I have friends in the US that want the US government destroyed, there are people in the southern US that think the south won the civil war. Who cares?
Every government in all of human history has had its detractors and supporters, more detractors probably exist in expatriated communities, their existence does not really prove anything.
the no kings movement draws a line between no kings in the USA, and leaving other countries to pursue the same.
didn't Donald Trump campaign on no more foreign wars? doesn't America First mean not starting some forever war?
and if there is a good case for intervention: then make it! what are the objectives? Regime change? we killed most of their leadership, and they are still running the show. We killed Osama... and then fled Afghanistan decades later. why is there such a short memory in this case? these dudes HATE US: their recruiting propaganda gets more effective with every bomb we drop on them.
and if regime change is so important, than surely we will invade North Korea next right? and Russia? what about them? how about Venezuela? ohhh, yeah we left the regime in place, with no change for the people living under it.
perhaps was controlling oil the key objective? well... we stopped sanctioning the Iranian regime, and they are still in a position to stop traffic in Hormuz: the current terms they are asking gives them more control over the strait, rather than less?
so what the hell is our objective? can we just admit that we have no idea what we're doing, because we have no strategy?
Be an apologist for something that isn't truly riddled with internal inconsistency.
I’m not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that anti-regime Iranians are a minority?
I’m not sure if we have good statistics on this. So everyone may have a different perspective.
All I can say is this: I’m married to an Iranian woman, and through her I’ve met many Iranian expats, and I’ve talked to her family members within Iran.
I think you’ll find that Iranian expats are pretty unanimously against the regime. That’s millions of Iranians. My in-laws who lives in Tehran are anti-regime, along with every single person on my wife’s side of the family: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody.
Thousands of protesters were killed opposing the regime. And that’s just the latest protest.
This is a regime that will kill women who don’t cover their hair correctly. Dancing and singing in the street is illegal.
Don’t be concerned on behalf of the regime. This is a just war supported by Iranians. You are on the right side of history to kill people who hang protestors and force little girls to cover every part of their body.
And a significant portion of the opposition wish he was dead.
It’s not about “minority vs majority” it’s the very biased phrasing of “we should bomb Iran because people want regime change” Imagine if Iran was bombing USA because the majority of Americans want regime change.
>That’s millions of Iranians. My in-laws who lives in Tehran are anti-regime, along with every single person on my wife’s side of the family: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody.
How do you square this with the absolutely massive pro-government rallies that we've seen all across Iran for the entire duration of the conflict? Millions of Iranians opposed to the regime, in a country of 90 million+, might still be a fringe minority.
If you asked some American expat their thoughts on MAGA, and they responded "China should bomb MAGA rallies so we can be free from the Republican party, my whole family in the US agrees".....that person would be considered a fringe lunatic, even if Trump's regime has record-low approval like it does now (and rightly deserves, I hope he is impeached and jailed).
In a country of 90 million, if the regime has 20% supporters, that’s 18 million supporters.
Tehran population is 9 million, 20% of that is 1.8 million.
So it’s easy to understand why you might see videos of hundreds or thousands of regime supporters in the streets. That doesn’t mean they’re the majority.
Maybe they should go be the boots on the ground for the next quagmire if it's so important to them? Commander in Chief Bonespurs and the Secretary of Booze can lead the charge straight up the Straight.
Or maybe they should just focus on being Americans in America and some day Iran will sort itself out without the US' "help".
why do we have a moral obligation to help? and why them? there are many places on Earth with a lot worse situation for citizens than Iranians, do we have a moral obligation to help everyone and prioritize?
again, why do we care? about this region in particular. and for whom
would it be “game-changing” other than Israel?
> we have to be pragmatic and choose our battles
this sounds very far removed from “we have a moral obligation”
bottom line, we should not give two shits about what is happening there and we even went voting for a candidate who told us he’ll be the one to make sure we don’t give two shits about it except of course he turned out to be worse than all previous ones combined :)
Surely you can steel man this yourself. Iran wants nukes. Iran has stated it would like to destroy the US and Israel. Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally. Iran has missiles that can reach Europe. Iran is an ally of Russia and China. Iran wants to control the passageway for a big chunk of the world's oil. Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
This is not comprehensive and maybe you can quibble with some of it, but it is not mysterious why we might care.
>Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally.
The former is a meaningless characteristic when said democracy commits a genocide and runs an apartheid state (hard to deny with the recent capital punishment law exclusively for Palestinian prisoners). Hardly model behavior for anyone else in the region to emulate. The latter is meaningless since this ally only ever drags us into problems, almost all of which are of its own making.
> Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
It's easier to cooperate with your neighbors when you stop squatting on their territory, or stop massacring them.
>but it is not mysterious why we might care.
I think "people who care" should volunteer to serve in the IDF, and leave the rest of America out of it. Kinda like the various low-friction pipelines for people to go fight/die for Ukraine without committing US Service Members to such a wasteful endeavor.
I'm well aware of the insane perspective of Iranian monarchists in America. Frankly it's not really their fault, American interventionists have pushed them into this brainrot.
But having an opinion doesn't make it a good opinion and there is no way to say "please get my grandmother's blood on your hands for my insane vision of Iran" sanely.
Thanks, I hadn’t seen that article before. Interesting read.
My take is that GAMAAN likely overstates the opposition, but all surveys on Iran are imperfect, not just GAMAAN.
I know Pew has done surveys in Iran, but didn’t directly ask if people support the regime.
I personally believe that the opposition group is larger than the regime supporters. I think there’s enough data to infer that.
But I’ll also admit that there’s probably a sizable percentage of ambivalent/non-revolutionary Iranians who would just be satisfied with a better economy.
I trust the people who are close to this more than what you hear on the news. My guess is 90%+ of the readers here know nothing of Iranians except what they read or hear on the news.
How many of you have been to Iran, have family members there, etc? I'm guessing very few.
Well, whenever my city has to vote on extending the Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, coincidently Xfinity/Comcast is giving $5 off pizza coupons at my local pizza place.
One of the objectives of the Artemis missions is to prepare for Mars travel, none of the objectives of Artemis are to view Earth as the only planet we have nor to preserve it.
Proving the Earth is flat is not one of the stated goals of the Artemis program which is to establish a permanent base on the moon to prepare for deep space exploration.
Just because a law is bad doesn't mean breaking it is a good thing. The laws against gambling are bad, but that's because they're too loose, not because they're too strict. Breaking those laws to gamble doesn't make gambling a good thing.
One freedom denied to Americans is that we can not provide comfort to our enemies - this is punishable by death according our constitution, so we tend to err on unwavering support for our military always.
Many Americans may be absolutely against this horrible, barbaric, idiotic action in the Middle East, but they might wisely not want to talk about it.
So let me say "Thank you to all American troops for your service, God bless America. Our military is the only reason we have peace and freedom." - this is my official public opinion as an American and I would never have at least two witnesses catch me saying anything different.
I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't happening that day.
So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).
I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than break-even.
I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.
I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).
> if the people involved are responsible and having fun.
I think "please gamble responsibly" has the same power as "please drink responsibly." Which is to say, we regulate the ever loving hell out of alcohol sales, and that's probably where gambling should be headed as well.
There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.
The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.
You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.
Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.
Your question implies a sense of moral outrage about gambling so I don't if it was asked in good faith or not.
Kalshi was on my radar because of Tim Walz dropping out the Minnesota governor race and an article about who would replace him being wagered on prediction markets, coincidently this was during a boring part of January after a snow storm and so weather was on my mind.
You can wager on aggregate precipitation, high and low temp, etc. The price is a binary contract between two parties with the market taker paying a small percent fee, so the conclusion you make that it "seems like a roundabout way to lose money" was not the conclusion I drew then nor believe that conclusion to be true even now, being a market maker using a trivial model from one-day forecast data was break-even for me.
Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.
My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).
A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of.
It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits.
It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant.
Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.
If a company puts unenforceable terms in their TOS, how likely are they to comply with the law in every other matter? No way would I give my kid a device made by these people for that reason.
I literally LOLed at the idea that purchasing a consumer product, at retail, could include stipulations on my future employment. And at the hubris of any manufacturer for imagining they could get away with such an absurd idea.
Every government in all of human history has had its detractors and supporters, more detractors probably exist in expatriated communities, their existence does not really prove anything.
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