The networking effect in action.

If you’ve got a dedicated group of friends on a platform and you can’t figure out how to move them all at once, you’re unlikely to socially isolate yourself just because they ratchet up the enshittification another rung.

silently

But when they have better AI you guys want the country to bend over and get fist fucked.

It’s legit infuriating to see the Chinese economy investing in bluesky R&D, which has the long term benefit of better software, cheaper hardware, and more useful technology. All while American politicians insist “We need to build more hand cranks and charcoal fire pits to power our billionaire sponsored CSAM engines!”

All this while US Tech Companies turn increasingly to religious hacks to launder their shitty apps and platforms.

The conversations I’m talking about are pre-war, when there wasn’t even hint of the US or Israel attacking Iran.

:-/

I’m friends with several Iranian people, good friends with some of them. Every one of them and their families has nothing but bad things to say about that government.

I saw plenty of interviews with this kind of person at the CPAC rally. I even knew a few that attended. I periodically get AI Slop videos from a coworker, insisting that people are waving comically oversized Iranian flags in every city in the world (alongside miniature Israeli flags for some reason).

I have heard simultaneous claims that Iran has killed north of 90k of their civilian population in a matter of weeks, and that reports of the girls school getting bombed by the US are fictious or Iranian state propaganda.

This is not propaganda when it comes from people, especially women

It is absolutely propaganda. And it is being fed to people who hate the government and are that much more willing to believe crazy bullshit because they hate it.

Much like American liberals biting on The Pee Tape hook, line, and sinker, it’s bait for a population of expats hungry to believe the worst things about a government they hate.

you have swallowed hook line and sinker the romantic nationalism that is the foundation liberalism

???

Ein volk, eh?

Scaring yourself by reading words in German will put you out of whole branches of modern political philosophy.

I don’t see any point in continuing this discussion

You literally changed the noun here

The nation is its people. You don’t get to wiggle out by saying “I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government”. Iran isn’t being occupied from the top by an invading army. It’s a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.

You focus on the “anti-imperialist” side of the ledger, whereas I asked about all MENA countries.

The pattern of imperial conquest, ethnic divide-and-conquer governance, and villainization of popular politics isn’t unique to occupied MENA states. What sets Iran apart from Saudi Arabia or Turkiye or Jordan or Egypt is its unaligned status.

What Americans claim they hate about Iran and Yemen but can’t be bothered to care about in Dubai or Kuwait or Azerbaijan is a series of tropes drummed into them by Christian Fascist national media.

Why are the western allies also autocracies? Qatar, UAE, Saudi, Jordan. Who do they also suppress? Right: the Left, the socialists, the labour movement, the radical youth.

Iran isn’t a leftist or socialist state in any meaningful sense. They’re as draconianly anti-socialist as any Saudi government. That’s a big reason why you have crowds of Iranian civilians gulled into supporting a nepo-baby from Maryland as their US-sponsored savior (which the US secretly backed a return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a western proxy). This is not a conflict between Western liberals and Eastern socialists. It’s a fight between Western Christian Imperialists and Eastern Muslim Nationalists.

That question is a gotcha

Thought-Terminating liberalism at its finest.

you conflate the Iranian regime with the Iranian nation

No, I don’t

why do you think middle eastern countries are mostly autoctacies

Go ask Mohamed Morsi. Ask Mohammad Mosaddegh or Chadli Bendjedid. Ask Thomas Sankara. Hell. Ask Ismail Haniyeh. Ask all the Middle East liberals what happened following the Arab Spring.

“Why is a country that’s perpetually under siege and threatened with regime change so militaristic and obsessed with self-policing?” should be self-explanatory. Particularly when “we’re under attack by evil outsiders, please surrender all your civil rights!” is a line I hear regularly in Western Media.

I guess I can bat the question back to you. Why are so many NATO member states autocratic oligarchies?

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The Iranian regime is horrible

I’ve been reading this propaganda continuously since I was old enough to pick up a newspaper.

Practically every Muslim nation gets this treatment to some degree. But countries we’re at war with get it extra bad.

America is not a representative democracy.

A hard pill for the electoralists to swallow.

Both political parties have had their part on the genocide. And It’s Illegal for Americans (and increasingly Europeans) to do anything that matters against the programmed bloodshed.

Okay, but you can’t say that too loudly without being accused of shilling for an Evil Foreign Country.

Whataboutism!

I think if you asked a Joe Biden voter in 2021 “Are you excited to do genocide across the Levant for the next ten years?” they would not be enthusiastic.

Hell, even the Trumpies don’t like our war with Iran (mostly because of gas prices, but still…)

The genocide is part of a Eugenics campaign cooked up by The Epstein Class. But so much of America is just along for the ride.

America has been getting played by Israel since the 40s

and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category

It’s a very thin data set. One entry for 2000. Nothing beforehand. Then nothing for 12 years that just happen to occur during the height of invasion and mass displacement of the population.

Wikipedia would suggest the literacy rate was high prior to 2000. After the invasion, there’s very mixed data, with high enrollment rates conbined with high dropout and grade repeat rates. But it’s an article plagued with dead links, so…

I don’t think it’s controversial to say the war and mass displacement resulted in declining standards for education.

“The Russian economy is going to collapse and then the Ukrainians will win” is a line that’s been printed since the war started.

China do not wsnt to take Japan

Historically, it’s been the other way around

Isn’t Japan also hosting an enormous US Naval buildup right now?

This feels like a repeat of Ukraine/Russia.

CIA is the major constant but I’m sure some rich and powerful men carried between the two

The CIA is, at it’s heart, a cartel of rich, powerful WASPy families from the 1950s

Did we ever get a count of how many were working for Israel?

Protestant is a form of Christianity

It violates a litany of Christian teachings.