Its the stupid reddit echo chamber, turn that shit off. WW3 isn't happening, its not even close, the fact that NPR and NYT aren't running propaganda pieces about how awesome it is that we killed this guy is a good indication that its unlikely to go crazy out of control. I think this is the first time I've ever seen the mainstream media write such positive things about a guy who was actively organizing terrorist groups to kill US citizens and probability contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Americans. Crazy world we live in, but also speaks about how little appetite there is for war.

A Fearful American's Guide to Iran

Iran is the root of the word "Aryan" in that Iranians are ethnographically the original white people and then Mohammed happened and the Muslim conquests and there's ass-tons of history there but what you really need to know is that from a white people perspective? Lawrence of Fucking Arabia said "give it all to my buddy's kids" about the whole of the Middle East thereby demonstrating a patent lack of interest in a complex situation full of complex people with such stunning regularity that Edward Said launched an entire subclass of anthroprological studies criticizing it.

There are about four paragraphs of summary I'm not going to put here because while it's interesting to me? It's not vital to the discussion which is this: Iran went from being dominated by the Ottomans, who were overthrown by the British, who instilled a puppet, who was overthrown by the British, who installed his son as a puppet, who was ousted by Time Magazine's 1951 Man of the Year, who the British tried to overthrow and failed, so the CIA overthrew him, and installed the son as a puppet, who instituted death squads and all sorts of heinous shit but also threw righteous parties and made Europeans all happy and also let women vote and drive and banned the veil and supported intellectualism and also secularism but also Zoroastrianism because what he feared the most was the angry poor fundamentalist Shia who totally overthrew his ass in 1979.

You know how Venezuela is kind of nothing but poor people and government goons now? Same thing happened in Iran, where a massive diaspora of everyone with any means and a lick of independence bailed hard to the point where there are something like a million Persians in LA alone. Meanwhile Iran went from "place we dump more foreign aid than all other countries combined (yes including Saudi Arabia and Israel)" to "place that held our embassy personnel hostage for a year and a half." So that wasn't great.

Fundamentally, Iran was our bitch from 1954 until 1979. And then it belonged to a bunch of Death to America fundies who, erm, had been trained by Americans. Which is why we looked the other way while Saddam Hussein ground about a million people and a trillion dollars' worth of materiel into fertilizer and slag over the course of eight years without actually changing anything.

Here's the important bit: despite eight years of trench warfare, Iran managed to basically "win" the Middle East through Hamas and Hezbollah. Iraq invaded but Iran blew up our Marine barracks. Donald Rumsfeld backed Hussein while Hezbollah captured the CIA station chief for the whole of the Middle East. And while we gave Stinger missiles to future Al Qaeda to fuck with the Soviets, we also sold them to Iran to fuck with Iraq.

From the above paragraph, one might draw the conclusion that US policy towards the middle east is muddled, cloudy and poorly thought through. One might also draw the conclusion that the Iranians managed to survive as a regime of angry fundies despite long odds. One could even draw the conclusion that Iran hasn't felt the need to fight anything but a defensive conventional war in recent history (in fact, you have to go back to the Sassanid Empire to find a war of aggression) yet has also persisted.

The first statement from the White House talked about the "Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps" which is telling as they've been the "Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" since 1979 which any decent intelligence analyst tasked with the region could have told you so it's a reasonable presumption that no decent intelligence analysts were consulted until the administration got dragged on Twitter. So. Our thoughtful, measured and insightful approach continues apace.

Thing is: nobody saying anything you're hearing knows enough about the Iranians to guess what they'll do next. Including me. Past performance indicates that they'll wait until the time is right and then they'll hit HARD and MEAN and DECISIVELY and really spin up whoever they're trying to piss off. Pile into tanks? Fly jet planes? Totally not their style.

Iran is also Shia, and nobody hates the Shia like the Sunnis, who are pretty much the rest of the Middle East. There were a whole bunch of twits going on and on about the Guns of August and Archduke Ferdinand and shit without acknowledging that the entire point of Guns of August was that it was a whole bunch of people who should have known better doing their duty to fight the previous war and grind themselves into fertilizer doing it. Iran hasn't fought that war ever and they were damn near the first ones out of the gate in the new war of "if I kill your guys with plausible deniability I can keep doing it for decades".

So Iran isn't likely to do anything obvious, and if we do anything obvious it'll look like obvious victory until it absolutely totally isn't. Iran was deeply involved in making the invasion of Iraq suck; Iran has been deeply involved in making the Syrian Civil War suck. The guy in charge of that? Is the guy we turned into hamburger last night and he was apparently super-effective.

So no. There's no "world war" here. There's a bunch of angry fundies who are exceptional at stabbing people in the dark and they've just had their motive amped to eleven and anybody who thinks they know what's likely to happen next? Is fooling themselves.

Don't let them fool you, too.

have you seen this guy i found it helpful

i have no answers and am probably un-draft-able

general consensus seems to be that iraq doesn't want a war cuz deyyy weaaakkk but also, today i wondered if it might be a bad time to wear my vintage "Desert Shield" sweatshirt that I got for xmas.

Mixed all around and i don't pretend to be informed enough to have any idea

How do you embed tweets again

The news is gearing up for war, just like they did with Iraq. Gotta get you scared, so you let your Congresscritters and Resident-in-Chief use up a bunch of weapons and hardware, so the American economy can rebound building new war shit to stockpile after using up a bunch of the old shit.

The truth of the matter is that Iran has an army of about 250k people. The US has 1.3m. Iran has no way to deploy an expeditionary force - aka, an invasion - anywhere their 250k soldiers can't actually walk to.

So you, as a resident in America, are safe. If you work in a large Trump-owned property in a major American metropolis, you might get hit by lightning on the way to work, but there's an even smaller chance that an Iranian state-funded terrorist blows up your building and kills a couple hundred people (out of the 3-4k that work in the building).

You can - as most Americans will - simply ignore the whole thing. There's 330m of us, and about 1m of them will care or be involved in some way (most protesting against it, but probably 15k actively involved in the warring process).

Don't let the news media drive you crazy. Go to the store. Go to the coffee shop. Go to the beach. Enjoy this amazing world we live in, and know that people in Hong Kong have things to ACTUALLY worry about, while you have zilch you need to do about anything, ever.

Here are two reasons why Trump won’t go to war with Iran:

1) Putin would rather he not.

2) Trump voters would have to fight it.

The news is very scary.

Things are a mess and they have been for a long while for a lot of countries over there. Every single day people are suffering and every single month something happens that invites escalation. The difference between yesterday and today though, is that something happened that got our collective attention. The media wants you to be scared and fascinated all the same, because then you start paying attention, if only for the wrong reasons. It's how they make their money. The talking heads will talk, whether or not they get to you all depends on whether or not you listen, and the more you listen, the more power you give them.

It's really important to care about what goes on in the world. It's really important to feel fear and sorrow and anger and hope and relief. But what's just as important, if not more so, is that you care because you choose to, that you feel those feelings because they come from your heart, not because someone tells you to and you choose to feel those things unthinkingly.

Be scared. It's okay, because we all are. But also, be brave and be thoughtful and be a fountain of love, because those are what we all need to be if we truly want to make a better world.