…The great project you were referring to was a neoliberal one…

I’m an American. I want nukes. Not for my country, me specifically. We should legalize the private ownership of nuclear bombs!

How would the Canadians possibly smuggle a nuke across the border?

“Mr. President, the Canadians have called to apologize for insulting you. They’re also sending an apology gift. It’s a large, golden, 20 foot tall statue in the shape of a moose!”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Bring it to DC at once!”

It seems that’s what Iran was doing actually. They enriched uranium up to 60%. Bomb grade is 90%. But there’s really no reason to enrich that high except to make nukes. And nuclear enrichment is not a linear thing. Half the work is just to get to 5% enrichment.

It seems they designed their program to be right on the edge of nuclear breakout. In retrospect, they probably should have gone straight for the bomb.

In science, we prefer observational to speculative evidence.

You spend your life building a beautiful home. Right when you pay the mortgage off and finish the last detail…a drunken maniac busts in the door, shoots you, and moves into your former home. And he just gets away with it because there’s no cops in your town.

Or, more concretely, you build a magnificent culture, industry, society, and economy. You invest in your people and technological innovation. You turn your nation into an economic powerhouse. Then the neighboring country, who put all of their more limited resources into the military, storms across the border and takes over your little paradise. Now you’re still paying the tax levels of a Nordic welfare state, but all of the money just goes into the pockets of the warlords and oligarchs of the mafia state that just conquered you.

As if the Ukrainians aren’t a culture and people going back thousands of years. What odd bigotries you have.

They own things. And those things are flammable.

I’ve listened to him a bit in the past, but I’m not familiar with any recent work he’s put out.

All that’s needed is military supremacy.

Violence and chaos is the point. Neither Israel or the US have the means or motivation to actually occupy Iran with ground forces and to build a new government from scratch. Hell, look how well that worked in Iraq. The goal is instead to turn Iran into a failed state that is completely incapable of providing even the most basic services to its population. A collapsed state can’t build effective missiles or support proxy wars outside its borders. At best you can knock together a few hamas-style bottle rockets in garage workshops.

Right now the goal is to wipe out the government leaders and military assets. When that fails to result in the overthrow of the Iranian government, the US and Israel will move on to civilian infrastructure. The power grid. The water systems. Fuel production and distribution, bridges, ports, rail lines, etc.

If they can’t topple the Iranian regime, they’ll leave the Iranian regime ruling over a pile of ashes, a nation with the infrastructure level of Somalia.

You can’t install a friendly government with air power alone. You can however do enough damage to a nation’s infrastructure that it can’t even keep its own people alive, let alone have the spare resources to affect things beyond its borders.

That is the real goal of this war. To turn Iran into a failed state.

I mean, that’s exactly what we did last time!

There an article here?

The US brutally represses protests just like the Iranians. US police just have more money for less lethal weapons.

People come to Lemmy precisely because they’re tired of big algorithmic corporate platforms. They come here precisely to get away from AI slop on platforms like Facebook. Hell, half the people here have been banned from reddit based on comically flawed algorithmic AI moderation tools. This platform is heavily selected for people who dislike AI and AI content.

What do you call a low-level Nazi without any leadership responsibilities?

A Nazi.

And meanwhile, Israel has instituted a policy of the deliberate mass execution of journalists on an industrial scale.

On what criteria are they worse than Israel? Neither are good. They’re both authoritarian theocratic hellholes. One is a rogue state with a nuclear arsenal, the other is a rogue state seeking a nuclear arsenal. But Iran hasn’t invaded any nation in its modern history, while Israel invades people on the regular.

You need to open your eyes. You don’t even know why Iran is bad. You’ve just had a lifetime of propaganda calling them evil while our own allies over there, Israel and Saudi, are just as bad if not worse.

Terrorism (n): violence committed by low income people with dark skin complexion.

You need to get past the idea that everything on social media is a formal debate.