I think what's actually interesting about it is that Iran actually forbids crypto for local currency transactions, because they don't want people to bypass the local currency. So it's one rule for the government and another for the people.

But yes, I agree with most of what you said, also what Jellen said about global corp tax is kind of messed up. They don't want to go after their own big corps, but rather control the rest of the world. As long as the fiscal years start at different times, they can still shuffle money around as they please, but nobody actually dares touching the US corps in the US.

> So it's one rule for the government and another for the people.

Of course it is, otherwise it wouldn't be a government. People get really silly with this. Governments can define laws, enforce them and so on. They have many rules that apply to them and not to everyone else. That's the whole point.

The US also has done the exact same in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act

I agree with you on how governments often work. I can’t agree that’s the whole point, though. Why would it be? I’d be curious to understand why you think so.

The whole point is to enforce rules that benefit the whole, at the cost of individual benefit.

Say you have 100 rials or 1M. Converting it to BTC might be good for you individually if you believe the local currency is going to lose value, but it’s not good for the collective as there will now be less demand and more supply of it. So the individual benefits at the cost of the group. Stopping that is the gov’s job.

This is a general comment, I am not familiar with Iran as a country and might be missing context.

this is a really unconvincing example, at least to me. despite the name, bitcoin doesn't function much like a currency. that is to say, someone who would otherwise hold $1mm cash would probably not want to convert that to bitcoin, at least not for legal transactions. so if a meaningful amount of people would rather use BTC than fiat, the problem is not that people are allowed to buy BTC. the problem is that the government has failed spectacularly at issuing a stable currency, which is one of its main jobs.

It might not be a pertinent example for btc, it was just used as an example.

The US did something similar with gold - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act#:~:text=The....

The main point is, the govt has a mandate to take actions that benefit the whole, even at the cost of individuals.

Yes it will make mistakes, and yes it sometimes will be corrupt and abuse that mandate, but in those cases the country can appoint a different group of people to try and fix things, that’s its only option that addresses the problem and is not “benefiting the individual and harming the whole”.

Sometimes a foreign force will overthrow your elected government, because they want your oil, appoint a dictator instead and provide him with support in exchange for military interest. After decades, he is ousted, foreign relations are understandably sour and your neighbor decides to invade, so the powers provide support lest he be defeated and you are pronounced a country non-grata.

More to the point, it shouldn't be the or a country that appoints leaders. They should be appointed by the people, but for various reasons it has a rather poor success rate.

> So it's one rule for the government and another for the people.

You cannot imprison other people, but your government sure can. There are many cases where the government has special jurisdiction as compared to citizens and it is clearly recognized as a moral thing to have in democracies around the world.

There is a strong philosophical argument in favour of governments following different rules from people.

However, in this practical case, the government is forcing people to make bad choices (to use a second rate fiat currency). It understands it is forcing people to make a bad choice, because it doesn't want to make that choice itself.

This is the thing I don't get about more tin-pot dictatorships. It is obvious why the States force people to use their first-rate fiat currency - the US benefits hugely from people using the dollar.

It is obvious why Iran might force its citizens to use the US dollar - if they didn't they probably get invaded by the US on some flimsy pretext.

But why force people to use a local fiat currency? It just makes their country poorer. Why are there all these idiots who look at their own economy and think "gee, this thing might work to well if we let people save in a liquid asset"?

How do people think they are going to generate wealth if not incentivising people to consume less than they produce? It is the only reliable path. Why do all these governments find it so scary?

I think this is a bit different. They’re exporting something that’s illegal to use locally. It’s like if the government of a dry county was distilling liquor.

In the absence of a state, personally jailing someone who violated your rights would be morally just. With the establishment of the state, we still maintain this right. We just delegate its exercise to the state, to ensure it is subject to due process.

It is unjust to delegate moral rights we do not have, and could no not legitimately exercise on our own in the absence of a state, like jailing peaceful people, to the state.

> You cannot imprison other people

People who aren’t the government do, in fact, do that.

With a strong and effective government, there is a high probability that they eventually face significant adverse consequences for doing so, which may deter those who are deterrable, but even then it still happens.

> You cannot imprison other people

There is an estimated 40.3 million slaves on Earth today. Just throwing that out there.

Bitcoin will never be true decentralization because the real world runs on centralized violence and power grabs.

True decentralization means you don't get to complain when Bitcoin is used to do everything you hate.

You don't get to complain when honest people lose cumulatively billions of their hard earned savings to scammers and hackers.

You don't get to complain when peope hire hitmen, buy drugs and child porn with it.

You don't get to complain when data mining centers hook illegally to the power grid and steal millions of dollars of energy.

Or when countries avoid sanctions, or manipulate other countries through it.

That's precisely what decentralization and deregulation looks like. It's the law of the jungle. Enjoy.

All those things were already illegal (worse yet, immoral) whether you pay for them in fiat or in Bitcoin. That's a false equivalence.

That's the whole point. They're illegal/immoral, but decentralization means you can't mitigate them despite that.

Tell me when is the last time a drug dealer used a wire transfer with reason "for the cocain"? Oh they don't do that. I wonder why.

Drug dealers use wire transfers all the time.

And there are benefits to being able to stop governments from controlling people. I would say the benefits of this far outweigh giving the state an even greater power advantage over non-state actors that may be acting maliciously.

So for me, yes, decentralization please.

Most of the thing you listed are illegal, and paying them with Bitcoins don't make them magically legal.

If someone makes an "Uber for hitmen", it will still be illegal in spite someone is using an app to hire them and paying them with their altcoins.

Honestly it's very disappointing I have to explain this but I NEVER ARGUED THE LEGALITY STATUS of these activities.

I argue the fact Bitcoin and other coins enables crime.

I'll make it really simple for you: would you hire a hitman with a briefcase full of cash, or you'd do a bank wire with subject "for the murder, thanks"?

Think why we don't use bank wires for this.

Now think why anonymous cash transfers are hard internationally.

Now think what Bitcoin is. It's anonymous cash over the Internet.

It's a huge enabler for illegal activities because it's anonymous and decentralized and happens over Internet.

You can spin it any way you wish, but the fact speak if you're a criminal, Bitcoin is automatically the most attractive way for making transactions to you, aside from person to person cash briefcases.

Law is centralized by nature. Because law has to be enforced in a centralized nature. Decentralization and anonymity means you can't apply the law. "Illegal" means therefore NOTHING to Bitcoin.

The irony of this whole statement is that bitcoin isnt anonymous! (which is a core reason it lost its intended value as a medium of exchange)

The general sentiment also applies to cash, and the reality is the authorities want to track your every transaction, which is why every opportunity to diminish cash has and will be taken.

It's anonymous because you see wallets, but you don't know who has them. That's what anonymous means.

The reasons you give against Bitcoin can be used also to against encryption.

We agree that hiring a hitman is illegal, and we agree that it will be easier for the police to solve the crimes if encryption is banned and the police can read all the emails/whastapp/whatever of all the people in the city.

Encryption is tolerated because it also allows protecting regular people from criminals, in ways which allowed to build e-commerce on top, and ultimately enabling great economic boom on the Internet. If it was only about securing messaging, it would likely have been banned already.

People forget what the 90s was like (if you had to export out of usa)

You just haven’t had enough time to see why cryptocurrencies should be tolerated. Eventually you will.

I'm tired of this completely wrong argument.

- Encryption doesn't stop law enforcement from having backdoors at key servers, and they do.

- Also we're discussing a financial transaction instrument, which REQUIRES MASS for it to make sense (for it to be valuable for transactions).

- While you can roll your own unique encryption and communication channel and authorities won't know a thing.

So no, situation is completely different with encryption.

I should have written "end to end encryption".

But if you have written it I'd have to note end-to-end encryption (as in truly end-to-end) is rarely applied in the real world.

It doesn't make even pragmatic sense, for ex. how can Apple index and process your photos, if it just sees them as bunch of binary noise? It can't. So it doesn't.

It can't be decentralized to begin with, because whoever has more money can run more mining and whoever mines more has more power in the network. It's still more about rich hording power. On the flipside it may just be a little bit more distributed and accessible than the current prevalent system.

But mining doesn't grant you any power (unless you manage to accumulate 51% of it, which is in this day and age pretty much impossible for a single individual or organization). Mining is just a service that you provide (to secure the network), and you get rewarded for it.

Compare that to how monetary inflation works in the fiat world: they just press a button, et voi-la, they got their funding.

That's kind of always the case, because using non-government backed currency undermines governments control of its own economy.

Why are sanctions on Iran immoral?

Sanctions seem like the least harmful way to deal with bad actors at the nation state level like Iran, North Korea, and Russia. This is the equivalent of not playing with the kid who can't play fair or follow the rules. Replace playing with trading.

You might say Iran is not a bad actor, but that's not a winnable position to take.

Would you prefer military intervention over sanctions? What else can you do in these kinds of situations?

Even if you grant that Iran is a bad actor (which is kind of rich considering how much western countries deal with Saudi Arabia)...

It's still very fucked up that the US signed a treaty with Iran saying "we'll lift sanctions if you do X", Iran did X... and the first thing the US did after the next administration change was to say "Fuck the treaty we signed, we're putting sanctions back".

What's the message being sent to Iran? "It doesn't matter if you try to play nice, we're going to destroy your economy unless you submit as a vassal state to the US"?

Also, I don't see how the US has any sort of moral legitimacy to unilaterally decide which country is a "good actor" and which country is a "bad actor", even against the wishes of its allies (including western democraties). In a fair process the US would only be one of several countries deciding together, and would only act with common backing.

If your answer is "moral legitimacy doesn't matter, because the US has the power to enforce its decisions", sure, that's true. Enjoy it while it lasts.

But don't act surprised when other countries start banding against US hegemony.

> It's still very fucked up that the US signed a treaty with Iran saying "we'll lift sanctions if you do X", Iran did X... and the first thing the US did after the next administration change was to say "Fuck the treaty we signed, we're putting sanctions back".

Yeah it is fucked up. What is the word of the US worth if it's going to flip flop every time the party in power switches. That's going to have ramifications.

> Also, I don't see how the US has any sort of moral legitimacy to unilaterally decide which country is a "good actor" and which country is a "bad actor", even against the wishes of its allies (including western democraties). In a fair process the US would only be one of several countries deciding together, and would only act with common backing.

Every country can decide for themselves who are good and bad countries, and they're free to take whatever action they feel is appropriate, including war. That's how nations work. Now some actions have consequences, and some nations have more or less power and influence. The US does have some moral authority in that it sometimes stands up for what's right rather than what's in their best interests. For example, bans on buying conflict minerals.

The UN is supposed to function like you're saying, but in reality it's quite dysfunctional. Because of the veto system the default action is no action so it's hard to agree on anything.

> But don't act surprised when other countries start banding against US hegemony.

They can and they will, but such is the nature of things. Nations rise and fall.

"The US does have some moral authority in that it sometimes stands up for what's right rather than what's in their best interests. For example, bans on buying conflict minerals."

Yes, it makes sense for them to ban buying conflict minerals since they want to hold a monopoly over that ability themselves. Bolivia is one of the top suppliers of lithium to the US and has suffered dictatorships, election interference, and ongoing far-right paramilitaries financed and trained by the US and it's allies.

The US has NEVER done something to "stand up for what's right", every action they do is calculated to help themselves. If they are condemning or condoning anything, it is for their own self interest. This is how they can simultaneously call out the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs by the CCP while simultaneously not being able to even condemn the killing of Palestinian children on record when being asked repeatedly by journalists. That's because China is a rival but Israel is an Ally.

They'e only recently publicly recognised the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire because relationships between the US and Turkey have grown increasingly strained. If they had any moral authority, they wouldn't coddle their friend's war crimes and hold them to the same standards as their enemies.

You have a very extreme, no nuances opinion. Categorically, whenever you have an opinion like that you're almost surely wrong.

With something like the foreign policy history of the United States - that's a very rich area that doesn't permit a simple black and white position like yours. I want to downvote your comment twice. We could use less of that kind of thinking in the world.

Is the rather obvious (or I would think) observation that empires tend to make decisions for pragmatic reasons of self-interest as opposed to ideology a "very extreme, no nuances opinion". You cannot just dismiss all criticism by the intellectual hand wave that is things not being "black or white" - as if people who disagree with your smug sycophantry really view the world that way.

No, it's not that we don't lack naunce, it's just that we don't flinch away from ugly reality by labelling it as a "very rich area" just because it concerns an empire we are a part of as opposed to the enemy.

For all of your indignation on the fact that I refuse to play apologetics for your favourite hegemony, you have not made one real counterargument for why my view of the US and their role in the wider world is incorrect.

I'm very proud frankly to hold the "extreme, no nuances opinion" that imperialism is bad and for that matter ethnic cleansing and the intentional bombing of civilians. You apparently disagree, seeing as in an earlier comment you dismissed such charges against Israel and Saudi Arabia as if they are wild accusations as opposed to a matter of public record for the wider international community and the UN.

I'll let everybody else decide which of the two modes of thinking we could do less of in the world.

You're wrong. If your view point permitted some leeway I might spend time arguing with you.

But I think conversion with you is a waste of time, so let's drop it.

Feel free to not respond as the thought is mutual but it's not my "view point". It is a matter of fact that Saudi Arabia and Israel have violated nearly every human rights charter in the UN and I'm sorry that my recognition of that fact does not give you any "leeway" to weasel your way out of acknowledging their crimes against humanity - or the US's complicity in all of this by continuing to supply them with arms.

An opinion is a view point. And we're talking about whether the US ever did something because it was the right thing and not the best thing for the US. Stop redefining things.

About your Israel rant, I've said elsewhere, Israel was fully within its rights to fight back against Hamas. If drug cartels in Mexico started firing rockets into Texas, there would be a full scale invasion. There are two sides to this conflict and of the two Israel tries hard to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas tries hard to cause them. It's obvious to me which side has the moral high ground.

"If drug cartels in Mexico started firing rockets into Texas"

Imagine if the US were taking more and more territory from Mexico while illegally evicting and assaulting Mexicans to make room for US settlers. Let's say that they then made it impossible for Mexicans to leave or enter a narrow strip of land and denied them medical treatment and severely restricted food and water access. That and prior to the attack of the cartels, let's say 6 years ago, the US launched strikes against the Mexicans where a later report by the UN found that 80% of the dead were civilians.

Imagine then if that drug cartel itself was originally placed into power by the US to avoid the formation of rival organisations that the Mexicans could choose between.

I didn't say Hamas is unprovoked. I did acknowledge there are two sides to this conflict (there always is.) That's more than you've accomplished here so far.

Provoked or not, one side is trying to kill civilians and the other side is trying not to. The good guys seem pretty obvious to me. I worry about your moral compass, because you seem to be on the other side of that. Do you condone or support the terrorist attacks of Hamas?

The only reason you have for assuming that the IDF are trying not to kill civilians is their own word which is worthless to me and anybody outside of their alliance with the US.

They have lied repeatedly before about how their attacks did not hit non combatants only for later UN reports revealing that the majority of deaths were civilian. They even bombed offices for Al Ghazeera and AP News recently in Palestine, likely in retaliation for testy interviews and coverage. Am I supposed to believe that those were holding Hamas as well?

And you never said anything about Hamas's motivations in the first place. You just treated Israel's actions as being justified as a given so don't give me this bs about how you're somehow being fair in your coverage when you're transparently biased towards Israel.

And as for your question, while I do not condone any attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure (which already makes my moral compass better than the IDF's), I absolutely support resistance by the Palestinians against their violent and illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing efforts by Israel. You don't get to cry about your right to self defence when you're the ones who they're trying to defend their homes against.

> The only reason you have for assuming that the IDF are trying not to kill civilians is their own word

No, actually I'm looking at their actions. Evacuating buildings first, checking them via drones, then firing warning shots, then bringing them down. Levelling a twelve story building with 0 casualties is a degree of care rarely seen in warfare.

Civilian casualties, of course, do happen and are not avoidable in war. That's the nature of it.

> so don't give me this bs about how you're somehow being fair in your coverage when you're transparently biased towards Israel

I'm being more fair than you are in your bias against Israel.

Yes, they showed a great "degree of care" in levelling a building that happened to contain the offices of media that were critical of the actions of the IDF on the basis of “Hamas military intelligence” with no evidence given. Btw, conflating giving the inhabitants of a building an hour's warning before a strike with evacuating is a stretch but even if I accepted that premise, is the IDF going to compensate the inhabitants of this building a single dime? Given their history, I would guess no.

However, outside of a building containing high profile media companies, many Israeli strikes are far from being as careful. You can waffle on and on about how heroically and nicely they fire air to ground missiles in cities from a safe distance but in the end the raw numbers don't lie. Compare how many Palestinian's have died since this conflict started compared to the Israeli's and it's plain that this isn't a "war", it's a massacre.

The actual attitude towards Palestinians by many Israelis including officials is positively blood thirsty and genocidal. I've seen enough interviews on the streets of Tel Aviv to be deeply concerned. The population have grown increasingly radicalised and right wing by decades of IDF propaganda and there seems to be little recognition of their common humanity with the Palestinians. They will not be satisfied until the entire Palestinian population are either purged or driven from Israel.

There is no possible way to reconcile the requirements of a egalitarian democratic society with a Jewish ethnostate. This is the reason why they push for a "Two State" solution even though it's a farce and Palestinian territory has been eroded away more and more with Settlements that are illegal by international law. They do not want to the Palestinians incorporated into their society because they want to maintain a Jewish majority. There is no way that desire can be achieved without ethnic cleansing in the long term and we are seeing more and more brazen actions towards that goal.

The solution is both obvious and incredibly hard: Get rid of the two states and make it a single democratic state with full civic and political rights given to all inhabitants. The hardline Zionists of course will never stand for it though so it's never happening without a radical revolution in Israeli society.

I am personally sick and tired of arguing with somebody who thinks I should treat an aspiring ethnostate with anything more than contempt so this will be my last post to you. Feel free to have the last word.

I will urge (probably uselessly) that maybe instead of listening to IDF and US propaganda, you look at news in countries that don't have financial and political interests tied up in multi-billion dollar arms deals and territorial acquisitions. I don't listen to RT for details on Ukraine after all. Good night!

There's not one bit of nuance in this. Not a single look at what the Palestinians are doing wrong or at the other side of the conflict.

It has been mostly a waste of time talking with you, as I predicted from your first comment, but it wasn't without entertainment value.

Your ideas about a one state solution are kind of interesting. Honestly, I'm not sure the Palestinians would even want that if it were on the table.

My prediction is similar to yours. The Palestinians will refuse to compromise (capitulate?) Sufficiently for the Israelis. They'll keep losing power and territory and leverage and the deal on offer will keep getting worse. Until they've all moved on or been assimilated.

Their best hope is make a bad deal now, because it's not going to get better for them. It's not fair, but it is the reality.

> This is the equivalent of not playing with the kid who can't play fair or follow the rules.

More like the equivalent of the school bully threatening to beat up any kid who plays with the kid he doesn't like.

"Doesn't like" due to the real and lasting harm they've caused to the entire region

Says the country which organised a coup in Iran to install a dictator, financed another local dictator to attack it, then waged war twice against him leaving a country in ruins, supports and arms a religious absolute monarchy and its wars, supports an apartheid regime, paid jihadists in Syria to keep a civil war running...

Sanctions aren't violence, or even the threat of violence. They're an attempt to prevent violence.

Sanctions threaten violence against any one who does business with any one targeted by the sanctions.

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I'd say Iran isn't a bad actor.

They're not an American client state, bit they're no worse than America, China, or Saudi Arabia

You can argue that they're a threat to american interests and an embarrassment to the American intelligence agencies, but that's not exactly the same as being a bad actor.

That's a logical fallacy. Two wrongs don't make a right.

China and Saudi Arabia are pretty dirty, but I don't see the US in that camp lately.

Really? You don't think the US selling billions in arms to both Saudi Arabia and Israel makes them complicit in those ally's crimes against humanity?

What about the fact that the US has been sponsoring military and paramilitary organisations in central and Southern America for decades to fight against attempts at unionisation or socialisation efforts to help ensure their control over the rare earth metals and oil there? There are death squads that have mowed down entire villages after being informed of talk about unionisation as well as driving away indigenous tribes who happen to live in areas that are inconvenient to the interest of US multinational companies.

Are you also somehow forgetting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq that was perpetuated for decades after the given reason for invasion were dealt with for the transparent motivation to plunder the resources there? More than 200,000 civilians dead (and that's on the optimistic side of projections) as a direct result of actions from the US army.

All of these examples I gave are crimes that the US are currently engaging in and even with that restriction, this is far from a complete list. If I expanded it out to what they have been up to in the last 5 decades, then it would be a lot longer still.

If you don't see the US as dirty, then I don't know what standards you are operating under.

> Really? You don't think the US selling billions in arms to both Saudi Arabia and Israel makes them complicit in those ally's crimes against humanity?

Crimes against humanity? How am I supposed to take you seriously. I'm no fan of Saudi Arabia, but they're a necessary evil. But Israel? I don't know what standards you're operating under...

So you don't see Saudi Arabia's actions against the Yemenese or Israel's actions against the Palestinians as crimes against humanity? I guess then you have no standards at all then since the ones I'm operating under are shared by the UN and the international community outside of the US and it's sycophants.

This is so full of false equivalency I don't really know where to start. I'll just say supporting a theocratic dictatorship that sponsors terrorists all over the world (no doubt partially through bitcoin). Also China who is currently committing genocide on a large scale as well as trying to take over commerce by building artificial islands in the strait. You can't "build" an island and expect to take over shipping lanes.

>>I'll just say supporting a theocratic dictatorship that sponsors terrorists all over the world

Which country are you talking about? The Western foreign policy elite and Gulf Arab states funded a massive influx of Islamic militants into Syria to try change that country's regime:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/foreign-fighters-flow-t...

The largest insurgent faction, and the one receiving the bulk of this material support, was effectively led by al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, the al Nusra Front.

Unfortunately, every state has the blood of innocent people on their hands.

> Unfortunately, every state has the blood of innocent people on their hands.

Yes, but that doesn't mean they are equal either. Some are worse than others.

Pretty sure the US and friends are easily the worst when it comes to sponsoring international terrorism, especially if you don't just arbitrarily decide that state mandated actions are exempt from consideration as terrorism. Iran and other "bad actors" are not even remotely on the same level.

> Pretty sure the US and friends are easily the worst when it comes to sponsoring international terrorism.

That's nonsense, but I welcome you to make a case for it with facts.

> especially if you don't just arbitrarily decide that state mandated actions are exempt from consideration as terrorism

If it quacks like a duck, yes. State mandated actions are not exempt. But don't go equating drone strikes on military targets - actual terrorists - as terrorism. That's military action, not terrorism.

> Iran and other "bad actors" are not even remotely on the same level.

Don't even get me started on Russia and North Korea. If you think the US is a worse actor internationally, your moral compass is very poorly calibrated.

"That's nonsense, but I welcome you to make a case for it with facts."

Ok then, how about the fact that the US has been funding Al-Qaeda affiliated organisations to promote act as opposition to both Iran and Saudi Arabia's ideological and political enemies.

What about what went down and continues to go down in Southern and Central America where entire villages are being murdered in cold blood to discourage workers from organising for their own best interests and against the interests of the US? There are dozens of military and paramilitary organisations in Columbia and Bolivia that use arms and training provided by the US and allies (Israel in particular) to brutally put down worker uprisings and efforts at unionisation. Some of this training from the IDF in particular involves intentional maiming of members to drive up fear through the population against the idea of going against the regional power. Violence for the sake of spreading terror among the populace is terrorism by definition and the IDF have been both inflicting this on the Palestinians and training other groups to do the same on their own people.

This training and arms that Israel provides to these far right groups are directly subsidised through the billions in dollars that the US transfers to Israel yearly. This is no charity. The US has direct economic and political interests in keeping Central and Southern America under a tight thumb for both the rare earth metals there and the oil. They use the IDF to perpetuate fascist regimes abroad instead of direct support because of how bad the PR got during the 80's and 90's.

What about the plundering and destabilisation of Afghanistan and Iraq and how it has radicalised the region and formed dozens of terrorist groups that are now conveniently targeting surrounding nations which have not the best relationships with US empire. The leaks exposed by Julian Assange conclusively show that the US intentionally struck civilian targets including medics so don't bs to me that the Drone strikes (which btw were also being used illegally across Pakistani borders and murdering civilians) was strictly above board.

I invite you to make the case for how Russia and especially North Korea are somehow worse than the US in terms of state sponsored terrorism or even more traditional crime such as drug trafficking (Colombia remains one of the largest cocaine producers in the world with almost half of all cocaine controlled by the paramilitaries there) but I think you fail hard.

> Ok then, how about the fact that the US has been funding Al-Qaeda affiliated organisations to promote act as opposition to both Iran and Saudi Arabia's ideological and political enemies.

if you count Israel among US’s friends, you can also count Israel spending decades covertly supporting violent Islamist groups in Palestine as a counterweight to the relatively secular PLO, which is how we ended up with Hamas.

Sanctions on Iran are indiscriminate, and mostly harm civilians. It's collective punishment. To put into perspective the damage done to non-combatants: one study found the sanctions the Trump administration placed on Venezuela led to 40,000 deaths:

https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-...

You probably should read up on the history of the Shah of Iran, Western oil companies, the CIA and the Islamic revolution.

That's not an argument. But I happen to be familiar enough with that history to also say your point isn't even a valid one.

That's the two wrongs make a right logical fallacy. That the US did shit to Iran does not excuse the shit Iran is currently up to.

"You should read up on" is not a persuasive logical argument - it's a dismissive throw away line given by someone who doesn't have one.

As long as you also read up on the related history of Russia and Communism, too. This is a good suggestion.

The book, "Twilight War," has a lot of material background on the matter.

The issue isn't that Iran is doing bad things directly, it's their proxies forces. You can Google and find a source you may trust more, but here's two[0][1]. Iran was taking much of the money the US was paying them to not build nukes, and funneling it into proxy forces to further their interests in the region. You can dig deeper to understand what those proxies have been doing in the region.

[0] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/irans-islamist-proxies

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-iraq-proxies-insight...

Doesn’t the US use it’s money and influence to further its interests? many heinous and hurtful outcomes are facilitated by such funding around the world. That would include overturning a democracy in Iran and putting it on a course for the governance it has today.

So we should just be OK with that when Iran is the one doing it? You can object to US foreign policy and also be opposed to Iran's attempts to destabilize an entire region causing immense suffering in the process

Iran's proxies have fought against:

1) US, the illegal invader actively destabilizing the region for two straight decades+.

2) ISIS, the brutal Islamist neo-Caliphate birthed from the destabilization brought by (1).

3) KSA, currently bombing Yemeni civilian infrastructure into the largest humanitarian crisis in the world using weapons and support from (1).

4) Israel, the apartheid nuclear ethnostate that has abused a captive population for generations with the support and protection of (1).

US had three motives for entering the Middle East. The first was originally the attack on 9/11, the second being trying to maintain one friendly government (Israel), and third was access to oil.

The problem with the first is that the US never came up with a good exit strategy, so we are just kind of lingering over there now. It's not even clear what our objective was from the start (it's all sorta all over the place). There has been an appetite to get the US out, but when Obama got us out, ISIS took charge in the region and Obama had to send troops back in.

Supporting Israel can be done through money and arm sales, so you don't really need forces over there.

Oil has become less of an issue since the US went through. Its fracking boom and generated an oil surplus.

It's definitely a careful balance, while many people don't want to be there, if the US does not have troops there, it could become a breeding ground for anti-American organizations that then want to attack the US. It's a hard problem.

Iran has a shit regime (corollary: all countries' regimes are shit, just some more than others).

To your question, it's a matter of emphasis. You have a fundamentally greater moral imperative to criticize your own government (I assume you're not Iranian living in Iran) and its dealings/shortcomings simply because you can, in principle, actually have some relatively significant impact on its actions. So no, there is no need to ignore the conduct of the Iranian government, but if you place emphasis on it disproportional to what you actually have influence over, your moral priorities are fundamentally misplaced.

I’m not sure I would characterize Iran’s efforts as destabilizing the region, certainly not more than the US injecting billions of dollars of arms into the region.

Really we’re in the endgame of fossil fuels, and arguably control of access to those resources that was the main reason that the US was so heavily involved in that region for decades. But with the green revolution needed and pragmatically quite close in reach, the US needs to fundamentally rethink its involvement.

A rethink along these lines would be good imho. Less stick and better carrots.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-05-21/com...

Weak comparison in scope.

All Iran has to do is stop supporting terrorists around the world and threatening international commerce through the gulf then the pressure will be relieved. It's actually pretty simple. this is their own doing.

Iran: "we will wipe Israel off the face of the earth!"

You: economic sanctions are immoral!

Lol.

> immoral

So, how do you feel about throwing gay people off buildings?

Edit: Yes, I know this isn't any part of why we have sanctions against Iran. But it should be.

I fail to see how an economic sanction towards an authoritarian regime that ends up having a greater impact upon its people than on the regime itself will somehow fix said regime's mistreatment of minorities.

I come from Venezuela, I have family in Cuba. I know what economic sanctions look like and what they do against dictatorships. Hint: they do nothing, because they're not going to abide by your rules or meet you in the middle.

That's a very practical way of putting it, thanks.

This was mostly a knee-jerk reaction on my part because it often seems to me that in the rush to (rightly) denounce bad policies by the U.S. or other countries against Muslim majority nations/groups, the fact of extremely barbaric practices by some of these groups is just swept aside, like it's okay because they're being victimized. It's still not okay.

Regardless, I concede the point. I'll leave my prior comment up, though, because I can't be alone in these feelings and your response provides more nuance to the issue.

Do you think attitudes towards homosexuality are any more progressive in Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc? No, but they’re “good” US client states and help further US interests in the region so it’s okay when they dismember a journalist inside an embassy and whatever else besides.

Since you are in a conciliatory mood, you might also want to reconsider the whole "throwing gays off buildings" thing, because that doesn't happen in Iran. LGBT rights are by no means great in Iran, but this kind of hyperbole does not help anyone.

I decided to check on this, and it would appear that it was more of an ISIS thing that anti-Muslim Americans falsely projected out across the entire group. However, there have been at least a few hundred state-facilitated executions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iran).

One thing I was not aware of before today is that Iran is second only to Thailand in sex reassignment surgeries, which I found very surprising. Apparently it may be done in some cases to avoid persecution of same-sex relationships, but the fact that it's not only tolerated but partly paid for by the state is pretty mind blowing. There's always more detail when you look closer at issues like this. Thanks for prompting me to look it up.

Look also at the sanctions we imposed on Iraq after the first gulf war. Conservative estimates put the death toll at a quarter to half a million CHILDREN alone. I guess those kids should have risen up and overthrown Saddam, because that’s what the sanctions were conditional on - his removal from power.

I don't think harming all Iranians via sanctions for the actions of the regime is the right way to deal with this, especially because the sanctions do nothing to stop persecution of LGBT.

How else do you propose pressuring them? Launching an invasion doesn't really seem like an improvement for the common people there

I don't think that's his point.

The US doesn't embargo Iran because of that. Otherwise they'd probably have to embargo a bunch of their closest allies for half a century or more.

It's all realpolitik, morals don't influence this issue much.

I dislike our alliance with Saudi Arabia. What is your point?

What kind of argument is that? LGBT rights in Saudi Arabia is almost equally non-existent [1] yet US happily sells them arms used in a horrific war in Yemen. SA's prince can even get away from blatant murder.

Besides, it was ISIS throwing gay people off roofs and filming for propaganda. Iran has an authoritarian system with it's (many many) own sins, but it's no different than any other country in the Middle East. All are terrible, but some receive love from the west and some don't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia

It wasn’t replaced by “nothing”. The information that intelligence agencies are able to gather about Iran’s nuclear weapons programs is more detailed and accurate than what the IAEI could or would gather under JCPOA. The Iranian regime faces internal dissent, and western intelligence agencies working with dissenters to retard the Iranian nuclear program directly (see last month’s cyber attack on Natal for instance) may handle the threat better than the state department and the UN.

For me as a member of the general public it's actually "nothing'. Intelligence agencies are opaque, have no incentive to tell the truth and have a track record of lies.

An international body has at least some checks and balances to keep it close to the truth.

Like the WMD in Iraq and the smoking gun?

No, I think this is different from that example. I don’t even know what you’re trying to compare.

The UN inspectors said there are no WMDs in Iraq. The US intelligence agencies said the opposite and provided made up proof taking the US into a quagmire of a war. In the end there where no WMDs in Iraq.

So I am saying the US intelligence agencies are useless and are used for political purposes to re-enforce what ever the current administration wants to do for foreign policy.

While there sure was lots of cherry picking and hyperbole of the evidence going on, the situation was more interesting.

The US intelligence agencies were not uncritical about the wmd case but the administration pushed hard. There were lots of dissenting leaks in the press. The interesting aspect tough is that the whole situation was made much harder because there was so much lies and deceptions going on in the iraqi buerocracy. SH bragged on the phone to underlings about his wmds to secure and shore up his position and other players did the same. Now the intelligence agencies did tap into that communications which made it harder to make a correct assessment than just standing on the outside looking in.

That you’re pulling up a 20 year old example might suggest that it’s the exception that proves the rule. It doesn’t sound like either of us really knows enough to be making sweeping claims, and my objections are to that sort of thinking as much as anything.

I’d also suggest that there are many examples of UN agencies being less than objective, and swayed by political expediency and unstated loyalty. It’s dangerous to assume that corruption of purpose doesn’t extend beyond the nation state.