Wouldn’t be the first time Americans have fucked Kurds over.
I can’t help but wonder what the Kurds have been promised this time, besides the obvious (autonomy, statehood, etc)

Also, I imagine this won’t sit well with a lot of the westerners who have expressed pro-Kurdish views in the past

“The Kurds and the Jews are natural allies in the Middle East,” he said, adding that many Kurds view Israel’s establishment as proof that independence is achievable for stateless nations.

“We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” the regime insider said. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”

As opposed to before when you adhered to the rules of the game? Bruh, c’mon bruh.

“this war is going on gracefully with [Khamenei’s] designing”

Well great then. Apparently everything is peachy.

I do wonder where the balance is, because it has to be one. Basically they want to hit them hard enough to get them to pressure USA/Israel into stopping but not hard enough that they start seeing the short-term cost of this war as being bearable for the long-term benefit of no longer having neighbor ruled under Islamic rule.

Iranians have long carried a grievance that global powers exploited their country’s resources while neglecting their democratic aspirations.

They are correct.

History shows that popular uprisings gain confidence when they sense the world is watching – and supporting

at least as far as our protests were concerned, I remember how good it felt when we got the “Europe sees you” response, really emboldened us. Who knows if we would’ve succeeded without international attention.

Unfortunately, both in our case and I believe in this case too, Europe is slow to act. It has always been slow. “it’s not a bug, its a feature”

Sources in ​Sri Lanka’s navy and defence ministry said the vessel ⁠had been attacked by a submarine and at least 101 ​people were missing in the incident that took place off ​Sri Lanka’s Indian Ocean coast.

that’s the best confirmation that I saw, but I guess we’ll see more information later on

Ez fix: just take the cage door off before you transport people?

Around 500 to 1,000 out of 50,000 lorries in Singapore have caged decks. Such lorries may still be used to transport goods.

If only so few even exist, I wonder how many of them have been used to transport people

For anyone else wondering what the warship was doing all the way over in Sri Lank, it seems there have been some military exercises that Iran took part in India, hence it was moving through the Indian ocean where.
Ofc, this hasn’t been confirmed yet, nor have they confirmed whose submarine attacked the warship (although we can make some fair assumptions)

Out of all the feasible outcomes from today’s point of view, Pahlavi might be the least bad one, which is why I don’t think its going to happen.
More feasible seems to be a situation in which the IRGC&co continue with their occupation of the country and USA/Israel strike some kind of deal with a new ayatollah (which for now seems to be the old one’s son, go figure). Either that or the conflict continues for X time and it gradually simmers down, no deal struck.
Very unfortunate reality for Iranians, I’m afraid.

So basically cultural erasure/genocide in the name of removing barriers between people (because learning a second language is an impossible task and no one earth can do it).

Much easier for the state to control people when they eliminate other cultures and languages, that’s basically been the aim with most such cultural destructions

Wouldn’t students who were taught in (insert minority language here) be at a disadvantage trying to compete with first-language Mandarin speakers for jobs outside of their narrow region?

No, absolutely not. Learning another language - especially learning a majority language is easy as fuck. There’s countries with 2, 3 or 4 official languages. Nobody bats an eye.
Learning a second language is the default across all of Europe, so much so that it starts being seen as kinda boring/bland? Even in France, kindergarten-aged children learn English. In my country, Romania, by far not the most well off country in Europe, English is taught from kindergarten as a second language and then from age 10 you get to learn a third language - french, german, spanish, italian. Some schools have started introducing the third language earlier. And yes, this does mean that minority children often get to learn 4 languages.

Even in the US, there’s been intense debates over schools offering core instruction in Spanish,

I’m not even going to comment on this because I’m going to be hurtful and bigoted.