this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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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
It seems like u are forgetting Iran finances a lot of Islamistic terror groups like Hisbollah, Hamas, Huthi, etc. that cause unrest in the whole region.
I'm not forgetting that at all. I have critical support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Huthis in their struggle for freedom and territorial integrity against genocidal Israel.
It is Israel's invasions and apartheid that causes unrest in the whole region.
America has funded more terror groups in the region than Iran has.
And in terms of numbers of dead, the number of people killed by Iran's proxies is just another rounding error.