Iran is obviously not innocent (nobody is), but their population is currently being hit for no particular reason beyond "Israeli vibes". That's not a broken clock being right, that's a broken clock telling the wrong time.

1. it was free;

2. it was sponsored by the most fashionable project of the time (Linux);

3. it did not require a server;

4. because it was FOSS, people could extend it without asking anyone's permission; and...

5. ...once GitHub appeared, simplifying the PR process, the network effect did its thing.

Git was hard to use and to understand. It did not win on technical features alone, as you said there were plenty of alternatives. It won because of community and network effects.

When you point at a resource under my control and force me to share it (or else), it's not "a custom of commons" - it's a classic colonial appropriation.

Which is also how Rome and (initially) the Islamic kingdoms saw the sea when they were upstarters - Rome was very much not a naval power to begin with (or ever, really) and Islamic kings resorted to piracy to match Italian and Spanish powers.

Beyond lofty words, when they finally ended up controlling the straits, both empires definitely treated them like personal possession ("mare nostrum", Ottomans closing the Bosphorous...). Like everyone else, in practice.

Staccato, which is Italian for "detached, separated".

When I see simple Italian words used as technical terms in music or art, I think "oh, this must be what English speakers feel when they work in tech - a lot of common words becoming specific concepts in that particular field".

The various treaties about freedom of passage exist precisely because, before the last 200 years, everyone did whatever they wanted with straits and other natural chokepoints, including closing them at will. Freedom of navigation is not an obviously natural right nor one universally accepted, before colonial powers effectively invented it and enforced it with guns. If somebody shows up with bigger guns, it might well disappear again.

Also, I wish the expression "close but no cigar" could be banned on the internet. Unless you're a professor of international relations at a renowned university, you simply don't get to gatekeep what reality is - particularly when making up arbitrary principles like these.

Even most dictatorships don't "have a dictator". They have a "great leader" that coincidentally gets voted in again and again, for whom constitutions are amended, and who happens to have his own "revolutionary" irregular militias, not-so-secret police grabbing people on the streets in plainclothes (or worse), a subservient parliament rubber-stamping decrees, etc etc.

Even without some of that, the "unitary executive" theory, as implemented by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, is effectively a temporary dictatorship in all but name.

> all the oligarchs in the US got rich when the economy was doing well.

You can make bank when things go bad. Look up the European currency crisis of the 90s, when folks like Soros amassed their billions. Or the few who got 2008 right.

Whoever is betting with incredible timing on Trump's unexpected policy shifts, every other week, is definitely not getting poorer. And when the economy tanks, assets get cheap - which is great if you have accumulated cash.

Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq (it's an Iran proxy now). Korea was a stalemate.

Pretty much every time the US goes alone against a medium-sized country, it doesn't end in victory.

Everything else is maintained and operated in agreement with local authorities - which is why the US, at the moment, cannot use Spanish bases and Diego Garcia to wage war on Iran. Even Saudi bases have been blocked in the past (notably to invade Iraq).

Without long-term bases, it becomes extremely difficult to project power with continuity. Can you still do the occasional special op, like killing Osama? Sure, but you can't do things like ensuring free navigation (and hence the flow of resources and goods) and signal intelligence gets so much harder.

It has had some effect; the emirates are desperate to find a way out of this conflict, and various figures have publicly said "the system of alliances [with the US] has worked but needs to be modernized" - i.e. we can't allow Americans to do what they want anymore.