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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   33963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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"US bad, actually" is a pretty common take, but

  1. When comparing the US to a Islamic theocracy, even with all the bad things the US has done, the US still comes out on top. BTW, the word "unprecedented' gets bandied out a lot nowadays, but one of the revolution's early acts was the Iran hostage crisis at the US embassy to Iran. That was "unprecedented".

and

  1. From the perspective an American, it doesn't matter. They're an enemy whether the US deserves the enmity or not.

As for the "Evil Empire", regardless of what they did or didn't do to the US, the USSR was that; ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians, and the survivors of the Prague Spring, among many others.

As for the "Evil Empire", regardless of what they did or didn't do to the US, the USSR was that; ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians, and the survivors of the Prague Spring, among many others.

Oh, I am not doubting that. I am not some Holodomor denier.

I am also not saying that the net effect of the US is as atrocious as the net effect of the Ayatollah regime. FWIW, I consider the net effect of the US to be strongly positive from a global point of view. However, I would claim that if we only consider the territory of Iran, then the effect of the US seems pretty clearly net negative. The Ayatollah has certainly be worse from my PoV, but Iranians have little reason to like the US.

While I am sure that the Iranian hostage crisis was in some ways "unprecedented", I don't think it will even make the top 50 atrocities committed in the ME. Presumably the perception of the revolutionaries was that the Shah was basically a stooge, and the US the puppet masters. The people in the US embassy were working very hard to keep the Shah in power and Iran under the thumb of the US. Sure, the Shah had guaranteed them diplomatic immunity, and violating their embassy would be a defection from diplomatic norms, but it does not read to me as an act of pure evil. (With the benefit of hindsight, it was also very stupid on part of the revolutionaries. They gained nothing, antagonized a global superpower and also set themselves up for becoming a diplomatic pariah.)

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