Yeah those people that sheltered Anne Frank. What a bunch of assholes!

Somewhere Hari Seldon is laughing.

You’re beyond saving. You cannot even recognize why it matters if you’re participating in a genocide or not. A genocide is already happening, why not make a buck off of it? In a past life, you worked at IBM. There you sold computers to the Nazis to help them tabulate the Holocaust.

https://reason.com/2025/01/27/trump-revives-bidens-failed-proposal-to-remove-palestinians-from-gaza/

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-white-house-accused-endorsing-displacement

Read the article. The most egregious violations occurred during the Biden administration. Biden is better at Trump as a whole, but on the Gaza issue, both have support for Israel locked in at 100%. People often fall for the marketing - Biden virtue signals while Trump vice signals. Biden made a few token show gestures towards Palestinian rights, and Trump gleefully celebrates his cruelty. But in terms of actual tangible support for Israel? Trump’s record is a direct continuation of Biden’s. The Biden admin for example were the first ones to propose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. That isn’t something Trump came up with - he just vice signaled with his stupid ‘Gaza riviera’ plan, while Biden’s plan for ethnic cleansing was discussed quietly.

When the US starts being the primary funder of them.

Man, there’s got to be a way to solve the Taiwan problem. Maybe a great compromise, a grand bargain? Taiwan lets Beijing save face by admitting that the PRC has been the legitimate government of all of mainland China and Taiwan from the beginning. But at the same time, Beijing then magnanimously grants Taiwan formal independence. Moreover, such an agreement is part of a larger grand bargain involving US normalization with Cuba. The US learns to live with a Communist neighbor off their coast, and China learns to live with a highly capitalist neighbor off their coast. The US military can keep troops stationed in Taiwan, and in turn China gets to station military troops in Cuba (if the Cubans are cool with that.)

One can dream, one can dream…

Or, with my luck, we’ll end up with the nightmare monkey’s paw version of this, where the two superpowers simply arrange to deport the entire Cuban population to Taiwan and the entire Taiwanese population to Cuba, and both countries then annex their respective neighboring islands. Authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing for all, all in the name of peace!

Why should Canada get involved in defense of a bully who is threatening to invade it?

Precisely so it doesn’t end up on the wrong side and end up getting invaded.

Trump lies.

Depends on the official, really.

Yup. When have established powers ever liked a revolutionary government? We don’t have to like the type of revolution Iran underwent to acknowledge that it was a radical revolutionary government in the literal sense of the term. No country on Earth has a form of government like Iran’s. It’s pretty unique. Any time a decent sized country tries is taken over by revolutionaries who attempt a radically new form of government, they receive immense opposition from the old powers. All of Europe declared war on France for chopping the head off their king. Every western government embargoed the people Haiti for daring to violently overthrow their slavers. An expeditionary army of numerous capitalist powers invaded the nascent Soviet Union to try and shut it down. And Iran has been under massive sanctions since they dared to throw their western-backed dictator out by force.

Established powers always try to clamp down on any kind of revolutionary government. It’s not that they fear the government itself; they fear the ideas that government represents. Iran needed to be punished. It needed to be embargoed into poverty. They couldn’t just let Iran try out its new form of government and let them sort themselves out. Because if Iran can overthrow a western-backed puppet and seize control over their own natural resources? Well that’s an idea that could spread far and wide.

Russia is a real country run by actual human beings. They’re not Mordor with a dark lord commanding an army of orcs. And Russia wants allies. They’re up against a vast global US-lead alliance system. Of course they want allies.

This could very easily spiral into a full-on WW3 scenario. Note, WW3 may not look like what you expect it to look like. We’ve been culturally conditioned to think WW3 will look like thousands of mushroom clouds over major cities, but that need not be the case. WW3 could be a large conventional war just like the previous world wars.

Russia is already bogged down in Ukraine, and the US and NATO are supplying them. Israel is at war with a half a dozen countries, and the US is supporting them, including directly entering the war on Iran. The danger of WW3 lies is revealed when you ask, why did Israel choose this time to attack Iran? They chose to because now was simply the perfect opportunity. With Iran’s proxy fighters around Israel devastated, with the Gaza a smoking ruin, Iranian power is lower than it has been in years. That’s why they decided to do this now - kick them while they’re down.

Us getting bogged down in Iran, however, presents other countries with their own windows of opportunity. And the biggest one is China invading Taiwan. China has been saber-rattling and openly planning an invasion of Taiwan, to be done at some point in the next few years. What better time to launch it than when the US has already been depleting their limited weapon stocks in Ukraine, and just got bogged down in Iran?

China is already involved in the Ukraine conflict; they’re one of Russia’s biggest suppliers. Iran also is a Russian ally, providing them thousands of drones. The alliance system of a potential world war is already laid out. It would be Russia/Iran/China vs the US, NATO, and assorted allies.

This would be unlikely to end up in a full nuclear exchange. Direct invasion of the homelands of Russia, China, or the US are not going to happen. But we could see multiple large conventional armed conflicts breaking out in multiple theaters, a conflict between two vast alliance systems that between them encompass most of the world’s population.

If that isn’t a world war, I don’t know what is. Nukes don’t need to fly to have a conflict that leaves millions dead.

Iran would be perfectly within their rights to assassinate various US government officials. After all, that’s exactly what the US and Israel have been doing in Iran.

Dude on CNN talking about how “now we are looking for Iran to come to the table for diplomacy”.

I just can’t understand how someone can have such low self-awareness. We just seem to have pulled off an attack on Iran that likely dwarfs the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pulled us into WW2. The idea that anyone would be remotely interested in peace talks after such an attack is just flabbergasting.

Fuck. The Mossad got their hands on a Death Note.

Israel doesn’t seem to be using its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent for invasion.

So it’s just a coincidence that no neighboring country has threatened them with outright military invasion since they got nukes?

And when has Iran ever threatened to use a bomb against Israel? They deny they’re even trying to get a bomb. Do their politicians like to say, “death to Israel?” Sure, but that’s just part of their discourse. The Iranians use “death to” as a synonym for “down with.” They say the same thing during political campaigns against opposing political candidates.

An Iranian bomb would stabilize the situation because the same pattern has occurred in numerous other conflicts. Yes, nukes don’t prevent conventional wars, but they do prevent total war between nuclear powers. Russia would have never attempted its invasion of Ukraine if Ukraine still had their nukes. India and Pakistan’s arsenals are what kept the recent conflict between them from spiraling further than it did.

You can speculate that nukes wouldn’t prevent further expansion of Israel, but that’s ahistorical analysis. Having an opponent that is just as well armed as you are makes you act more carefully. The Soviets didn’t just keep expanding across Europe, precisely because the US had the bomb to hold them in check. Israel has been able to act with such impunity because ultimately none of its neighbors can stand up to it. It’s only when some of Israel’s neighbors actually have nukes, and they have to address their neighbors as equals, that peace is actually possible. As long as one side holds complete military dominance, real peace isn’t possible.

We should welcome an Iranian bomb. Honestly, it’s what the Middle East really needs to bring it to stability.

The biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East is Israel. They’re a destabilizing force because they’re an expansionist nuclear-armed power with no hard borders. Their borders aren’t actually fixed; they’re in a decades-long process to slowly expand them. For those who forget, Israel’s MO is to:

1. Destabilize border regions of neighboring countries and foster the creation of militant groups within them.
2. Use those destabilized regions as justification for military occupation of the territory of neighboring countries.
3. Announce the creation of border “buffer zones.”
4. Allow their civilians to move into what is supposed to be a DMZ-like buffer zone.
5. Again have civilians in the line of fire of militants, demanding further border expansion.

Israel has been expanding like this for decades, and there’s no end in site. Their immediate neighbors are all to weak and destabilized to resist this process of slow Israeli lebensraum. The people in the Middle East are rightly afraid that they’ll be next under the Israeli boot, and they’ll find themselves reduced to the plight of the Gazans.

Israel is out of control. It’s an expansionist military power hellbent on gobbling up its neighbors. The reason they’re able to get away with this is because they have nuclear weapons. No Arab nation can invade them without the threat of being nuked in return. Israel uses its nuclear arsenal to conquer its neighbors.

Another nuclear power is desperately needed in the region to hold them in check. A nuclear Iran would serve this role well. They wouldn’t be able to wipe Israel off the map, as that would result in them getting nuked in return. What a nuclear-armed Iran can do is to finally put a check on Israel’s endless military expansion. We need powers that can stand up to the Israelis as equals and say, “no. Your borders are fucking big enough. You’re not taking one more square meter of land.”

Cute idea. But unfortunately not practical. For something as valuable/kg as cocaine, you can go to the trouble of using a narco sub. But there’s zero chance such a sub could practically carry cheap bulky goods like flour, rice, etc.

You might be able to use them to smuggle in medicines though.

They will then destroy Hamas. Once Hamas is destroyed, they will demand that the new group be destroyed before the war can end. They will then fund a third group to distribute aid.