cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47584733
Trita Parsi May 18, 2026
We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.
Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.
Reddit has tankies too. Sure, it’s fucking annoying to have an argument with someone who you can’t tell whether they’re a troll or just thoroughly deluded, but overall they’re not that hard to avoid.
Just block a couple instances, a few comms, and the worst users. Tag the ones who aren’t quite bad enough to block outright and avoid engaging with them except to stick up for someone they’re hounding. It’s not that bad.
There’s plenty of good stuff here. Especially if you’re a techie or a trekkie, but also just plenty of general internet silliness, and some nostalgia bombs here and there.
Maybe there aren’t as many niche communities as reddit has, but that might build over time.
Really? I thought Reddit was fairly right-wing, and loved to ban leftist viewpoints? Reddit definitely has trolls though, that’s for sure. And bots, and perhaps a couple irl humans occasionally here or there mixed in as well 🤪.
You are offering solutions that every single one of us here has done to handle the trolls in this place, but remember that non-technical normal folks think different. Also, when they first browse a place with anonymous guest access they do not have an account yet nor the ability to ban anyone or anything - they simply see what they see, and that is it. (which is why they leave rather than stay)
Or for someone who joins, later after that the trolliest places never honestly announce their true intentions, so they have an enormously steep learning curve. We know the unwritten rules, but to a new joiner the process of catching up is overwhelming. Look up the Wikipedia definition of “Nazi bar” - hint it has little to do with actual irl Nazis and everything to do with the Paradox of Intolerance. We host tankies here, hence we are a tankie bar, like it or not. And just as a Jewish person might not feel comfortable around actual Nazis, American centrists do not feel welcomed in a space where tankies run the major portion of the show. Plus they get relentlessly trolled, e.g. by hexbears, and hence they leave. And after they leave, they complain about us, which causes others to not want to join us over here.
My argument is that I wish that we were not the incels that we clearly, collectively, are. DoN’t YoU rEaLiZe WhAt A nIcE mAn I aM? If we are going to be offensive to people, I would hope that we could at least do so honestly and genuinely, not living in ignorance of that fact (as the tankies themselves do).
And yes there’s genuinely great stuff here - there’s also genuinely great stuff over on Reddit btw, and even on Xhitter and Facebook, not that I want to go to any of those places to see it, but I acknowledge that it is there. I choose to be here. But most people do not choose that, and that’s okay. Or at least it’s facts, which we should own up to imho.