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?
I almost wonder if that is a point, to make Iran, the second coming of North Korea, look like a responsible actor
and doing it at the behest of israel to, whom have been salivating on attacking IRAN directly for decades.
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.
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.
I feel less sorry for the American people, simply because they may have a bad feeling, but the Iranian people are actually dying. And that's at
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...
You can't be the victim and perpetrator at the same time.
It didn't defy party lines either, a quarter of American citizens are suicidally/homicidally religious and they support the war.
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.
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.
The US is also an authoritarien theocracy. In god we trust
The bar was on the ground, and magats brought a backhoe.
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.
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.
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.
If it's just a numbers game, then the US has saved orders of magnitude more people than they've killed. Hell, even if you just look at the Bush administration, PEPFAR alone saved more than 26 million people, while the Iraq war killed one million at most.
I mean if this is only about outcome and not about intent, the US has historically provided about 1/3 of the Earth's foreign aid. You could discount that by saying that the US, being so wealthy, was more capable of doing that. But that's not the outcome-oriented viewpoint that we're taking.
We could look at the moral philosophy of the leaders and political systems at play here, but that would be "ignoring the reality", so let's just get out the sparklers and don our American flag shorts, because your by-the-numbers approach has a clear winner! USA! USA! USA!
Give 1 child a vaccine.
Shoot 1 child in the head.
Under your logic, these two are equal, and cancel each other out.
US imperialism is a disease, please get well soon.
Not my logic. You're the one who wanted to simplify it to body counts. Is adding good deeds also too much nuance for you? All morality is judged on bad deeds alone? Wow that's even more simplistic.
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).
hey someone gets it
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.
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.
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.