... which is entirely consistent with his statements.
Here are more of his own words from the same letter:
> And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
The blood of patriots and tyrants. He never expected rebellion to go unchallenged, he was advocating that we should maintain the spirit of rebellion as a guard against tyranny.
Sure, but this is only tenable as a technical position that aims to reduce all forms of centralized power. It completely fails as a political position applied to the nominal "government". Politically, pushing in this direction seems to only ever play out as reducing the power of governments over corporations, while often even increasing the power of government over individuals (spurred on by corporations looking to wield that power through the government). Whereas for it to achieve its intended individual liberty, the complete opposite would have to happen - decreasing the power of governments over individuals while holding or even increasing the power of governments over corporations - otherwise unrestrained corporations simply step into that nonconsensual role of government and we're back to step #1.
Would you believe that I agree with what you wrote completely?
I’m pretty much a pure anarchist in terms of principles, but I’m a pragmatist in practice. I’d describe my approach in politics as “What do you wish the government would stop doing? Let’s focus on making that happen.”
You can’t change a culture by changing the political system, but my hope is that you can change a political system by changing the culture. I want to be as independent of the state as I can possibly be, and I want to encourage others to do the same. My hope is that this sort of cultural shift will eventually lead the shrinking of the state. I don’t expect to live to see that happen, but I hope my children and their children do.
Aside from the above, just don’t harm others. That’s it.
I would. My own views had to come from somewhere, right?
Responding to what you've said, my unfortunate experience is that culture always ends up going sideways. As movements grow in mindshare they tend to attract people focused on power/expedience, only applying the initial precepts towards those ends. And gaining control over some existing centralized power structures is much more lucrative than a given person's share of the distributed wealth that would be created by successfully constraining them.
Which ties right into the problem I saw with your original comment. A statement like "Government should be so powerless as to be unattractive targets for corporate influence" lands in the political/partisan context by default. And while perhaps that's a symptom of how [unfortunately] inured in centralized politics we are, it's still a fact. So even though we can both take a step back and lay out the context where that can be an agreeable productive statement, the overwhelming use of similar statements is actually to attack individual liberty by getting people to overfocus on the nominal government while giving a pass to another primary contingent of the centralized power structure.
If you’re interested, see my response to a sibling comment of yours for a more complete description of my mindset.
Specific to this, though: there’s a big difference between a stateless society and a failed state. You’re describing failed states.
I also very much agree with you about the result of a power vacuum. I argue that a power vacuums exist not because of the absence of a state, but because of the absence of a state where the populace expects and relies on a state to be.
I didn’t say we should get rid of it all tomorrow morning :)
I'll admit that there are definitely times where I decide it's fine to roll with it blind. It's not often, not for critical paths, and definitely not where I don't have a good understanding of the blast radius if it fails spectacularly - but you'd be surprised how often it's easier and faster to fix it if it breaks than it would be to make sure it's not broken.
Litigation aside for a moment - I'm not sure vide-coded reporting could be much worse than what I've seen from early-career analysts in past companies.
> At any tech company with leveling guidelines that I have seen, promotions above mid level have never been based on “I codez real gud”. It’s always been based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity. It’s stated differently in different companies.
I 100% agree here.
AI has been a huge boon for me personally, because I stopped spending most of my writing code years ago. I was reviewing code, writing procedures, handling incidents, and generally just looking for pain points across the entire company and solving them before they became critical.
Those skills have transferred directly to working with AI.
The most important bit to me is that doing something like this would be entirely in-line with his personality.
Also, I think he truly believed there was a good chance he’d eventually be brought back. The most likely case in my mind is that he died with the private keys in his head, and that we’ll never get confirmation.
It depends. If it later comes out that their nuclear material was secured by the US, this is much more acceptable - it would seriously incentivize pipeline construction by making passage through the Strait more expensive. Given that closing it is really the only lever Iran has that can put pressure on the US at all, this attenuates that a great deal.
It’s not acceptable on its face, but there’s a lot going on in this conflict that isn’t making the news.
Iran has also been freely bombing Israel and US assets around the Middle East. The Zionists bit off more than they could chew and now Iran is better positioned than ever before. Not only that Iran has earned a lot of respect globally and Israel/the US has lost what little they had left.
> Iran didn't escalate against anyone except their aggressors.
This is categorically false. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Qatar, (Kuwait,) even Oman and Turkey at various times, and Cyprus. Iran demonstrated superiority in only one respect during this war, and that was in recruiting otherwise well-meaning, levelheaded figures in media and government, even religious leaders, to spout incoherent nonsense as you did here.
Its neighbors are hosting US bases which were used to launch attacks on Iran. Bahrain in particular hosted the largest US radar station in the region which was being used as the control centre to coordinate the attack on Iran [1]. These countries were absolutely not 'non-aggressors'.
I would still call countries that host a radar station non-aggressors as they were not active participants. Either way Iran was pretty selective in terms of its "aggressor" definition. It didn't attack Syria or Iraq despite those countries contributing their air space. It didn't really attack Turkey other than like 3 rockets that were shot down.
Clearly this was not about attacking someone that's attacking you or military assets. This was about leverage. Attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure of countries that are assumed to have some lever over the US to force it to stop while at the same time are too weak or too afraid to defend themselves (which is why you did not see the same scale of attacks e.g. against Turkey despite it also hosting the US). It's a tactic. It's also a war crime.
Russia is the aggressor there, and I don't recall Ukraine targeting other countries with Russian bases. Also, the war in Ukraine is about Russia expanding territory so it involved boots and occupation since day one, which is not the case in Iran.
At least there is an idea that at least one of the reason Russia attacked Ukraine was to prevent it from joining NATO, which would have enabled US military bases in Ukraine.
The Iranian government is terrible, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. relationship with the gulf states isn’t worse off than in February. The United States made our alignment with Israel hard to ignore and was significantly unable to protect allied countries while drawing fire onto them. It’s entirely possible for both sides to lose a war and I’d bet we’re going to see enough of a shift away from us, likely to China, to solidly count this as a loss.
It hard to say which way this goes. It's a possibility. But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
The US is still the only world power that has the ability to e.g. prevent Iran from just walking in and taking the gulf countries. It's true that protection isn't hermetic.
But hermetic protection is REALLY important when your entire economy is based off of oil and water desalination plants. Iran still retains the ability to damage that infrastructure. The Gulf countries have some hard decisions to make, but I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them sprint closer to Iran. Already we are hearing of a joint Omani-Irani agreement on Hormuz administration…
But it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Oman is more complicated but they are also not going to align with Iran.
It's hard to evaluate but I don't see huge shifts from the gulf states. The US is still their best bet (not to mention that they are heavily invested in that). They have major investments that aren't oil, i.e. unlike Iran they can live very comfortably even if the energy sector is shut down. They prefer to make money from oil and gas but they also prefer a weaker Iran.
It's looking like more of the same and counting down to the next round.
> it's not new that there's no hermetic protection.
I think what new is the realization of Iran’s willingness to escalate.
> There is no real possible alignment between the regime in Tehran and the Sunni Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. There is no way they are sprinting closer to Iran.
Can you please expand on that? I don’t understand why they couldn’t be aligned.
Basically they believe the rulers of the gulf countries should be overthrown and that those countries should be run by Islamic rules. So basically MBZ who rules the UAE (as an example) wants to keep ruling the country and strike some balance between economic prosperity and maintaining his rule while Iran would want to see him removed and his government replaced by a theocratic regime. Naturally the UAE also wants not to be bombarded by Iran but the personal survival of the UAE rulers is a bit more important to them than that goal.
> But China can offer even less protection than the US can.
I think a lot of those states are wondering how much protection they’d need if we weren’t based there and drawing fire. China can offer economic stability and sales of modern military equipment for self-defense, and I think the entire world is working through the implications of the United States allowing an unsound octogenarian to destabilize the dollar or declare a major war on a whim. There’s a lot to dislike about China but the gulf states aren’t exactly sticklers for democracy and stability is good for business.
> We have seen that the US ability to project power is great. We've also seen (and I don't think anyone didn't know that) that power has its limits. Especially when it comes to fighting fanatics with nothing to lose.
My unprovable pet theory is that the US would've had less black eyes if we didn't have incompetent people like Kegseth in charge, and especially if he hadn't been allowed to dismiss top brass across the military just because they were too woke/not "warrior" enough.
Hegseth didn’t help matters at all but the problem started at the top. In past administrations, the various people leading the military & State would’ve pushed back against Netanyahu/Graham’s sales pitch that it’d be an easy war, identified actual goals, and planned ahead to achieve them (e.g. assembling a coalition like their counterparts did against Iraq twice) but everyone with backbone or independence was purged under the Republican’s new unitary executive theory. Hegseth was selected because he would never say “sir, that’s a bad idea” as happened so many times during Trump’s first term.
Nobody is taking the side of the IRGC here, it's an awful regime that should fall in a just world. But it's inevitable they will retaliate against their neighbors, if their neighbors are complicit in attacking them. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait are not innocent, they picked a side and are paying for it.
That’s fine just stop grandstanding about little ole’ Iran being attacked or civilians dying if you don’t care that innocent civilians in other countries are dying. When you do you are taking a side and suggesting Iran is the moral actor here. They’re not.
Lots of people here are taking the side of the IRGC. It's not ok to attack the civilians of the gulf countries because they are aligned with the US whichever way you look at it. Attacking US military assets are fair game.
Lots of people are taking the side of the US, which has attacked civilian infrastructure and killed civilians in Iran and threatened to completely destroy Iran. And you have lots of people taking the side of Israel, which is has been conduction a genocide openly. All the sides have blood in their hands but I would argue the IRGC has the least blood in their hands.
There is no data based view of this world where the IRGC and the Islamic Republic doesn't have the most blood on their hands and is the least moral player here by modern standards by far. Just in 1988 they executed 30,000 people. In 2025 at least 1000. In 2026 10's of thousands.
Dissidents are being hanged in Iran as we write this.
Israel has claims of self defense after being brutally attacked. The US has claims of wanting to take down the regime and prevent them from getting nuclear weapons. You can argue about claims and actions. The Iranian regime has no shred of excuse other than their total lack of humanity.
What in the world?? Iraq was a million civilians killed by the US. Gaza was 100,000 civilians killed by Israel in the last 3 years. And that’s not including all of the other atrocities committed by the two countries.
And there is no proof of the 10s of thousands of protesters killed claiming. That was just propaganda to enable this recent war.
Countries can claim this and that about defense and brutal attacks, and depending on who you are you believe the propaganda or not, but in the end what matters is the destruction and killing they do. Which US and Israel and done more of by a long shot.
Probably a risk worth taking; defending a pipeline is much easier than escorting huge, slow-moving ships through a 24km-wide Strait laced with mines and peppered by artillery and missiles.
Pipelines can be protected. Just putting it in the ground for example. Or you build a "bomb" proof shelter over it - Iran's missiles are not bunker busters, we know how powerful they are and can design for that. Air defense systems are getting better too.
Wait, that last one doesn’t seem right. Where do you draw the line exactly, if earnest-held political beliefs are “choices”?
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