Adam Serwer

It's like, buddy, did you think that was a choice?

You know what I mean?

Did you think that you just did that out of the goodness of your heart?

And I think he probably does believe that because he's blinded by this sort of ideology about cultural superiority to the extent that they assumed that if they just simply bombed Iran a whole lot, that Iran would not really react or try to figure out a way to outmaneuver them.

And while it's clear that...

The United States is militarily superior to the Iranian military that does not necessarily yield strategic victory.

And this is sort of the lesson of American military interventions for like the past century.

So it's kind of striking that they hadn't learned it.

I think to go back to your point about virtue signaling, if you abandon the virtue signaling and you just – you want to talk like Darth Vader in your speeches, then it's a little harder to be like, but we're the good guys.

And obviously if you kill protesters in the United States –

it gets a lot harder to attack other governments for doing the same thing.

And to be clear, the Iranian regime has been a lot deadlier against this protest than the Trump administration.

Sure, of course.

But the issue with abandoning morality and being like –

a might makes right school shooter manifesto type rhetoric is that, you know, then people take you seriously and it's harder to appeal to the better angels of people's nature and make it seem like, you know, you're doing things out of the goodness of your heart.

You've already told us that your might makes right people.

You can't then complain that it's wrong when the strong abuse the weak.

I think that people are justifiably angry about the suffering that has been inflicted on Palestinian civilians with American help.

And I think that when it comes to the Iran war, we are talking about... I mean, not unlike the 15th Amendment discussion, we are talking about the kind of war that the American government, the original founders of the American government...

split the war powers in such a way to prevent capricious kings from going to war for personal profit.