All these Iran-backed forces are formally allied into an Axis of Resistance, and their main success so far has been to confuse people like you about who holds the moral and ethical high ground. The reason they sought to sow doubt and confusion is to isolate Israel so they can destroy the nation, the whole thing, as they continuously have campaigned to do for perhaps 70 years.

One thing I used to side load or F-Droid was a keyboard, to circumvent what I perceived as privacy violations. But my selection Year 0 got forked or disappeared by Year 2, idk when or why, and thats a glaring security or privacy risk that I don’t have time to monitor and figure.

I actually thought Google’s solution in the article was charming— toggle developer mode. If you’re in developer mode you know you’ve got something to monitor and mitigate. Smartphones just aren’t powerful enough to use for their own defense at a consumer level against professionalized hackers, and from a product positioning perspective Google’s move is completely defensible.

And in the reverse, if a person makes a series of impulsive, damaging decisions, they probably will not be able to accurately explain why they did it, because neither the brain nor physiology are tuned to permit it.

Seems pretty much the same to me.

It’s just the NYT. Let’s not demean the rest of the media for the faults of the NYT.

That self-perception lowered the gate for interference in Ukrainian affairs in the first place, but also set a ceiling on escalation.

Yeah, the game Iran is now trying to play is called “Pipelines and Pirates”.

There’s actually a ship deployed to the region right now named after the standard US response to this game, the USS Tripoli.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

This is categorically false. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Qatar, (Kuwait,) even Oman and Turkey at various times, and Cyprus. Iran demonstrated superiority in only one respect during this war, and that was in recruiting otherwise well-meaning, levelheaded figures in media and government, even religious leaders, to spout incoherent nonsense as you did here.

Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.

The IRGC and Iranian leadership assume that since Israel is just one nation, and not a big one, that they really really want to annihilate, it should be no big deal for everyone else to accept. But that is a dangerous, even existential proposal on both sides, as the IRGC knows, partly because the US position worldwide is about projecting security for partners.

Iran actually occupies a mirror position regarding the Palestinians, who have fought and suffered greatly. So Iran strives to reverse the positions of the Israelis and Palestinians— not to raise all ships, but swap them— which isn’t a moral cause from an impartial perspective, it’s just picking a different winner.

The US and Israel sought peace through negotiations for decades regarding the Palestinians, while Iran has continually plotted and waged war, which it now has on its home soil. The US and Israel have genuinely sought to peacefully resolve the situation, while Iran has not, not in my lifetime.

Translated to human terms: stop threatening the US and its allies.

The US position is not sadism, it’s how every nation except Iran tolerates one another, live and let live.

Russia and the US— they competed strongly with one another during the Cold War but generally respected red lines. Russia withdrew its kinetic threat from Cuba, the US knew circa 1998 that expanding NATO through the old Warsaw Pact would make no friends in Moscow. Strong, rules-based brinksmanship all the way around.

Iran is just about ideological extremism. Sometimes there are rules, or used to be, but the IRGC signed up a bunch of unprofessional clowns to wage total war on its behalf and, at core, talks like “mutually assured destruction” would be a total “win”, provided Israel was on the other side. If either superpower exposed that kind of philosophy in the Cold War can you imagine the calamity? It’s inherently destabilizing.

In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.

One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.

What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.

Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.

Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-...

If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.

So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.

2. Let’s hypothesize the US gov’t or allies did pre-release this info to traders as a policy tool, inviting them to sell oil profitably, shaping the later price action . In a practical sense they may have brought more speculators to the short side than otherwise would have been there; is that scenario really beyond the pale?

3. News of war and sovereign relations on an international stage necessarily will test the boundaries of traditional law of confidentiality and fair practices.

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/06/18/world-news/iran-supreme-leader...

[2] https://www.news18.com/world/in-the-name-of-haidar-last-post...

This particular market wasn’t about the likelihood of a strike but the probability of radical success. It seems at least possible in the circumstances that the Iran Supreme leader chose his own fate, which was inherently predicable and also exactly what I seem to recall him publicly predicting, albeit without a strict deadline.[3]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-says-he-g...

[3] https://www.malaysianow.com/news/2026/03/01/khamenei-killed-...