The USA have backed the coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mossadegh, to begin with.
"In 1953, the CIA- and MI6-backed 1953 Iranian coup d'état overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company."
So the claim here is that by backing any coups and revolutions, the US tacitly backed all of them? Ok!
Like: yes, I lay a lot of the responsibility for the nightmare state Iranians live in at the hands of Cold War NATO policymakers, for sure, but I don't think it's all that useful as a positive claim of what happened in the 1970s. The US did not support the Ayatollahs.
> So the claim here is that by backing any coups and revolutions, the US tacitly backed all of them? Ok!
I didn't say that. It's just that Iran already had a democratically elected government. However there is some truth to the claim that you put in my mouth, that is, you can see that pattern quite often in history. Chile is another example but let's focus on Iran.
I can't see that it would be anything other than guesswork. Polls are unlikely to be possible with any accuracy there. This is anecdotal, but I've heard from the few Iranians I've known that much of the population lead western lives behind closed doors. Their civil subjugation seems to come from the threat of violent punishment (torture / rape / death / disappearance) and a Stasi-esque domestic intelligence network.
Small sample, but talking about this with my Iranian friends, the sentiment among them and their wider network is that they do acknowledge that Iran has problems, that they need a change in leadership, but that they do NOT want a regime change at the hands of the US/Israel. For them that is a recipe for disaster and more carnage.
In their view, the topology of Iranians and their political views would be: 10% - pro-US regime change intervention; 20% - ardent regime supporters; 70% - pro-regime change but without US involvement.
It’s possible this is less about comms or cost, and more about occupying an orbit with high utility. I think of it as just an extension of PRC’s “rape the oceans” policy.
The purpose of the United States government is to benefit the people already here. It is not reasonable to assume that Americans should have to compete with the labor pool of the entire planet.
>But it turns out that for many of you it's about the place you happened to be born.
This meme needs to die. It was not some sort of accident that I was born in this country, it was the consequence of generations of conscious decisions and actions. I had a 0% probability of being born literally anywhere else. And as such, it is perfectly reasonable to want my government to prioritize the needs of me and my compatriots over those of others who are not from here.
> Americans should have to compete with the labor pool of the entire planet.
You almost always do, with houw our world is set up. No matter what you believe.
> it was the consequence of generations of conscious decisions and actions.
Oh, yeah, you are worthy, the others aren't. Got it.
> it is perfectly reasonable to want my government to prioritize the needs of me and my compatriots over those of others who are not from here.
They are not, in fact, prioritizing the needs of your compatriots. They would if they cared about making your country more competitive.
But in fact, they are hard at work to alienate your allies, erase your competitive advantages and turn you into a dictatorship.
Good luck, you're going to need it. Don't worry, I know us across the pond are fucked too, but at least we are not throwing away our status as a superpower for the dumbest of reasons.
I think the hyperbole in your comment is clouding your point, which appears to be that you are skeptical that immigration restrictionism is on balance good for the United States, to which I’d say that immigration restrictionism is actually the default setting and the current era of high immigration is unprecedented and new. This is the same pattern in Europe as well. The US achieved its super power status during one of the more restrictionist periods for immigration in its history, so I don’t follow how moderating immigration just a little bit equates to “throwing it away”.
>at least we are not throwing away our status as a superpower for the dumbest of reasons.
If you would choose to believe, all of this is a strategic play to get off the resource curse (aka the Dutch disease), with resources in question being trust and US dollar being the world currency.
Throwing that away may be a good thing for US long term.
Because there's a non-trivial element of the current USG (and probably a decent sized portion of American voters) who think we'll be at war with PRC within the next couple years, at some point when the next Taiwan invasion windows open (April and October each year). From that perspective, this is prudent policy. If you don't think this is likely, or don't care about broader historical or geopolitical trends, then yes it's very annoying.
That doesn't explain it, though. In this case and the TikTok case, nobody has been able to cite exactly what all these "personal data" are. Not once have I seen a citation of what TikTok has "stolen" from users, somehow defying data sandboxing implemented on mobile devices.
This fake hysteria over drones is even worse, considering that the drones don't have the means of sending arbitrary data to remote servers.
It can't send "whatever it wants." The user has to grant access to various categories of personal data.
And whatever it sends can and would have been sniffed by now. It's incredible how much time people have to expend on way-more-obscure snooping than that.
It has your location and your phone number and flight logs. The later are systematically sent to the Civil Aviation Administration of China along with your phone number which is a unique ID in China. I am not talking about hypotheticals, I am talking about what's happening right now in 2025 in China and that will happen all around the world as governments tighten the grip.
There is nothing to prepare for because the only possible war between the USA and China is a nuclear war and such a war has no victor. Both countries are "prepared" in terms of nuclear weapons.
The USA is clearly not prepared to sacrifice any of its own cities to prevent an invasion of Taiwan.
All this sabre rattling and military buildup only serves to put money in the pockets of the military industrial complex and/or build military capabilities for each country to exert its will within its own sphere of influence.
> There is nothing to prepare for because the only possible war between the USA and China is a nuclear war and such a war has no victor.
I think there are 2 false statements here. First, you could have conventional conflict alone, the same way you had WW2 without extensive use of chemical weapons.
Second, there are possible paths to have a winnable nuclear war, actually, the US did have one a couple of decades ago and it won. I do agree that saying this out loud though is dangerous because the reason for nuclear taboo is also based on the perception of "end of world" it has.
> Second, there are possible paths to have a winnable nuclear war, actually, the US did have one a couple of decades ago and it won.
Well yeah because at that time they were the only one who had a nuclear bomb. That situation didn't last long.
I think it's really great that it's such a taboo, otherwise these things would be used a lot, incurring all sorts of pollution, mass casualties and chances to escalate. It's a good thing that these have not been used since WWII though I do think their existence as a deterrent has brought us a bit more peace.
> Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.
It’s debatable whether it’s a better use of US power and resources to try to stop PRC from obtaining these chips versus, say, sinking the Chinese fishing fleets actively wrecking entire ecosystems. I probably agree with you that on balance working on the later problem has a higher long term ROI.
Yes, thank you, not enough people know this. Though, it should be inferable from the name. “Copy right” to mean “I/we retain the right to make copies”. Certainly sounds like a publisher right to me.
You can even dissolve the uranium in the water and use the same substance for both fuel and propellant and so capable of reaching far higher temperatures than those that would cause any engine to melt.
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