above, you seem to imply that the Iranians may have already sneaked nuclear matarial to military sites. But the The IAEA found no evidence of that, at least as of 2025, well after the treaty, as per this summary report:
> Iran held enriched uranium at all three main nuclear sites: Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan. There are no indications that Iran moved stocks outside of these three sites [2]
Once again, do you have sources for what you are saying, that the Iranians weren't following the treaty while it was in effect, or that there were military sites where they were hiding nuclear research? I'm not finding any.
Or is this just an opinion, or a guess? I would say that one must be careful, those who profit in some way from war always exaggerate the enemy.
I'll have to dig up some sources later, if I don't then consider the point conceded I guess as a way of holding me to it.
The other problem of course if the fundamental "need" to have a JCPOA in the first place. Iran can just stop trying to build nuclear weapons and then we don't need these kinds of agreements.
They also enriched uranium: "Iran has 440.9 kilograms (972 pounds) of uranium that is enriched up to 60% purity, a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency." [1]
why were they even doing that? When I read things like that it's like who even cares if they were supposedly following the JCPOA? I'm not trying to change the subject or move the goalposts, but just pointing out how it's interesting that they have all this enriched material. Why do they even have it? Someone said they were following the agreement, why do they need to have this agreement to not enrich uranium? Just don't do it?
The IAEA also said: "In its May 2025 report, the IAEA noted Iran’s enrichment to 60% purity—beyond JCPOA limits but not prohibited under the NPT itself" [0]
Apparently the Iranians started enriching to that 60% level, and self reporting, in 2021, as leverage in the unsuccessful negotions to bring the JCPOA back into effect to get sanctions dropped.
International politics is what it is - power and self interest. There are those who don't want Iran to have a nuke. Iran has its reasons for wanting that capability. Throw in the crusades and ongoing holy wars, colonialism, oil, authoritarian regimes, propaganda, alliances, greed, etc - it's no wonder this is still a problem. One of many problems in that part of the world.
Ironic that the U.S. got the iranian nucear program started, eh? [1]
> Throw in the crusades and ongoing holy wars, colonialism, oil, authoritarian regimes, propaganda, alliances, greed, etc - it's no wonder this is still a problem. One of many problems in that part of the world.
Are you serious lol. Ok let’s go back to the Persians invading the Greeks!
Yes, I'm serious. The Persians are a proud culture and know their history. Just like a lot of other people.
You don't think religion still motivates people? There have been Sunni vs Shia and Christian vs Muslim conflicts for about a thousand years, more on than off. Israel vs Palestine more recently, fighting over ancient holy sites. So much back and forth - the Muslim conquest, the crusades, the Ottomans, Napolean, the Shah of Iran, 9/11, etc.
Are you saying that those in the Middle East don't know the history of all that, or don't notice that they have been imposed upon lately by foreign powers?
Are you saying that there's not a large loud group of people in the U.S. who have been saying that Islam is evil? They aren't like us. They want to kill us all. They'll never stop. Etc. They're going to nuke Boston if we don't attack. I know a lot of religious people looking at current events as end-of-times bliblical - New Jerusalem, second coming, etc. These people have been very politically influental. Even now Vance is very publically calling a muslim senate candidate evil.
Those in power use religion to radicalize people. Are you saying this isn't happening and hasn't been happening for hundreds of years?
I'm into history, so maybe I'm coming from a different angle.
You've posted quite a bit in this thread and repeated a number of things that appear to be factually incorrect. Are you sure that you are well informed and not making biased assumptions?
> You've posted quite a bit in this thread and repeated a number of things that appear to be factually incorrect. Are you sure that you are well informed and not making biased assumptions?
Please cite these things that are factually incorrect.
> Israel vs Palestine more recently, fighting over ancient holy sites.
That's not recent. Don't you know your history?
> Yes, I'm serious. The Persians are a proud culture and know their history. Just like a lot of other people.
> So much back and forth - the Muslim conquest, the crusades, the Ottomans, Napolean, the Shah of Iran, 9/11, etc.
Persian != Muslim - don't you know your history?
Iran wasn't responsible for 9/11.
You're lumping in a lot of distinct cultures and civilizations over thousands of years to make a point that just does not make sense.
Speaking of, yea you remember the Crusades, why do you seem to forget the Mongolians who did far worse to Islamic civilization than anyone else in history? Why doesn't anyone seem to remember that and use that as justification to invade China or Mongolia or something?
It's because this notion of some long historical memory is bullshit. The Persians, the Iranians, they forget about this stuff just like every other country. Nobody has a "long memory", and if Iran is holding on to some 2,000 year old grudge and they're just going to keep screwing with stuff while the rest of us are trying to get on with our lives, maybe Trump was right to suggest annihilating that civilization. What other option do we have?
> Are you saying that there's not a large loud group of people in the U.S. who have been saying that Islam is evil?
Yea that's generally true. Most people don't care about Islam or Muslims. This is unlike Islamic countries who care very much if you aren't Islamic. Maybe Islamic countries should grow up and get with the times?
> Even now Vance is very publically calling a muslim senate candidate evil.
As an aside I detest JD Vance but he's calling this guy evil primarily because he's a communist, not a Muslim.
When are you talking about and what is that based on? It was the US that withdrew; the other countries continued. US intelligence concluded that Iran had no nuclear weapons program (or maybe, no active one; I don't recall).
> you'd also have to say you 100% trust American intelligence to verify
Nope, the plan was for the IEA to do their thing with on-the-ground inspectors, sensors, etc. As just one example, nuclear materials leak radiation and they can find indications of it in air, soil, etc., around faciltiies. Edit: Also, many other countries were involved and looking closely, including European powers and Israel.
> When are you talking about and what is that based on? It was the US that withdrew; the other countries continued. US intelligence concluded that Iran had no nuclear weapons program (or maybe, no active one; I don't recall).
They'd just move the research to clandestine or military facilities. They're not stupid. Countries like Iran know how to play these games and they use our own legal mechanisms against us all the time.
Separately we shouldn't have to have a JCPOA in the first place, they can just not pursue nuclear weapons like almost every other country on the planet.
> we shouldn't have to have a JCPOA in the first place, they can just not pursue nuclear weapons like almost every other country on the planet.
Other countries do pursue and have nuclear weapons. Iran has not yet created a full nuclear weapons program - or hadn't before the current war.
Iran, being under constant threat from the US and Israel, with open calls to attack Iran for decades; seeing two neighbors recently deposed by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan); and having had their own government deposed and replaced by a US-friendly one (Mosaddegh in 1953); under constant threat from neighbors and the region (Iraq invaded in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states are open enemies, Israel of course); may believe that they need nuclear weapons to survive.
Is there another country in a similar position, with the resources to develop nuclear weapons, that doesn't have them? North Korea and Israel both made that choice in similar circumstances.
The US 'nuclear umbrella' covers its allies around the world, a very effective non-proliferation tool. Otherwise, I imagine South Korea, Japan, many NATO countries would build them - there is already discussion of it in the former two countries.
Don't care then. The premise of having to have the agreement in the first place is faulty, so arguments about who was following it and in what sneaky way are simply irrelevant.
> Other countries do pursue and have nuclear weapons.
So should more countries get them then? Are you against nuclear non-proliferation? If you want more countries to get them let's start with Israel and Saudi Arabia, then move to South Korea and Japan, and let's load them up in the Baltic states too so Russia doesn't think twice.
> Iran has not yet created a full nuclear weapons program -
Then what was the point of the JCPOA?
> or hadn't before the current war.
They hadn't as the war is going on either just to be clear. There seems to be this cargo culted comment that they're going to have one now. They won't. We will bomb it no matter what.
> Iran, being under constant threat from the US and Israel, with open calls to attack Iran for decades; seeing two neighbors recently deposed by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan); and having had their own government deposed and replaced by a US-friendly one (Mosaddegh in 1953); under constant threat from neighbors and the region (Iraq invaded in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states are open enemies, Israel of course); may believe that they need nuclear weapons to survive.
Right, everyone is bad here but poor lil ole' Iran. The US was in Afghanistan after Bin Laden. It was in Iraq after Saddam. The whole world, despite Iranian delusions of grandeur, doesn't revolve around them. Other countries are also under constant threat from Iran (US, Israel, Gulf States, more) as they fund militants, murder people, load up on missiles and drones and fire them indiscriminately, and try to build nuclear bombs.
I doubt that the world will subscribe to the idiocy of the current US admin. China will just push harder for renewables while Europe and the rest of the world will try to coup with the shock but I am certain they won’t go to war with Iran because they have no reason. Eventually US will have to decide if it’s going to do anything or just live with high oil prices for long or just go back home in a British Suez fashion.
> Eventually US will have to decide if it’s going to do anything or just live with high oil prices for long or just go back home in a British Suez fashion.
This is the flaw in your thinking. It won't be the US who alone decides to live with high oil prices, it'll be everyone.
Vague promises of "pushing for renewables" is a gross mischaracterization and misunderstanding of the importance of oil and gas to the global economy. Note, I'm not anti-renewable or whatever, but chalking this up to a "US problem" is willfully ignorant.
Declining to follow a blunderer into a blundered war really isn't a "decision to live with high oil prices" rather common-sense. This is the USA's mess.
You can be mad at America and ignore Iran's role if you want, but that doesn't lead you to anywhere productive. The United States like any country is an actor on the world stage that has interests and can take action to defend or assert those interests. If the world thinks this is a problem, they should have mediated between the United States and Iran and helped to prevent conflict. Instead they did next to nothing. War happened. Cue surprise and condemnation.
I think the world will start mediating but not in the way you think/want. They will just divest from the U.S., slowly but surely so that when the next U.S clown start messing around they don’t have to flatter it anymore.
They are divesting. Moving gold away from the US, selling US bonds, the EU creating an investment mechanism meant to pull EU investment away from the US and into EU companies, etc.
The Netherlands still maintains gold in the US and also divested from Canada. It's also like, $80 billion dollars which is maybe a lot to a tiny country with the GDP of Florida but it's an inconsequential amount to, say, the American economy. Second there are mechanical and legal reasons you might want to have more gold in London where it is more easily tradable.
> the EU creating an investment mechanism meant to pull EU investment away from the US and into EU companies
If you claim this is a divestment from the US (the most important market for many European countries) then you also have to claim the EU is divesting away from China.
Arming all their proxies in the region so they can indisriminately kill people ? Firing balistic missiles and drones on cities ? Atacking civilian ships & killing many sailors just doing their job ?
I know. It was a rhetorical question. I want the person I was replying to, to admit to these non-defensive activities, or admit to their not following the events closely.
I think the rhetorical answer is why should we care if Iran is doing bad stuff around? Is that enough to start a war with Iran?
We don’t care if Trump is doing a deal with criminals to steal oil from Venezuela either so why should the world be so eager to help him steal oil from Iran as well?(and perhaps do a deal with the meanest of them all)
Why should we care that Israel is doing bad stuff around? Or Russia?
> We don’t care if Trump is doing a deal with criminals to steal oil from Venezuela either so why should the world be so eager to help him steal oil from Iran as well?(and perhaps do a deal with the meanest of them all)
Not stealing oil. Let’s set that aside.
The reason nobody cares is because Maduro was a criminal and was responsible for economic devastation in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the country fleeing!
Russia-Ukraine war is important for Europe and perhaps should for the US as well but you can well see that’s not that important for Israel for example.
Nobody cares about Maduro saga because it’s not worth it to upset the U.S for obvious no real gain. On the other hand the Greenland saga for example played out differently. You may see a pattern if you look close enough: Greenland and Venezuela are pretty much the same situation and taking down the bad guy had nothing to do with it. You may also remember the U.S released the convicted drug dealer from Honduras because it played ball with the U.S.
> Russia-Ukraine war is important for Europe and perhaps should for the US as well but you can well see that’s not that important for Israel for example.
We just decide it's not important then like Europe decides Iran isn't important. No difference.
> Nobody cares about Maduro saga because it’s not worth it to upset the U.S for obvious no real gain.
Well it's not that there's some "let's not upset the US" thing here, it's because they know it was a good thing for global security and good for the Venezuelan people.
> On the other hand the Greenland saga for example played out differently. You may see a pattern if you look close enough: Greenland and Venezuela are pretty much the same situation and taking down the bad guy had nothing to do with it.
That doesn't make any sense lol. How in the world are you arriving at a pattern match where you see Maduro, a guy helping Russia evade sanctions, destroying the Venezuelan economy, and creating a humanitarian disaster as 1/3rd of the country fled with Greenland, a country the US operates military bases on and has a population of like 20 people?
> You may also remember the U.S released the convicted drug dealer from Honduras because it played ball with the U.S.
I'm not familiar with the exact circumstances here. Maybe I agree or disagree with the action, but if they were doing something that was more helpful than the punishment for the crimes they committed maybe it makes sense to do.
> The reason nobody cares is because Maduro was a criminal and was responsible for economic devastation in Venezuela resulting in 1/3rd of the country fleeing!
And now it's even worse but USA gets free oil so it's all fine!
No, it's better now. Most Venezuelans are glad that Maduro is gone and their economy will improve greatly over the next decade or so. The US isn't "getting oil for free".
> Europe and the rest of the world will try to coup with the shock
The two major economies in the EU (France and Germany) are both facing severe recessions and a parliamentary deadlock + soon to be elections would will be most certainly won by Putin's allies and/or radical communists.
All of this to say I would not hold my breath on Europe doing much at all in the coming months/years.
I was talking about France Unbowed (LFI) in France which is radical left parti (and allies of the French communists parti) that wants to burn the debt owned by the French state (their own words not mine) and could be in the second round of the French election vs the National Rally (far right).
Both the National Rally and France Unbowed are in favor of stopping Ukrainian foreign aid.
What is the world going to do? The US is the only country that has a "blue water" navy. That means not just enough ships to go to sea, but enough of a supply line to handle all the logistics of having ships anywhere in the world they want them, for as long as they want.
Everybody else (with sea access) has a coast guard, and maybe a few ships for show. China is making enough ships that in a decade they could be there, but it isn't clear they want to go there - they don't see to be building the world supply line needed (but around China they do have that power already).
That is if you don't like the current situation with the US deciding the rules of the sea, then you need to pay for your own navy.
China is the reason we don’t have 5-6 dollar gas. They literally cut their imports to prevent economic disaster. If they begin buying at regular levels we would be the ones hurting more.
No that's not the only reason. High oil prices affect their economy quite a bit, and much of their imports form what I understand come from the Middle East.
High oil prices affect them less than any other country in the world. They have the largest oil stockpiles by far, eclipsing even the US, and they have unique access to oil sanctioned by the west.
China is essentially the only actor in the market that is able to weather this conflict in marathon fashion.
The US is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world (or #2 or something - besides the point). Your argument that only China can weather these price disruptions doesn't seem to hold water for that reason and because of Chinese actions to use that strategic supply to keep prices lower than they otherwise would be. It's not because it's some random benefit for the world (including the US) it's because their economy like any major industrial power relies on oil and gas (and coal) and keeping prices low to help their export-dependent factories.
They have their own advantages and strategies to deal with these things, but this idea that China just like sits around and "weathers the conflict" unscathed is just incorrect.
China's economy is one of the least dependent on oil and gas. Electricity is mostly coal, renewables and nuclear. Transport is increasingly electric (including trucks). Chemicals are moving from oil and gas to coal.
If global oil and gas prices rise, Chinese electricity and transport prices are largely unaffected, unlike the rest of the world. Even the US doesn't have that kind of resilience.
However, China is a net importer of oil and gas, while the US is a net exporter, so when it comes to trade the US is the main beneficiary, although it mainly benefits one single sector.
> If global oil and gas prices rise, Chinese electricity and transport prices are largely unaffected, unlike the rest of the world. Even the US doesn't have that kind of resilience.
This is simply inaccurate. I don't know why you or others keep repeating this. It's bizarre. How do you think China gets goods out of the country to other countries? Separately China is specifically dependent on oil and gas shipments from the Middle East. How these disruptions affect countries depends on a lot of different factors. This blasé assertion that China somehow isn't affected by oil and gas prices is not reflected in reality or China's own actions. Why do you think they're drawing on their strategic reserve?
Iran's government is ideological as a fig leaf of continuity with the Revolution. True believers are few these days, and the IRG is largely keen to stay in power in order to protect its vast business interests.
How can other countries deal with Iran while Trump is in power and unilaterally cancels treaties and attacks countries without consulting others? It’s simply impossible.
That's very hypothetical, but one might also ponder what under scenario Israel might attempt to sink a US battleship and murder dozens of US servicemen.
If a nuclear bomb vaporized New York and you were forced to guess who did it between Israel and Canada, the better guess would be Canada and they don't even have nuclear weapons.
Attempts to claim that your side is somehow superior and not subject to the same human evils as the other side are never true, and just encourage your own people to commit evil - they are justified and the other side is evil, of course. Somehow everyone thinks that, which should tell you something about the truth of it. But of course for your side, it's actually true!
One classic method is to try to tie it to scripture, but people behave like people regardless of their scriptures, and members of every religion has done plenty of horrible things in the name of their god. The Christian Gospels are about as pacifist as scripture gets and yet many horrible things have been done in Christianities name - often justified because the victims were non-Christian.
There is plenty of religious-sanctioned violence in the Old Testament, including in the Torah, and plenty of violence against non-Jews today - so much that it's a bit bizarre to overlook it.
Up until fairly recently, Israel was a stand-out in the region for actually having things like decently fair elections and a political class derived from a relatively wide sample of its populace. Other countries in the region were either Arab nationalist republics, Islamic republics, or authoritarian monarchies. While it was ethno-theocratic, it was one that seemed to balance religion with secular demands, and as it is, most countries around the world have at least some basis in ethnicity. The US is a notable exception for this, for what it's worth. This has begun to fade as a more conservative sector of Israeli society has begun carrying more political power, but it's not to the same extent as you find in other countries in the region.
Nuclear weapons are indeed bad and we used to try to negotiate ways between major powers to reduce their number. We don't do that anymore, for a variety of reasons. The more of them there are in different, independent hands, the more likely they are to be used. If they're used, there's a real chance that nuclear-armed powers make severe miscalculations about who is firing what at where. For example, a USAF radar operator watching an over-the-horizon system pointed eastward sees a large number of missiles being launched, and may assume that they're Russian missiles aimed at the US, when they are in fact Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. They might make a potentially species-ending mistake as a result.
The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame. Iran is a Shia Islamic theocracy. Beyond the Western-ish influence that Israel brings to the region, there are serious theological implications from the existence of Israel. Islam has a core tenant that there is no higher power other than Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. Allah is the same god that exists in Christianity and Judaism, and Muhammad is held as carrying on the thread of prophecy that began with the biblical Adam.
There's a lot in common in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and like all other faiths, people interpret it in different ways. The Iranian regime - who definitely does not represent all Muslims, let's make that clear right now - interprets it as the basis of their power. They are a group of clerics and scholars who govern a nation through interpretation and application of religious jurisprudence via one head cleric, the Ayatollah.
If you are a person who either rules a society based on any religious jurisprudence, or are working under that person - as all of the Iranian government does - you can't have too much tolerance for things that might undermine that religion. The Iranian theocracy's interpretation of the line of prophecy that Muhammad is a part of is that he is the "seal of the prophets", meaning that there will be no further revelations or corrections to the line of prophecy until the end-times. Muhammad is held up as having revealed corrections to the line of prophecy, meaning that while Judaism, Christianity, and other Abrahamic faiths are of the same prophecy, they ultimately got some things wrong.
Now let's get back to the existence of Israel. A short description of Israel in the context of what I've described is that you have a people who now control some of the Abrahamic faiths' most holy sites, and they're doing it based off of what is seen as the "wrong" prophecy.
If people who believe in the "wrong" prophecy are firmly in charge of the sites you consider holy, what does that say about your prophecy and your claim to power based on it? Sort of reduces its power, doesn't it? You can't have that. Something has to be done.
In the eyes of the Iranian theocracy, that "something" is funding, training, and commanding militia and military groups who are sympathetic to your understanding of prophecy and having them strike out at the theologically inconvenient people. Developing more powerful weapons to use while doing so is a natural part of this. What's more powerful than a nuclear weapon? Nothing. So you make that your ultimate goal. What they might do with it, who knows, but again, simply having more nuclear weapons in the hands of more independent actors raises the likelihood of their use with potentially catastrophic results.
The plight of the Palestinians just happens to be a convenient excuse for all of this. They're Arab and majority Sunni as opposed to the Persian and Shiite Iran. If there were a two-state solution as we spent most of the last 30 years working towards, it likely wouldn't satisfy the Iranians, which is why they don't recognize Israel at all instead of saying "we'd recognize you if you retreat to your pre-1967 borders and let the Palestinian Authority govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip."
I'm not chastising them for anything. I'm explaining my view on the rationale of their leadership.
That being said, if you're talking about the 1953 coup, ask the British about that. Also, it doesn't take away from the fact that the 1979 revolution didn't install any sort of representative government, either.
I don't think they'd use it, no. They seem to have behaved pretty rationally in response to foreign powers meddling in the region to me. You can wring your hands about them funding terror groups, but it's nothing that we and the brits haven't done over the decades in the region. Their resistance to Israel isn't irrational either.
"The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame."
Besides the point and whataboutism, but I'm not advocating that Israel should have nuclear weapons. They do, and I'm not sure there's much we can do about it at this point. Same with North Korea. I'm opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and just because one country has one doesn't mean other countries should go and get them too.
Maybe we should have brokered some kinda deal with Iran to prevent them getting a nuclear weapon then, huh.
At this point they'd be fools to not pursue getting one, and we killed everyone in a position of authority who was rational about it. Cats out of the bag, one more nuclear rogue state.
> Maybe we should have brokered some kinda deal with Iran to prevent them getting a nuclear weapon then, huh.
Maybe we should have brokered some kind of deal with Russia to prevent them from invading Ukraine. Do you trust American intelligence 100% to verify Iran is not building a nuclear bomb? And if they weren't, why also were they funding these militant groups? What's the point? It's Neo-colonialism in the Middle East.
> At this point they'd be fools to not pursue getting one, and we killed everyone in a position of authority who was rational about it.
The leadership wasn't really rational in your western sense. I'm not sure where you are coming up with that. If they were rational they wouldn't be murdering their own civilians, chanting death to Israel and death to America as a national past time (no sane nation does this, or if you want to argue they do then don't get mad when Americans are burning the Koran or whatever) and funding militants. You're trying to argue from a place that assumes your values about economics and prosperity and global human rights with an entity that does not care about those values.
If they were rational as you'd like them to be they'd just not do any of the things they've been doing. Why does Iran have to get special treatment to not build a nuclear weapon? Have you thought about that? Why do we have to pay them off? Why are they special snowflakes who get to hold the world hostage less they build nuclear bombs to threaten others?
> Cats out of the bag, one more nuclear rogue state.
That's the fault of the rest of the world then for failing to come together to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Burning the Koran is protected free speech, just as burning a flag is, or the Bible, or whatever else you'd like.
The point is we had a deal, and Iran kept their enrichment below weapons development levels for all of that time. Even a few years after the deal was broken by Trump, apparently. We could have kept that status quo going and not dealt with tolls in the strait and expensive military operations, and it would have been better for everyone involved. But now I don't see a path back to that, and no one is interested enough to stop the proliferation or put enough resources into it to "win". Blame whoever you like I guess, but I'm blaming Trump for tearing things up and kicking off this recent war.
Anchoring on this deal is a waste of time. We shouldn't have had to have a deal in the first place. They could just join other responsible countries like, idk, Vietnam, Brazil, and hmmm who else, Switzerland! in not pursuing nuclear weapons.
> We could have kept that status quo going
Like the last time the Houthis disrupted shipping? Or when Iran launched and supported attacks on Israel, plus continued disruption in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq? (Yemen too but mentioned via Houthis). Idk if that's a tolerable situation.
I don't recall the houthis disrupting shipping before 2018. The status quo under before that point was fine for the global economy and for the US. If it wasn't fine for Israel, that's a problem for their own military to deal with, ideally without US backing that drags other countries into the issue.
Good luck with non proliferation but I think the very obvious "we can attack and invade countries without nukes but can't do that to countries with nukes" lesson is being demonstrated to everyone, so countries that don't want to be invaded will be trying to get them now. Anyone near Russia for sure, possibly even Switzerland eventually.
Hey I mean this is your problem too, wherever you are from. You seem a little nonchalant about nuclear proliferation which most consider to be a rather serious matter because of the potential for real nuclear war or nuclear attacks.
I'm in the US, like most posters here. And since we're not going to do a military invasion and occupation of Iran (and I would be against it in any case) this is just how it is. It's not good, I really preferred things under Obama where we at least tried to keep a lid on weapons, but people voted for the right and this is what we're getting for it.
If you've got a good way to stop people from wanting nuclear power and weapons you can try it, and sincerely good luck to you. It would be nice. I don't think you can stop Iran though.
Well we can stop Iran, we already have recently by bombing the sites. They can retaliate of course but they could always do that which is why they built up these missile and drone capabilities and built up militant groups like the Houthis.
Obama was my favorite president and I think his efforts to stop Iran were great, but at the end of the day the agreement was never going to work because in order for it to work you require circumstances which defeat the purpose of the agreement in the first place, which is that Iran would not have an interest (like most countries) in pursuing a nuclear weapon.
To your point about stopping other countries. Well unfortunately nobody in the world except the United States seems to have any interest, and since they are unable to step up and be responsible we'll either have to bomb other countries who try to build nuclear weapons or we'll have to let those weapons spread and hope we don't see nuclear bombs being used. It's really awful. The EU, Russia, and China are the ones who bare the lion's share of the blame if that were to occur. China and Russia for turning a blind eye or outright supporting other countries obtaining the weapons, the EU for not supporting the United States when it seeks to stop the spread.
> Maybe we should have brokered some kind of deal with Russia to prevent them from invading Ukraine.
I understand history and contemporary events is not your strong suit, but such a deal was very much on the table in December 2021 and the Biden Admin laughed it off. Then again in April 2022.
Iran clearly has the capability to flatten every major hospital and university and desalination plant in Israel, like Israel has done in Gaza, but they don't.
It's also clear that Iran having nukes would be a strategic deterrent to Israel's ultraviolent territorial expansionism.
I suggest you look into the many confirmed impacts in Israel, including at heavily protected airbases and downtown Tel Aviv where the regime embeds its military intelligence centers.
There's a reason why Israel has stopped directly striking Iran.
Its the other way around - Iran stopped targetting Israel, to make it leass likey they will shoot back. Also turns out shooting up poorly protected Us bases & wasting their irreplaceable AA interceptors is much better "return on investment".
> Iran clearly has the capability to flatten every major hospital and university and desalination plant in Israel, like Israel has done in Gaza, but they don't.
I'm not supportive of Israel having nuclear weapons, but Iran won't do something like this because the Israelis might nuke them. That doesn't excuse Iran also building nuclear weapons. Neither should have them, in my view.
Iran also supports the militants that continue to create conflict in Palestine. It's not one-sided and any vague assertion that there's only one bad actor here is illegitimate.
The conflict in Palestine is created entirely by Israel. The militants are just the people who refuse to lay down and take it. This has become more and more obvious - if not through the genocide in Gaza, then through the rapid illegal colonization happening at an accelerated place in the West Bank.
It's not entirely created by Israel, and most of the militants are just lunatics who are thankfully killed. But that doesn't excuse Iranian funding of other militant groups in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq. Nor does it excuse Iran's material support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, nor does that justify Iran trying to build a nuclear weapon.
> I'm not supportive of Israel having nuclear weapons, but Iran won't do something like this because the Israelis might nuke them.
You've said elsewhere in this thread that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and that a global oil crisis is worth preventing that from happening. You've referred to the Iranian government as a "deranged death cult". Here you're saying that even though Iran already has the capability of making Israel uninhabitable, they won't do it because they're rational actors who understand mutually assured destruction. Which one is it? Assuming your premise in this comment of the Iranians being rational actors who understand MAD is correct, could there be other reasons for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons (i.e. sovereignty and national security)?
> they won't do it because they're rational actors who understand mutually assured destruction
It's both. The Iranians are rational within their own cultural understanding of what rational actions are. It's not rational, for example, for them to build nuclear weapons, deprive their people of economic prosperity, kill thousands of protestors, fund militant groups spreading terrorism and murder throughout the region, yet they do it anyway.
You can be simultaneously "rational" in some ways and "irrational" in others. Their general activities are irrational, but that doesn't mean they see the point in launching indiscriminate missiles at Israel only to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon. Why not wait until you have dozens and then go for it and launch one at Europe (don't forget, despite European politicians kissing the toes of Iran out of fear and cultural decline that Iran still hates Europe too) or the US too?
> could there be other reasons for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons (i.e. sovereignty and national security)?
Why do you assume the other reasons are for peaceful purposes? Can you think of some malicious purposes that Iran might acquire a nuclear weapon for?
> It's not rational, for example, for them to build nuclear weapons, deprive their people of economic prosperity, kill thousands of protestors, fund militant groups spreading terrorism and murder throughout the region, yet they do it anyway.
Iran's behavior (not its rhetoric) is largely pragmatic in the sense of pursuing national and regime security. For example, its strategy of funding military groups allows it to project power across the Middle East relatively cheaply, and meant that for decades most Iran-US and Iran-Israel fighting happened outside Iran. Of course, after the October 7 attacks the network lost much of its deterrent value once Israel decided that escalation was worth the costs the militant groups could impose, and began direct attacks on Iran. Still, it worked well for the prolonged gray-area conflict it was designed for.
Similarly, if Iran got a nuclear weapon, it wouldn't achieve much beyond self-defense. Iran wouldn't be able to blackmail or coerce its neighbors for the same reason that North Korea isn't able to extract concessions from the West, or that Israel isn't able to push around its neighbors. Nuclear weapons are not useful tools of coercion. If they were, maybe Israel's status as a nuclear power would have dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear enrichment. Any state that used a nuclear weapon would have the whole world turn against it and risk nuclear retaliation. Both Iran and its neighbors know this, so any hypothetical nuclear threats would not seem credible.
This explains Iran's historical strategy of being a "threshold" nuclear state- possessing the expertise and capability to build a nuclear weapon without suffering the political consequences of actually building one. However, the US-Israeli attacks on Iran in 2025 and 2026 (including assassinating the head of state and his family) may lead the Iranian leadership to conclude that having a threshold capability is insufficient and that the country needs an actual nuclear deterrent to protect its sovereignty in the future.
I don’t disagree with your analysis besides a little too much “US/Israel attack”, but my point wasn’t that their regime did things consistent with their regime goals.
My point (and I apologize if it wasn’t clear enough) was that westerners approach Iran from our own concept of rational behavior: democracy, human rights, free trade (over simplifying but bear with me).
If Iran were acting rational according to our principles we wouldn’t be here. But they’re not. Trying to negotiate with them based on “rationality” doesn’t make sense because the views on rational behavior are generally incompatible. It’s the same to a large extent with Putin. Why give up huge economic advantages and prosperity and all of those things and become a truly European company just to invade Ukraine? The behavior according to our views isn’t rational but to Putin (and those who support) it’s quite rational.
Why did Iran willingly disassemble their other WMD programs, like bioweapons and chemical weapons, if they are irrationally bound to destroying Israel?
Chemical weapons are perfectly effective for that desire and dramatically easier to build and deploy than nuclear weapons.
So if you expect Iran to just explode Israel ASAP, why are they holding back right now with their weapons not targeting civilian infrastructure? Why did they stop pursuing cheap WMDs that don't need complicated enrichment?
Note that Iran is objectively not pursuing a nuke as fast as possible. They've had sufficient enriched uranium for a long time to be able to actually start building and testing physics packages and even get their first detonation test, but they instead have just been building a stockpile.
>I'm not supportive of Israel having nuclear weapons
Okay, then by your arguments about Iran, we should be invading Israel right? Like right now! They cannot be allowed to have nukes!
What about North Korea? It sure is funny how all the hand wringing about them getting nuclear weapons got quiet after they built a nuke and didn't use it
> Okay, then by your arguments about Iran, we should be invading Israel right? Like right now! They cannot be allowed to have nukes!
This is immature. If you wanted to use that logic we should invade Russia and China too, and of course the UK and France. Let me cut to the core of the issue here and prune away the window dressing: not all countries are treated the same, nor do they deserve to be.
> What about North Korea? It sure is funny how all the hand wringing about them getting nuclear weapons got quiet after they built a nuke and didn't use it
You don't think it's still worth hand-wringing about? Just because it's not #1 on the news cycle - quick look a Trump tweet - doesn't mean it's not a big problem. Tell it to the Japanese in particular who have to suffer from North Korea launching ballistic missiles around their country.
"We have seen what happened with Venezuela, but at least Mexico and Canada can somewhat keep a lid on it. Which is above and beyond what they owe the rest of us since they did not create that problem. The United States government is ideological in a way that westerners don't really understand. Trump is too via his desires regarding Greenland and Canada but the American system isn't too alien to our own views - they play tennis and vacation in Europe and all that stuff. Their government is simply not interested in the things that you and I are interested in."
Bad argument for many reasons (and lazy). But Maduro was a criminal, supported Russia evading US and EU sanctions, and his gang and their disastrous economic policies resulted in around 1/3rd of Venezuelans leaving the country resulting in a humanitarian disaster.
Nevertheless, Venezuela remains in the same situation as before. Aside from Maduro, the corrupt and criminal government remains intact, the head of state handpicked by the US president, no public elections in sight. There has been no political change whatsoever apart from the takeover of oil fields.
Ok then what's the problem? We abducted some random criminal guy and nothing changed for Venezuela (which you know is a lie lol) except the US gets access to oil (which helps bring down global prices) and to stop Russian shadow fleet tankers.
"Ancient" colonialism? The US and Israel are both actively seeking to expand their colonial territory.
This was an interesting piece of fiction you've written, with some very impressive mental gymnastics on display. However, it's so wrong that engaging with it would be doing you a disservice because it would make you think it's even an intellectually respectable position to have in the first place.
the reason China was using stockpiles is they want to time the gasoline price shock right to the midterm elections. The moment they stop using stockpiles and start purchasing the prices will jump
Eh? They didn't/aren't using their stockpiles to anywhere near the extent the US has! There reserves are much bigger - they have about a years supply - yet they used less in absolute terms than the US!
What they did was aggressively reduce demand by accelerating the switch to EV's and firing up a few more coal powerstations.
In terms of influencing the midterms - I suspect China isn't anywhere near the front of the queue in hoping Trump get's a beating given the chaos he is causing.
Complaining about foreign interference is ironically straight from the Hillary playbook.
They are strategically using their stockpiles. There are a lot of factors in their strategy and some of them conflict. This has an effect on the world market.
How much of their strategy is to change elections vs other concerns I don't know.
> time the gasoline price shock right to the midterm elections.
Donald Trump can end this at any time if he wants. It would have been better to not have started it, thou. Less killing of innocent people, less spending on weapons, better mental health for USA soldiers...
And why is China suddenly at fault for America's actions?
> Donald Trump can end this at any time if he wants.
I'm not really sure that's true. The US is no longer a credible negotiator. I'm not sure negotiating a peace would necessarily end the situation immediately.
The US isn't even negotiating. Fairly sure they don't have a full negotiating team and they're doing it via 1-2 Trump flunkeys and Pakistan intermediating.
Partially true. Seems most likely that Trump didn't like the Iranian provisions for reparations to end the war. A hard stance they've taken, one Trump would never go for (because of how incompetent it would make him look), and here we are.
lol. The orange man is doing more damage to the USA than China could ever do short of actual war. He is destroying the US militarily, economically and politically. They emphatically support his efforts.
At some point they might prefer stability and sanity. I would bet that at this point they don't care much either way.
China is playing long, most of the ~unchanging things are in their favor and the US already proved that they're unreliable. People won't forget that soon even if Trump is gone.
Stability and sanity is not happening whether the conflicts stop in Yemen+Hormuz or not. At that point it's just going to go back to tarriff wars and new terror campaigns that the US admin will start somewhere else
The context of this is which party China would prefer to win the midterms. The dems winning would distract Trump from being able to fuck up the rest of the world a bit.
My bet would be that China doesn't care much either way, they win regardless.
We agree that China won't care long term. They cannot lose in the current setup
In my view the worst that can happen for China is that Trump gets limited by anything. He's hurting US relations more than he's hurting China short or long-term. Relations take longer to build than trade
"Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"
> "Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"
Yeah, that's the obvious answer, but I suspect there's a point where if the US fucks things up too quickly and too messily, there's fewer customers for China's crap and/or the random throws of monkey shit drag China into messes they don't feel like dealing with.
Slow erosion of the US's global power is likely better for them than an implosion that might cause collatoral damage.
> The situation you're imagining is one of a global all encompassing depression caused by a single government.
Doesn't even have to go that far (though it pretty easily can, the US is a big enough market). If the US causes a refugee crisis that affects one of China's allies, or fucks with the global oil supply enough or a thousand other things, that stuff is still annoying to China even if it's usually relatively better for them than it is for the US.
> Not unthinkable, but the Americans would feel that deeply. Do you think they want to?
The people in the US choosing do not care if the rest of America feels it or not.
So your point is moot: tariffs are a tax on your own population, ostensibly to stimulate local manufacturing but in practice it is just another tax. Protectionists will immediately reach for this mechanism because they believe - in spite of all the evidence - that this time around it will work. It never does.
Manufacturing is so intertwined now that all tariffs do is to reduce the buying power for those at the bottom of the totempole, whereas those higher up hardly feel any concrete effect. Whether other countries are stupid or not has no bearing on the discussion, that's just a distraction and the way the USA has been wielding tariffs over the last period is destructive in ways that will affect the country for decades to come.
"Whether other countries are stupid or not has no bearing on the discussion, that's just a distraction and the way the USA has been wielding tariffs over the last period is destructive in ways that will affect the country for decades to come."
I said nothing of the kind. You are injecting that statement here yourself.
---------------------------------------------
Returning to the topic of interest:
Tariffs do work: they protect certain industries and keep them onshore.
For instance the manufacture of nuclear warheads by the USA is an onshore industry and will remain so. I am certain that Japan or North Korea could eventually make a cheaper and probably even a better nuke but b/c I don't want to be forced to do periodic quality control tests and checks. The USA chooses to keep the industry here.
But as far as I am concerned, I'd also like to keep hand tools as a protected onshore industry.
Well, the southeastern USA is going through a Renaissance of explosive growth b/c it is the intent to industrialize that region and recapture the USA lead in manufacturing. Maybe we can get you a job, dgellow, since your country is dwindling and predicted to actually disappear in a matter of decades:
The End of Germany as a Modern Economy
- Peter Zeihan
I apologize: the first bullet of my post above should have been three separated line items instead of two. This has apparently caused great confusion.
As usual, none of you spotted the error and, of course, several misinterpreted my scribbling to best suit their own malicious intents, much to my chagrin (though no surprise).
I offer this rather late correction and apology: I so rarely make a mistake that I do not usually revisit a post but, in this case the piling on was merely too much to ignore. I shall try again:
It is a good thing that the USA no longer intends to pay for:
- NATO - Leaving NATO (STILL not done) would save the USA money! The USA pays approximately 16% of NATO's total budget and the USA is the largest spender on defense within the alliance, accounting for about 60% of NATO's total defense spending.
- Security on the high seas was primarily the task of the US navy. That will no longer be so.
- tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades).
The USA can use that money that way. It's not though. Spending isn't decreasing and any savings in tax has easily been overwhelmed by the increased costs facing consumers, especially in the last two years.
It's so amazing to watch people (presumably Americans) over and over make everything about American domestic politics. That the only way to explain Trump's behaviour is on the domestic terms that Americans know and are comfortable with.
I see this over and over again with the Canada stuff. Or Greenland stuff. Not taking it seriously because "oh that's just Trump deflecting cuz of [Epstein|Midterms|etc]." Meanwhile the actual blast radius here is far far far outside of the domestic arena.
When will people just take this guy at his word? He says he wants to conquer or do X Y and Z. That's it. He said those things. Believe him. Stop trying to make it about yourself. (And also he wants to make personal money off manipulating the stock market and oil prices.)
It's not a good look, esp to the victims of Trump outside the US who have no power to vote in American elections and yet are victims of American power.
I don't doubt that. But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping. And IMO you get your best understanding by actually writing some code. Even if you don't actually ship what you wrote.
Let’s not romanticize it too much... A lot of enterprise systems are built by developers copying an old AbstractBeanFactoryFactory from a 2011 stack overflow thread without really understanding it :)
Nobody is. It's the AI slop which is supposed to replace this shit which barely worked with equally shit shit which doesnt work which people are romanticizing.
Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good.
those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping
I don't necessarily disagree. That said...
Why?
I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?
Yeah... like we all get to start green field projects and write all the code we should understand. Many of us cut our teeth on bad legacy stuff with no proper documentation made by "engineers" long gone. At least a LLM can easily make sense of this mess.
I code to make money, and the kind of stuff I work on doesn't kill people or lose massive amounts of money if it has bugs, so to me velocity to a solution is much more important than velocity to understanding.
It seems one way Iran fights the US asymmetrically is by harming the Federal financial picture with endlessly higher rates + borrowing costs. If this keeps happening month-after-month, year-after-year, we're really going to feel the squeeze.
Treasury has already tried to reassure markets and failed
and I'm not sure how much they need to do to drive up costs. During Covid the economy has started showing signs that the incentives are wrong and Trump 2 showed you can just buy government favours and tilt the field to your advantage.
Covid was early 2020, he lost too. Dems can just match it with 5K given approval comes from congress not EO. The congress will flip Nov 4. And congressional witch trials will be devastating in Jan 2027. If recession happens by then, congress can revoke SS protection after 2028. By then given worldwide mess and maybe AI havoc, I doubt we thinking about him more than our walmart cart. Sigh, a future that I am not looking forward to.
Even if they don't say that, it is the obvious thing to do. Elections are coming up in a few months. Already because of midterm elections the democrats were expected to gain seats (this is something you could predict the day after the 2024 elections before Trump took office again). The democrats are not so stupid as to not yell about gasoline prices in their advertisements - this is a big deal to a lot of people. Iran has a lot of power to affect gas prices (something they have long known) and so their best chance to harm Trump is to ensure the democrats win as many seats as possible.
The real question is what happens after the elections. There is a lot happening in Iran and nobody can figure out which factions really are gaining power (we know who is the public voice of power, but not if they have real power)
Personally I think the hanlon's razor approach is an intellectually lazy thought terminating cliche that provides cover to people/groups who do act with malice.
A US administration sympathetic to Russia stands to benefit from higher oil prices.
It’s a simple calculation though and not talked about enough. USA went to war in Iraq 25 years ago thanks to the oilmen in charge at that time. For all the political bluster about Iran and gas prices, $100 oil makes them hugely more profit than $60 oil. Of course producers and shareholders of American oil companies want that extra free money. They’re not pumping oil out of the ground and keeping it at a low price just to be benevolent to the American consumer.
It's more complex than that. US crude oil extraction companies don't want prices to climb too high as longer term that destroys demand and encourages customers to find alternatives. Something in the $75–80/bbl range for WTI crude is probably optimal to maximize long-term industry profits.
They can afford to let domestic prices increase more due to the political allies they have. When burning oil is subsidised by wind farms are banned that's a win-win for the oil companies.
I think that is a contributor, but the root cause of the Iran war was Netanyahu goading a simple person into it. The US military and intelligence community knew the risk of this, told everyone not to do it, and they did it anyway.
(if one is some combination of unsophisticated, irrational, and vain, and in a position of power, they will eventually be exploited by someone more rational and sophisticated, imho)
I don't even really understand Israel's game plan here. Iran took a lot of damage but now they control the strait, they have a lot of leverage. Hard to know how it's going to shake out, but how is Israel better off now?
Israel didn't really change their position much. Iran was already funding all their enemies.
I suspect (know way to know) Isreal would have been better off attacking Iran alone - they could have sent a message "back off - we can do more harm to you than you can do to us", but sending that message is hard. They tried to send a clearer bigger message, but the problem is the message getting through ended up being "this is the worst that you will do to us and we can endure". The reality is Iran knows the US and Israel won't invade, and so long as that option is off the table Iran can do anything it wants knowing things won't get worse.
Compare to how Bush handled Iraq - months of convincing the world to help him invade (not always successfully, but enough that many people were sending troops). If conditions were sent such that troops really were on the table I would expect Iran to back down (I give it about 60% odds, which means 40% an invasion happens!). Israel would have won in that case, but it wasn't handled like that (there are reasonable odds that the US would refuse the propaganda to invade if that was tried though which means Israel would be back to the previous status quo...).
You probably have to read that last paragraph a dozen times to understand it. I'm not the best writer and it is a complex subject.
They’ve massively expanded into Lebanon and Gaza, settlements are continuing to grow at an alarming pace, the Saudis have little choice but to get massively more involved in fighting Iran and their proxies, A less feckless US campaign could have eliminated or greatly weakened Iran’s nuclear program, Bibi’s mostly consolidated all power in Israel… it hasn’t worked out that poorly for Israel.
This was Israel’s last chance to strike on Iran using the US as the munition, because the next Congress and President wouldn’t and Netanyahu (76 years old as of this comment, close to end of male life expectancy) will only live or be in power for so long.
Very similar to Putin (73 years old, as of this comment) making his move against Ukraine when he did. Light cone of potential outcomes and path dependency.
“Old men pulling triggers out of ideology before they’re too weak to.” I argue that, in many ways, extended life expectancy has been a curse in this context. It has allowed unscrupulous people positions of power where great harm is incurred with limited repercussions (if any!), positions of power they would not be in if they had aged out sooner. You can only wait to vote them out, or wait for them to die if you cannot vote them out. Very unfortunate.
That’s correct but it’s multimodal. It might not have been the reason for getting involved in the first place but it does now seem like a reason for something happening every time the oil price starts to drop again.
For now. They are well aware of the long picture. They know how long they can risk doing without maintenance, and will do it eventually. They are also well aware that EVs are coming and high fuel prices hurt them long term because people will switch and not come back.
Someone else suggested they see $85/bbl as the ideal price. I don't know if that is true, but it seems reasonable.
EV is committing irrespectively of what refineries are doing at this point. The latest Chinese models with a reasonable range are cheaper to manufacture than ICE cars. So I can see why refineries want to get as much money as possible now before the massive switch to EV.
This is a really complex optimization problem, but slowing EV adoption, which low gas prices help, is likely the better course for a few more years. Eventually just gouge the petrol users left is the most profit, but I don't think that has been reached yet.
>This was the desired effect though, as higher oil prices means more profit for US based oil producers. I'm sure that will trickle down any time now.
That's giving the Trump administration too much credit. Before the war there were pieces about how oil companies were doing worse under Trump than under Biden[1]. Of course, you could argue that the Iran war is Trump finally responding to oil companies, but given that it only started more than a year after he took power, it really makes you wonder whether Trump is bumbling along, or playing some 5d chess with the global oil market. On the flip side there's plenty of evidence that he doesn't want high oil prices, for instance lifting sanctions on Iranian and Russian oil.
I don’t know why anyone gives Trump credit for things like this. He (like all elected officials for the past few decades) is a figurehead and has been manipulated by careerists at every step, who themselves are beholden to the lobbyists that grease the wheels of government.
It's not that complicated with him. He literally gets on the phone with CEOs and takes orders directly. But that only sticks until another competing interest talks to him.
I sometimes comment on the actual facts of an issue on threads about an alarmist, clickbait headline. Not to minimize the issue, but to help people calibrate how freaked out they should be.
But people get really offended with the idea of calibrating their freak out. I think there’s just a group of people addicted to outrage. Nuance and critical thinking get in the way of that.
You don’t need to go to 11 on every issue you can calibrate. Trust me it’s good for your sanity.
The $14 is what ARMA claims in their press relesaes but they haven't broken down where they came at that number. Many analysts seem to think it could be much higher.
The net effect along with other regulatory moves the AB gov't has taken (they banned all renewables projects outright for some months a couple years ag) is to discourage investment in what was formerly a growing sector.
First you introduce the tax, then you increase it. Minimum public anger. They messed up because it's a recycling tax that I presume does not apply to... everything? So it feels punitive. Also it's big. I pay way less recycling tax on bigger and harder to recycle items.
It will only make sense if the per cost panel is less than certain number (if my math is correct it should be $175), but if the panel cost is over $175 then even with more sales taxes in other provinces the total will be cheaper. That is of course on capital cost not operational, also, not counting the “forced recycling” mentioned.
It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel.
I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.
I used to do that, then someone on HN basically said I had mental problems because of the way I wrote the article. Best part is Claude told me to tone it down a bit, and I completely ignored its advice. Wouldn't have happened if I had listened to the AI.
I've also been called a schizophrenic on a GNU mailing list because of my idea and the working code I submitted. Caused me to literally quit the list on the spot. Best part is the maintainer eventually implemented his own version of it.
Since then, others have encouraged me to keep it up, but I just don't feel comfortable anymore with this "just be yourself" nonsense.
I think that's the first time someone claims that "write with some personality" is some easy thing you just learn somehow. There are authors out there, even ones that make a living on their writing, who still haven't learned to "write with some personality".
What exactly does that mean and how concretely can people actually do this in practice? A few "tips and tricks" might be more helpful than "just write better" or similar stuff.
Thanks a bunch! I actually tried "writing more personal" just some weeks ago, and the feedback I received so far been relatively OK I think, except some people apparently think the part about the drugs to be childish. May I ask what you think of it, if it does sound like it's written with actual personality? https://emsh.cat/en/the-people-are-still-there/
I won't claim to be a professional author or even good, but lately I've been trying to get more into the "it's a person who writes actually" direction and this was an exploration into that, so any sort of feedback would be most welcome, if you have the time!
reply