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Iranian soccer team carries backpacks to protest the strikes on an elementary school in Iran
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Its amazing how shitty the US is behaving, to the point where the theocratic authoritarian government of Iran is looking like the good guys.
It's an authoritarian theocracy. How the fuck is the bar to be better than them so low, yet they still fuck it up?
Most people don't seem to be able to view both sides as bad. I feel for civilians on all sides, because they are the ones dying and suffering. Caught between murderous assholes.
Feel exactly the same as an american. No one here wanted to get involved. It defies party lines, literally no one wants it. We had the largest protest in our country's history on Saturday and they will do nothing. It wastes billions of our tax dollars while our people can't afford food. Its a couple of dozen people at the absolute top who are pulling the levers here, while ignoring what the people want.
TBH i dont think that those at the top care what you want....
Exactly the problem unfortunately. It's extremely demoralizing. I'm still proud, like I said the largest protest in our history, I've never seen more Americans this motivated before, but I hope the organizers plan to do something. They don't care about protests. They just let them go knowing everyone will go back to work the next morning. However, if they go too far the propaganda machine will simply pick up and say whatever it needs to and people eat it up happily. My uncle steadfastly believes that the majority of protesters are in fact "paid actors". Millions of paid actors. Billions of dollars spent on it obviously.
It doesn’t defy party lines any more. MAGA just took a few weeks to receive their newest orders from daddy.
That makes sense, they seemed mad for about a day about the gas prices and now I guess they just grabbed a bottle of lube instead of demanding it stop.
Meanwhile I actually know personally TWO people who went out and bought EVs! In car centric transit deserts where they have to drive. Both had some form of "I've been debating a new car for a while and this made my decision not to use gas". So a very thin silver lining that people are at least thinking about it.
The Iran war is all a big ruse from Big Musky to sell more Teslas? I'm joking of course, but there is some Technate of America ties there. More so with Venezuela, Cuba, Columbia, Ecuador, and Greenland. But that's way too deep of a rabbit hole...
yeah, its not a binary bad/good issue and it never has been. Most issues arent, they are about proportion. Islam is poor on womens and gay rights for example, but that doesnt mean any person murdering muslims is simply off the hook because Israel generally does better on those issues (assuming the woman or gay person is not muslim, in which case israel says to murder them)
People these days who claim that Israeli crimes are fine because Muslim countries have problems are victims or perpetrators of Israeli propoganda, all with the net goal of land theft to build a greater israel. All of the middle east's murders and war crimes are about acquiring oil and land theft. And while there may not be any 100% good guys, there are some really really REALLY bad guys, and western governments are siding with the greatest evils in the region.
I can’t think of anyone who thinks any side is good except the brainless sycophants who believe the lies from trump and his Ministry of Truth. Maybe it’s because of my time on Lemmy, but people seem to understand that Iran is shitty, but not shitty enough to manufacture the excuses to do what trump is doing.
It's almost as though Americans have been brainwashed to believe brown people with the wrong religion are inherently evil. And, as a consequence, they find themselves on the side of a genocidal regime that venerates child murder.
The Iranian government is a bunch of evil assholes, just like the Israeli and US governments. This is a case where the "both sides are equal" is true. It's not long ago that the Iranian government murdered thousands of their citizens and they have been oppressing their people for decades. It's just that they have been attacked by equally evil cunts.
The need to paint everything in broad brush "Good v Evil" is what legitimizes these wars to begin with. The idea that you're doing anyone a favor by bombing them should be ridiculous on its face. But we consistently build up this narrative of the Just War, we declare everyone we don't like is Hitler, and then we throw more and more of the planet into the "Hitler" bucket when they aren't along for the ride once the bombs land.
When you kill off all the nice guys, what you're left with are the assholes. The Iranian government is the end result of this multi-generational culling process. The American and Israeli governments are, too.
Obviously they're both evil, but calling them "equal" feels like hegemonic propaganda. What makes them equal?
Over the years, Iran has murdered 10s of thousands of people. Over the decades, a good estimate is in the hundreds of thousands of people murdered.
For the American and Israeli death tolls, you're going to have to add two zeroes to those numbers.
The Iranian murders are a rounding error when compared to the death America has been exporting for decades.
Thats mostly due to lack of ability, not lack of desire. Do you think that if the socioeconomic positions were reversed, the current Iranian regime would have been any better than the US, or Israel?
You can quibble about death toll amounts and functional ability... but that doesn't change desire.
I do believe thinking in "equal to" terms needlessly belittles the death and destruction perpetrated by these tools... but only as much as quantifying them at all. These people are sick, twisted megalomaniacal dickbags who should be brought low. Sadly that only seems to happen at the whims of other sick, twisted megalomaniacal dickbags.
The best we can do is try and wedge ourselves into the cracks to push them all out of power while trying to stave off the opportunists who try and do the same.
And not bicker amongst ourselves about the level of evilness to quantify each by.
Why does desire matter?
I have a desire to kill billionaires. Does that matter? Should I be tried for murder? No, because I'm not actually going to kill anyone.
Putting violent desire on the same moral plane as actual murder victims is a silly thing to do.
In this hypothetical the details really matter, but in general I think no, the current Iranian regime would not be better.
I think a better hypothetical would be that, if the US never did a coup in Iran and overthrow their democratically elected government, and the socioeconomic positions were reversed, would Iran be better then? I think yes.
Agreed, but what if not stopping the IRGC ends up causing orders-of-magnitude more suffering and deaths? (Tho, is Trump actually unleashing the IRGC because Mojtaba gives them free-er reign than Ali; and causing some Iranians to actually side with their own psychotic countrymen against the attacking foreigners? If yes, then US voters may be more harmful than Iran.)
Would Hamas not be vastly worse than Israel if they had the same military power as Israel?
ISIS?
Shouldn't intent count to prevent access to biological and nuclear weapons?
This is the logic of preemptive war, and it is blatantly illegal under the UN charter. This type of logic is very dangerous because it can justify any war without evidence.
How could they possibly be worse than Israel, who is invading it's neighbors, starting wars for territory, doing ethnic cleansing, and threatening to drop nukes?
I agree that I do not want to see a Hamas government, and an ISIS government would be horrific, but history shows these type of groups form as a direct result of imperial violence.
Israel funded Hamas and killed it's more moderate competitors. Hamas' early leaders like Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were scholars and academics, serious people interested in peace. Israel killed them and their families, and their successors, over and over until you end up with a violent, uneducated leader like Yahya Sinwar.
The US acted similarly when we meddled in the Syrian civil war, giving weapons and money to ISIS.
I don't know how this would work at all. How do you measure intent? Does the US have good intent with its nuclear arsenal? Russia? Pakistan?
I think your question has 2 logical conclusions:
OK - reacting-only would reduce wars of aggression.
How about if 98% of UN members votes for an allied attack against something that almost everyone agrees is psychotic, like ISIS, NK, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, etc.? Does the combination of actions and clear intent not make pre-emptive war and regime change of these seem like the right thing?
Here I don't agree - I think the 1988 Hamas charter is utterly indefensible.
Yes, and Israel was formed in response to the Holocaust and pogroms. Hamas is also genocidal, just incompetent - but would be worse. I think both should be boycotted and sanctioned, until Israeli voters stop voting the way they have been (which might not happen until they reject religion and racism), and Gazans overthrow Hamas (which seems more possible than in e.g. NK).
Yeah, allowing Iran to get/create nukes and intercontinental delivery, would reduce the chances of attacks against it like the recent ones by USA and Israel, which would be good for the normal people of Iran in the short and medium term.
When it comes to the people (not the regimes) I think that the Israeli, older Gazan, and USA citizens are the worst because of the way they vote(d); while the Iranians might be the least bad (tho that may just be because they haven't had real elections for so long).
Preemptive war and regime change is still a terrible option. If you actually want to solve the problem you have to get to the core of the problem, and decapitating leadership has a consistent history of making things worse.
Take NK for example, how did it get to where it is now? In the Korean War, America bombed everything. We bombed hospitals, schools, water treatment, power, factories, homes. Douglas MacArthur complained that there was nothing left to bomb. Then we set up a brutal sanctions regime, effectively cutting NK off from the rest of the world for many decades.
The Kim dictatorship tried everything they could think of to lift the strangling sanctions. Diplomacy has made some gains with Russia and China, but very little with the West. The Kim regime has been taught that the only way to receive Western goods is through threats, missile tests, and nuclear capabilities.
If we would decapitate the Kim dictatorship and keep the sanctions regime in place, then another brutal dictatorship would just take their place. I'm certainly not a fan of the Kim dictatorship, but regime change war is not a solution, it would just make everything worse.
I find it interesting you mention Saudi Arabia. They are a client state of America, why would we want to decapitate them? There is a mutually beneficial relationship- we get oil and regional influence, they get military toys and legitimacy. This mutual benefit is so strong that we let them get away with 9/11.
Mentioning ISIS is curious too. ISIS is not a state, so the UN was able to vote to attack them. The UN (along with Iranian forces) did decapitate their leadership, multiple times.
If the only thing you know about Hamas' history is one line from one charter, then you haven't read enough to form a comprehensive opinion on the subject, and I would encourage you to read more.
Blaming 'older Gazans' for the way they voted is utterly ridiculous. You do know that Gaza has been an open air concentration camp since at least 2012, right? Their vote has little effect on matters. Gaza would still be a concentration camp if Fatah had won instead of Hamas.
And as for the 2006 election that you blame 'older Gazans' for, did you know that election was orchestrated by George W Bush and his "democracy promotion in the middle east"? Are you aware that he was warned Fatah would lose to Hamas? Israel committed many horrific war crimes as they withdrew from Gaza in 2006, so Gazan voters were feeling especially radical at the time. Bush needed a victory so he pushed for early elections. I think Bush has more blame than 'older Gazan voters' for the outcome of this election.
How George W. Bush Helped Hamas Come to Power
hey someone gets it
Oh, please. That's nitpicking bullshit. Nobody is trying to downplay the pure evil the US have brought to the world for decades. But acting as if the Iranian regime isn't as bad just because they don't tallied the same numbers is idiotic. I'd argue it's simply a lack of opportunity. All of those fuckers would make the world instantly better by dropping dead. That includes the governments in the US, Israel, Iran, Russia and China at the very least, plus a load of billionaires.
I don't think it's nitpicking at all. There is a serious difference between thousands of dead and millions of dead.
Anyone who ignores that reality is downplaying the evil that the US has wrought.
Yeah they even killed 30000 people according to the folks that bombed them 2 weeks later.
How dumb can you be lmao
Absolutely not. The Iranian regime has a lot of blood on its hands, both at home and abroad, but it doesn't even come close to the sheer amount of evil exercised by Israel and America. The worst thing the Ayatollah regime has ever done was support the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. That's obviously evil as fuck, but it looks downright cute compared to Israel's literal genocide and America's War on Terror (let alone its even worse historical crimes). In this class of absurd evil, killing a few thousand people is literally a rounding error.
The bar was on the ground, and magats brought a backhoe.
The US is also an authoritarien theocracy. In god we trust
Anyway who act suprise should read history book. Since civil war ended, the US has always been a military based economy and always been shitty.
It just now being forced in front of people faces as they cannot easily control the internet anymore. Although with AI advancement I wouldn't be surprised they pass a bill to control what information a person read online, either by a basic firewall rules or by phone screen readers that can alter and block information on the fly.
It will start with (porn) and (child sexual content) then blaming Russia and Iran to then being the norm.
Everytime they lose control of media they have to scale back their shitty behavior before starting again.
Iran murdered Thousands oft protestes a few months ago.
We all know that they don't care about their people.
Not questioning that they killed protesters, but I've yet to see any kind of reputable sources backing up the absurd totals that some have reported.
It's not "shitty", that's just pure evil. And then the double tap. US is just pathetic on a whole another scale.
And behaving? It's not the first time they've done something like this.
I hope the world never lets them forget all the atrocities they've caused but we know how the pitty patty moral astroturfing, victim blaming, strawman, narcissism, ignorance that appears every time defending it.
We watched with disgust as Israel genocided Gaza, but Trump watched it and said "My turn!"
US is much more involved in the former, and same w Israel in the latter. They aren't exactly taking turns.
I almost wonder if that is a point, to make Iran, the second coming of North Korea, look like a responsible actor