Ep. 94: The Race to the Bottom
Hey FRs,
This week we had the brilliant and hilarious (our favorite combo) Negin Farsad on to talk through some of the tragic nonsense currently sweeping across West Asia. It appears that both the U.S. and Iran are hitting drinking water infrastructure on purpose, like they're in the War Crime Olympics and just realized Russia still has the lead for the coveted gold medal.
It's gonna be a tight race, folks.
Why did Iran formally declare the ceasefire dead this week?
Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Gharibabadi made it official on Saturday: the U.S. violated the MOU framework, so Iran said f*** it. Considering the structure of the deal, this is no great surprise. The 60-day framework had no enforcement mechanism, Israel was never party to it, and both sides had incentives to let the other break it first. We now have nightly U.S. strikes followed by Iranian retaliatory strikes on Gulf infrastructure followed by nightly US strikes followed by Iranian retaliatory strikes followed by.....you get it. And with no diplomatic off-ramp visible.
Are the U.S. and Iran both deliberately targeting civilian water supplies?
They sure are, and that's worth sitting with. The U.S. struck a desalination plant in Jask, cutting off water access for roughly 10,000 people across 20 villages during extreme summer heat. Iran responded by sending Shahed drones into Kuwait, hitting a desalination plant that supplies 90% of Kuwait's drinking water. Targeting civilian water infrastructure is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, and both sides are seemingly just doing it willy-nilly.
There is no international body currently positioned to enforce consequences against either of them, which isn't a technicality. It is the whole f***ing problem.
Do the fractures in the MAGA coalition over this war actually matter?
The real ones? Yes. Tucker Carlson called the war a mistake. Candace Owens has been publicly slamming the administration's Iran posture. Joe Rogan spent three hours pressing Vance on why deals keep collapsing into renewed bombing campaigns. Not a friendly question from the king of the manosphere.
Pull up a seat, folks. With all the other crap we have to witness these days, we're due a good public self-own.
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