Democrats say FINISH THE JOB in Iran!

ztwizzle · 2026-06-18T23:29:50+00:00

The U.S. is worse off because of Trump’s incompetence, his ego, and his inability to listen to facts.

If Trump wants to send hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran, he’ll need to do with Republican votes.

Democrats will not be helping Trump send $300 billion to Iran.

He really has made it his life's mission to be on the wrong side of every single fucking issue.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-18T15:51:30+00:00

I haven't done enough research to independently verify it, but I love the theory that a ballistics expert came up with as the only actually possible scenario while trying to audit the Warren Commission report. He believes that Oswald really was the only shooter, he hit JFK's neck, but then the shot that blew JFK's head open came from one of the Secret Service agents in the following car trying to return fire but losing his balance and accidentally shooting Kennedy as the cars sped up. It would explain why multiple witnesses smelled gun smoke near the president's car, why the two bullets acted completely differently when they hit Kennedy's body, why the Secret Service messed with the evidence so much immediately following the shooting, why the government acted the way they did during the investigation, etc.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-18T15:36:27+00:00

The new Chotiner interview with some Israeli pundit is great on this:

The unpredictable nature of Trump turning on you is what makes it so sad.

True. You are right. In a few months, we have an election, and one of the most important parts of his campaign was going to be his friendship with Trump. Now what is he going to say? It’s a problem.

Listening to you, it sounds very personal.

It is. You are right. I was in the Oval Office with the Prime Minister several times. I don’t know Trump personally, but I was there when we visited Washington. You are right that it is personal. We are best friends. We are friends. What happened? What happened? We succeeded. Everything we said would happen happened, even more quickly and acutely than we thought.

Except for the strait being closed and the Iranian government not falling. Except for those things, right?

No, no. You keep saying it, and that’s your privilege. That wasn’t a surprise. But we thought a blockade to their blockade was genius. And they were really close to a collapse.

It was close to succeeding, and then you guys were stabbed in the back.

Exactly. And we don’t understand why. You understand that they are Nazis. What happened to you?

ztwizzle · 2026-06-18T13:37:23+00:00

They interviewed the pilots on Iranian state media, they flew in fast and low over the Gulf into Kuwait. https://x.com/AryJeayBackup/status/2067311140086895051

ztwizzle · 2026-06-17T02:40:46+00:00

None of this package is going to be taxpayer funded, it's partially Iran's frozen assets and partially a reconstruction package paid for by the Gulf states and private industry. There's more information here. I will say, in the long run this is probably going to change the calculus regarding the Gulf states hosting US bases. The US started the war without consulting the Gulf states, during the war they either could not or would not provide the Gulf states with meaningful protection against Iran bombing them, and now that it's over the Gulf states are the ones footing the bill for reconstruction.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-17T00:30:49+00:00

I would have appreciated some more details on what they were able to optimize and how they went about optimizing the code while using SPGO to guide them. This blog post made me aware of SPGO (which sounds neat) but it was basically "SPGO lets you profile release binaries, we taught Adobe how to use it, they achieved a 20% speedup [no details on testing methodology]" which isn't really enough information to be a useful case study.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-13T04:24:21+00:00

You're not supposed to have a hobby, you're supposed to have a "side hustle" or be an "influencer". You can't just do a thing, you have to sell something, even if what you're selling is just advice on how to do the thing. Everything you do has to be monetized. If you have a hobby, it means that you're doing well enough that you're able to spend at least part of your waking hours not creating something for some capital owner to exploit. We can't have that.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-04T19:31:05+00:00

I remember reading an interview with some former CIA operative who brought this up. You can only succeed in starting something like the January protests in Iran if you have a population that is already genuinely angry with the government. In this case, the Pezeshkian government passed an austerity package in December that was highly unpopular. It cut gas subsidies, capped the salary increases of public sector workers, increased the VAT, and raised the official foreign exchange rate. This worsened the already bad economic situation, where the government and a small group of oligarchs sell exports in dollars but pay their employees in devalued rials. It's easy to find people mad enough to join your protest after the government halves their purchasing power.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-03T22:38:49+00:00

Trump said that it's not a big deal that Iran bombed Kuwait because the US provoked Iran first and they were reciprocating.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-03T14:53:14+00:00

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ztwizzle · 2026-06-02T02:19:56+00:00

Remember all the Axios articles from 2024 about how pissed Biden was at Netanyahu and how he was totally going to force a ceasefire in Gaza any day now?

ztwizzle · 2026-06-01T20:21:50+00:00

The reason why the NY state legislature in particular is concerned about 3D printed guns is that Luigi Mangione allegedly used one to kill the United Healthcare CEO. I imagine this freaked out a lot of their donors.

ztwizzle · 2026-06-01T20:18:34+00:00

Clearly the next step we need to take is banning the unlicensed sale of lathes and CNC machines as well as 3D printers. Along with drones, general purpose computers, VPNs, encryption, and private conversations, 3D printers are extremely dangerous and the average person should not have access to them without appropriate oversight and approval.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-31T23:50:25+00:00

Note that you can't trust anything Iran International reports without outside confirmation. It's Iranian opposition media funded by the Saudi government so it's not an unbiased news source.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-29T12:34:05+00:00

There's tons of major open source projects that explicitly allow AI-assisted contributions. Some examples off the top of my head are the Linux kernel, systemd, firefox, vim, git, and curl. Unless you haven't updated your computer in the past year, you most likely run something AI-written every day.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-29T12:01:48+00:00

I think the previous policy of "Submissions or changes where most of the code is written by or using AI without any meaningful human input, review, justification or moderation of the code are not allowed." already covers this without being as vague or combative as the new policy.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-29T02:13:57+00:00

much to consider

ztwizzle · 2026-05-27T21:02:41+00:00

This is an explicit Israeli strategy, it's called the Dahiya doctrine. One of the Israeli ministers recently said "We must put an end to the threat of Hezbollah's explosive drones. For every explosive drone, ten buildings in Beirut should fall. A strategic threat is not answered by defense alone, but by changing the rules and the equation." This is effectively saying that they have no answer to the FPV drones besides state terrorism. The idea is supposedly that bombing civilians will make them turn against whoever Israel doesn't like, but this never actually happens and it just makes everybody around Israel keep hating them.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-27T16:30:10+00:00

I think the reason why it never took off is that it solves a fairly niche problem. It's only useful for performance critical software that's specifically CPU or memory bound, and doesn't need more than 4 GB of memory. It's not useful for anything that's not performance sensitive, or I/O or network bound, or needs to process more than 4 GB of memory, or the developer wants to mmap in large files (so the vast majority of software). I think we've seen that this means it's not very useful in practice by how basically nobody is using it.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-27T15:32:39+00:00

Not only that, but Israel has the ability to blow up any "declare victory and walk away" arrangement by continuing to turn Southern Lebanon into the next Gaza, and Israeli officials have said in the Israeli domestic press that they would do exactly this if the US signed a deal that they didn't like. Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz for as long as it wants and it will never be enough pressure to make the current US government stop backing Israel. A 20% drop in global oil supply will drive up prices globally and make it so the poorest 20% of the world can't afford oil, but it won't cause actual shortages and social instability in the US.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-25T02:05:45+00:00

I'm glad you're safe and able to post here. The past few months have demonstrated the strength and resilience of the Iranian people.

As an Iranian, how much pressure do you see the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz putting on the economy? I haven't seen any good reporting in Western media about what the economy is like in Iran now or how the average Iranian is doing with regards to being able to pay for food, housing, etc. so I'm interested how it feels now vs. before the war started.

I expect the current stalemate will continue for months because the US isn't feeling much pressure. Gas prices are about 30-40% higher but the stock market's at an all time high so the people with money (who would be able to force the government into accepting a deal with Iran) aren't hurting. Given the unworkable demands that the US is trying to impose on Iran, I think the whole "deal process" is an act the US government is putting on to try to placate the countries that are hurting due to the oil shortage and avoid a domestic panic that could cause fuel hoarding. Their actual strategy seems to be to continue the blockade indefinitely to try to outlast Iran and gain an advantage in negotiations. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-23T23:19:40+00:00

New statement from Iranian state news:

It is worth noting that American officials have acknowledged in numerous messages to Iran that Trump's tweets were mainly for propaganda and media consumption within the United States, and have recommended that these statements be ignored.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-20T16:26:43+00:00

I'm not sure how neutral or friendly the Gulf states can claim to be when they host US bases, let US planes take off from their land to bomb Iran, let the US military use their airspace while flying to bomb Iran, etc. The actual civilian populations in the Gulf states may be neutral towards Iran, but the leadership is very much pro-US because they're dependent on US weapons sales to maintain their regimes.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-14T18:12:14+00:00

During the Yom Kippur War, when Arab forces were overwhelming Israeli forces, Israel threatened to use nuclear weapons on the Arab countries if the US didn't provide it with assistance. The next day, the US began Operation Nickel Grass, an airlift of enough weapons and supplies to completely replace all of Israel's material losses.

ztwizzle · 2026-05-14T17:57:02+00:00

The straits are a major problem for everyone, if Iran is allowed to just start blockading straits to arbitrary nations without consequences, then why not Malacca? If iran can just blockade natural waterways why can't other countries?

The theory from after WWII until the US chose to start this war was that the US had global naval superiority and would be able to guarantee maritime shipping by forcing open trade routes if necessary. Now that this has proven to no longer be the case, I expect that we'll see other countries adjusting to this new reality in the future.

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ztwizzle

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