lizzy مثلية الله ☭ 
yea iran's government famously bombs random countries on the other side of the earth unprovoked
RE: https://mastodon.scot/@MartinTaudio/116148867695362874
RE: https://mastodon.scot/@MartinTaudio/116148867695362874
Lars@lizzy i think the quote is saying that neither government is acting in the interest of the people. this manifests in different forms. the american people didn't exactly ask for america to bomb random countries, they'd rather that money be spent on their needs. and the iranian people certainly didn't want to be massacred for protesting their government either.
@lizzy also, iran may not have the capabilities to directly go start random wars, but they do sure like meddling in foreign affairs by funding terrorist proxies; and let's not forget that many of the drones that russia has been using in the invasion of ukraine are very much iranian.
@lizzy it's definitely fair to say that iran sucks. does it suck more than the US? depends on perspective. from the perspective of random 3rd party countries, the US is a much higher risk, for reasons of scale alone. from the perspective of the respective citizens (which the quote seems to be getting at?), i'd consider iran to be considerably worse. as much as current US politics suck, that kind of mass murder just isn't a thing there.
@lizzy perhaps most importantly, i would not mistake the quote to mean "the US and Iran are equally bad" (by whichever measure), which is a fairly ill-posed question (from which perspective?). "the same" is meant qualitatively.
really the statement is just: the individual people of conflicting states tend to have much more in common, and get along much better, than their respective governments. and that suggests a failure in how our systems work: clearly that can't be the will of the people.