I watched some of the videos. I think that the New Yorker does its readers a disservice by not pointing out that they also contain blatant lies, just like the propaganda they're supposedly countering. For example the "Victory Chronicles" video really misrepresents how much damage Iranian drones were able to do in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
Its a regime that killed 10s of thousands of its own people for protesting. Ofc its all blatant lies, cute legos or not. There's literally no good sides to this war (anymore)
I keep getting downvoted and flagged, but there is noway anyone in good faith would support this war crime. A president who threaten to send a country to stone age, saying in front of everyones face that he wants to take the oil..
I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime, when we have on other hand, someone who is vocally saying that he is willing to destroy the country's infrastructure and steal their oil.
Well, sure I don't mind getting flagged or downvoted. But at least I speak my mind and what I believe is true.
This isn’t a contest for most just or most evil. Iran has committed horrible atrocities. The US’s approach to this war has been completely wrong and they are threatening war crimes.
US armed rebels, that is their history, Israel wants to the current government down at all cost.
They did that with Iraq, ISIS, they trying with Kurdistan..
I'm defending a theocracy, but this is not how countries are freed. And he is clearly claiming to take the oil, destroy their infrastructure and take the country to the dark ages. If Iranian government was saying that, hell would go lose.
Keep in mind that we now know that US supplied the protestors weapons to wage violence during the crackdown that resulted in many police officers being killed. We also know that the US has run a campaign to turn protests into riots in past events. And we know that the US sponsors campaigns to create unrest in the country.
If Iran sucks, it is only because the US wants it to suck
Saying things is not a war crime. So if Iranian soldiers surrendered to US soldiers and they were shot that would be a war crime. I don't think that happened? Hegseth statements could be used to support the claim of war crime under such circumstances if they were to arise. [EDIT: As a commenter suggests it is possible that simply saying this is a war crime, or at least there are some legal opinions suggesting it]
Attacking civilian targets with cluster bombs has happened and Iran is doing that as we speak. That is a war crime.
Attacking infrastructure is not a war crime if that infrastructure serves a military purpose. Attacking purely civilian use infrastructure is a war crime.
Threatening to attack civilian use infrastructure is not a war crime. Threatening to attack infrastructure used for military purposes is also not a war crime.
Mowing down protestors with machines guns is not a war crime but maybe we should consider it a crime against humanity.
EDIT: FWIW I do care about what Hegseth said. It's wrong and he shouldn't have said that. But people say stuff- what matters are the actions.
There are some actual acts that count as war crimes as well, that Hegsdeth has overseen - killing civilians off the coast of venesuela by attacking and sinking fishing boats, but also then killing the civilians after theyve jumped ship.
then in the iran conflict, leaving the sailors to drown after sinking iran's show boat with a sub
It's not confirmed but I agree it was very likely a US strike. An accidental one.
Assuming the US did not intend to kill school girls that is also not a war crime. You can certainly argue that this happened due to the US decision to go to war and claim the actions to not be moral (or illegal as some have stated). Others might argue that more harm would occur if no action was taken and that the action minimizes the overall harm (e.g. to the Iranian people or others).
You could also argue that attack was intentional. I don't think there's any evidence of that and I'm not sure what purpose it served if it was one.
It is difficult to extract the real purpose of most things about this war, if you're in the US, since almost every single part of it seems against the US' interests and public face.
You're probably technically correct and that the US didn't intentionally look in Google Maps for an elementary school and decided to destroy it. But did we really need to Double Tap it?
Why do you think no one cares? My feeds are outraged. Maybe some normies can’t keep up with all the specific heinous stuff coming out of this administration, but I don’t think they’re happy about it.
> I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime
Iran mass murdered tens of thousands of protesters in one day. I was outraged when Trump’s goons murdered two Minnesotan protesters—if we can agree this is evil, it should follow that a regime that murders tens of thousands of protesters is also evil. This isn’t complicated, which is why you’re being downvoted (I did not downvote you).
But as Trump has assured us, that’s the old regime which is completely different from the current regime, which as Trump again has assured us, is not anywhere near as crazy as the old regime.
/s
The Iranian regime is incredibly evil. That makes the American actions even more evil given that they’re providing that evil regime so much cover and allowed it to transition from their 86 year old leader with almost no opportunity for opposition.
Oh, so you're ideologically captured by an admin that's proven to be full of liars. There was never a good side. There's no good side to war in nearly any case (limited exceptions and this is not (was never) one of those).
The most powerful country in history attacked a smaller country that wasn't a threat to the stronger country. Had the USA (and Israel) not attacked, it's unlikely that Iran would have struck first.
And Iran firing missiles on Israel in response to genocide in Gaza isn't really a credible threat. Israel could stop massacring civilians at any time to make Iran stop firing upon them.
I'm just really puzzled by people frankly, one would expect Hacker News to be of higher caliber. Ready the history, watch real geo-political analysis. But even without that, a presidents in who screams profanity on social media, threaten to take oil and resources of other countries and bomb to the dark ages..even without any political background, this a real low for any position let alone the president of the US.
I think Social Media truly brought the worse in people. People are not trying to be decent anymore.
I think it just represents people/entities who conduct business internationally, since camels used to be a major transportation method on the Silk Road.
Unrelated. I found this China propaganda video depicting its interpretation of the Iran war entertaining. It talks about the “flowing valley of gold” the Hormuz Strait, the “white eagle alliance” the USA, and “white eagle gold tickets” the petrodollar.
I would be interested to know how these are made on a technical level. Is it a combination of several tools and are they local or some service (I would think LEGO minifigs would trigger some copyright issue)? I also assume you need to do certain things to keep the consistency and somehow sync the music with the video?
people were worried about deepfakes with AI but instead the propaganda is doing pretty well, and arguably better, when it's not a deepfake but instead silly, catchy, youthful, and is playing up existing beliefs. The invasion is deeply unpopular in the US, and these videos only serve to amp that up.
Deepfakes were never necessary, people have been making incredible propaganda forever though the same few tactics. For instance, presenting footage out of context.
That Hegseth one is an extraordinary piece of media. It's dense with Hegseth and Epstein lore, the song is catchy, the visuals are a significant cut above the normal AI slop aesthetic.
If this is Iranian state backed propaganda (which seems very likely) it's light years ahead of those White House videos with footage of bombs mixed in with clips from action movies.
Today I saw an analyst from Pakistan and he also had some of these "trump-lego-snippets" in the video, was wondering why someone would put so much effort in a video against trump, but it seems he copied it somewhere (from this group e.g.)
Is it even propaganda if you just read aloud your enemy’s wikipedia? I think Bubba refers to someone else than Clinton and Iran’s regime is despotic assholes, but apart from that pretty accurate depiction.
information or ideas that are spread by an organized group or government to influence people’s opinions, esp. by not giving all the facts or by secretly emphasizing only one way of looking at the facts
or another definition:
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a particular cause, doctrine, or point of view.
If its aim is to influence opinion then yes. It doesn't matter if it's true or not true. It's the goal that matters. One can influence opinions with a subset of truths.
No one cares about who made these videos in the US. The bigger issue is why are we engaging in a ground war in Iran when it doesn’t really serve US interests? Everyone on both political spectrums in the US can see why it benefits Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not the US.
We’re using precious resources like missiles that we will need in the Pacific theater in next 1-2 years
Because it wasn’t planned that far. The administration probably thought it would go like Venezuela. A Middle East historian would have told you Iran has building for all our war for decades because it trusts none of its neighbors.
A second problem is that the US knew for a while that we were weak at asymmetric warfare but we didn’t fix it. There was a war game in 2002 (the Millennium Challenge, which was actually set in the Strait of Hormuz) that, though the red team did very much cheat, it did hint at a major weakness that wasn’t resolved.
There are US defense companies today that actually specialize in that but they weren’t given the same attention (but boy are they now).
Anduril is the biggest one. They are based in Costa Mesa, CA and are building a bigger R&D facility in "Space Beach" (Long Beach, CA) and a manufacturing facility near Columbus, Ohio.
Afterwards, you have smaller companies like Shield AI (San Diego, CA), Saronic Technologies (Austin, TX) and some other smaller ones.
Because this war is driven by Israel, not the US. The destruction of Iran, no matter what the costs for the world, is seen as an existential matter for the current Israeli government.
But, destroying Iran without using nukes is not a Job Israel can do by themselves, they need the US. And while the Democrat establishment (although not the base) don't see an issue with supporting Israel activities in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, a war with Iran was not something the Democrats would agree with.
So, they had this window of opportunity with Trump, before the midterms, and they acted.
We may not agree, but under the point of view of the Likud, it makes perfect sense.
Right, Iran used to have a parliament with Mossadegh as prime minister, what happened there? Oh yaa, Mossadegh wanted Iranian oil for Iranians, so the US and UK overthrew Mossadegh, with the help of conservative mullahs, and installed a dictatorship. Then SAVAK with CIA help spent decades slaughtering the secular opposition.
> that’s murdered 100s of their own people
There are armed Balochi and Kurdish separatists shooting at the Iranian army right now, no doubt with clandestine Israeli and US support. Incidentally the Kurds had their own state at the end of WWII, until the US and UK made them dissolve into Iran.
Also aside from the bombings, the Basij have been fired on from the ground and have fired back. Who is arming the people shooting at the Basij is unknown, but some signs point to Israel.
I write this less than three months after armed federal personnel decided to march into Minneapolis and among other things kill a nurse and also a woman.
> and aided terrorist organizations
The Arabs in southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip have lived there a long time. Over the past century Zionist Jews from around the world have been invading their land, shooting, bombing, starving them. If they fight back the epithet terrorist is applied to them, and if these brave men fighting for their people are assigned the word, it gives it a great esteem.
Of course Mossadegh was "not ideal", but the current regime are genocidal islamists that over time have taken more and more to massacring their own population for ever more reasons.
A pinprick and metastasizing cancer are both bad in absolute terms, but not remotely comparable.
That doesn't even include the massacre they did on their own population 2 months back. When it comes to genocides, Iran's islamists have a LONG list of mass-killings to answer for.
No. Iran's islamists have organized plenty "hills", including an attack on Brussels airport and metro. Me and my wife were within 2 km of the shooting.
In the airport, they found a woman pushing a carriage. They shot the baby first and waited, laughing, for the woman to collapse onto the floor, dead, still bleeding baby in her hands, to shoot her. She survived. THAT is who you're dealing with here.
We found out Iran's embassy was involved in organizing these attacks. There is nothing you can possibly to do convince anything done to these islamists, each and every one of them, is immoral in the slightest.
And today the occupation IRGC regime (that recently by IRGC released numbers massacred 3000 Iranians on the streets in 2 days) is importing foreign militias to prop up their unpopular regime (along with recruiting child soldiers for the Basij you mentioned).
"The roaming of the Islamic Republic's proxies in Iran; entry of "Zainabiyoun" of Pakistan after "Hashd al-Shaabi" of Iraq and "Fatemiyoun" of Afghanistan
Reports of the presence of forces affiliated with the Zainabiyoun Division of Pakistan have been published in various areas of Sistan and Baluchestan province."
I watched "One Battle After Another" and it shows how deranged people are. I don't think its a new thing, I just think in any stable society, people who don't thrive eventually find a way to destroy the society in the hope whatever comes next will serve them better. In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage, it stands to reason that lazy, stupid people will need to play differently in order to win.
This is a pretty obvious misinterpretation. Protagonist bad ≠ antagonist good. This isn't even the law of the excluded middle because there was only ever a statistical relationship between the morality of narrative opponents.
> I just think in any stable society, people who don't thrive eventually find a way to destroy the society in the hope whatever comes next will serve them better.
It seems our society is being destroyed by people who are thriving the most.
> In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage
Which society is this, Sweden? Xi Jinping is pretty smart and hard working, is China being demolished by lazy dumb twats? Because it seems to me its US that is overrun bu stupidity and sheer lazyness right now, but it seems to be because it rewards people like Musk, Trump etc.
Israel/the US started the war by murdering 160 Iranian school girls and has been murdering civilians non-stop since (and before) then. How many civilians has Iran killed?
It's ironic how they've been so instrumental in bombing Ukraine's civilian targets (for years) and now they're likely to get their civilian infrastructure bombed, by a third party. Strange times.
Having an electoral mandate is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. If you don't follow your own laws and your own constitution, for instance, you're not a in a democracy, even if you have been elected. Precisely because you are elected under the assumption that you will follow the laws and constitution, not have unlimited power to do whatever you like until the next elections.
> On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12
Check out the history behind this and how the US has treated Iran because of their Oil for almost a hundred years now. This is 100% on the west in my opinion. We've been abusing these people for the longest time.
I will side with any country that's being illegally attacked, and whose population is being illegally targeted, thank you very much. Sovereignty is fundamental, it's been broken. The state of Iran is the result of US and Israeli meddling. There was time for criticizing Iran before it was attacked.
When I first heard about the protests in Iran, I assigned automatically the blame on the dictatorial regime.
Nevertheless, after the following events and after extra information provided by the US government itself, this is no longer so clear cut.
The truth is that we do not really know what happened in Iran, how many have been killed and whether that was really an internal protest against the regime or a coup attempt organized by USA.
The timing of the protests is too suspicious. The most plausible hypothesis is that US/Israeli agents have initiated the protests by influencing a great number of well-intended internal opponents of the regime, who probably have suffered then most from this action.
If some of the opposition had received US weapons, that can explain the paranoia of the dictatorial regime, even if there is little doubt that the retaliations against the opposition must have affected many who had no ties with USA or Israel.
Until credible information will surface about what really happened in Iran at the beginning of the year, we can affirm only that it is likely that the dictatorial regime has killed or tortured many non-violent opponents, but there is nothing certain about this.
On the other hand, the unprovoked crimes committed by USA since the beginning of the year against countries like Iran or Cuba are certain facts, about which there exists no doubt whatsoever, because the top US officials are bragging about them.
For all we know, USA might have already killed more Iranian civilians than the Iran government, so any claims that the attacks done by USA are somehow intended for supporting the Iranian people, are completely ridiculous.
While Iran is bad - US is engaged in war crimes (they even brag about it). It’s like when Russians defend their war crimes by saying that Ukraine is corrupt.
I agree with you on principle, but you're oversimplifying things if you think that opposition to the United States or Israel is all about a single person.
I think it's possible to have a grown-up discussion about the production value, cultural relevance, and effectiveness of propaganda without "siding" with the videos' sponsors. This appears to be an uncomfortable case of bad people speaking at least some truth--to the point where it's resonating.
There was an interview with a historian and he said an interesting thing about the ancient Sparta: "Everything we know about Sparta we know from its enemies".
Remember Snowden? Remmeber Assange? Remember Aaron Swartz? Remember the terrorizing of Occupy Wallstreet organizers? Remember the funding of terrorists all over Africa? Remember Libya? Remember who funded Isis?
> Siding with a dictatorial regime that’s murdered 100s of their own people and aided terrorist organizations
I'm getting really tired of this. United States and Israel have bombed and killed more innocent people than I can count on. The biggest terrorist regime is United States right now, bombing schools.
Your own president tweets out war crimes, your secretary of defense proudly proclaims "no quarters" and "send them back to the stone age".
Do me a favor, and please lay off the morality lecture.
How about you talk about the Gaza genocide for once? Or the IRAQ war that killed millions of people? Or using nuclear weapons on Japan? or the killing and raping of Vietnamese ?
Or the fact that you backed Saddam to use chemical weapons on Iranians during the 8 year war?
Incorrect, and just yesterday Trump admitted that these weren't "protesters", they were heavily armed (by the US) insurrectionists trying to overthrow the government. Iran was right to fight them.
A regime driven by a weird religious cult and murdering their own citizens is battling a regime which is driven by a weird religious cult and is murdering their own citizens.
I think in this situation it is okay to cheer on both sides.
You mean like siding with the dictatorial regime that provided material support to the 9/11 hijackers, 15/19 of whom were nationals of that country? And then we wanted to question 3 menders of the royal family who were implicated they all mysteriously fell out of windows, died in a car accident or otherwise died?
Another national was a renowned arms dealer linked to both Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. And then that arms dealer’s nephew was chopped up in a foreign embassy and taken away in pieces?
They murdered thousands of our citizens let alone theirs.
Trump just yesterday admitted to arming anti-Iranian insurrectionists. So Iran did not "murder 100s of their own people", they fought off a CIA armed coup.
what numbers can you trust? i mean, you can trust whatever suits you, but *i* don't trust, really, any of the things i hear about the global bad guys, particularly iran when america is making war on them or building a case for war.
We were shuffling capital to China after Tiananmen Square. People were talking about how we should have left Saddam alone because of how "orderly" Iraq was under his boot. Europeans were happy to ink the plans for Nordstream 2 after Russia sent tanks into Georgia, and Russia received no less than a FIFA World Cup and Olympic games after seizing Crimea.
There is incredibly little will to stick to the whole "humans have rights and we should have a rules-based international order" when the rubber meets the road.
rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"
Its a nice thing in theory but in practice power always overruled morals and I think the current US admin not only freely admits this but also kind of rubs your nose in it. In a way its less hypocritical than previously but also incredibly sobering for someone who grew up in a seemingly more "stable" world
> rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"
I think there was an effort to try to stick to it, at least early on after WWII when people had seen what the old system resulted in.
Then the Berlin blockade, Korea, and Hungarian intervention happened and the implication was made that the rules were what were to be aspired to, not actually followed, and it's been all downhill from there.
Incidentally, most of those aren't on the "Us empire".
I watched some of the videos. I think that the New Yorker does its readers a disservice by not pointing out that they also contain blatant lies, just like the propaganda they're supposedly countering. For example the "Victory Chronicles" video really misrepresents how much damage Iranian drones were able to do in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
Is it really necessary to mention something so obvious?
Propaganda videos are not meant to tell the truth. They are meant to exaggerate the facts. You know, like CNN exaggerates how terrible iran is.
Oh poor Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Im sure my pet animal is shedding a tear or two for them
Are you sure of it?
Its a regime that killed 10s of thousands of its own people for protesting. Ofc its all blatant lies, cute legos or not. There's literally no good sides to this war (anymore)
Killed 10s of thousands of civilians, you mean Iran or Israel?
Again, are you sure of it?
I keep getting downvoted and flagged, but there is noway anyone in good faith would support this war crime. A president who threaten to send a country to stone age, saying in front of everyones face that he wants to take the oil..
I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime, when we have on other hand, someone who is vocally saying that he is willing to destroy the country's infrastructure and steal their oil.
Well, sure I don't mind getting flagged or downvoted. But at least I speak my mind and what I believe is true.
This isn’t a contest for most just or most evil. Iran has committed horrible atrocities. The US’s approach to this war has been completely wrong and they are threatening war crimes.
Everyone sucks here.
US armed rebels, that is their history, Israel wants to the current government down at all cost.
They did that with Iraq, ISIS, they trying with Kurdistan..
I'm defending a theocracy, but this is not how countries are freed. And he is clearly claiming to take the oil, destroy their infrastructure and take the country to the dark ages. If Iranian government was saying that, hell would go lose.
Keep in mind that we now know that US supplied the protestors weapons to wage violence during the crackdown that resulted in many police officers being killed. We also know that the US has run a campaign to turn protests into riots in past events. And we know that the US sponsors campaigns to create unrest in the country.
If Iran sucks, it is only because the US wants it to suck
That's exactly it. They admitted supplying anti-government rebels with weapons.
Imagine a country comes and arm a group in the US to rebel against the government..
Hegseth saying no quarter is a war crime but no one seems to care. Why is that?
Saying things is not a war crime. So if Iranian soldiers surrendered to US soldiers and they were shot that would be a war crime. I don't think that happened? Hegseth statements could be used to support the claim of war crime under such circumstances if they were to arise. [EDIT: As a commenter suggests it is possible that simply saying this is a war crime, or at least there are some legal opinions suggesting it]
Attacking civilian targets with cluster bombs has happened and Iran is doing that as we speak. That is a war crime.
Attacking infrastructure is not a war crime if that infrastructure serves a military purpose. Attacking purely civilian use infrastructure is a war crime.
Threatening to attack civilian use infrastructure is not a war crime. Threatening to attack infrastructure used for military purposes is also not a war crime.
Mowing down protestors with machines guns is not a war crime but maybe we should consider it a crime against humanity.
EDIT: FWIW I do care about what Hegseth said. It's wrong and he shouldn't have said that. But people say stuff- what matters are the actions.
There are some actual acts that count as war crimes as well, that Hegsdeth has overseen - killing civilians off the coast of venesuela by attacking and sinking fishing boats, but also then killing the civilians after theyve jumped ship.
then in the iran conflict, leaving the sailors to drown after sinking iran's show boat with a sub
I think the US destroyed a strategically important elementary school on the first day of the war.
It's not confirmed but I agree it was very likely a US strike. An accidental one.
Assuming the US did not intend to kill school girls that is also not a war crime. You can certainly argue that this happened due to the US decision to go to war and claim the actions to not be moral (or illegal as some have stated). Others might argue that more harm would occur if no action was taken and that the action minimizes the overall harm (e.g. to the Iranian people or others).
You could also argue that attack was intentional. I don't think there's any evidence of that and I'm not sure what purpose it served if it was one.
It is difficult to extract the real purpose of most things about this war, if you're in the US, since almost every single part of it seems against the US' interests and public face.
You're probably technically correct and that the US didn't intentionally look in Google Maps for an elementary school and decided to destroy it. But did we really need to Double Tap it?
Timothy Snyder has an opinion about this: https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/2040883546093436941?s=20
I'm not quite there yet.
> Saying things is not a war crime.
On the contrary, there appear to be good legal arguments that Hegseth merely saying "no quarter" is, on its own, a war crime:
https://www.justsecurity.org/133970/legal-advice-hegseth-no-...
You might be right. You're definitely right there are legal arguments to support that.
Why do you think no one cares? My feeds are outraged. Maybe some normies can’t keep up with all the specific heinous stuff coming out of this administration, but I don’t think they’re happy about it.
> I don't understand how any human in good faith could look at Iran's government and say they are the evil regime
Iran mass murdered tens of thousands of protesters in one day. I was outraged when Trump’s goons murdered two Minnesotan protesters—if we can agree this is evil, it should follow that a regime that murders tens of thousands of protesters is also evil. This isn’t complicated, which is why you’re being downvoted (I did not downvote you).
But as Trump has assured us, that’s the old regime which is completely different from the current regime, which as Trump again has assured us, is not anywhere near as crazy as the old regime.
/s
The Iranian regime is incredibly evil. That makes the American actions even more evil given that they’re providing that evil regime so much cover and allowed it to transition from their 86 year old leader with almost no opportunity for opposition.
> 10s of thousands
I sorta doubt those numbers.
> (anymore)
Oh, so you're ideologically captured by an admin that's proven to be full of liars. There was never a good side. There's no good side to war in nearly any case (limited exceptions and this is not (was never) one of those).
The most powerful country in history attacked a smaller country that wasn't a threat to the stronger country. Had the USA (and Israel) not attacked, it's unlikely that Iran would have struck first.
And Iran firing missiles on Israel in response to genocide in Gaza isn't really a credible threat. Israel could stop massacring civilians at any time to make Iran stop firing upon them.
It is crazy that comments like this are getting downvoted when it is clearly the truth.
Is it really crazy though? Sad, but given the state of everything I don’t find this crazy.
I'm just really puzzled by people frankly, one would expect Hacker News to be of higher caliber. Ready the history, watch real geo-political analysis. But even without that, a presidents in who screams profanity on social media, threaten to take oil and resources of other countries and bomb to the dark ages..even without any political background, this a real low for any position let alone the president of the US.
I think Social Media truly brought the worse in people. People are not trying to be decent anymore.
I'm much more impressed by Chinese state-made eagles vs. cats video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dGY0_pgkv8
That's crazy. Who is the camel at the end supposed to represent? The springbok is presumably south africa i.e. BRICS so someone else in that alliance
I think it just represents people/entities who conduct business internationally, since camels used to be a major transportation method on the Silk Road.
That one is so good.
Unrelated. I found this China propaganda video depicting its interpretation of the Iran war entertaining. It talks about the “flowing valley of gold” the Hormuz Strait, the “white eagle alliance” the USA, and “white eagle gold tickets” the petrodollar.
https://youtu.be/As0rplNJTZI
Given the headline, they found out nothing about "the team".
A better article, I think: "Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War" [0]
404 Media is journalist-owned if you want to contribute to consistently good journalism. I am not affiliated.
0. https://www.404media.co/iran-is-winning-the-ai-slop-propagan...
I would be interested to know how these are made on a technical level. Is it a combination of several tools and are they local or some service (I would think LEGO minifigs would trigger some copyright issue)? I also assume you need to do certain things to keep the consistency and somehow sync the music with the video?
There's also an Anime style one, more martial and militant in style.
https://www.instagram.com/kutub.production/
It was quite obvious, but this is a noteworthy example of just how much more effective propaganda will become with AI.
These videos are blowing up on Twitter.
I personally found the one about Pete Hegseth quite well made and the song actually catchy.
Edit: Video link courtesy mirashii in this thread - https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116348872322024778
people were worried about deepfakes with AI but instead the propaganda is doing pretty well, and arguably better, when it's not a deepfake but instead silly, catchy, youthful, and is playing up existing beliefs. The invasion is deeply unpopular in the US, and these videos only serve to amp that up.
Deepfakes were never necessary, people have been making incredible propaganda forever though the same few tactics. For instance, presenting footage out of context.
The deepfakes haven't gotten really good yet. Give it a year.
deepfakes have been pre-subverted by having leaders that can't put coherent sentences together, or be trusted when they say literally anything.
A trump deepfake will be just as reliable about trump policy as actually listening to him speak. maybe even more reliable than from the horse's mouth
You're right and it's not even hyperbole. Big sigh.
Invasion?
Ground troops are going to be deployed
That would be a precondition, yes.
Care to share the link?
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116348872322024778
That Hegseth one is an extraordinary piece of media. It's dense with Hegseth and Epstein lore, the song is catchy, the visuals are a significant cut above the normal AI slop aesthetic.
If this is Iranian state backed propaganda (which seems very likely) it's light years ahead of those White House videos with footage of bombs mixed in with clips from action movies.
The White House seems to have made the mistake of hiring HOI4 modders for their propaganda team.
Is this one group?
Today I saw an analyst from Pakistan and he also had some of these "trump-lego-snippets" in the video, was wondering why someone would put so much effort in a video against trump, but it seems he copied it somewhere (from this group e.g.)
Is it even propaganda if you just read aloud your enemy’s wikipedia? I think Bubba refers to someone else than Clinton and Iran’s regime is despotic assholes, but apart from that pretty accurate depiction.
propaganda (noun)
information or ideas that are spread by an organized group or government to influence people’s opinions, esp. by not giving all the facts or by secretly emphasizing only one way of looking at the facts
or another definition:
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a particular cause, doctrine, or point of view.
So, in short, almost anything of substance that is disseminated over mass and social media?
If its aim is to influence opinion then yes. It doesn't matter if it's true or not true. It's the goal that matters. One can influence opinions with a subset of truths.
Hate to admit it... but the video goes hard
Lego must be so mad hahaha
The production values were great. I can't deny it.
No one cares about who made these videos in the US. The bigger issue is why are we engaging in a ground war in Iran when it doesn’t really serve US interests? Everyone on both political spectrums in the US can see why it benefits Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not the US.
We’re using precious resources like missiles that we will need in the Pacific theater in next 1-2 years
We will need the weapons to counter when Israel goes off the rails and starts waging war everywhere.
Here we are getting snaked into a war that we dont want, by a country that probably wants us to become weaker in the future.
Because it wasn’t planned that far. The administration probably thought it would go like Venezuela. A Middle East historian would have told you Iran has building for all our war for decades because it trusts none of its neighbors.
A second problem is that the US knew for a while that we were weak at asymmetric warfare but we didn’t fix it. There was a war game in 2002 (the Millennium Challenge, which was actually set in the Strait of Hormuz) that, though the red team did very much cheat, it did hint at a major weakness that wasn’t resolved.
There are US defense companies today that actually specialize in that but they weren’t given the same attention (but boy are they now).
When one side complains no fair the other side is cheating, you've probably already lost.
Relevant The Far Side cartoon: https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/...
Which defense companies?
Anduril is the biggest one. They are based in Costa Mesa, CA and are building a bigger R&D facility in "Space Beach" (Long Beach, CA) and a manufacturing facility near Columbus, Ohio.
Afterwards, you have smaller companies like Shield AI (San Diego, CA), Saronic Technologies (Austin, TX) and some other smaller ones.
Because this war is driven by Israel, not the US. The destruction of Iran, no matter what the costs for the world, is seen as an existential matter for the current Israeli government.
But, destroying Iran without using nukes is not a Job Israel can do by themselves, they need the US. And while the Democrat establishment (although not the base) don't see an issue with supporting Israel activities in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, a war with Iran was not something the Democrats would agree with.
So, they had this window of opportunity with Trump, before the midterms, and they acted.
We may not agree, but under the point of view of the Likud, it makes perfect sense.
Puppet regime has competition. Now do Putin.
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No doubt, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News and please especially don't start flamewars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Siding with a dictatorial regime
Right, Iran used to have a parliament with Mossadegh as prime minister, what happened there? Oh yaa, Mossadegh wanted Iranian oil for Iranians, so the US and UK overthrew Mossadegh, with the help of conservative mullahs, and installed a dictatorship. Then SAVAK with CIA help spent decades slaughtering the secular opposition.
> that’s murdered 100s of their own people
There are armed Balochi and Kurdish separatists shooting at the Iranian army right now, no doubt with clandestine Israeli and US support. Incidentally the Kurds had their own state at the end of WWII, until the US and UK made them dissolve into Iran.
Also aside from the bombings, the Basij have been fired on from the ground and have fired back. Who is arming the people shooting at the Basij is unknown, but some signs point to Israel.
I write this less than three months after armed federal personnel decided to march into Minneapolis and among other things kill a nurse and also a woman.
> and aided terrorist organizations
The Arabs in southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip have lived there a long time. Over the past century Zionist Jews from around the world have been invading their land, shooting, bombing, starving them. If they fight back the epithet terrorist is applied to them, and if these brave men fighting for their people are assigned the word, it gives it a great esteem.
multiple things can be bad at the same time.
Of course Mossadegh was "not ideal", but the current regime are genocidal islamists that over time have taken more and more to massacring their own population for ever more reasons.
A pinprick and metastasizing cancer are both bad in absolute terms, but not remotely comparable.
What genocide did they commit?
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
That doesn't even include the massacre they did on their own population 2 months back. When it comes to genocides, Iran's islamists have a LONG list of mass-killings to answer for.
The foreign-armed coup attempt? Is that the hill you wanna die on?
No. Iran's islamists have organized plenty "hills", including an attack on Brussels airport and metro. Me and my wife were within 2 km of the shooting.
In the airport, they found a woman pushing a carriage. They shot the baby first and waited, laughing, for the woman to collapse onto the floor, dead, still bleeding baby in her hands, to shoot her. She survived. THAT is who you're dealing with here.
We found out Iran's embassy was involved in organizing these attacks. There is nothing you can possibly to do convince anything done to these islamists, each and every one of them, is immoral in the slightest.
That is pretty bad, but where's the genocide you mentioned?
And today the occupation IRGC regime (that recently by IRGC released numbers massacred 3000 Iranians on the streets in 2 days) is importing foreign militias to prop up their unpopular regime (along with recruiting child soldiers for the Basij you mentioned).
"The roaming of the Islamic Republic's proxies in Iran; entry of "Zainabiyoun" of Pakistan after "Hashd al-Shaabi" of Iraq and "Fatemiyoun" of Afghanistan
Reports of the presence of forces affiliated with the Zainabiyoun Division of Pakistan have been published in various areas of Sistan and Baluchestan province."
I watched "One Battle After Another" and it shows how deranged people are. I don't think its a new thing, I just think in any stable society, people who don't thrive eventually find a way to destroy the society in the hope whatever comes next will serve them better. In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage, it stands to reason that lazy, stupid people will need to play differently in order to win.
I can't wait to read wikipedia in 30 years.
I'm sorry, your takeaway from that film was that Sean Penn was the good guy?
This is a pretty obvious misinterpretation. Protagonist bad ≠ antagonist good. This isn't even the law of the excluded middle because there was only ever a statistical relationship between the morality of narrative opponents.
Isn't the film fiction? I haven't seen it but I would refrain from using a fiction film as something to measure "how deranged people are" by.
> I just think in any stable society, people who don't thrive eventually find a way to destroy the society in the hope whatever comes next will serve them better.
It seems our society is being destroyed by people who are thriving the most.
> In a society where hard work and intelligent gives you an advantage
Which society is this, Sweden? Xi Jinping is pretty smart and hard working, is China being demolished by lazy dumb twats? Because it seems to me its US that is overrun bu stupidity and sheer lazyness right now, but it seems to be because it rewards people like Musk, Trump etc.
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Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. The GP comment was bad*, but responding in kind is the opposite of what we're trying for here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(* for reasons—I hasten to add—unrelated to which side of the conflict they or anyone else is identifying with)
It's almost funny how both of these descriptions can apply to either country.
Except that only the US and Israel are bombing schools.
I agree that HN often turns a blind eye to all of the awful things that the US and Israel do, but Iran is hitting civilian targets as well.
Israel/the US started the war by murdering 160 Iranian school girls and has been murdering civilians non-stop since (and before) then. How many civilians has Iran killed?
Iran hit a teaching hospital so I guess they technically managed to hit a school and a hospital at the same time.
Iran has helped Russia bomb many schools and hospitals.
It's ironic how they've been so instrumental in bombing Ukraine's civilian targets (for years) and now they're likely to get their civilian infrastructure bombed, by a third party. Strange times.
You probably have to wait 2 more years to see if they're really a dictatorship, for the time being at least they still have an electoral mandate.
Having an electoral mandate is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. If you don't follow your own laws and your own constitution, for instance, you're not a in a democracy, even if you have been elected. Precisely because you are elected under the assumption that you will follow the laws and constitution, not have unlimited power to do whatever you like until the next elections.
The Trump regime is still borderline, but I think it's fair to call Netanyahu a dictator at this point.
Not to mention atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 170,000+ deaths.
the japanese killed around 50 times that number of people in ww2 (R.J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide, 1997)
Who exactly are you talking about?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
> On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12
Check out the history behind this and how the US has treated Iran because of their Oil for almost a hundred years now. This is 100% on the west in my opinion. We've been abusing these people for the longest time.
Before the US it was the British with BP.
Before the British with BP it was the British East India Company.
Before the British EIC there were various periods of Arab, Turk and Mongol control.
Persia has been a political football since Alexander the Great. Cursed geography.
I will side with any country that's being illegally attacked, and whose population is being illegally targeted, thank you very much. Sovereignty is fundamental, it's been broken. The state of Iran is the result of US and Israeli meddling. There was time for criticizing Iran before it was attacked.
When I first heard about the protests in Iran, I assigned automatically the blame on the dictatorial regime.
Nevertheless, after the following events and after extra information provided by the US government itself, this is no longer so clear cut.
The truth is that we do not really know what happened in Iran, how many have been killed and whether that was really an internal protest against the regime or a coup attempt organized by USA.
The timing of the protests is too suspicious. The most plausible hypothesis is that US/Israeli agents have initiated the protests by influencing a great number of well-intended internal opponents of the regime, who probably have suffered then most from this action.
If some of the opposition had received US weapons, that can explain the paranoia of the dictatorial regime, even if there is little doubt that the retaliations against the opposition must have affected many who had no ties with USA or Israel.
Until credible information will surface about what really happened in Iran at the beginning of the year, we can affirm only that it is likely that the dictatorial regime has killed or tortured many non-violent opponents, but there is nothing certain about this.
On the other hand, the unprovoked crimes committed by USA since the beginning of the year against countries like Iran or Cuba are certain facts, about which there exists no doubt whatsoever, because the top US officials are bragging about them.
For all we know, USA might have already killed more Iranian civilians than the Iran government, so any claims that the attacks done by USA are somehow intended for supporting the Iranian people, are completely ridiculous.
Trump said on Sunday that the US at least tried to arm the protestors.
> The U.S. sent guns to anti-regime protesters in Iran amid the wider war against Tehran, President Donald Trump confirmed to Fox News on Sunday.
> Trump made the comment during an interview with Fox News' Try Yingst, saying the U.S. delivered the weapons through the Kurds.
> "We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them through the Kurds. And I think the Kurds kept them," Trump said.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/us-iran-trump-israel-war-l...
The story seems plausible but the source is as poor as they get.
Trump facts change so quickly.
While Iran is bad - US is engaged in war crimes (they even brag about it). It’s like when Russians defend their war crimes by saying that Ukraine is corrupt.
I agree with you on principle, but you're oversimplifying things if you think that opposition to the United States or Israel is all about a single person.
I think it's possible to have a grown-up discussion about the production value, cultural relevance, and effectiveness of propaganda without "siding" with the videos' sponsors. This appears to be an uncomfortable case of bad people speaking at least some truth--to the point where it's resonating.
Churchill and Eisenhower beg to disagree. When everyone is bad, you focus on restraining the most powerful actor first.
There was an interview with a historian and he said an interesting thing about the ancient Sparta: "Everything we know about Sparta we know from its enemies".
So instead we must side with another regime that slaughtered 72'000 innocent civilians of another country, most of whom were women and children?
That 72k is a bare minimum. Those are just the recovered and identified bodies.
Do you mean the US of I?
Remember Snowden? Remmeber Assange? Remember Aaron Swartz? Remember the terrorizing of Occupy Wallstreet organizers? Remember the funding of terrorists all over Africa? Remember Libya? Remember who funded Isis?
Is that regime you are talking about?
> Siding with a dictatorial regime that’s murdered 100s of their own people and aided terrorist organizations
I'm getting really tired of this. United States and Israel have bombed and killed more innocent people than I can count on. The biggest terrorist regime is United States right now, bombing schools.
Your own president tweets out war crimes, your secretary of defense proudly proclaims "no quarters" and "send them back to the stone age".
Do me a favor, and please lay off the morality lecture.
How about you talk about the Gaza genocide for once? Or the IRAQ war that killed millions of people? Or using nuclear weapons on Japan? or the killing and raping of Vietnamese ?
Or the fact that you backed Saddam to use chemical weapons on Iranians during the 8 year war?
The number is well in the thousands/tens of thousands, and we have no way of knowing precisely because, well, it's a dictatorial regime.
also because, well, our dictatorial regime.
Incorrect, and just yesterday Trump admitted that these weren't "protesters", they were heavily armed (by the US) insurrectionists trying to overthrow the government. Iran was right to fight them.
i really can't tell which side you're talking about
You are absolutely correct. However, I fear you're running up against the basic human instinct of "my enemy's enemy is my friend.".
I also wonder how many actually support them, and how much is just a result of opinions boosted by bots?
A regime driven by a weird religious cult and murdering their own citizens is battling a regime which is driven by a weird religious cult and is murdering their own citizens.
I think in this situation it is okay to cheer on both sides.
Cue dozens of comments doing exactly that...
Who is siding with Iran?
Most commenters in this thread.
I appreciate that this statement accurately describes all three regimes primarily involved without naming one.
You mean like siding with the dictatorial regime that provided material support to the 9/11 hijackers, 15/19 of whom were nationals of that country? And then we wanted to question 3 menders of the royal family who were implicated they all mysteriously fell out of windows, died in a car accident or otherwise died?
Another national was a renowned arms dealer linked to both Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. And then that arms dealer’s nephew was chopped up in a foreign embassy and taken away in pieces?
They murdered thousands of our citizens let alone theirs.
What leg do we have to stand on here exactly?
Trump just yesterday admitted to arming anti-Iranian insurrectionists. So Iran did not "murder 100s of their own people", they fought off a CIA armed coup.
There's an implicit tolerance of authoritarian regimes so long as the price is right. This is nothing new.
Which one? If you mean Iran, "100s of" seems like a weird understatement.
what numbers can you trust? i mean, you can trust whatever suits you, but *i* don't trust, really, any of the things i hear about the global bad guys, particularly iran when america is making war on them or building a case for war.
How about start with the number that the regime itself admits to; namely, thousands of protestors killed.
Today’s world is messed up. Look at EU leaders rubbing shoulders with Syrian president/ex-terrorist.
That's in part because many EU countries would like to ship the Syrian refugees back to Syria.
Today's?
We were shuffling capital to China after Tiananmen Square. People were talking about how we should have left Saddam alone because of how "orderly" Iraq was under his boot. Europeans were happy to ink the plans for Nordstream 2 after Russia sent tanks into Georgia, and Russia received no less than a FIFA World Cup and Olympic games after seizing Crimea.
There is incredibly little will to stick to the whole "humans have rights and we should have a rules-based international order" when the rubber meets the road.
rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"
Its a nice thing in theory but in practice power always overruled morals and I think the current US admin not only freely admits this but also kind of rubs your nose in it. In a way its less hypocritical than previously but also incredibly sobering for someone who grew up in a seemingly more "stable" world
> rules-based international order is mostly a propaganda term that the Us empire invented. It also was mostly "rules for thee but not for me"
I think there was an effort to try to stick to it, at least early on after WWII when people had seen what the old system resulted in.
Then the Berlin blockade, Korea, and Hungarian intervention happened and the implication was made that the rules were what were to be aspired to, not actually followed, and it's been all downhill from there.
Incidentally, most of those aren't on the "Us empire".
Don't worry, the multipolar world you dream of will be here soon, and it will be as brutal and violent as you're hoping.
> Don't worry, the multipolar world you dream of will be here soon, and it will be as brutal and violent as you're hoping.
... I don't hope for that?
Indeed, we even had deals with Germany and Belgium who bombed hospitals in Yugoslavia in 1999!
Don't forget Trump rubbing shoulders with al-Sharaa either.
And Putin, and Orban etc.