First 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3B
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Why Americans are not rioting in the streets is beyond me.
Same with education
> In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $37,400 per FTE student, which was more than double the average of OECD countries ($18,400; in constant 2021 U.S. dollars).
I get that it's cool to say US doesn't spend on these kinds of things, but it's just not true. It's a rich country
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
There is no world where the way it is done now is “good”.
The citizens themselves have to pay from their own pocket, and they get substandard services because the whole thing is setup to maximize profits for private companies.
The three examples in bko's grandparent comment you'd replied to were education, medicaid, and medicare.
… that’s not a flex.
> that's not a flex
Was there something about bko’s comment that made you believe they thought it was a “flex”? (I'd similarly say the US spends a lot but doesn’t get good results.)
Regardless of your stance on single payer healthcare, anyone can see what we have is a highly corrupt and contemptable system and what I am receiving is not "socialized" health care.
What you have there is profit maximisation. The poor guys can't afford healthcare anyway so they give it to them for free but you're still scraping by to fill the big guys pockets. Because you can.
But don't blame socialism for it because this is none of that.
And this is why it's so hard to discuss, because you are always damned either way by someone declaring that whatever you were talking about was in the other half of it's Schrödinger's socialism state at whatever moment you were talking about it.
To be honest I'm a bit primed by the (mostly) republicans always attacking our welfare safety net, our healthcare, our kindness to immigrants etc. Even our lack of exploitative ultra-capitalism. Whereas for us these things work well. So I jumped to the defensive too quickly.
We then in the same breath complain about government but put forth no effort to fix it.
My own country's parliament is having more debates about the Iranian war and we're just sending one warship to Cyprus!
That's not entirely fair. The January 6 rioters acted because they knew how bad for the country it would be if the wrong candidate got into office and started a war.
I don't think that's what they were told when they were given marching orders to fight like hell
The only core issue is that everything that was said that day was a whole a total lie and the responsibility hangs with the liars
And why people still work for the military.
If I worked for the military I'd be willing to fight in defensive operations but not this kind of oil imperialism. This is only going to make the world less safe because there's a whole new generation of people whose families got killed and now have an axe to grind and they're going to come after those who did it. Iran isn't even that bad (it seems to be mostly military targets) but in Lebanon they're levelling entire city blocks again.
The last Iraq war created ISIS. The Afghan war didn't accomplish anything, things got back to square one in two months. What's the plan for Iran after the war? Oh wait there isn't one. Again. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/12/israel-iran-us...
You definitely don't get to just quit.
I'm not in the military of course and I couldn't be, I'm not a team player and tou unstable, I would spiral out of control in such an environment. But I thought there were ways of getting out of it.
I'm really am tired of reading this nonsensical hyperbolic line. No one is hurting enough to care to take to the streets. You know this, I know this, we all know this. Please stop repeating it.
Part of the problem is they just don’t know it.
How much paid maternity leave do you get? Paid time off to move house? How’s your healthcare when you take a few years off work to raise your kids, or learn to paint?
These are basic human rights for many around the world.
if only this would have been done before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!
It's clear we are going to lose, because we cannot topple the regime without putting troops on the ground, which we will never do. Setting that as a war aim doomed this whole effort from the start.
The problem is that there's always a very convenient aspiring nuclear power to hit. In hindsight they rarely never were a real threats (Iraq, Cuba). And what became real threats have historically been downplayed by the american government (North Korea).
Feel free to list the details about when, how and why it happened before ;) interestingly none of these scenario would even have happened if they had nukes to begin with, how weird
> interestingly none of these scenario would even have happened if they had nukes to begin with, how weird
this is very weird speculation, Iran would be way more aggressive in its action in the region if they would have nukes.
depends how you define "attack us". Iran is part of Iran-Russia-China axis, which goals are very explicit in expanding influence and territories (Ukraine, Taiwan, Syria, Iraq, Gulf states). If they succeed, Western world will be cut from semiconductors and oil and become much weaker.
How did it go in Iraq? Afghanistan? What's up with kidnapping Maduro? Is this what the "western world" is about? Securing resources by bombing people preemptively because they might do something you don't like one day?
You can't look at the recent history of the region and point the finger at literally anyone else other than the US with a straight face lmao, you're the blood thirsty nation who's military industrial complex got out of hand, just watch the latest videos posted by the official white house accounts, only psychopaths would come up with these
it was decades of very intense proxy wars: Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon. Iran didn't hesitate to attack oil assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack
> Is this what the "western world" is about? Securing resources by bombing people preemptively because they might do something you don't like one day?
sure, that's what humans do through centuries. If you don't do it, you get extinct because other forces become stronger and bomb you.
Compared to the US and Israel who only mind their own business and never do any shady things of course. Russia says the same thing about the US in Ukraine, but there it's a dirty propaganda lie, when it comes to Iran it's just the Real Truth ™
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.
The USA even bungled up an operation (with the goal of gaining better intel and internal domestic spies in Iran) by convincing an Iranian physicist to carry convincing plans to an address in Iran. That physicist got so sh-scared (who wouldn't) that the nuclear bomb designs would be so transparently bugged that he feared for his life. He did the unexpected: he recognized which parts of the designs were obviously manipulated for failure and corrected them before indeed depositing at the address. He feared and figured that other physicists in Iran would quickly spot the same manipulations in the weapon design, and he would effectively be committing suicide by thus proving himself a spy!
What a cuck-op of an operation!
decades and decades and decades of ...
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-n...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskMiddleEast/comments/1l9t7yl/neta...
you don't train such huge proportions of the population towards physics without nuclear weapon ambitions
you don't enrich uranium to absurdly high levels for peaceful energy production (sorting isotopes is expensive)
you don't assassinate with hydrogen cyanide (generic non-brand equivalent of Zyklon B) random minorities (like Mahsa Amini) just because they would like to study law, and happen to have a less-regime aligned attitude, unless you are running a chemical weapons program (which apparently wasn't really halted after the Iran-Iraq war)
I have an ambition to marry MacKenzie Scott but doubt that’s happening :)
Closing the Strait of Hormuz is quite easy, scorched-earth-tactics (well scorched-sea-tactics) like sea-mines are a lot easier than conquering territory.
Just look Bosnia&Herzegovina and the huge minefields that were deposited there.
This doesn't show Iran's resilience, and sea mines can be cleared.
There's a long list of cards the USA holds and somewhere down that line there are options like announcing total destruction of neighborhoods of Teheran, and advising the inhabitants to leave, starting with the richest (and thus regime aligned) neighborhoods. Just gradually announce the carpet bombing neighborhoods and provide ample time for evacuation. Watch your demands being met one by one: defuse your sea mines, if one more goes off thats another richest neighborhood gone, give up your for-energy-generation-over-enriched uranium (there is no discussion of its existence as Iran was pleading an insignificant dilution of part of this stockpile) or that another richest-neighborhood-thats-left gone.
Unlike the human-shields / hostage-taking tactics of the IRGC / ayatollah, it would target not innocent third parties nor the lives but the possessions of the regime-aligned parts of the population.
All the people you forced to study physics for the megalomaniac dreams of the regime? Allow them to flee the country (and take their inkling nuclear skills with them) and welcome them with a new free life. In the west we don't gas your girlfriends, sisters, nieces over a few hairs sticking out from under their headwear.
People repeat the patterns of their breaktrhoughs / successes.
There were many factions around the time the current regime rose to power.
Which one won? Which one was reluctantly given bargaining power by the free world? The faction that took hostages.
Ever since, whenever the regime felt threatened (internally or externally) they resort to hostage taking and human shields.
No sane person puts a girls school in a semi-used military complex, especially not in that hotbed of the middle east, with Iraq as a neighbour, Israel not much further, and while sponsoring and weaponizing groups like Hamas.
"Regime-aligned civilians" is a slippery slope that is essentially collective punishment. Most anyone in Iran can be tied to the government through jobs or family, and they are not segregated by level of "regime alignment", so you would be obliterating the homes of many civilians who might otherwise oppose the government.
Genuinely flabbergasted that you came up with that strategy unprompted when not even Hegseth ("drink blood from the skulls of our enemies") has suggested it AFAIK. Your post genuinely reads like the monologue of a cartoonish villain.
And even Israel puts military targets next to civilians.
Just embarrassing levels of hasbara.
I am not blaming OSM for what happened, but just to avoid having a great FOSS project being used for unverified targetting: perhaps we should have stronger requests for verification for military domains around the world. OSM could contact the governments and ask if any non-military entities reside in that base. If the government refuses to confirm or deny, or just pretend there is no school, then OSM can bring this response up at a later date.
Would expect nothing less of the current administration than to use Open Street Map in their killing campaign (maybe Apple Maps should have been cross-checked)
I am also interested in seeing verifiable proof that Apple Maps displayed a school there before the attack occured, and I certainly agree all available maps should have been checked, including past satellite imagery, which surely would have betrayed the presence of large amounts of children (from shadow lengths). As I said before, what happened there was inexcusable.
What is known is that Israel and USA divided the targets according to respective materiel proximity, which MUST mean that a common list of targets would have been maintained and then divided by proximity / weapon range. This means that in theory Israel could have selected the target, just like USA may have selected certain more northern targets, and then misplaced trust could have enabled blindly bombing a target selected by the other nation state.
In other words I certainly see it as a possibility that Israel intentionally shared this target pretending not to know about the girls school. They certainly can be suspected of having a motive: revenge for the killings of their children on the music festival. The genocide in Gaza apparently doesn't sufficiently quench their thirst for revenge, especially since everyone knows Hamas is effectively Iran-in-Gaza. From the perspective of Israel it's also an excellent way to ensure sustained conflict between Iran and the USA, and thus force the USA to continue contributing firepower in this escalation.
IF the above were the case, in my opinion the best move for the USA is to acknowledge as quickly as possible that while they bombed the target location, that this target selection was by Israel.
But really, North Korea seems to be more quiet since they have them. I think the world would have been less safe if they'd been attacked.
NK can feign concern like revealing trajectory choices, radar signatures etc. but those can all be addressed: stick a big retroreflector on it that drowns out any actual radar signature, use a ridiculous trajectory, that still puts a representative heat and temperature burden on the re-entry vehicle, and so on and so on.
It seems NK doesn't want to be taken seriously (and the same for Israel when it comes to nuclear weapons to be honest).
That's a risk not worth taking. They have exploded several, they're a credible threat now. But they only seem to be interested in using it as a deterrent, which is the sane choice given mutually assured destruction. They won't use them offensively as they'll just get wiped out.
If they had been attacked before building them I'm sure many people in Seoul would have died from artillery attacks and perhaps China would have got into a hot war with the US. I think we're better off that it didn't.
I'm pretty sure Iran would have done the same thing.. They're pretty sane too. Evil and terrible murderers to their citizens but they're not going to play nuclear chicken with a thousand times more powerful enemy.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
> before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!
Lmao yeah OK buddy, your dollars are financing both, and many more, atrocities
I have a youth trauma, that I refuse to sponsor through (obligatory) healthcare and taxes. No taxes means no income. Fine I'm a homeless bum!
All I see is angry circumcised men being sent to fight another nation's angry circumcised men, instead of addressing the perpetrators of their traumas, work from the individual perspective not the collective one.
> After the revolution they didn't even pursue nuclear weapons until they understood it was the only thing you can get to protect yourself from Israel and American bullying.
I see this claim a lot, but it appears to not be true: plenty of nations have no nuclear weapons program and aren't being bullied; while Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and clearly is being "bullied".
Yes Trump is a clown, in most democracies we can select who brings the bad news and can do the posturing. Most policy is deep state and persists across electoral swings from one party to another. It's not because Trump has been selected as the mouthpiece in charge, that the plans weren't drafted by "deep state" (non-elected) servants and organizations.
The whole republicans vs democrats is a ridiculous joke, you don't have to tell me about it.
Republic: from latin Res publica (the affairs or decisions or matters that belong to and thus need to be decided by the public) so basically "power to the people"
Democracy: from greek dēmokratía, dēmos and krátos (people and rule or power) so basically "power to the people"
So we have 2 parties claiming to stand for the same thing "power to the people" and a never ending fight for the Greek term or the Latin term. Most US citizens don't even understand greek or latin!
What does every elite do in fear of its population? Divide and conquer: divide your population in half and have them fight for a greek term and have the other half fight for a latin term, but use dead old languages so people are blinded from seeing they want the same thing!
Oh, that never occurred to me. Now the two party system is even more ridiculous. Thanks for the insight.