It is crazy that comments like this are getting downvoted when it is clearly the truth.

Is it really crazy though? Sad, but given the state of everything I don’t find this crazy.

I'm just really puzzled by people frankly, one would expect Hacker News to be of higher caliber. Read the history, watch real geo-political analysis. But even without that, a presidents in who screams profanity on social media, threaten to take oil and resources of other countries and bomb to the dark ages..even without any political background, this a real low for any position let alone the president of the US.

I think Social Media truly brought the worse in people. People are not trying to be decent anymore.

To be honest, this forum is where I come to take th temperature of the US "centrists" who brought us to this point. I've quit other social media, so this is one of the few places where I can hear what folks (who are often quite clever in quite a few dimensions) spout rather vicious thoughts.

The other spot I get exposure to this part of the US political spectrum is the comment section of a youtube guy who is pretty far to the right but who has a seemingly (at least to me) well-informed understanding of the facts- he's interesting because it's kind of wild to hear the more lumpen version of this site and what their concerns are: they are really mad that this war is happening instead of further domestic crackdowns on immigration.

In both cases, it's helpful to understand where folks who have some pretty misinformed understandings of history and politics are sitting with their opinions.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that a bunch of aspiring venture capitalists, who have probably have been or are on the cusp of having a small taste of the massive wealth that their work in building out the surveillance state has brought to their masters, have totally shitty politics.

I think you are right, I've also stopped social media myself recently and left with nothing but YouTube and the occasional visit on HN for tech.

With that said, and I'm aware that HN audience are mostly in tech but I always thought we in tech are better trained to think critically and look at things from various perspectives. But to see the exact same response patterns one would see in FB makes one surely question how many people are truly capable of independent critical thinking. I'm also starting to think that given the complexity of modern life and the amount of information we are flooded with people are simply choosing the most repeated narrative within their circle without much reflection or any critical thinking. At the end of the day most folks here are busy with other things and it is easier to believe they are evil and we are liberating then dive deep into one of the most complicated areas when it comes to history and geopolitics.

Well, a lot of the folks here also share the view that because they understand how pointers work in C or can orchestrate stuff in docker (or whatever the kids do these days) they must be smarter than all us dumb losers who can't figure out how to make our brains okay with this world.

It's an appealing view, and I get it. Probably not a bad idea to question at length.

This comment provides no insight nor facts. Why bother to make it?

The numbers are independently verified by UNHRC [1].

The United States is the aggressor in this conflict. Its action is a violation of the UN Charter and international law.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Human_Rights_Co...

That's not what you say it is. It is an estimate from UNHRC, which has a wide range. The estimate also seems to be for all dead, including counter protesters and government officers. Verification of any kind is in short supply.

It also does nothing to address the Iranian government's claim - strongly supported by US and Israel's public statements(!) that it's a foreign coup attempt rather than peaceful protests.

"Foreign coup attempt" is an extraordinary claim that is not backed by publicly available evidence. Indeed, it's not even backed by the statements by Iranian government officials, who are on record upholding the killings [1]. Furthermore, Iranian Ministry of Health officials have upheld these estimates of the death count. Eyewitness accounts uphold the fact that the Iranian government has perpetrated mass killings of protestors [2].

It is understandable that a person who distrusts the United States government would be led to believe the statements of a government in opposition to it. Indeed, the United States is engaged in an illegal war in which it is the aggressor. However, the statements of the Iranian government attributing protestor deaths to foreign-backed paramilitaries is not backed by any credible set of facts.

1. https://reliefweb.int/report/iran-islamic-republic/iran-deat...

2. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/16/iran-growing-evidence-of...

> "Foreign coup attempt" is an extraordinary claim that is not backed by publicly available evidence

It is not an extraordinary claim, and it's backed by absurdly strong evidence. As I said, it was pretty ridiculous that Mossad openly said not just that they wanted regime change (as the US also did), but that they were actively assisting in it. And in addition to the thousands of protesters who have been reported dead, hundreds of policemen or revolutionary guards have also been reported dead.

An ordinary, popular protest, even a damn angry one - even one armed with handguns! - does not kill hundreds of policemen. If you think that's possible, you don't understand the power difference between civilians and people with a full time job and training to use violence on civilians. Even if you would ignore the public statements (which I won't let you!) you simply do not succeed at killing so much of the state's violence apparatus without serious material and organizational support.

And anyone who's been following Iran for a while knows that yes, Mossad actually has shockingly many native agents in Iran (e.g. the murder of scientists wouldn't have been possible without it) and in addition there are political cults like MEK, and supporters of the dictator son Pahlavi, who are certainly organized and certainly not pacifist in their fight against the government.

It's your loyal party line messaging which is detached from reality.

"It's backed by absurdly strong evidence"

(fails to produce any sources for unfounded claims, followed by a lot of rhetoric)

Note the failure to rebut the provided sources in my comment.

I accept that it's unlikely that you'll examine your own priors. My response is for the benefit of people who haven't had the chance to read extensively and travel, who might take your claims at face value.

You're good at trying to seem authoritative with your footnotes and links, but in this age of chatbots it's important to be able to see through that because it's trivial to bluff. Any idiot can be good at it. That's rhetoric. But you'd better get with the times: I think you'll find it's better to write like a regular human these days, rather than like a corporate news anchor or a chatbot, if you want to convince the commoners --- excuse me, I mean the "people who haven't had the chance to read extensively and travel".

The evidence I "provided" was evidence I think you already admitted. You do not deny that the US and Israel openly (and to repeat myself, insanely - it's so bad you'd almost think it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage any legitimacy) took credit for the attempt to replace the government of Iran to an unprecedented degree - why don't you find an example of an attempted revolution where a foreign country claimed to "be with you on the ground"?

I could have linked to the insane tweets with [1] and [2] myself, but why bother. I trust people to find them themselves if they're in doubt.

Never engaging with the credible evidence presented, claiming that heads of state said something they didn't. Other readers can be trusted to see through your lies.

Oh can they? You seem to have a pretty low opinion of them.

I guess no head of state just threatened to nuke Iran either, and that is a preposterous lie.

You have not presented evidence. You have just linked authorities. The direct statements - those are evidence.