
Karl Franzhammer
6K posts







Wild but predictable sentiment data from the US.



The Graham Platner tattoo controversy is not about youthful mistakes. It is about the specificity of the Totenkopf. This is not the widely recognized swastika, it is the specific insignia of the SS units that ran the Nazi death camps. This is the symbol of the executioners. This is the symbol of the men that murdered 10 million men, women, and children. These men murdered the babies. For a self proclaimed military history enthusiast to wear the literal badge of Holocaust executioners for 20 years shows a level of understanding and admiration that cannot be explained away. People tattoo on their body WHO THEY ARE and WHAT THEY LOVE. The Democrats are so desperate to flip a Maine Senate seat that they have abandoned every moral red line they once claimed to hold. They have proven that winning at any cost is their only conviction and the Holocaust is just a cheap political prop to be weaponized only against their opponents. This is not just a betrayal of their voters. It is a total moral collapse.








Yeah, Zheng He was a total fabrication. The giraffe so widely painted in the Ming court actually swam to China. The neck actually evolved as a kind of snorkel, you see.


While domestic airlines gouge passengers, in Spain you can go 400 miles (the distance between SF/LA, Chicago/Minneapolis, or DC/Charlotte) in 3 hours for just $73. We’ll do anything but provide rail service to this country.

Hasan Piker: “America is, in its foundation, a white supremacist country. This is very frustrating for Republicans to hear, this is even frustrating for liberals to hear sometimes, but it’s just the truth”


Your references to “fundamentally different data sets” and “parallel reality” @StrickerNonpro are precisely what prompts me to reply. I think you are overstating the clarity of the case. The JCPOA was never the magic solution some now suggest. It had benefits, but also serious risks, sunset clauses, and strategic consequences that unfolded over time. Even Obama acknowledged the sunset problem: once advanced centrifuges came into play, "in year 13, 14, 15...breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero" (NPR April 2015). That alone should make us more modest about claiming that one side saw reality while the other lived in fantasy. The deeper flaw in much pro-JCPOA analysis is that it is static. It judges the deal as if its consequences were frozen in 2015. They were not. Over the next eight years — and especially after October 7 — the costs became clearer: the nuclear file had been artificially separated from the regime’s broader system of coercion: missiles, drones, proxies, hostage-taking, maritime threats, regional intimidation, and domestic repression. As I argued in Iran Crisis Notebook #2: The Layered Roots of the Current War, bit.ly/4w3TY4y this war did not begin with the United States or Israel. It began in 1979, when the Islamic Republic launched its revolutionary war against America, Israel, the liberal West, and its own people. The current confrontation is not a war Washington or Jerusalem started; it is their effort to finish a war the regime began and has sustained for 47 years. And on “parallel reality”: I lived and worked in Iran for more than a decade, then spent more than a year in Evin prison, including eight months in IRGC solitary confinement, as a political prisoner and U.S. hostage. I was interrogated for years by senior IRGC officers. I know what a parallel reality looks like. It is the worldview of the Islamic Republic itself: every deal is treated as a tactical instrument in a zero-sum struggle to preserve revolutionary power, in which it is the entire rest of the world that is driving the wrong direction on the highway (to use a Persian joke). The idea that remaining in the JCPOA would have strengthened “pragmatic elements” and pushed Iran in a more moderate direction is, in my view, the real illusion. After the Green Movement was crushed in 2009, genuine reformist politics inside Iran was systematically destroyed. Leaders were imprisoned or exiled. Reformist parties were banned. Newspapers were shut down. I was in prison with some of those people. So yes, data sets matter. But assumptions matter more. And the assumption that the Islamic Republic was gradually moderating is one I simply do not recognize — not from lived experience, not from research, and not from the regime’s own conduct. If there is a parallel reality here, it is the belief that a revolutionary regime built on hostage-taking, repression, proxy warfare, and anti-Western struggle was quietly evolving toward moderation because of a nuclear bargain.






“approximately 50 violent groups or gangs in Oakland with an active membership of between 1,000 and 1,200 people, which represented just 0.3% of the population … were responsible for up to 85% of the city’s homicides”




@ViceLitty @noam_dworman you don't see the double standard ?



