It's amazing how much stupidity you manages to pack in a few paragraphs. I've decided to engage it one last time; after this I'm done. Probably forever.
Step 1: “The Iranian regime is wicked. This should be acknowledged.”
This is the opening move in every bad foreign policy argument: moral branding as strategic substitute. “Wicked.” That’s it. No context, no history, no understanding. Just a label slapped on like it’s a Marvel villain. What does wicked mean in this case? That Iran is authoritarian? Brutal? Repressive? So are most US allies in the region. Saudi Arabia executes people for witchcraft. Egypt jails journalists. Israel is currently flattening Gaza block by block. Are they all wicked too, or does “wicked” only apply to governments you’ve been trained to hate?
But more to the point: what are you proposing we do with this wickedness? Because that’s what this entire line of reasoning hinges on. If calling a regime wicked is just a rhetorical flourish, fine. But if it’s supposed to justify military action, then you’ve just advocated moral total war—foreign policy by exorcism.
Step 2: “If you can’t accept that, there’s no point talking.”
Of course there isn’t. Because your position is a closed loop. You demand agreement with your metaphysical assumptions before we can even begin to discuss facts or outcomes. You’re not interested in a debate. You’re interested in moral submission.
This is the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “LA LA LA THEY’RE EVIL.” You’re not debating Iran. You’re protecting your fragile little worldview from the contamination of reality. If someone says “maybe we should consider what actually works,” and your response is “I don’t talk to people who don’t believe in evil,” you’ve left the realm of debate and entered the sandbox of magical thinking. You’ve effectively said: I refuse to engage with people who ask questions I can’t answer without chanting moral absolutes.
That’s not a worldview. That’s a coping mechanism for people who find cause and effect too hard.
You’re not interested in whether a policy produces peace, stability, deterrence or even long-term advantage for your own side. You’re interested in moral catharsis. In punishing the wicked, smiting the evildoers and feeling clean afterward. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of burning witches.
And what makes this dumb, not just wrong, but actively disqualifying you from adult conversation, is that it refuses to process consequence.
Let’s break that down further:
Sub 1. You can’t reason with someone who treats disagreement as heresy.
When you say “I won’t talk to people who don’t believe in evil,” you’re admitting you can’t distinguish between disagreement and depravity. You’re saying: If you don’t share my metaphysical priors, you’re not just wrong, you’re morally defective.
That’s how ideologues and fanatics operate. Strategists and philosophers, however, deal with people who don’t share their assumptions all the time. That’s literally the job.
Sub 2. You're not asking what works. You’re asking what feels good.
This is the key distinction between policy and theater.
Smart people ask: “If I act, will it achieve my stated goal?”
You ask: “If I act, will it affirm my moral disgust?”
This is why people like you always support the next war.
Sub 3. It reveals an inability to hold multiple truths at once.
Yes, the Iranian regime is brutal. Also: indiscriminate military strikes tend to kill civilians, provoke retaliation and strengthen hardliners. These things are simultaneously true.
But your mind can’t accommodate that tension. You flatten everything into one big moral binary where once you label something “evil,” no further thinking is required. It’s cognitive offloading and it’s dumb because it rejects complexity in a domain that requires it most.
Sub 4. It treats politics as a religious war—without even the consistency of religion.
“I don’t talk to people who don’t believe in evil” is not a policy stance. It’s a self-imposed lobotomy. It means: I’m not here to think, I’m here to worship my disgust. But unlike religion, it offers no redemption, no coherence, no code. It's just about presumed righteous fury.
The dumbest part of this is you think this moral absolutism makes you wise. You think refusing to engage with anyone outside your moral tribe makes you principled. What it actually makes you is useless: to peace, to diplomacy, to strategy and to the very concept of accountability.
To continue with the rest of your so-called argument...
Step 3: “If the US became a repressive theocracy, attacking it would be reasonable.”
Ah, the hypothetical pivot. You just compared the most powerful nuclear-armed country in the world to Iran, then used that thought experiment to claim moral consistency. Let’s unpack how absurd this is.
First: the US has been repressive. It has funded death squads. It has dropped nuclear weapons. By your logic, someone somewhere should have attacked US nuclear facilities decades ago. And if you say, “No, because we’re a democracy,” then congratulations, you’ve admitted your logic is not moral, it’s tribal. It's not about evil, it's about who you see as evil.
Second: attacking Iran is not a thought experiment. You’re talking about actual military strikes on actual nuclear facilities in a country of 85 million people. And your justification is “well, I don’t hate Persians, just the regime.” Wonderful. That’ll be very comforting to the civilians who would die in the fallout. Tell the corpses it was all very morally sound.
Third: if any ideology you don’t like justifies pre-emptive strikes, then every state is a target. China. Russia. India. Turkey. The list goes on. But of course, you’re not applying this logic universally. You’re applying it selectively, because this isn’t about wickedness. It’s about who you think deserves to die.
Step 4: “I don’t care about facts. We need a paradigm shift.”
And there it is: the moment when the mask fully drops. You admit facts don’t matter to you. You just want to feel right.
Let me translate that: you don’t want to debate. You want moral license to believe whatever supports your pre-selected enemy narrative. When someone challenges you with history, evidence or strategic analysis, you ignore it. That’s how cults work. This is how warmongers talk right before the bombs drop. It's how people act when they know they’re wrong but don’t want to give it up.
Your “paradigm shift” is not visionary. It’s just you giving yourself permission to ignore everything inconvenient. Iraq? Libya? Doesn’t matter. Civilian death tolls? Doesn’t matter. Diplomacy? Doesn’t matter. You’ve made up your mind. The world must conform. Where have we seen that before? Oh right... Gaza.
Step 5: “If you don’t believe in good and evil, we’re talking past each other.”
No, we’re not talking past each other. You’ve just run out of arguments and retreated into cosmic language because your position has no leg to stand on.
Let’s be clear: the world is full of evil. But the presence of evil doesn’t mean we drop bombs until it feels better. That’s not morality. That’s cowardice dressed up as courage. It’s easy to scream about evil. It’s harder to explain how your cure won’t kill more than the disease.
And the irony is, you don’t actually believe in good and evil. You believe in your good and their evil. That’s why you’d never apply your logic to Saudi Arabia, to Israel, to the US under Trump, or to any “friendly” regime. Your whole worldview collapses the moment you apply it consistently.
This is why your political mumblings every time are like a child’s drawing. It pretends to be moral but it’s tribal and incoherent. It substitutes certainty for wisdom and posture for policy. And worst of all, it’s been tried but it’s called failure. Your ideas don’t need a “paradigm shift.” They need a burial.
As I said: You’re setting up a position that can’t really be challenged, because every shift in policy, whether engagement or hostility, is framed as just another method of containment. That makes your theory immune to contradiction, which is a problem if we want to understand history analytically rather than narratively.
That doesn't make it a strong theory at all as it cannot explain anything...