Imagine if a bunch of tech bros said: "Hey, you don't need exercise. It's totally fine if your muscles atrophy. After all, we have technology to move you around and it can do so much more quickly than your muscles ever could!" We'd laugh them out of town.

Well, guess what? If you don't exercise your brain, it atrophies. If you outsource your thinking, you eventually become unable to think.

> then why did the iranians rally around it after the leader was killed?

They didn't. They celebrated in the streets when Khamanei was killed.

None of the Iranians I know are in Iran, but many have friends and family there.

Here is a link of people celebrating Khamanei's death.

There are no doubt pro-regime demonstrations. When such a vicious regime demands a supportive demonstration, people will comply.

Note that many Iranians are secular. Persian culture predates Islam by centuries, if not millenia, so when you say that killing Khamanei was like killing the Pope... that really doesn't matter to secular Iranians, who only saw him as a vicious tyrant.

I agree that the people of Iran are brave and dignified people. Every single one that I've met has been a lovely person. They are also overwhelmingly thirsting for freedom from Islamic regime domination.

Well, yeah. The US military is the best in the world for massive high-tech conventional wars.

Ukraine is probably the best in the world for drone warfare.

Iran is far superior to the USA when it comes to retaining strike capabilities under enormous pressure from a stronger foe.

The USA is getting weaker in the following ways:

1. It's pissed off most of its allies who will be much less likely to help them out in future. We all helped out after 9/11 and in Afghanistan. That ain't happening in future with the attitude from the Trump regime.

2. The USA is sabotaging its own economy, first with ridiculous sanctions and second by blowing up the world economy with this war.

3. The USA may have an impressive industrial base, but dig deeper... pretty much every supply chain in the USA has some dependence on China or some other country, and alienating those countries is not a good strategy.

4. The weakening of democracy in the USA and its contempt for the international order is emboldening countries like China and Russia. They feel much less constrained by a weakened and disengaged USA. As for oil, the USA is allowing Iranian tankers through! So China will get its oil anyway, because Trump is afraid to block it and make oil prices spike even higher.

Again: I do not want Iran to win. But it will win, because you (and the current American government) completely miss the point.

Iran wins by having its regime survive. And the survival of that regime is not in doubt. At least, not unless the USA invades with ground troops and is willing to take thousands to tens of thousands of casualties.

Do you really want that to happen? Do you think the American public wants it to happen?

Also, please provide citations for "regular Iranians" taking over police stations. The Iranian regime has shown it's willing to act with the utmost brutality, and 50M unarmed civilians cannot win against 1M armed troops.

Russia can't do shit to help Iran

Oh, I dunno. A little bit of intelligence and satellite photo assistance and poof there goes a very expensive AWACS.

It's obvious to everyone that Russia is helping Iran with intelligence at the very least, and possibly even with air defenses... how is it that an F-15E was shot down now, a month into the war?

I agree that leaving the war unfinished will be a disaster. However, finishing it is going to take the lives of thousands to tens of thousands of American soldiers, if "finishing" means regime change. You willing to live with that? (I'm not American, so it's not my fellow citizens whose lives are on the line.)

Iran is "vulnerable" and "weak"? Really? It just took out a $750M E-3 Sentry AWACS using missiles and drones that probably cost it a total of a couple of million bucks. It downed an F-15E and an A-10. It damaged a Black Hawk helicopter.

The stakes for the Islamic Republic regime are existential. If it survives, it wins. And in the entire history of warfare, the number of regime changes achieved via air attacks alone is precisely: ZERO.

That means boots on the ground. In a country of 90 million that can probably rustle up 1 million troops to defend itself. You really think the USA is going to go there?

The end result will be the survival of the Iranian regime, which over the next 5-10 years will rebuild its missile and drone capabilities and probably double down on building nukes. And it will never trust the USA again, having been attacked while in the middle of negotiations.

Meanwhile, the USA has a significantly depleted Patriot arsenal and other weapons and is going to suffer enormous economic shocks. And Russia's loving the increased oil prices (except thankfully, Ukraine is hitting its ability to export oil, but still... it will end up benefiting Russia.)

I know many Iranians. Not a single one of them supports the regime. And they tell me anti-regime sentiment is widespread within Iran.

There were many videos of Iranians inside Iran celebrating when Khamanei was killed.

Yes, probably now there's a rally-round-the-flag effect because the US and Israel have been hitting civilian infrastructure and Iranians don't like that. But you should not confuse Iranians angry about their neighbours being killed and civilian infrastructure destroyed, with support for the Islamic regime.

My impression is that most Iranians hate their government, but they also feel disillusioned and betrayed by the USA and Israel, who clearly have no interest in the Iranian people themselves.

Of course, I do not want the Islamic Regime to win this war.

But Iran will beat the USA. Not because the US military is bad. It isn't; it's the best in the world.

The problem is that the USA will lose because its political leadership is completely incompetent. It had no idea how Iran would react. It thought this would be Venezuela II. Even though any armchair general could have predicted that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz to cause economic pain, Trump seems to have been caught by surprise.

The US political leadership has no plan, no clear goals, no strategy, and no clue who they are dealing with. They are going to put their own soldiers' lives at risk and are going to totally botch this shitshow.

The real winners in this are Russia and China. A weakened USA is just what they want, and it's just what they are going to get.

Very few people support the Islamic Republic regime. We all know it's a disgusting regime.

However, we can still criticize the completely stupid reasons the USA started this war and the absolutely incompetent way it is being prosecuted by the USA.

I find PiShop to be pretty good.

I own 8 Pis of various kinds, and 7 of them are busy running 24/7 doing various useful things.

Yep. Roughly the same age and was sure back then that we'd have a permanent habitat on the moon by 2000.

Funny that your subject line is a modification of the Star Trek catchphrase... which was well-known for having an extremely diverse crew, especially for the time when it was made.

I love it when people think Star Trek wasn't what today would be called woke.