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This is truly horrifying. Even more so that the world is watching it happen with precious little protest.

The next day, everything abruptly changed. Protesters kept coming, but their injuries were close-range gunshots and severe stab wounds, typically to the chest, eyes and genitals. Many proved fatal.

Jfc that's horrific. You know how you can tell when somebody feels emboldened because they escalate?

I find Trump's attacks on the Iranian government ridiculous. That's not because the Iranian government is in the right for slaughtering civilians or because the Iranian government shouldn't be held accountable. It's because as leader of the allegedly "free world," Trump has been setting the tone for other leaders to crack downs on free speech and human rights, since he stepped into office once again just over a year ago. His own behavior enables and emboldens this.

Knowing how everything else operates in this administration, the psychological manipulation layered into everything this administration is doing should never be discounted. To be clear, that doesn't mean that the violence at the protests in Iran is being overhyped, it means that it's almost certain that Trump (or more likely the billionaires and other people who actually direct Trump) are very aware that they are enabling this. Destabilization of other countries prior to a regime change (including your own) almost always relies on mass psychological operations, and pushing the population to carry out the bulk of the work for you by manipulating their behavior.

The people who used their money to get Trump elected would love to see the U.S. invade Iran, because they always profit from invasions. They see this situation as a double win. The U.S. government's crack down on rights of civilians in the U.S., emboldens the Iranian government to crack down even harder on it's own civilians. Not only does this chill dissent in the U.S., it provides a necessary pretext to do what Trump's been threatening to do in Iran.

Hypocritical? Yes, but do you think that matters? Even if you remain a member of the "reality based community," did that matter when it came to Iraq? Did it matter when it came to the Epstein files or Venezuela? These are lawless individuals out to serve themselves. They literally believe it is their job to create the reality, and we're just the NPCs that get to live in it.

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

-One of these democracy hating oligarchs circa 2004.

In other words, these psychopaths truly believe they are gods among men, and we're all just ants under their magnifying glass. Hypocrisy, morality, none of that matters. All that matters to them is winning through exploitation and preserving their status at the top of the heirarchy.

Gee this all feels a whole lot like the media reports of WMDs leading up to the Iraq War. All the US and Israeli friendly media sure want us to feel a certain way about Iran based on what people said they saw.