Indeed it was, from 1789 to 1947. It was then changed to Departments of Army and Air Force, later the National Military Establishment, and finally the Department of Defense in 1949.
On Israel, is it possible that they feel their influence on US foreign policy is waning and they want to push over Iran before they can’t do it anymore, even if the propaganda in America hasn’t been sufficiently set up yet to provide cover? Where pushing Iran over is useful because having weak neighbors is good for their expansion?
Possibly wishful thinking, but that’s the only way I can make it make sense in my head.
does anyone seriously believe there can be a good outcome of this for iranian people?
I can't make up a story that will be good for iranian people in the end. Is there even an example in last 100 years that started out like this thing is starting out and ended well for the people?
I didn’t really know much about Iran as a typical American until I married an Iranian woman. And then I met her family and her friends and I came to love Persian people. They’re some of the kindest people I’ve ever met.
What hasn’t come up enough in this thread is the currency crisis that triggered the protests. The economy is in shambles and they’re still simmering anger about the Mahsa Amini killing.
There Iranian people are tired of being under the thumb of the mullahs. They don’t want to live under an Islamic theocracy.
Millions of Iranians all over the world and inside Iran are cheering us on. They’re done. Yes, they’re scared and they don’t know what will come next, but they know what they have now is intolerable.
it’s possible this could all go badly, but what the Iranian people have now is worse. We have to try. Every Iranian person I’ve met is hopeful something better will come.
A similar scenario to this played out in Yugoslavia and overthrowing of the previously proven, and definitely not 90% manufactured "evil, genocidal and dictatorship regime" of Slobodan Milosevic. A lot of people cheered, including many expats, and "democracy" and "freedom" were finally gifted to the people. To be clear, I, in no way, justify any atrocities committed in war by any party - but "evil" and "savage" was used to describe a lot of legitimate reactions of the country, in a very similar way to how Iran is now "savagely attacking" innocent countries around them.
What happened afterwards in reality was 20+ years of escalating corruption and sale and systemic destruction of any valuable assets - culminating in the government of Aleksandar Vucic, member of Milosevic's regime, who in the recent years pumped out absolutely incredible amounts of money out of the country and is a de-facto dictator.
If you ask people who remember living under Milosevic about how it was, they all say the same thing - bad in some ways, but certainly better than this, and that he was a "little kitten" compared to the current fully criminal organisation.
Ironically, Iranians right now are saying the same thing about the Shah. They’re saying that, while the Shah wasn’t perfect, things were better back then than they are now.
> If you ask people who remember living under Milosevic about how it was, they all say the same thing - bad in some ways, but certainly better than this
Has anyone thought much about the impact of living in a group with a strong shared mythology? That is very rare among modern people, to the extent that we may have a hard time relating to it or reasoning about the impact it has on people’s moral sentiments and behaviors. Or at least it’s hard to see the one we do live in in a “this is water” kind of way, and we may have a hard time reasoning about the differences that different “waters” produce.
Like if you grow up living inside the Star Wars mythology and suddenly you get a chance to fight The Empire, do you do it? Do you really care if people outside the Shared Mythos Group (TM) disagree with you doing it?
(Note that I’m not saying anyone in this framing is “The Empire”, I’m just using the Star Wars mythology as a familiar example of a mythic framing)
The phones might not even be more expensive in the long term, if we’re just in an easier-to-discover local maximum in efficacy x cost x pollution space.
I don’t really understand the advantage of doing it this way vs having them pay directly.
Re debt loads - does the debt load actually materially affect default risk in this case? It’s not like US bonds are officially rated as high risk, at least. Debt to GDP is one thing but without a comparison to other bonds and their associated debt to GDP and a relationship inferred from that data it doesn’t really say anything in a vacuum. Why would it be done this way instead of just paying directly? As opposed to the more straightforward explanation of US bonds just having a favorable payout to risk ratio vs other options. It just smells like some kind of conspiratorial thinking and I’m not sure if it actually adds up.
Honestly asking by the way, I haven’t seen anyone spell out the theory and it just seems quite hand wavey to me.
In my subjective experience cannabis does tend to nudge some part of the brain into edit mode. What happens afterwords depends on the person.
For me it upended a lot of my alignment with the contemporary consensus morality. Before marijuana I had a sense that the morality wasn’t actually well foundationed, or at least it was equivalent to a religion in that respect, but my mind seemed to avoid thinking about it too much. With marijuana my mind freely went there, and I think a lot of my prior beliefs about the world and social systems ended up being altered.
I haven’t ended up with any diagnosed conditions, but it is inconvenient to have beliefs that are quite different from the societal default, even though in my case I do believe that my way of seeing morality is significantly more accurate on a technical basis than the consensus view. And I suspect this wouldn’t have happened without any marijuana.
I can definitely see how someone with a less analytically oriented mindset could end up going off in weird directions and writing that as a legitimate belief while in edit mode.
We definitely need studies to properly characterize what exactly this edit mode is, but I am not too skeptical about there being some kind of causal link between marijuana and going off the rails mentally, in some individuals and in some environmental conditions.
Bear in mind that majority of people with diagnosed Schizophrenia tend to smoke cigarettes / tobacco. But this is never raised the same way as cannabis is.
Does treatment ever speed up death? Given that chemo is super hard on the body I imagine it could? That might just account for your use of “mostly”, though.
It would depend on the treatment. In my case I had neoadjuvant radiation followed by chemo, then surgery, capped off with more chemo to kill any cancer cells that might have tried to make a dash for it. I would assume that while the radiation treatment elevated my risk for future cancers, the greater risk was my 10 hour surgical procedure.
Absolutely, we may have a depressed rate of CRC where ultramarathoners just get back up to the historical baseline. Who knows, but we don’t know it isn’t that.
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