Up until fairly recently, Israel was a stand-out in the region for actually having things like decently fair elections and a political class derived from a relatively wide sample of its populace. Other countries in the region were either Arab nationalist republics, Islamic republics, or authoritarian monarchies. While it was ethno-theocratic, it was one that seemed to balance religion with secular demands, and as it is, most countries around the world have at least some basis in ethnicity. The US is a notable exception for this, for what it's worth. This has begun to fade as a more conservative sector of Israeli society has begun carrying more political power, but it's not to the same extent as you find in other countries in the region.
Nuclear weapons are indeed bad and we used to try to negotiate ways between major powers to reduce their number. We don't do that anymore, for a variety of reasons. The more of them there are in different, independent hands, the more likely they are to be used. If they're used, there's a real chance that nuclear-armed powers make severe miscalculations about who is firing what at where. For example, a USAF radar operator watching an over-the-horizon system pointed eastward sees a large number of missiles being launched, and may assume that they're Russian missiles aimed at the US, when they are in fact Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. They might make a potentially species-ending mistake as a result.
The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame. Iran is a Shia Islamic theocracy. Beyond the Western-ish influence that Israel brings to the region, there are serious theological implications from the existence of Israel. Islam has a core tenant that there is no higher power other than Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. Allah is the same god that exists in Christianity and Judaism, and Muhammad is held as carrying on the thread of prophecy that began with the biblical Adam.
There's a lot in common in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and like all other faiths, people interpret it in different ways. The Iranian regime - who definitely does not represent all Muslims, let's make that clear right now - interprets it as the basis of their power. They are a group of clerics and scholars who govern a nation through interpretation and application of religious jurisprudence via one head cleric, the Ayatollah.
If you are a person who either rules a society based on any religious jurisprudence, or are working under that person - as all of the Iranian government does - you can't have too much tolerance for things that might undermine that religion. The Iranian theocracy's interpretation of the line of prophecy that Muhammad is a part of is that he is the "seal of the prophets", meaning that there will be no further revelations or corrections to the line of prophecy until the end-times. Muhammad is held up as having revealed corrections to the line of prophecy, meaning that while Judaism, Christianity, and other Abrahamic faiths are of the same prophecy, they ultimately got some things wrong.
Now let's get back to the existence of Israel. A short description of Israel in the context of what I've described is that you have a people who now control some of the Abrahamic faiths' most holy sites, and they're doing it based off of what is seen as the "wrong" prophecy.
If people who believe in the "wrong" prophecy are firmly in charge of the sites you consider holy, what does that say about your prophecy and your claim to power based on it? Sort of reduces its power, doesn't it? You can't have that. Something has to be done.
In the eyes of the Iranian theocracy, that "something" is funding, training, and commanding militia and military groups who are sympathetic to your understanding of prophecy and having them strike out at the theologically inconvenient people. Developing more powerful weapons to use while doing so is a natural part of this. What's more powerful than a nuclear weapon? Nothing. So you make that your ultimate goal. What they might do with it, who knows, but again, simply having more nuclear weapons in the hands of more independent actors raises the likelihood of their use with potentially catastrophic results.
The plight of the Palestinians just happens to be a convenient excuse for all of this. They're Arab and majority Sunni as opposed to the Persian and Shiite Iran. If there were a two-state solution as we spent most of the last 30 years working towards, it likely wouldn't satisfy the Iranians, which is why they don't recognize Israel at all instead of saying "we'd recognize you if you retreat to your pre-1967 borders and let the Palestinian Authority govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip."
I'm not chastising them for anything. I'm explaining my view on the rationale of their leadership.
That being said, if you're talking about the 1953 coup, ask the British about that. Also, it doesn't take away from the fact that the 1979 revolution didn't install any sort of representative government, either.
"The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame."
I don't think they'd use it, no. They seem to have behaved pretty rationally in response to foreign powers meddling in the region to me. You can wring your hands about them funding terror groups, but it's nothing that we and the brits haven't done over the decades in the region. Their resistance to Israel isn't irrational either.
It's not propaganda. It's just the result of the policies that the CCP has implemented in the past, and given their death grip on politics in China, it could very well happen again should it be found advantageous to the survival of the party.
I know that it's not a luxury that all metro areas can implement, but if you look at airports like Denver or Kansas City, there is a very, very good reason that those airports are out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of accidents happen close to the runway, either on takeoff or landing. It's better that it be in a field than a road or building filled with people.
The way this was dealt with historically, for better or for worse, was to put the cheap housing under the flight path. The proles were left to deal with the noise. The Harlem neighborhood of Kansas City North is a good example of this. It sits next to MKC and has a flophouse motel, a car repair shop, and little else.
When aircraft got significantly faster, heavier, and larger with the advent of jet airliners, it became less of a noise issue and more of a safety issue. You can tell people to put up with noise, you can't tell them to put up with a huge airplane falling out of the sky onto their homes.
It is the job of management to figure out how to make gains over the next 90 days, not make gains sustainable. The money available for consumers to spend in wake of their unemployment is the problem for whenever that issue occurs.
If there isn't a good way, you break the company up, sell it for scrap, give the resulting money to the shareholders, and they do whatever with it. It's the Jack Welch model.
The risks of AI, while mostly hypothetical, have been understood for years.
If they were really this concerned about the risks of AI re: the survival of the human race, they wouldn't have joined a company working in such a space to begin with.
I hate to be this cynical, but part of me wonders what the financial angle is here.
You have technically brilliant people working in a white-hot target for investment and who can draw a high salary. Anthropic is a hyper-scaler that has the moat of high hardware prices and very little else. Every day, that moat gets a little smaller, and FLOSS models get a little better at being "good enough" for the price. You're an Anthropic employee looking to jump on the next big wave since the wave Anthropic is riding is starting to peter out. You go on the record across the trades and news sites talking about how dangerous AI is. That creates a need for someone to make it less dangerous. In theory, you could satisfy that need, for the right amount of money.
Again, I hate to be this cynical, but... it's the tech industry.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
This has frequently been true in American history though.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:
1. Complain loudly about weaponization of institutions
2. Use public support to "reform" those institutions
3. Weaponize those institutions against opponents
4. (Implied) Everyone forgets those institutions were previously less corrupt
The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.
That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
Up until fairly recently, Israel was a stand-out in the region for actually having things like decently fair elections and a political class derived from a relatively wide sample of its populace. Other countries in the region were either Arab nationalist republics, Islamic republics, or authoritarian monarchies. While it was ethno-theocratic, it was one that seemed to balance religion with secular demands, and as it is, most countries around the world have at least some basis in ethnicity. The US is a notable exception for this, for what it's worth. This has begun to fade as a more conservative sector of Israeli society has begun carrying more political power, but it's not to the same extent as you find in other countries in the region.
Nuclear weapons are indeed bad and we used to try to negotiate ways between major powers to reduce their number. We don't do that anymore, for a variety of reasons. The more of them there are in different, independent hands, the more likely they are to be used. If they're used, there's a real chance that nuclear-armed powers make severe miscalculations about who is firing what at where. For example, a USAF radar operator watching an over-the-horizon system pointed eastward sees a large number of missiles being launched, and may assume that they're Russian missiles aimed at the US, when they are in fact Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. They might make a potentially species-ending mistake as a result.
The largest issue with Iran having nuclear weapons is that it almost certainly intends to use them against an already nuclear-armed power, Israel, in a way that really doesn't have any rational endgame. Iran is a Shia Islamic theocracy. Beyond the Western-ish influence that Israel brings to the region, there are serious theological implications from the existence of Israel. Islam has a core tenant that there is no higher power other than Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. Allah is the same god that exists in Christianity and Judaism, and Muhammad is held as carrying on the thread of prophecy that began with the biblical Adam.
There's a lot in common in the three major Abrahamic faiths, and like all other faiths, people interpret it in different ways. The Iranian regime - who definitely does not represent all Muslims, let's make that clear right now - interprets it as the basis of their power. They are a group of clerics and scholars who govern a nation through interpretation and application of religious jurisprudence via one head cleric, the Ayatollah.
If you are a person who either rules a society based on any religious jurisprudence, or are working under that person - as all of the Iranian government does - you can't have too much tolerance for things that might undermine that religion. The Iranian theocracy's interpretation of the line of prophecy that Muhammad is a part of is that he is the "seal of the prophets", meaning that there will be no further revelations or corrections to the line of prophecy until the end-times. Muhammad is held up as having revealed corrections to the line of prophecy, meaning that while Judaism, Christianity, and other Abrahamic faiths are of the same prophecy, they ultimately got some things wrong.
Now let's get back to the existence of Israel. A short description of Israel in the context of what I've described is that you have a people who now control some of the Abrahamic faiths' most holy sites, and they're doing it based off of what is seen as the "wrong" prophecy.
If people who believe in the "wrong" prophecy are firmly in charge of the sites you consider holy, what does that say about your prophecy and your claim to power based on it? Sort of reduces its power, doesn't it? You can't have that. Something has to be done.
In the eyes of the Iranian theocracy, that "something" is funding, training, and commanding militia and military groups who are sympathetic to your understanding of prophecy and having them strike out at the theologically inconvenient people. Developing more powerful weapons to use while doing so is a natural part of this. What's more powerful than a nuclear weapon? Nothing. So you make that your ultimate goal. What they might do with it, who knows, but again, simply having more nuclear weapons in the hands of more independent actors raises the likelihood of their use with potentially catastrophic results.
The plight of the Palestinians just happens to be a convenient excuse for all of this. They're Arab and majority Sunni as opposed to the Persian and Shiite Iran. If there were a two-state solution as we spent most of the last 30 years working towards, it likely wouldn't satisfy the Iranians, which is why they don't recognize Israel at all instead of saying "we'd recognize you if you retreat to your pre-1967 borders and let the Palestinian Authority govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip."
reply