callously handwaving away rape and diappearances as a tool of governmental control

Why do you hate America?

Like the number of prties is an indicator if how good you’re doing democracy

“Iran only has one party and that’s bad”

“The number of parties doesn’t matter, aktuly, and you’re stupid if you thought so”

:-/

You should be ashamed to defend such a brutal regime

Wipe the Saudi light sweet crude off your lips before you try to deliver that line in earnest.

I suspect your definition of “brutal regime” is “they won’t let me jerk it to women in bikinis”. There’s no real concern for Iranians assassinated by the Mossad or bombed by the Americans or starved through international sanctions. Nevermind the native expats hounded by western anti-immigration police or scientists who were kidnapped and tortured or civilians shot out of the sky for no reason at all.

You only seem to understand “brutality” as a White Man’s Burden to resolve. So long as westerners get to exploit the labor and livelihood of a Middle Eastern people, Islamic Despots don’t seem to bother you in the slightest.

Iran isn’t democratic. It’s a single party theocracy

I count four major coalitions of parties, and a healthy batch of independents, which is more than can be said of any American, Canadian, or UK government. I don’t know how you get “single party” out of that. Hell, the Reformist coalition just took the Presidency a year ago for the first time.

jails or murders it’s people for saying mean stuff about the unelected leader that was supposedly chosen by god

You seem to have Iran confused with the US. It’s always fucking projection with you guys.

Western Press do be like that. The Saudi government is experiencing the same water crisis, but somehow remains beyond repute.

I hughly doubt their uranium is civilian

It is at least as civilian as any French nuclear plant. To date, there is no evidence of plutonium enrichment or bomb construction, which is more than can be said of their Israeli neighbors.

Do you mean the Guardian Council of Islamic Jurists? The populist leaders that lead the revolution against the Shah’s military dictatorship in 1979 and retain enormous popularity within Iran’s conservative religious community?

They’ve got about as much “absolute power” as any unelected SCOTUS judges. The power is entirely derived from the Iranian bureaucracy’s loyalty to the Council over the Presidency.

Iranians have a more democratic society than any other country you could name in the region.

What they are is under siege. The eleven day war with Israel crippled their domestic infrastructure. And the ongoing sanctions placed by the US prevented them from rebuilding in a timely manner.

people in power are myopic and prioritize short term benefice over long term thonking

I’m not sure “maintaining adequate levels of domestic crop yield” is a short-term benefit. They’re stretched for water because they’re in a historic drought during a climate catastrophe. This is a no-win situation, exacerbated by the constant threat of military invasion by nuclear superpowers and their rabid fascist local proxies.

The Iranian government can’t summon rain from the heavens any easier than their Saudi or Qatari neighbors. Those states just have the benefit of access to western markets and engineering firms for enormous desalination plants. Meanwhile, Iranians’ energy infrastructure - necessary to run the pumps and pipelines that irrigate much of the country - have been subject to repeated bombardment by Israeli and US aircraft. Most notably, their civilian nuclear program was crippled by Trump’s B-2 bombing run in June. But this is just the tail end of the damage inflicted by the eleven day shootout with Israel.

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

It’s not post-apocalyptic when 1% own 99% of the wealth.

It’s post-apocalyptic when your municipal utilities are all shut down and the only potable water sources are surrounded by armed goons.

See Palestine

Palestinians are being mass murdered the old fashioned way. All the talk of Lavender AI and autonomous drones and the like obscures the far more banal reality of IDF troops walking through the center of towns and shooting anyone they see with their rifles.

Thinking we’re going to have comically resource intensive and technically complex machines in the post apocalyptic future is so optimistic.

They create the economic activity.

You have to go back and actually read Kapital.

More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.

Visit a refugee camp and explain that to the locals

They need economic activity to be livable. Shoving broke people onto a reservation doesn’t accomplish that.

I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.

I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.

And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.

Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to

doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.

At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”

SecurityCube 360 Pro

The Russian Federation being granted the former USSR’s permanent seat was conditional: the Russian Federation was required and expected to uphold the responsibilites that the USSR had, as well as the USSRs treaties and agreements. Failure to uphold those commitments would mean the Russian Federation was in breach of their agreement with the UN and should lose the seat formerly granted to the USSR.

Sure. But the mechanism by which the UN functions is such that the Security Council has extensive veto power over most actual policy set by the UN. Consequently, any effort to challenge Russia on its failed obligations or to penalize or remove them would be subject to… Russian veto of the action from the Security Council.

That’s because the UN doesn’t exist to set policy against its primary member states. The UN exists to allow member states a neutral(ish) space to negotiate international policy amongst themselves and to organize against non-members and non-state-actors. Even if you could kick a $1T/year economy and largest sovereign landmass on the planet out of the body… who would benefit? Its not like removing Russia from the UN makes the country not-a-state. It’s not like the BRICS wouldn’t continue to coordinate amongst themselves independent of the UN. All you’ve done is cut the cord to the Little Red Phone that helps a future Russian President and a future American President from hashing it out before they launch nukes at one another.

The USSR, interestingly enough, had signed many treaties recognizing the borders of its successor states before it was dissolved, one of which being Georgia. Thus the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia in 2008 violated one of these USSR agreements they are required to uphold. This was a direct violation and one that is technically grounds for removal of the UN, at least removal from a permanent seat.

You can single out the USSR on this technicality and hold Russia to it. But then you could single out the US for its extensive violation of the Geneva Convensions or its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or any number of other historical treaties and associated promises.

You could single out the US for the Hague Invasion Act if nothing else. But we won’t, for the same reason nobody’s seriously interested in ousting Russia (or China or the UK or France for that matter).

This isn’t the G7 (formerly G8) where “We’re embargoing you, why are you even here?” would be the response to any Russian delegation. This is the body that exists to negotiate member states out of nuclear war. If anything, the Security Council should have significantly more members, given how nuclear weapons have proliferated over the last 70 years.

Maybe getting Pakistan and India on the panel could avoid the last great Pyrrhic Victory of human civilization.

I feel like I’m looking at a scene from The Reanimator.

Oh sure. Hillary and Sarkozy suckered him into it. But that’s half the problem with Obama. Whether its Larry Summers or Joe Biden or Rick Warren or Elon Musk, there’s always some rich white asshole by his side, dangling a million dollar speaking tour over his head and leading him like a rented mule.

She’s got a lot of dead bodies to stack up before she reaches the Obama tier. But if the confrontation along Venezuela’s cost goes hot, she could get there quick.