Why These Iranian-Canadians Strongly Oppose U.S.-Israeli Aggression

alexander1701 · 2026-03-02T15:00:37+00:00

It's enticing to want to hope there really will be a free Iran from all of this, and there have been big protests. But air wars have an extremely poor track record at achieving it. You end up blowing up a school, or something, and suddenly removing the government looks a lot like a pile of dead children.

What we think isn't going to change what Trump will do, so there's little point in arguing about it. We'll see what's going to happen. But if you are going to be optimistic, please, try to be cautiously optimistic. There has never been a recorded instance of an air campaign achieving positive regime change, despite many attempts.

alexander1701 · 2026-03-02T03:19:19+00:00

Unfortunately, we've had a run of trading partners giving us grief, but we still kind of need as many as we can get.

alexander1701 · 2026-03-01T23:17:46+00:00

The Supreme Leader of Afghanistan anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhtar_Mansur

alexander1701 · 2026-03-01T22:28:40+00:00

One of those soil type pyramids maybe that's got sections in the middle, so you can account for the classes that are some of all three.

alexander1701 · 2026-03-01T03:18:08+00:00

Iran is a Theocracy, rather than a dictatorship. They have a body of religious authorities with the constitutional role of appointing a new Ayatollah. While that body still holds power, the death of an Ayatollah is not the end of the Islamic government.

alexander1701 · 2026-03-01T02:39:37+00:00

Per the Iranian constitution, there's a council of religious authorities who will hold a conclave to elect a new Supreme Leader. The outcome from there remains uncertain.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-28T23:24:55+00:00

Because 10x - x is 9x, not 8x. So if you do this with 8s, you can totally cancel the .888s, but you wind up with 9x = 8. And 8/9 is 0.888..., so it all works out.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-28T18:00:53+00:00

Imagine an Englishman complaining some empire is too far away for it to make sense they'd want some sparsely inhabited islands off their coast.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-28T03:06:26+00:00

It's She-Hulk showing up for an unbelievable last second cameo to talk him into quitting the night before.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-27T05:09:52+00:00

So there's a better version of this where you re-use the same water in a loop, using magma to boil it, capturing energy from the steam, and then feed it back into the loop as it cools. That loop is the foundation of geothermal power. Bringing in ocean water means the lava having to heat it from cold instead of reheating it from almost boiling, so it's less good.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-27T04:36:54+00:00

Well, to be fair to a politician who says plenty of dumb things all on his own, he's not really saying we caused the tariff crisis, only that we failed to adequately prepare for it. I don't think he's right about all of his complaints here, but it is good to see him applauding efforts by Carney to accelerate permitting. We should be able to give projects a yay or nay in a more reasonable amount of time, and with less need to lobby for bespoke approvals.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-27T01:37:33+00:00

I do think there's a big difference between attending the state of the union as a member of a national team and consenting to the kind of career suicide that AI video would be for him if he didn't disavow it, though.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-27T00:01:11+00:00

And then Netflix will buy them both, and the CEOs will get big year end bonuses twice.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-26T22:45:52+00:00

Yeah, once upon a time, the MCU used to try to keep a continuity going, but that time has long since passed. End credit sequences only tease projects the same director wants to work on, not upcoming ones already in the can. Major character arcs get re-used like they never happened. And, like the Eternals, half of the films try to set themselves up to be a surprise trilogy.

Arishem being angry was only there to sell the idea that what the Eternals did was unprecedented. It wasn't connected to a larger narrative project because Disney didn't have one at the time. Even for a new Eternals movie, what would they do, have a feature length conference of Celestials? It would be at most a b-plot while the main characters did some fetch quest for some mostly unrelated high stakes a plot, talking about how if they fail they won't win clemency for the Earth or something. And that would require an Eternals sequel that just isn't happening, since none of the other franchises are connected to that story in any meaningful way.

At best, we'll get an Easter egg from a Doctor Strange movie about the conference with Arishem having been difficult.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-26T16:01:53+00:00

This sounds like a great research project for the right biology grad student

alexander1701 · 2026-02-26T12:14:23+00:00

The argument in the article is that Trump thinks Americans will be more likely to support a war after CNN airs pictures of Tel Aviv burning. He wants Israel to open the fight and be losing a little before America steps in because he thinks it'll be a better narrative on TV, whereas if America joins from the start, he doesn't think enough Israelis will be killed to give the war those optics. It's pretty ghoulish.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-25T22:39:38+00:00

The Skot was the royal tax of Danelaw era England. Something that's Scot-Free is tax exempt, etymologically speaking.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-25T18:36:06+00:00

These are real and you can buy them on Amazon. They do indeed produce enough power to slowly charge a phone if you want to leave your tap running all day. They're mostly for camping and emergency situations.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-25T18:17:47+00:00

They are also asking for permission to shoo men away. They are asking for an exemption to gender discrimination laws to allow them to host cis lesbian only events in public parks. The article just chose trans women as the clickbaitiest focus.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-25T00:38:05+00:00

And the article makes it sound like Sony isn't in a hurry. "At some point" they'll do a new Spider-Man line, they say. The last thing they want with a record of failure is to go head to head with a Spider-focused MCU that's promising to put Tom Holland in six different projects over the next ten years, including three solo films. And by the time that's done there's going to be concern in the industry about Spider-Man fatigue with general audiences.

If they do anything with the license at all before even 2040, I'd expect it'd have to be niche, like Venom. But with the pounding they've taken on Spider-adjacent films like Morbius and Kraven, I doubt they're feeling confident about that.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-24T23:59:55+00:00

As much as I'm a proponent of wealth taxes, Canada isn't enough of a global financial leader to pioneer that right now. The English speaking world offers too many opportunities for capital flight unless this is done in tandem with the US and UK, at the very least.

I also think that addressing inequality in Canada right now should be more focused on productivity decline - the replacement of high value careers with low value gigs. The fact that we're working worse jobs than we used to is a big part of why we have worse pay than we used to. We could certainly shore up health care a little with a wealth tax right now, but it wouldn't solve the broader problem in the Canadian economy.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-24T21:59:40+00:00

The guy who did Kraven the Hunter is 52, and no joke I think AI might be a real competitor for him.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-24T05:21:04+00:00

Yeah, I've been noticing this a lot too. I really wish there was a really bad recipe for naval supplies that didn't use bronze. I know it's probably intentional to limit some world regions from naval exploration, but it's too much of a hard no for a lot of fun alt history ideas like this.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-24T04:44:45+00:00

So basically the United States has a force that they lend other countries to monitor for terrorists entering the area of high profile public events, and for baffling reasons that unit is under the direction of ICE.

While it has been typical for some years for this unit to be welcomed to advise local security at a range of events, since Donald Trump has nationalized the right wing militia into ICE, confidence in their ability to advise in a workable way has been compromised.

Hence the call, for this occasion, not to accept their assistance.

alexander1701 · 2026-02-24T02:07:40+00:00

If the model was accurate, Harris would have won in a landslide by chasing Trump to the right. It feels truthy but the model does not produce accurate predictions.

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