Why won’t the Left in the United States support the current citizen’s revolution in Iran? If we want to understand why, we have to realize that all these actions occur in The Matrix, as well as on the top level.
A brief update. Approximately a week ago, across Iran, massive public demonstrations have been held against the mullahs and the Islamic Republic. The deeper history locates the start in Iran’s Kurdistan, in the town of Saqqez, centered on the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, after detention by Iran’s morality police in Tehran in 2022. The protests have bubbled along for awhile, but exploded last week across Iran. Though the collapsing economy certainly primed the pump, the treatment of women by the Islamic Republic’s mullahs have driven the moral compass on efforts to overthrow the current regime.
As I’ve written in this piece, Iran is not a ‘downstream tribal’ nation like Saudi Arabia. The population is split into multiple cultural and memetic groups, which range from tribal peasants to modern-day Performance-based liberals. Iran has some of the trappings of a Performance-based Communitarian society, in that its defense programs are likely the most advanced of any Third-World-esque outlaw nation. You don’t invent nuclear weapons nor sophisticated drones without the ability to have advanced social organization. And advanced social organization requires people to possess their own minds — agency.
In the wake of the bombings of the nuclear weapon Fordow and Natanz sites, less reported were other casualties of Israel’s and Iran’s 12 Day War (June 13-June 25, 2025) and Israel’s destruction of key centers of the Islamic Republic’s military ‘civilian suppression’ units. The Thar Allah Corps, Delman Corps, Special Unit in Khavoran, and the Imam Hassan Alborz Corps were four firebases stationed around Tehran to attack the local populace in the case of unrest and uprising. Because of their consolidation during the war — all members reporting in — Israel launched major attacks and basically killed the mullahs’ population suppression shock troops, creating prime conditions for a revolution. As this is being written, the mullahs are attempting to import Arab jihadis from Iraq and Syria to fill in these roles. It is not clear whether they will succeed (I expect Israeli intervention in any kind of mass airlift) but my guess is they will not.
It is important to understand, at least a little, why Islamic regimes are inherently anachronistic and incapable of long-term persistence. Iran long ago left being a Tribal v-Meme society (look at the long history of empires in its cultural record) and was, during the latter part of the 20th century, moving into the meme set of a Legalistic/Performance-based democracy. But this evolutionary progression simply got too far ahead of its leadership — Reza Shah was historically an autocrat and elite, and armed with Savak, a feared secret police, as well as a large peasant caste that was mired back in the Middle Ages. The result was that the regime collapsed, with some help, as well as disinterest from Western forces, and the mullahs took over. Organization and social evolution will always carry the day.
The problem with the level of psychosocial development of any hard core Islamic republic is that Islam, in its core beliefs, is stuck in Tribal/Authoritarian hegemony. Mental models are unchanged literally across centuries. And that means they’re primed to be taken over by psychopaths — which is what happened. Ceilinged out in complicated legalism, the individual has no agency in the face of the mullahs. And there is no allowance for individuals to develop in empathy past what the mullahs will allow. And Islam is very clear about maintaining second-class citizenry for those that don’t fall under the mullahs’ aegis. Don’t believe? Read about Jizya here — the dominant Somali mindset in the current set of fraud scandals in Minnesota.
All this might last for a long time in a pre-modern world (and did.). But influences from the outside are irresistible in the world of the Internet. When the signs of 21st century prosperity are only a click away, and one also gains the ability to broadcast your own plight to that world outside the mullah’s hegemony, regardless what happens with this revolt, the mullahs are living on borrowed time. Ask not who the Death of Geography comes for.
That doesn’t mean that blood will not be spilled. The various military organs of the Islamic State may be more than decimated — but they are not completely gone. And they have far more guns than the urban populations they are up against. A key noted element is whether the Army will refuse to shoot their own civilians, and turn toward the monarchists. We’ll see. I think the Army will turn — because the regime is driving the economy into the ground, and in the end, armies run on money.
So why, then, does the Left seem at best indifferent towards the mass protests in Iran? There is no memetic resonance between the conformance-demanding Left and the desire by the urban Iranian populace for more agency. In fact, it’s anathema. The Sophisticated Left — the Left that has some background knowledge on global affairs — keeps attempting to stand up organizations and agencies similar to what the mullahs have already created. Disinformation policing, messaging rigidity, moral condemnation of non-believers, and funding of special castes are the core of Leftist philosophy. All that’s left to differentiate is a call to prayer five times a day. The v-Meme matching between the punitive legalism and endless categorization of most of the Left in the Western world, and the destructive prescriptions of the mullahs meta-matches. Sure — they disagree on the top level (e.g. ‘treatment’ for homosexuality in Iran involves real conversion therapy — castration, though on second thought, maybe they’re not that physically far apart) but these are minor details. The deep structure of knowledge lines up, regarding who gets to dictate what people think, and who must be punished if their thought just doesn’t line up with the orthodoxy.
The last thing the Left wants to do is amplify the message of more agency. Much has been made about how various young people in the U.S. flocked to the Palestinian protests, and the assumption made was that those young people must have deeply understood the issue. Give me a break. The Palestinian protests were a social relief valve for young people deprived of 3 years of their social development by COVID restrictions. Protest movements were always a great way to get laid, and if you think no one was having sex in those tent cities, you don’t spend much time around post-adolescent adults.
For those that actually know what’s going on, the messages out of Iran are even more powerful against the Left. Iranians as a whole are exhausted with their government’s endless military adventurism across Iraq, Syria and Palestine. They’re the ones under Israel’s bombs, and what the urban class wants is NOT hyperinflation (the Rial, the Iranian currency has undergone something like 1000x inflation in the last 20 years) but some return to a modest prosperity that those of their educational caste have grown to expect. Iranians are very good at secret societies — this comes from literal 1000s of years of dealing with invaders. But by current global world trade standards, no one economy can exist today without trading with its neighbors. This notwithstanding the modest stream of supplies passing through Dubai, and on its way to Bandar al Abbas on the other side of the Persian Gulf.
And as I wrote in this piece, memetically the Left is profoundly wed to collapse. This made them natural allies with Hamas and their suicidal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But the current zeitgeist of the Iranian resistance is far more akin to MAGA — more of a ‘Make Iran Great Again’ mindset. People are literally yelling in the street they don’t care about Israel OR Palestine.
The current figurehead of the Iranian resistance is Shah Reza Pahlavi II — who before he was exiled in 1979, used to fly an F-14 in the Iranian Air Force. Information is sparse on him, honestly. I have a bias against any Pahlavi– they have a notorious reputation in my own family toward killing my family members. But I’m going to hold out hope that if the Revolution is successful, that we will see a receding monarchy after order is established. I’m pretty sundered from the remainder of my relatives in Iran, but I can tell you that all the engineering scholars in the US have no desire to go back. And they are not going to get caught in a group of immigrants condemning America. They know what’s at stake.
This is an ever-evolving situation. I’m going to pray for the Iranian people. No one in the world has a corps of first-class Immiserators like the IRCG and the Islamic regime, and the Iranian people have suffered enough. They serve as a cautionary note if we let our own AWFULs get out of control. And I’d argue that it is the Iranian people’s time. They deserve to be free.
But as we know all too well, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
Reproduction of a Side Table designed by Tage Frid – Walnut
It’s been over a week since the B-2 strike force, armed with GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs, took off from Whiteman AFB, flying some crazy mileage to and from sites in Iran (Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan) and dropping some specified load literally down the ventilation shafts of the Fordow site, to devastate the caverns where Iran had set up their centrifuge cascades. Uranium starts out as a gas, and then is spun in these centrifuges, each stage concentrating a little more, until sufficiently dense fissile material is collected.
From a memetic perspective, building any nuclear weapon requires a society of sufficient complexity, so that the parts of each step along the way can be coordinated and formed into a bomb. As I’ve said earlier, everyone pretty much KNOWS how to do it. But it’s kind of like watching a high diver pulling off two flips off the high board. You KNOW how to do it. But actually doing it ain’t so simple.
Less than 24 hours after the strike, a Defense Intelligence Agency report, ostensibly of “low confidence” was leaked to the likes of CNN and MSNBC, saying the strikes had not been successful, and that Iran’s nuclear program had only been set back “a couple of weeks” or some such icks. I thought that was patently ridiculous — I’ve worked as a military-adjacent rocket scientist my entire career, as well as supervising numerous projects in the nuclear nonproliferation space. The Air Force had dedicated a single individual to deeply understanding and planning this raid for FIFTEEN years, according to JCS Chair, General Dan Caine, when then led to the development of the GBU-57. That’s some crazy information sophistication right there.
But at the time of the raid, the point was straightforward — at that time, there was no way anyone could believe that any human could even know what happened to Fordow. At least any normal human. Fordow was a site buried under 300′ of mountain. Yet journalists like Jake Tapper jumped on the narrative that the strikes had failed. When, after some time had passed, it was obvious that there was a.) no way Iran was restarting its nuclear program any time soon, and b.) the strikes had been a devastating success, clowns like Tapper decried attacks on their reputation, as well as their obvious compromise of the intelligence apparatus of the country that hosts them.
Tapper had, however, played his important role in The Matrix — as one of the key gaslighters in the media apparatus. He had cast some doubt (however short-lived) on Trump’s declaration of victory, accompanied of course by the usual Trump bloviating. Trump is far from perfect, and boy he do go on. Those of us that have watched the gaslighting trajectory of what Mike Benz calls “The Blob” weren’t surprised by any of it. But there, for a brief time, the MSM had managed to spin up, along with the Blob-Congressional-Industrial Complex, the idea that the US Air Force, as hegemonic a force as has EVER existed on the planet, could once again not get anything done.
I’ve confessed in the past that I’m a Tolkien fan. And if there’s two quotes that roll through my brain on a regular basis, both are from the Lord of the Rings – notably, The Two Towers. The first is by Eomer, Lord of the Mark – “Those who do not lie are not easily deceived,” and the second by the traitor to Theoden, the King of Rohan, Grima Wormtongue, upon being daylighted on his deception, uses rules of engagement to avoid a dark fate “You have no right to assail me. I have not drawn sword nor threatened you.” Classic manipulation of civilization to protect obvious treachery. Those Eomer-devotees were not fooled, even if we didn’t know the answer.
What Tapper and others were doing were feeding into the chronic gaslighting narrative that the American public has largely been fed since the mid-90s. It is relatively nonpartisan (think Clinton’s impeachment trial as a start) as well as Bush’s Iraq War (GWOT) as well as Obama’s continued prosecution of it through Libya, as well as Afghanistan. It’s moved to high dudgeon with the Democrats, and the insidious development of the NGO-Industrial Complex, that’s formed so many channels for money to flow out of the Treasury, to all sorts of congress-lizards’ pet causes and spouses. Most of it has been squandered in the name of whatever cause-du-jour sounds the most virtuous for elites. But the reality is that the money hits hard in the travel budgets of the well-connected, as well as the academic institutions that prop up the philosophical component of the current elites, that is so important in forming rationalizations that confuse.
Which is the point. The definition of gaslighting, a term popularized from the movie ‘Gaslight’ with the immortal Ingrid Bergman, is a chronic and repetitive manipulation of information that the target experiences, with the intent of making them doubt all their own senses. Which then, deprives the victim of actually figuring out what the truth is on their own. It’s intended as a spatial/temporal agency destroyer, and boy howdy — it can work.
Gaslighting expands in the space of a society being overwhelmed by increasing complexity. People go looking for easier, simpler explanations of phenomena, often with high-level emotional resonance, which makes the various stories easier to remember. Psychopaths figure this out, and are more than happy to create these stories, almost always designed to strike fear in the target audience, with the intent of immobilization of the populace. You get to the point where you have no real idea what’s going on. So when something happens that you should know something about, you give up early. This drives relational disruption as well as the bonding that can happen over actual truth, between disparates parts of the population. The truth might be out there, folks might be able to agree on what that is, and form synergistic perspectives from different sides of the political spectrum. But we just can’t. We’re already been taught some version of learned helplessness.
And what THAT does is drive some form of decentralization, or its darker form, disintegration of societies. Things that OUGHT to be knowable suddenly are not. And then the folks making bank exactly from that confusion rush in to vacuum up the money feeds from the downed carcass. If a pack of hyenas comes to mind around a hapless giraffe, you’re not far off.
And so it is with Trump’s bombing of the Iran nuclear sites. One of the persistent myths in the US is that our armed forces are somehow incompetent, and cannot do their job. The reality is so strikingly different from this. In all cases, all branches of the military are wildly effective at blowing stuff up, everyone else literally runs for cover when they hear we’re going to show up. We consistently wiped the map of any of our enemies in ANY of our past conflicts. Even in ostensible debacles, like the Blackhawk Down incident in Mogadishu (I had a friend at that shit show) where 15 Army Rangers got killed, we killed over 1500 Somalis. And that was in the presence of Somali children running supplies for the warlords.
But tagged to that obvious first-wave success has also been myths — and they ARE myths — about our ostensible obligations in enforcing the American Empire. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, as an inveterate liar as ever disgraced the State Department, said “you break it, you own it.” Of course, this is not true — we might have bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq because of that philosophy, but we sure as hell didn’t care about Libya when we whacked Qaddafi. Libya now sits, a profound wreck of a society, with open air slave markets. The real point of the gaslighting was to prime the pump for both military contractors and NGOs to make a shit-ton of money. So we had to manufacture gaslighting myths to explain our presence in those countries, so that our winners, consisting mostly of elite East Coast families, could continue to make bank from the public trough.
When you assign someone to a 15 year tenure to blow up one place on the map, you’re doubling down on sophistication to fix your foreign policy problems. And in the case of Iran, Trump, wielding his own sword to cut the Gordian Knot of gaslighting around the use of military power, did that. I have no doubt, just looking at the subsidence patterns around Fordow, that the ceiling literally came crashing down. And Trump did NOT pay attention to the Collapse Mavens, like CBS’ Margaret Brennan, whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio demolished in an interview last week. It’s profound de-gaslighting when someone like Rubio basically said “these people have been obviously making a bomb, and we didn’t listen to all you idiots that attempted some re-interpretation of the fact that they had built this huge underground facility to make a bomb.” If Brennan’s side of the argument can’t be perceived as a Collapse Narrative, well you, dear reader, are not going to have your mind changed by a piece on a relatively obscure blog.
And, especially with regards to military power, we’ve ALWAYS totally dominated, for lots of reasons that I’m not going to go in here. Our military is powerfully sophisticated — to the point where the Collapse Champions have gone after it to make it less so. Obvious things, like “trans women in the military” or even deployment of women to forward zones (the pregnancy rate goes through the roof when it looks like real conflict is brewing, regardless of the actual valor of some women (some of whom have been my students) ) are attempted by the gaslighters to be turned into conflict-laden narratives, intended to divide.
I’ve mentioned Anand Gopal’s fantastic book before, No Good Men Among the Living, about our war with the Taliban. Militarily, we established country-wide superiority in almost no time at all, spunky mujahedin myths be damned. But we couldn’t hold it, because the gaslighting contingent, interested in turning our foreign wars into a money printing machine, didn’t define a military goal and then get out. When the Taliban was first subjected to F-18 strikes from carriers, it blew their mind — a literal alien force showed up and annihilated any resistance.
But where the lack of clear goals came in was in our lack of understanding of societal psycho-social development. Afghanistan could only be moved so far — especially in any kind of meaningful progression. And democracy was not going to be the end state. What that meant was that we would need to decide if we could do what the psychosocial DNA of that society, with its enslavement and chronic rape of women, men and animals, could be reformed. That would require a level of murder and assassination we are simply incapable of providing from our advanced civilization. And putting military and CIA operatives in place was not going to change that. It was the toxic sludge produced in the minds of our history and sociology profs that condemned us as much as the desire for money laundering from DynCorp and Halliburton, as well as the insane USAID network and plans to help Afghans increase the opium trade in the name of rural development. Gopal’s book details how the tribal leaders, realizing our own military leaders, with THEIR own limited psychosocial development, could be manipulated in taking out each others’ enemies using our military, which they had accurately assessed as being so overwhelming superior to their own. Societal evolution was not required.
And similarly in Iraq. While the various factotums were running around championing turning Iraq, a nation held together for reasons by Saddam Hussein’s barbaric form of Tikriti justice, the fact that Iraq as well was no monolithic mass of body politic (similar to what the gaslighters are projecting now on Iran, though Iran’s is a few evolutionary clicks ahead of Iraq) also escaped our analysts’ projections. Military strikes are one thing — and relatively sterile. But War itself (with a big W) always entails the same things, and Americans historically don’t have the stomach for it. War involves killing all the men, and raping all the women. It’s the way the game is played, deep in the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Memes. And if you can’t play that game, you better not show up with your various virtues. And the real reason your ostensibly virtuous NGO is there is to rip off the pig.
The real effect of Trump in the mind of the American people is he is ripping off the mask of the psychopathic gaslighters, that have sold us a myth of civilization in places that aren’t capable of sustaining a lot of it. Men can be women? Trump rips off the mask. Boys wearing lipstick and pretending to be girls aren’t destabilizing the level playing field of high school sports? That scab is coming off. USAID is really about curing AIDS around the world? That one’s gonna hurt.
And even further into our institutions. My pal, Jay Bhattacharya, at NIH, is also doing yeoman’s work in the de-gaslighting of the American populace. AIDS vaccine research that’s going on for 40 years, with no meaningful advance — that one’s gonna go. As well as a host of other emotional triggers that the old gaslighting elites have been using to great effect, to keep the money flowing into their various institutions. Look at the gaslighting virtue argument used FOR Gain-of-Function viral research. Mind-boggling that there’s even a discussion.
But don’t count on the old gaslighters to go without a fight. The recent donnybrook over illegal immigration is a great example of how the elites making the bank have their own Praetorian Guard of True Believers, holding forth on everything from “dads who are human traffickers are dads first” to “who will scrub my toilet at a rate under minimum wage?” The current 14th Amendment Birthright Citizenship kerfuffle is an amazing example of this. The 14th Amendment was passed to insure justice and citizenship for slaves at the end of the Civil War. Using it to argue for anchor babies, as well as birth tourism from China, in order to make sure their one precious baby can get into the UC System requires a different level of gaslighting. Yet, in this moment of time, it’s the Ds screaming about the unconstitutionality of Trump’s EO on this issue. And like all good gaslighters, they’re doing it with a straight face. With tears. Never underestimate the power of women crying. It’s an old trick.
Of course, America will remain confused for a while. Any detox process takes time. And the gaslighters, while fading, aren’t gonna stop any time soon. We didn’t get into this rut overnight, and we’re not going to climb out overnight. The irony that it took Trump, a pathological narcissist, to start the unraveling of the Great Gaslit Empire (backed with data from Elon) isn’t lost on me. But when your civilization is on the brink, your heroes you get are the ones you get.
And as for Fordow — that place went boom. Boy howdy.
P.S. A piece for another time — but how many of our institutions can we hope to save, considering how deeply they’re invested in gaslighting? Dunno. Some have completely turned into what I call Vampire Colonies. Where the psychopaths have functionally taken over. Not much hope for them.
Weippe Prairie, North Central Idaho – to the left of the barn is a 2000′ deep canyon
As I write this, for those that, in the future, won’t be able to place the date, we are still in the middle of Israel and Iran bombing and launching missiles at each other. Last night, there was a declared ceasefire brokered, or imposed (depending on your perspective) by Donald Trump, after airstrikes on the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Iran. For context, we are in such a bizarre blending of the information space, I decided to write to give some context for people hearing absurd things about the state of Iran.
I write this as someone with a profound personal connection to Iran. My father was a Tudegh member back in the early ’50s — the Iranian Communist party — that supported Mohammed Mossadegh, the moderate and truly progressive leader that was overthrown by the CIA in 1953. Led by Kermit Roosevelt, the coup installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the king/dictator as the leader of Iran. The secret police in Iran, called Savak, and allied with our own CIA, killed my uncle during this time period, though I’m unsure exactly of the timeline. My father, a revolutionary himself, tells the story of how he came to leave Iran thusly. He was standing before a checkpoint with a briefcase full of pamphlets, and realized that if he crossed that checkpoint and got discovered, Savak would shoot him on sight.
So he threw his satchel in the ditch, turned around, and started the process to take him to America – the very country that was working so diligently to kill him. My father was a doctor, and at the same time all this chaos was occurring, East Coast hospitals were sweeping major metropolitan areas in Iran to recruit physicians who would be brought to these same medical facilities. They would occupy a role as kind of “super-nurses” — indentured, but not given staff positions at the hospitals, so their immigration status would remain in limbo. It would only be by marrying my mother, a poor girl from Dickinson, Texas, and then moving to rural Ohio that he would become a citizen of the United States. In spite of all the carnage, my father was profoundly an assimilative immigrant. During his career, he estimated he delivered over 4000 babies, and more than paid back his debt to the U.S.
The situation in Iran that led him to leaving, though, is accurately described in the book All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. Why my father made the choice that he did, at that checkpoint, is given context by Kinzer’s book, and I highly recommend, if you want to understand the current situation, that you read it. In 1953, there was a wave of anti-colonial sentiment moving through this part of the world, and the short version is that populist wave led Mossadegh to get elected. And once elected, he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) which then started the intrigues led by our own CIA.
Here is the key point. My father, and his entire country, had just passed through the Depression, as well as WWII. People were literally starving, and my father was righteous. The colonial powers were still controlling key elements of most of the world. Winston Churchill, as former Vice Lord of the Admiralty in Great Britain had over 20 years prior made the monumental decision to move the Royal Navy to being oil-powered instead of coal-powered. And that oil was to come from Iran.
The problem was that then, as now, Iran was split into three primary demographic categories. My father, as a doctor, was one of the urban elites. There was the clerisy and mullahs. And lastly, there were the rural poor, alternately insular, and easily swayed by the mullahs. The difference between the elites my father circulated with (our last name itself means ‘Doctor’ in Farsi) and the current progressive elites running our own country into the ground, was that they circulated with the poor, primarily with military service. My father KNEW the problems of the peasantry in Iran. And while much of his history is extremely fuzzy, one point he made emphatically during my childhood was that while he believed that the poor could be helped, they could not be SAVED. When he made that decision at that checkpoint on that fateful day, he had witnessed the Iranian poor lining up behind the Shah.
And he said “screw it.”
There are all sorts of descriptive holes in my father’s story, that I’ll never know. That he showed up at Ellis Island, supposedly never having seen a flush toilet (likely an apocryphal, funny family myth) is indisputable. His manifest from the S.S. France is below.
But we’ll never know about his larger journey, across Turkey, eastern Europe, and finally France, leading to the port of Le Havre, in France, where he purchased his ticket and sailed to America. Like many people with traumatic pasts, he refused to speak of it, save in those few stories.
Modern Iran has structurally not changed much from the Iran my father lived in, as far as social demographic castes go. There are still the urban elites, who are highly educated. The plight of the peasantry has somewhat improved, though they are still backward and prone to believing in whatever the mullahs tell them. Treatment of women, which used to be abominable in my father’s time (my father’s family had a functional slave girl they had purchased out of humane considerations,) remains terrible, aside from the respite the urban class felt during the Shah’s reign. The old Shah, and his father, were tyrants only barely modified by Western influence. And here’s an interesting catch — the reason that the mullahs hated the Shah so much was for one of the few good things the Shah did — land reform in the countryside, which took away holdings from the faith.
The urban elites currently in Iran are living as Iranians for literal thousands of years have lived — in the context of a hidden, if not exactly secret society. Even after the sanctions, and the turmoil present from 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, the middle class has found ways to get by. Iranians are hooked on education — and unlike most of their Arab cousins, they are serious about it. Requests to study in the U.S. come regularly into my email account at the university. Educated Iranians are not particularly nationalistic at all, and so the various speculations that if the Iranian nuclear sites have been destroyed, the literati will rally to rebuild Iran’s nuclear capacity is highly unlikely. The nuclear program in Iran is a paranoid fantasy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the mullahs, who like all disordered religious leaders, dream of the apocalypse. The various scientists participate, I believe, somewhat reluctantly. And as with all hostage situations, implicit or explicit, their mania is tempered. And especially so — regardless of whether sites like Fordow have been completely destroyed, you might imagine being a nuclear scientist and walking into that venue and seeing what had to be massive destruction. It’s not going to fire you up to repeat the B-2 scenario on your head. This time, you just got lucky. And for those true believers, there are Mossad agents circulating, anxious to put a bullet in your brain.
Who actually controls Iran will become clear in the weeks to come. I happen to believe that the IRGC has more in common with paranoid English majors at Microsoft than ISIS. Iran is a western venue, and people like their creature comforts. The IRGC knows that without the help of the educated technical elites, there is no functional economy in Iran, and like those English majors, they cannot reproduce, nor maintain the tech. necessary for making the domestic situation work. Pictures I see of the IRGC also indicate a far greater age spread than in a situation like ISIS, which consisted largely of 20-30-something male transplants from across the Islamic world. Revolution sounds great when you’re a 20-something year old loser from Dagestan. Less appealing when you’re 50, and living in a relatively urbanized country like Iran. Remember that the Islamic Revolution has been going on now since 1979. That means the folks that took over the U.S. Embassy have more in common with our idiot boomers at a No Kings rally, worried about losing their version of Social Security, than any fiery idealistic radicalism they possessed in their youth.
One of the things about the current news cycle that is absolutely infuriating to me is the comparison of Iran, and its potentials, to other Arab states. This isn’t some strange point of personal pride. Iran has literally a 4000 year old sedentary culture. Cities are multiple, and highly regionalized. Tehran has a population of 9 million people; Isfahan, close to 2 million, and Mashhad 3 million, to name only a few. Contrast this to Iraq, whose civilization was centered around Baghdad (8 million) or in Libya, Tripoli (~1.3 million). Urban culture — not tribal culture runs Iran, and it has been that way for thousands of years. And it matters. Even in places like the oil-rich UAE, tribal sheikhs sit on top of their dragon pile of gold and skyscrapers. Iran may be benighted by the destructive rule of the mullahs. But it remains a distributed empire, with a strong intellectual component.
One of the other prevailing myths circulating in the argument about Iran is the notion “if we bomb it, they already know how to build it, so they’ll just build it back.” That is emphatically not true — and I’ll put my engineering professor-working in nuclear nonproliferation hat to address it. The most important thing to understand is that there is no new tech in creating a nuclear weapon. Making them small is another thing entirely. But since 1945, the world has known how to make nuclear fire.
The problem with making one, though, is that it requires a complex manufacturing operation to create enough fissile material to make a bomb. And that requires social cohesion and coordination. One of the wildest things I learned about making nuclear weapons is the delivery system is only a modest part of the problem. If you create a bomb, you can load it on a 747, fly it into any major airport, and detonate it. The real problem is creating enough fissile material. And that requires a complex supply chain — with lots of people talking to each other, in a coordinated fashion. Hardly a trivial problem in such a factionalized country, as I’ve described above. When you add a dollop of Mossad agents into the mix, your odds of success drop precipitously. It’s not that it can’t be done. Pakistan showed that it could. But it is non-trivial.
The images in the press of a monolithic culture immediately recovering and pulling this off are false. There is no overarching enemy that most Iranians view in fact. Only the mullahs chanting “Death to America”. All the rest of the Iranian elite want to move to L.A. 700,000 already live there. One of the most taboo subjects to discuss in the US is the effect of brain drain on underdeveloped parts of the world, to developed nations. Do you really think that the 700,000 Iranians living in L.A. were formally peasants in Iran? How might that affect the current dynamic?
One of the most important things for perspective to read are descriptions of the various Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in other countries like Iraq and Libya. Iraq, before the Gulf Wars, was a nation centered in Baghdad, but mostly tribal, with coherence provided by the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. Libya was not much different, though I happen to have a more ambivalent view toward Muammar Qaddafi. Don’t believe in the factionalized view? Look what happened when those regimes collapsed. Libya now has open slave markets — and that’s a tribal artifact. It’s simply not conceivable in modern Iran — no matter how much you hate the mullahs.
And the nuclear enrichment sites in those two countries? Portraits of mass disarray. I remember descriptions of bundles of tubes found, scattered like chopsticks. And that was without any major bombing. We don’t understand the role of social order in creating manufactured tech. And it shows. There’s a reason, for example, that Taiwan is the center of silicon manufacturing for the world. It’s an outcome of 50 years of social grooming of an entire population to get to the level of discipline and coordination to pull it off. But that kind of thing isn’t easily transferable. Iran has far more tech and ability than its Arab neighbors. I wouldn’t completely discount it. But rebuilding a series of bombed out facilities is not trivial. If you don’t think there’s mass confusion in Iran right now, you’re off your rocker.
Confusion in the information space — years of gaslighting regarding Presidential action — has really created many of the problems in the West in even understanding what’s going on now. My estimated date for mass confusion traces back to the ’80s. But it was truly in high gear by the early ’90s, and was profiled in one of my favorite books by William Greider — Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy We’ve existed in a gaslit world where we have been so inundated with disordered myths, we can hardly think of any action that might work unless we cut in the elite class to make money off our ignorance.
One of the most prominent was started by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, with his famous quote regarding countries — “If you take a government and you break it, you own it.” What Powell was really advocating for was the nascent growth of the Blob — the NGO-industrial complex deeply involved with ostensible nation-building. USAID-sponsored organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have always made bank of creating chaos– and so they have.
And it’s the seething from this contingent that is an enormous part of the problem. Trump is using our military at the time of this writing in a hegemonic, punishment-based, but fundamentally goal-based mode. He doesn’t intend to continue the war. He wants to punish Iran enough, and remove enough strike capacity so he doesn’t have to worry about them any more. Think Rome invading Carthage. And while what Powell said isn’t entirely wrong, the notion that we have to put ground troops into Iran to achieve our own goals as a nation is also wrong. Punishment that scares whatever group of elites running the show is not such a bad notion.
And Iran with a bomb is a frightening prospect. You better believe that the upper-class Iranian elites smoking Gitanes and eating baklava won’t be the ones deciding to nuke Tel Aviv. They may be key in making the bomb. But it will be culled fanatics from the IRGC flying the 747 into the city center. We’ve been fighting an 46 year war with Iran already. Taking out a key military capacity is in everyone’s interest.
The deep memetic problem we are actually having is that we’ve had that 40+ years of our own gaslighting governance, which has alternately funneled enormous amounts of money to our own nation’s elites, who continually dream of being let into the club of global power brokers, and the sycophantic press corps wanting to accompany them on their private jets. Someone like Trump is an ice-cold bucket of water over their head, in that he says he’s going to do something, and then acts on it. And then ends our participation.
But the problem goes deeper. Once a public is gaslit long enough, in a complex world, we lose the cognitive ability to even come up with alternate scenarios about what might actually be happening. I was talking to one of my extended network, who is heavily involved in the nuclear sector. We have a publicly accepted scenario regarding Israel’s attacks on Iran that they have been primarily air-directed, with the aim of that campaign to take out Iran’s air defenses, which seems to have worked. But my friend maintains that most of Iran’s air defenses, though, were not taken out from the air. They were taken out by sleeper commandos on the ground. And that there are a whole range of possibilities had Trump not acted to bomb Fordos and Natanz, including commando raids by the Israeli army to remove those threats. Planefuls of commandos could’ve landed in those remote locations and done the job that the bunker busters did in silence and stealth. It could be that Trump was compelled to act, to profoundly mitigate the broader inflammatory scenario of Jewish troops on the rampage inside a Muslim country.
And another surprise twist — along with Iran’s air defenses, apparently the same commandos focused on removing Iran’s attack helicopter fleet, which was an apparent success. Why does this matter? Attack helicopters are key in suppressing any armed rebellion. Perhaps not lethal enough to take on an advanced military, like the US. But plenty powerful enough to annihilate a homegrown insurgent population. It is highly likely that Israeli, as well as US planners, put a homegrown uprising on their bingo card, and created contingencies to make it potentially successful — if it happened.
None of this is surprising for those of us familiar with the capacity, if not the details of US military (as well as Israeli) planning. But we see more profound failure in our press corps, as well as uninformed members on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Intentionally or not, their lack of complexity in their thinking contributes to the crisis. Why? Simplistic messages travel virally far more quickly throughout the media. And no one’s had the chance to make a blockbuster movie on the actual scenario. So the LARP proceeds at the scale of the aggregate public’s awareness.
As I wrap this piece up, it appears that the cease-fire is holding. This is not surprising, as it is highly likely that Iran’s nuclear sites have been destroyed, and their command capacity for making trouble with their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies has been seriously degraded. Further, it appears China has stepped in from behind the scenes and yanked Iran’s chain. As the mullahs and the IRGC do some delicate dance behind the scenes about who is running the show, there appear to be enough elders in the mix who are not completely bonkers, who realize that further degradation of Iranian defense capacity leaves them vulnerable to other neighbors who are none too fond of the constant turmoil, with no apparent end in sight. Just as the Arab world is tiring of the Palestinian cause, the larger circle around Iran is done with the Ayatollah. I think pure, remorseless projection of force has a lot to do with it.
One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the interests of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.
So, stay tuned. The plot will likely be far more complicated than you can dream up.
If you try to immiserate Cecilia, she’ll let you know what she thinks of that.
I’m writing this on the eve of our Nov. 2024 election. It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on in the US, as well as around the world. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time pondering (too much, actually) is how, after the end of the Cold War, when we were literally on the edge of blowing the planet up, we ended up, instead of seeing a flourishing and evolution of the human spirit, we ended up being probably as miserable in society and culture as any time in my lifetime.
Let me give a little background. For those that don’t know, I live in a small college town (Pullman, WA) adjacent to yet another small college town, just six miles away (Moscow, ID). Both towns are simultaneously adjacent to some of the most magnificent mountains, wild rivers and forests in the Lower 48, which most of the residents have no inkling exist at all. You have to drive a little ways to get to them (2.5 hrs) but a sizable hunk of folks that have any interest in that kind of thing will get in the car and literally drive seven or so hours to a National Park for their yearly fix. That’s how insular they are.
People fantasize about retiring in a small college town — the theatre! An almost pro- sports experience! Concerts! Young people! But they don’t realize that the two communities, while great places to visit, are, at best mediocre places to live. It’s the reason they don’t really grow. And they’re not particularly cheap, either, for small town living. The residents running the show are a mix of locals from the conjoint farm community (we live in the most productive wheat country in the world) some strong church affiliates, as well as some professors.
But there’s no question what runs the culture. It’s the university, and the people associated with it. And as university culture either rises or falls, so do the fortunes of the culture. You may have noted that universities are on the wane in our society — declining demographics certainly play a part. But Woke politics have become so obnoxious, it’s intolerable for anyone who is remotely “normal” in today’s contemporary culture.
What does “normal” even mean any more? It used to mean a reasonable level of independently generated relationships (friends) with institutions to live your life and raise your kids with. I do realize that this hardly exists anywhere any more, especially if you compare it with where I grew up — a dysfunctional steel town on the Ohio River. But it’s saying something that there was a much more profound sense of community in a town in economic freefall than there is in a cosseted island of privilege, funded solely by outside revenue.
People think about retiring here because they come here to become educated, and that produces a lot of memories. They return here because of those memories are powerful, and they want to watch football, get drunk with old friends, and tailgate. It’s a powerful tribal alignment. In a time when the Immiserators (we’ll get to a more precise definition of them in a moment) have destroyed anyone’s desire to affiliate with state or nation, folks migrate to the university to recover that sense of community. But then, after the game, they leave. And leave this community, dominated by the ethos of the current academy, which is relationally disruptive, and inherently elitist, to its own devices. Which is not in the community’s favor.
One of the interesting things about being a professor for my entire career (north of 37 years) is that I’ve seen exactly every different stereotype of what the rest of the world think a professor is. I’m a Renaissance Man with a potty mouth — I write, I craft, play musical instruments, and talk about politics as well as engineering. Blah, blah, blah. People say “hey — you’re what we always thought a professor should be!” Because they know, from their own experience, what professors actually are. If you think, in the modern academy, you can succeed by NOT being neurodivergent in some form or another, I’ve got news for you. You’ve got to have some form of OCD to study flea anuses, or squirrel penises (I had a friend that actually did that, and was wildly successful – he was/is a decent human being, so don’t get carried away with that) for your entire life. But you have to be different.
And inside that difference, the majority become anti-rational. They might apply logic or complicated methods in their research. But when it comes to human relations, they sit in a rigid, hierarchical system that heavily penalizes any developmental nonconformity — such as actually evolving as a human being. University towns are filled with functional adult toddlers with some form of oppositional defiant disorder. It might move the science of squirrel penises forward. But it’s hell to live here.
Before we move forward, let’s define what an ‘Immiserator’ is. An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)
And those rules must be enforced. The joy is in the enforcement! At least for the Immiserator. You may be miserable, and the exception may never occur again. But rules allow immiseration to be applied across-the-board. Everyone gets to be miserable! Which is, of course, the point.
Immiseration is a primary tool of relational disruption. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re miserable. They might say the wrong thing, or blow up. That would lead to more enforcement of more rules, and more emotional flow to the Immiserators. So people start shutting down. That doesn’t really suit the Immiserators either — if everyone is quiet then there’s no one to punish. So instead of just letting people re-form social networks outside the Immiserators, they want to send you to talk therapy. Or Healing Circles. Or other such icks.
As we’ve seen in the last 10 years, Immiserators are very often female. Immiseration profoundly fits inside the foundational elements of women’s personae of Nurture and Social Control. When Nurture is minimized, then that energy has to go somewhere, and Social Control is where it goes. Whole societies are built on this. Who enforces the Taliban’s anti-woman edicts? It’s the Taliban grandmothers. Who are at war over the increasingly confusing rules governing access to young women’s uterine real estate? Middle-aged white women.
But if you think men are off the hook, you’re also wrong. Men pivot around the dyad of Protect and Provide. We see this on the Right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly hostile edicts for Protect also provide immiseration – we can get back to the extreme example of the Taliban preventing young girls from attending school. And Provide, at some level in recession because of failing differences in M/F incomes and job positions (note — women get more college degrees, more promotions, and lots of other stuff) still has the ability to hold hostage and immiserate people dependent on that good old Do-Re-Mi.
But back to my university town. In my town(s) we have a local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. For over 20 years, I’ve written for the newspaper as an op-ed columnist. It was a biweekly gig, paying the handsome sum of $25/column, which NEVER changed over the time . But I was happy to write. I figured it was my charitable donation to news in the area. I’m an educated man, with broad, international experience. By sharing my insights, I’d improve the information level of my community. I did try to write about local issues, as well as the larger ones more in my expertise.
Sometime in the last 15 years, the newspaper made a decision to go every day with op-eds from people like me. Well, at least ‘like me’ in the community. This was relatively innocuous, until the community (especially the folks in Moscow) decided to double down on religious persecution of a fundamentalist, Full Bible Church in their community. Their pastor, Doug Wilson, has even appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. The paper’s op-ed columnists would regularly scream and wail about Doug, and his congregation, which interestingly enough, are maybe a little older than the college kids, but far younger than the liberal/progressive elite that believed they ran the community. Doug is indeed an asshole, and he DID make it easy. We have (believe it or not) about 6 mega-churches in our combined towns, population of 65K. Doug is that nail sticking out begging to be hammered down by the Immiserators. He may or may not have had it coming. But as Clint Eastwood said famously, when it comes to the Immiserators, we’ve all got it coming.
But if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And those progressive didn’t have kids. And now they’re old. They’re almost entirely composed of people that perceive themselves as the intelligentsia. But in reality, they’re idiots. Screaming idiots.
The Moscow/Pullman Immiserati.
During COVID, they screamed so much at me, as I made my steady progression toward the truth of COVID, and ended up profoundly on the ‘defending young people’ side of the non-issue for them, I finally quit. They would write their op-ed columns about me and my op-eds — what I would consider an op-ed journalistic violation. When you have a column, you have an obligation to inform your readers. You get the bully pulpit. And the first word. But your readership gets the last word — in the letters. Instead, they wrote columns that would probably be considered libelous about me. They would dance and holler. And so I finally just gave up.
This cadre definitely immiserated me. And when I left, they went back to the standard themes. We are all racists. Donald Trump is a fascist. If you’re not hanging your head in shame for living in our little isolated enclave, you’re a member of the KKK. And so on. A lot of people in that caste (as well as the letter writers) had done yeoman work in the past, when we actually had problems, at least regionally. Coeur D’Alene, and Hayden Lake, ID are not that far away. Who can forget Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations? But that ship has sailed, or at a minimum, burrowed underground. Escalating real estate prices are never good for true believers.
It’s too painful to count, but at least in the last year, every op-ed that runs from the ostensible Left side, is about Donald Trump, or Christ Church, and how their supporters/followers are evil racists. Folks, we don’t functionally have an African-American community in this middle-of-nowhere burg. There are no reported instances of racism, though we have had black-on-black gang violence. Every now and then, we do see something directed against the Native American community, the Nez Perce. But even that is literally a once-in-two-years episode. If that. Hell, we don’t even have a Hispanic community outside the university.
But Immiserators gonna immiserate. And well-meaning people who are NOT the members of the Immiserati line up behind them. When you have a community where a fair share of the members have OCD or OCPD, and you stand up and say surgical masks don’t work to stop COVID, and we should stop torturing our students in grade school with this crazy bullshit, you should expect to take some heat. In the fragmented world of Pullman/Moscow, they managed to completely isolate me. I literally was screamed at in the street. No shit.
How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.
And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do. It doesn’t make any difference how preposterous it is — how crazy is it, really, that anyone would advocate for middle-aged men sporting a euphoria boner in a girls’ high school locker rooms, or how rare it is (if this was happening all the time, I guarantee there would be dead bodies in the street.) That’s NOT the point. The point is misery. Yours. Oh, and the self-righteous screaming.
Which brings us around to Donald Trump. I’ve written extensively about Trump on this blog (you can Google it) and none of it is complimentary. I’ve called him a narcissistic psychopath, among other things. But I’ve attempted to keep it real. Trump was, and is a moderate Republican in policy. He is not a fascist. He has a big mouth, and he violates institutional social codes of speech by saying the quiet part out loud. We have been seized by an institutional class that has, in league with the Immiserators, figured out how to successfully loot the Treasury, on every level of American society. Does he care about the American people? I think at some level he does. But he cares far more about his own personal image. I’m not as sure as I used to be that he is a narcissistic psychopath. But he’s still definitely a narcissist.
And he’s found his niche — fighting the Immiserati. He’s got some allies who actually have some policy sense on the misery — Vance, Kennedy, and especially Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who in any other time in America’s history would be a hero — putting people into space, creating WiFi for the world, electric cars, and the list goes on — is now chronically vilified by the Immiserati. One of Elon’s main messages is to young people — look forward to your life, there are not too many people on the planet, have children and families — the Immiserati beat the drum, and the sub-Immiserators chime in. Musk is bad. Evil, in fact. People are not nearly immiserated enough. Get ready for de-growth. They’re still functioning, aren’t they?
And a peace deal for Ukraine? Nothing is more immiserating than the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over everyone’s head. Lest you get carried away and think the Immiserators actually WANT nuclear war, I really don’t think that’s the case. But operating where they do, in the limbic zone, with its desire for depressive emotional state matching, they don’t care. It’s short term misery they seek, and damn the long-term consequences. I’ll still bet dollars to donuts that 95% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on the map. And Ukraine has its own Immiserators that are propagating policies that will annihilate their young male class. They’re emotional state-matching with our own US foreign policy Immiserators, that are watching the rivers of blood run while our own arms merchants get fat.
In order to fix this problem, we first have to recognize it. We have to dismantle the Immiserati, and their larger caste of Immiserators. That’s why the latest head of the Immiserati, a sock puppet as far as I call tell, Kamala Harris, tried to float the whole ‘Joy’ message. The fact that this whole campaign fell flat tells you that the public isn’t falling for it. Kamala went back to the drumbeat of the other side being Nazis, fascism, and the Handmaid’s Tale. They were more in form, and didn’t cause so much cognitive dissonance that people just tuned out.
We’ll see who wins. We’re still in a tight spot, regardless of who wins. But I’ve found that naming something is the first step in either saving something, or defeating. Let’s get out there and get busy.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 