I pretty much dislike the framing sewn into your comment.

That’s understandable, because I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Americans who try to justify the US-Israel attacks in Iran as moral acts done in the name of defeating tyranny. The Iran war is overall unpopular among Americans, but those who do support it do so for this reason. I was hoping I might be able to get a few of them to see that this tactic is counterproductive, especially if they truly care about harm reduction.

But maybe I underestimate how many Americans are just malicious, bloodthirsty barbarians. Of course, by that logic you could be underestimating how many Iranians are equally bloodthirsty. Perhaps the Iranian regime is not just blameless victims of Western pillaging. Anything’s possible, I suppose.

Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.

That’s why we shouldn’t have taken this tact. When you put a regime that has proven it does not care about civilian lives or human rights into a situation where they have nothing to lose, you are putting innocent lives at risk. Of course Trump and Netanyahu don’t care about human lives, either. So the situation is especially dangerous.

Remember the Waco siege in 1993? The Feds tried to raid the compound of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, because they thought they had illegal weapons. It turned into a stand off that lasted 51 days, and ended with a huge fire and 70 some of the Branch Davidians were killed, including a bunch of kids. No one is 100% sure who started the fire. Some people think an incendiary tear gas canister thrown into the compound by the Feds started the fire. Others think David Koresh and his people deliberately started the fire themselves. But, honestly, it really doesn’t matter who started the fire, the Feds shouldn’t have put a man like Koresh into a situation like that. By putting a potentially dangerous person into an increasingly no-win situation, where innocent lives were involved, you’re putting those innocent lives at serious risk.

The current situation in Iran is similar, but of course on a much larger scale. By pinning the Khamenei regime in a corner, we are putting innocent lives at risk. Some will say, “well, the regime should surrender to save lives.” Yes, they should, but they won’t. David Koresh should have surrendered to prevent the deaths of those children, but he didn’t. You can try to absolve yourself of responsibility for the tragedy, as the Feds did in the Koresh case, by saying, “if they would’ve just surrendered, those innocent people would still be alive,” but that won’t bring back the dead.

Some people get so caught up in “defeating the bad guy,” that they completely lose sight of the harm they are facilitating. At some point you have to ask yourself, “is this about winning or about saving lives?” Is this about you looking tough and dominant, and not backing down, or is this about protecting innocent people? If it’s the former, how many innocent lives are you willing to put at risk to “win” this battle of masculine wills?

Sure, any drivers who need heavy duty towing or off roading capabilities will have to spend the extra money for a body-on-frame truck. But, how many of the people who buy a heavy duty truck actually need that off-roading and/or towing capability? Don’t get me wrong, some definitely do. I live in a rural area and there are plenty of farmers or other blue collar workers who need those capabilities. I have a heavier duty truck myself, because I used to need it for towing a pretty good sized travel trailer. But we sold that trailer and now I’m left with way more truck than I need. I still want a “truck,” though. Or, El Camino type thing, or whatever you want to call it (honestly, it probably does need its own classification). I just need a bed, basically. I’m fine with a unibody vehicle. I’d prefer it, even. They’re safer and more efficient. More comfortable to drive, too. Whenever I tell people that they say, “just get an SUV.” But SUVs don’t have a bed. I don’t want to put trash, or green waste, or gravel, or dirt, or bags of cement, or wood, etc in the back of an SUV. I want a bed. But they basically stopped making those a long time ago. I guess they’re bringing them back with offerings like the Maverick, and that’s a good thing, I think. I see so many Mavericks these days. And I think that’s because there’s a fair number of people out there like me who don’t need the higher towing or off-roading capabilities (and so they’d rather not pay for them), but they still want a bed.

The Maverick isn’t a pickup though.

Ok, what should I call it?

Can they though? I mean, they have been able to sell relatively high priced Silverados for a while now, but I think the demand for a $60k+ pickup is waning. And I think that’s especially true now that gas and diesel prices are skyrocketing. If the Fed ends up having to raise rates to combat inflation, the payment on a truck like that will become absolutely insane. You know, moreso than it already has been. Even If people still want to have a stupid expensive pickup truck, more and more of them are just not going to be able to afford it.

That’s why I think smaller pickups like the Ford Maverick will become more popular. Ford sold 30% more Mavericks in 2025 than they did in 2024. If even one of these stupid companies would release a smaller, affordable electric pickup truck I think it would sell relatively well.

It’s so stupid. Like Chevy releasing an updated version of the Bolt, only to immediately turn around and announce that they’re shit-canning it. It’s a decent electric commuter car that starts just over $30k, exactly the kind of car the market needs more of right now, and they’re killing it so they can make more ICE vehicles. Stupid.

Such a rich and vibrant culture.

It’s not a world government.

Exactly. The UN is NOT a world government and we need to stop expecting it to act as one. That was never the intention of the UN.

That being said, a lot of people talk about the necessity for the “rule of law,” but there cannot be the rule of law without some kind of government with the authority to enact and ENFORCE laws. If nations are not willing to sign on to something like that, we cannot have the rule of law. Instead we will have the rule of whichever country has the largest, most powerful military and/or economic influence. I know a lot of Americans are fine with that arrangement because that position is currently occupied by the US, and has been for more than half a century, but the US might not always occupy that role. I wonder how those Americans would feel about this arrangement if China, for instance, were the world’s hegemon instead of the US?

The USSR is definitely the nearest analog. That was, what, 35 years ago. That’s very recent, in civilizational terms. A little over 100 years ago, in the early 20th century, several large, powerful empires collapsed. That’s relatively recent, all things considered.

Maybe it doesn’t seem to happen as much today because in the aftermath of all of those empires collapsing, new, more resilient nation states were formed, with more sustainable social, cultural and political systems. But the US is much older than all of them. The oldest democracy still going. Also by far the oldest federated, presidential republic. It’s hard to really compare the resiliency of a country like ours to, say, a much more recently formed parliamentary democracy, especially when most of those nations are much smaller than us by population, and are usually significantly less geographically and ethically diverse.

It’s like they’re daring me at this point.

I don’t want to leave this country. I was born here, my dad was born here, my dad’s dad was born here, etc. But, holy shit, this society is failing. It’s not failed, yet, but it is failing. I want to believe that things can turn around, but it gets harder everyday to hold onto that belief.

It’s especially hard because I feel like my proposals for how things could be fixed are actively, aggressively being fought against by many of my countrymen. Hell, we can’t even agree on the problems, let alone solutions. For a lot of Americans, there is no problem! This is all hunky-dory.

A nation is a shared idea. A nation exists when a group of people all agree that they are a nation. I ain’t in the same nation as these folks. They’ve got their idea of America and I’ve got mine, and they are two different things. I’m not a part of the shared idea anymore. It’s moved away from me. It’s become something that I don’t understand or agree with. I don’t think it’s moral or rational, or sustainable.

Frankly, I think the idea of America as a nation, as it stands right now, is doomed to fail. It’s far too tolerant of greed, ignorance and liars with malicious intent. A society like that won’t last. It will collapse.

So you’re telling me that people don’t like being bombed or shot by a foreign military, all while being told at the point of a gun that they should be grateful because it’s being done for their liberation? Well I’ll be darned.

Trump asks his boss to stop, boss says get back to work.

As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.

I think that’s been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it’s been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we’ve experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.

The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).

Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere and climate.

It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization’s existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.

I feel like our whole lives here in the US we’ve been told to expect things to just generally keep getting better, seemingly forever. Like, that’s the narrative of “progress.” The economy just keeps growing, the nation just keeps getting richer, technology just keeps getting better, living standards just keep getting better, so forth and so on. But, that was probably never realistic, or even feasible. I mean, no civilization progresses forever. Essentially every civilization that’s ever existed has followed a pattern of ascension followed by decline. Many of the most notable civilizations ascended very quickly and dramatically, and then collapsed just as quickly and dramatically. Why should we expect to be any different? What makes us think we won’t follow the same pattern as basically every other civilization in history?

I’m drinking my dinner plans right now. But I drive by a Culver’s all the time. I’ll definitely stop in someday soon and give it a try.

If warming continues to accelerate, we’ll hit 2C before 2050.

Yeah.

I’ve never been to Culver’s. Is it any good?

“An important caveat, however, is that the acceleration may prove temporary,” said Beaulieu, who has published on the topic but was not involved in the new study. She added that the strong El Niño of 1998 also produced a period of apparent anomalous warming.

“The relative slowdown that followed was interpreted as evidence of a pause in global warming,” she said. “Continued monitoring over the next several years will be essential to determine whether the accelerated warming rate identified here represents a lasting shift or a transient feature of natural variability.”

It might be temporary. It might be transient. Then again, it might not be. We’d be taking a huge risk by proceeding on the assumption that it will only be temporary. If we’re wrong the consequences could be severe. Maybe some people are willing to risk the future on hope, but I don’t think that’s a wise decision.

You ever hear the saying: hope for the best, prepare for the worst? We’re not prepared. Not even close. It’s true the worst case scenario isn’t likely, but it is possible. And worse case, though not necessarily worst care scenarios are also possible, and more likely. We’re not prepared for those either.

I talked to god just now and he said Trump is a dipshit.