Comment by getmeinrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by getmeinrn | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those really horrible situations that you want to ban because the knowledge of its existence is too depressing to grasp. But if you ban it, you haven't solved the poverty issue, in fact you've made people even more desperate. It becomes even more dangerous, higher prices due to lower supply.

But the opposite isn't desirable either. Sure, you can make it more legal, but now these people are being systematically exploited for their organs and there would be very little reason for it to go away, meaning there would now be incentives to keep people brutally poor so that you can get their organs.

What if you made a social program that said "if you are desperate enough to sell your organs, come to us and we will give you resources so you don't need to (Conditions apply)." And in order to curb abuse, some small percentage of the applicants actually were required to donate an organ, so that the program wasn't exploited by people stealing resources from those very desperate people. If you take resources from this program, you risk actually selling an organ like you otherwise intended. Only truly desperate people would be brave enough to use the program. And if you think that compelled donation is also barbaric, even in a small percentage, it would actually be a lie, but one that some portion of the program's budget is dedicated to upholding.

Or they can just stop getting nuclear weapons. And spending all their money funding terror against Israel, in Yemen and in Syria. You know, the sane option that they could've done for years.

Truth is that Iran is a terrorist organization leaching of its people. They have plenty of options to fix their problem, but their priorities are holy wars and nuclear weapons. Sadly it will be incredibly difficult for the Iranian people to overthrow this regime, and many of the Iranians who could've fight back had been leaving the country for years. I can't blame them, but sadly, regimes like these usually spiral downward in this way.

I don't think the allure of extremely desperate people selling their body parts will ever go away if an economy gets bad enough, and an economy being bad enough is not always dependent on some specific theoretically-easy-to-fix geopolitical situation.

What a brain dead argument.

In literally (yes, literally) every instance sanctions result in increasing the human suffering of the population at the expense of an already authoritative government regime.

What you're arguing is for sanctions to increase human suffering to a point where the public has nothing left to lose and they topple the government. It ignores the quagmire that human suffering increases, but not to the point where people have nothing left to lose. It also ignores the high likelihood the new government is even more hostile rather than less.

You should genuinely be embarrassed for even suggesting this.

Sadly, the alternative with this regime isn't lack of sanctions, it's (potentially nuclear) war. They have said many times they intend to destroy Israel, and I believe they intend to do as they say. We're on the brink of a regional war, that would be much worse than those suffering from economic hardship in Iran.

The sanctions aren't meant to topple the regime, they are meant to restrict the magnitude of the external damage they inflict. If there were no sanctions, Iran would have had nuclear weapons years ago, and there would probably have been a regional war with tens of thousands of casualties. I'm not sure it's even avoidable at the moment.

We're already on the brink of war if Iran decides to rush nukes right now.

I don't have any hope Iranians topple the regime, it's just robust enough to survive. The sanctions are necessary to prevent war or at least delay it. Without sanctions today, we wouldn't have prosperous Iran, we would have war ravaged middle east.

Israel could've had peace with Lebanon by now if it wasn't for Iran's cancer of hizbullah. Instead we have this. The only obstacle to peace in the middle east right now is Iran. Every terrorist organization can trace it's funding to Iran.

The only thing we can do is suffocate Iran so they can't afford to spread. That's the least violent option on the table.

Nah, not OP but I support the idea assuming it follows your train of logic, not embarrassed in the slightest as I've always voiced the same POV in public. That drip feed is the worst, it's a cancer kept at bay, the one that keeps hostile governments like Venezuela or Cuba with a lifeline. If their population is too passive to topple the government, or if after repeated attempts they end up with people not worried about nation building, it's not our problem. Don't they want self-determination? Then if they aren't playing by the rules, sanctions should get deeper.

TL;DR - what you really need to fix is poverty. Second (and third and fourth...) order effects will then automatically fix themselves.

Yes - fix poverty, no - higher order effects will fix themselves.

Think about how many billions of COVID relief funds were stolen due to governments being terrible or corrupt at administration. There has to be some (perceived) risk to taking common resources. And that risk needs to be calibrated so that it does not phase truly desperate people, but discourages exploitative people to move on to easier targets. Imagine if by taking COVID relief funds, you signed a contract that could destroy your business and made everyone in your organization personally criminally liable, if the funds were taken fraudulently.

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