Travis

I have bad news about Shohreh Aghdashloo's views on the war

I'm fairly sure neither this nor the school strike constitute, legally speaking, war crimes. However, I don't really care about that and think that the people who ordered it should go to jail even if we have to invent a special new law to do so.

If the rumors turn out to be true, we may be awarding a pretty big "fell for it again award" to the IDF for the classic blunder of "Attempted Helicopter Commando Raids in Lebanon"

nah dawg i went to a work conference here once why'd they have to do em like this 😭

Their lunch was dogshit though, real ones know Divan is here the real lunchheads schedule their work conferences

One of the instances in which it is actually emphatically true that by stifling left-liberal criticism of Israel on a liberal basis you just leave open room for nutjobs to do it and fill the space instead

Trump has privately shown serious interest in U.S. ground troops in Iran The president’s private comments have not focused on a large-scale ground invasion of Iran, but rather on the idea of a small contingent of U.S. troops that would be used for specific strategic purpos...

When it's going as planned

mfw this guy was THE middle east dude for the USG for like 20 years and he still has no idea how the Islamic Republic works

If it's IRAN that, in the long term, leads to the departure of the U.S. military from the Arabian peninsula, then at long last we can say bin Laden was not, in fact, vindicated.

If the ballistic missile appears stationary, you gotta start hauling ass my brother

astronaut meme: always has been

It's obvious to win you need to have (relative to a year or two ago) reasonably strong anti-Israel statements, but it is equally obvious that the pundit class will also never give up on this. Which means, at long last, centrists may recognize pundits as the enemy

I mean, this was always the only way to realistically achieve "regime change," because there is no actual organized political structures outside of the Islamic Republic. Any liberal, pro-democracy opposition was as ruthlessly annihilated by the Pahlavists and MEK as it was the IRI.

Centrists fumbling their way to eventually realizing that the only way you don't receive pushback is full-throated unconditional support for anything the most unhinged hilltop youth says.

You're missing the point arkadaşlarım. What Israel dislikes about Türkiye isn't whether it likes Israel, it's Türkiye's existence as a state capable of exerting its own sovereignty.

Trump wants to pick the next Supreme Leader

ie., there will be another supreme leader, ie. the Islamic Republic continues

Pahlavists and anyone else who thinks this is about freedom in shambles

It doesn't help that losing/not cultivating international knowledge and expertise only starts to hurt after a relatively very long timeline. So nobody really feels the loss because it happens slowly over decades.

Absolutely. I feel like the decade+ of propaganda about how area studies is woke and will make you unemployable certainly didn't help either.

The only force projection capability Iran *needs* to maintain is putting a drone or missile into an oil storage facility or tanker once or twice a day. That's what keeps the war's end state in their favor, every hit against Israel or US bases is lagniappe.

Israel planned a political war - to destroy Iranian state cohesion

US planned (lol) a military war - to destroy Iranian military capacity

Iran planned an economic war - to inflict as much economic damage on the world as possible, to force an end to the war

Only Israel and Iran's goals make sense

The United States Could Lose the Gulf Iran’s attacks on its neighbors are a reminder that the United States cannot protect them.

“Gulf states can no longer believe the United States can or will protect them from existential threats. And even as they are forced to openly cooperate with Israel in its war, they increasingly view it as a threat.” My new piece on the Gulf and the Iran war.

foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/05/i...

I don't doubt this is true, but how much do u think it has to do with cutting funding to language dpts and area studies dpts and not hiring tenured faculty in those areas? I know in my alma mater, a key feeder into the Gov FoPo blob, all of those got cut in favor of the business school

נס X סטילה - חרבו דרבו (Prod. By Stilla) YouTube video by Ness Ve Stilla

Or why not this banger? Is it because the music is complete dogshit or is it the extremely normal lyrics?

Videogame publisher: my game is a satire of individual acts of unquestioned violence and militarism

Andrew Tate: at long last, I will do the individual acts of violence and militarism from the classic videogame Spec Ops: The Line

An Afghan friend of mine once half-jokingly said that the Taliban eventually won because they were the only ones who actually wanted to stay in Afghanistan.

Weird that they used a classic American rock song rather than Israel's contribution to music, "May Your Village Burn"

There is also a small but growing subset of the most obvious case of "fell for it again award" folks who see the callous disregard for civilian life of the Israelis/Americans in this war and realize that they were wrong to call for American and Israeli military intervention.

I decided to psychically damage myself tonight and look at "Iranian opposition" Twitter, and it remains firmly entrenched in the idea that this attack was a misfired IRGC missile, also it didn't happen at all, and also that you're a Regime apologist for talking about it.

I may be crossing my wires here but it's my understanding that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the initial shocks that caused to (mostly) grain exports is more or less what caused global inflation to skyrocket. It's probably good that no key exports flow out of the Persian Gulf.

The hits continue! Can one of these liberal media figures please ask literally any basic follow up questions, or is that a skill limited to Isaac Chotiner and Tucker Carlson?

As in June, I think the Iran Opposition Industrial Complex has sold both the US and Israel (and bad or perhaps incomplete intelligence assessments) an idea that nobody in Iran believes in anything anymore. That's true of some, but it's clearly not universal!