Mo

The killing of Ali Larijani, like that of Ali Khamenei before him, is best understood as an instance of strategic martyrdom, a dynamic that exposes the fundamental irrationality of Israel’s and the US’ continued reliance on decapitation strategies, especially given their repeated historical failure. The decapitation-attrition-invasion playbook that the US and Israel keep drawing from reveals systems locked into a familiar repertoire of counterproductive violence that have consistently failed to adapt to reality. This failure is so glaring that even Trump acknowledged it, when he recently admitted that the US attacked Iran "out of habit." The underlying premise is that by removing senior leaders, the system they sustain will weaken and/or fragment. Yet this assumption reflects a narrow instrumentalist rationality in which leadership survival is treated as the paramount strategic objective and the threat of death is presumed to function as an effective form of coercion. But Iran operates from a value-strategic rationality whereby martyrdom itself can perform important political work and generate strategic effects that not merely resist but reverse the intended consequences of assassination. That Larijani attended the mass rally and made statements openly embracing the possibility of martyrdom before his death only underscores how consciously this logic is adopted by those who bear its consequences, a logic articulated most clearly by Khamenei himself, who declared that “either we are martyred on this path, whose honour is eternal, or we achieve victory; both are victories for us.” By transforming assassinated figures into sacred symbols of justice and resistance, in the tradition of Imam Hussein at Karbala, martyrdom converts the intended effects of decapitation into a strategy that successfully mobilises collective resolve, legitimises the political order, and regenerates both the system's continuity and its societal resilience. In short, strategic martyrdom ultimately contributes to deterrence by regeneration, whereby repeated attempts at decapitation are subject to a law of diminishing returns as adversaries discover that killing leaders neither fractures the system nor compels submission but instead contributes to its consolidation.

Is there a good theory about why sports betting has oneshotted Americans so badly when the rest of the world does just fine with it? Is this the downside of American optimistic entrepreneurialism? Or do they just lack the societal antibodies that the rest of us have developed?

I asked Tuberville about him calling Mamdani the enemy at the gates and if he thinks Mamdani is the enemy. “100% because, because he preaches and teaches Sharia law and he goes by the Quran. He was sworn in on the Quran. Look at the Quran. It preaches death to Americans.“

This isn’t just a little bit wrong. It’s spectacularly wrong. Can we please stop believing that wealth — even vast wealth — grants a person any particular historical, moral, or cultural insight?

"took so long to see us in a movie like this" ??? Does she mean animation? Because Parasite did pretty well back in 2019! (Well deserved, it was a great movie.) And Korean Americans make up only 0.6% of the US population. They're batting pretty well at the Oscars, actually!

Temple Israel in Michigan was founded before WW2, the name predates the state of Israel by almost a decade. You actually don't need to justify trying to slaughter preschoolers

0% state income tax for California families making under $100,000. That’s thousands of dollars back in your pocket where it belongs. As Governor, I’ll work the issue at both ends—lowering taxes for those who are struggling and raising them on the biggest corporations that can afford to pay.

Harrison Ford says “of course” he's had sex to soundtracks from his own movies