They could be deliberately planted war propaganda by the west to mislead Iran into thinking they're weaker than they are.

What is wrong with email exactly? You'd prefer we all use Shitcord instead I presume?

It's non-real-time. It sits in a box waiting for you. You're not incentivized to be in a place to get messages for fear of missing them. You don't have to scroll through unrelated crap. It's federated which means no single company can dominate it. You can use whatever app you like to download and send messages over standardized protocols so you can't be forced to view ads or spied on. Yeah it's not encrypted meaningfully (provider to provider with the NSA sitting on both ends listening) but what is that is in mainstream usage? It can be encrypted with plugins.

So where do you get off insulting email? What's your alternative that is superior and meets the same needs?

It makes perfect sense for China. If you have a non-addictive, no-mind-altering, no-negative consequences legal alternative to narcotics that relieves pain then you disincentivize use of drugs and the drug trade for some amount of users.

Cuba had no ability to do that unfortunately. They got embargoed and literally blockaded not long after the revolution and have been under embargo ever since. The US was never going to allow them to buy and import mass quantities of uranium, build centrifuges, over years, a decade of time refine it and develop a bomb. It just wasn't in the cards for their position. Their only option was being given ones and when the USSR backed down to the mad dog US and pulled out their nukes they found themselves in this situation.

To be honest given Cuba's size and proximity I'm not sure the US wouldn't have blanketed them in nukes in a sneak attack rather than allowed them to exist as a nuclear communist power nearby.

So yes the DPRK was smart in doing that. Iran was foolish in not doing that but both of them had vastly different situations to Cuba which just didn't have the ability for a variety of reasons.

It's also a simple fact they cannot replace tankers in terms of amounts of oil/gas they can move.

You'd need some wild infrastructure project with multiple side by side rail lines running a rail super-highway of sorts across multiple countries and a lot of tanker cars, engines, and precise scheduling as well as big sending and receiving rail yards with specialized equipment to try to accomplish that. There's a reason places just prefer pipes but a pipe across multiple countries would take a year to construct and that's not even taking into account the multiple years you need to wrangle the politics of the situation, who gets paid what and how much, land rights, disputes from US compradors trying to stop it, etc. And the fact the US can Nordstream it in multiple not-China and not-Iran countries which might be incentivized to slow-walk repairs.

As to infrastructure strikes on the Gulf states. The US may want that. I find Richard Medhurst's video essay on the petro-gas dollar compelling. If they could get Iran to destroy their vassal competitors or put them out of business for a while stocks and profits of American energy companies like Chevron would skyrocket. So Iran blowing up Gulf oil and gas would actually benefit American capitalists and possibly even Trump himself via insider trading as well as setting the groundwork for a petro-gas dollar and the hegemony that affords. So I'm not sure what you posit as a negative is actually a negative instead of just a benefit to the US that has Iran's hand doing what they want but cannot be seen doing.

Oh yes, cheap RAM soon hopefully. And by soon I mean maybe 2028 or 2029 with China's speeds. I hope they fucking destroy Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. But doubtless they'll just be banned from import to the west under national security concerns despite them being RAM which is all but impossible to conceal backdoors, malicious chips, etc on due to its nature.

Russia is not interested in fighting the US over this. If they haven't even bombed nuke-less European vassals like Germany for supplying missiles and drones for use in terrorist attacks on Russian civilians they're not going to escalate like that for a mere partner like Iran.

China I am also doubtful will do anything but bide its time. Happy to be proven wrong but they don't have the mature logistics chains or the right navy yet (they'll have it in a couple years) to fight the US on the high seas which is something they must have if they're attacking the US in this way if the US chooses not to back down. They have to be able to accept that contingency and deal with it and right now they can't so I don't think they'll act.

We've seen Chinese tankers turn around. China will saber rattle and be very pissed off about it and it will increase their drive to prepare for war against the US even further than it already has been but I don't think they'll do anything but file UN protests. They've already exhausted their economic leverage. We've been there done that with the back and forth on critical minerals with Trump in the tariffs battle and that's settled down and I doubt they want to disturb it for Iran which is a far flung partner that is quite a ways outside the SCS influence and economic zone and difficult for China to support even if they want to. US has Diego Garcia and several other bases along the way from Iran to China that can help interdict and resupply such missions, China has no such bases to help their own efforts if it comes to fighting the US.

So it's slapping Russia and China in the face but the US has been doing that for decades. Russia has taken a proxy war trying to destroy it for 4 years with various levels of threats they always back down on, refusing to ever strike Europe let alone the US despite piracy efforts against their own Russian oil exporting vessels. They won't stick their neck out for it, they expect Trump will give them peace in Ukraine once they take the legally incorporated oblasts and don't want to antagonize him. China is China. They don't want war with the US and won't go to war over this of all things.

The power system is already ailing so strikes on it seem probable. The US would likely target their health care system as well given capitalist hatred of it. Declare the hospitals had Hamas in them as is usual.

Nah I'm not sure I buy this.

Bombing railroads is much easier than building them. All the US has to do is bomb some big stretches, use some really big bombs to alter the landscape and the cost goes up significantly trying to fill the land back in and all that. I mean the US and zionists I think can afford to send a single plane every 3 days to bomb their rail bridges with 1-2 munitions. That won't cost them anything compared to a continued actual aerial bombing campaign on Iran. Iran can maybe do the Vietnamese resistance thing of rebuilding very, very quickly but they won't get a steady flow of shipments through. I mean they don't even have to risk pilots, this can be done by drones of via ship-launched cruise missiles.

Also US can start targeting Iranian trains not just the rails but the railyards, the locamotives, the repair and maintenance facilities and those take considerably more materials and effort to build than putting some rails and ties together and fixing some land.

Fact is you cannot move MEANINGFUL amounts of oil or other raw product overland. There's a reason we use these massive ships. Floating on the ocean means you don't have to fight gravity and the mass of your cargo as much as you do on rails or roads and the sheer volume you can carry in a few tankers cannot be replicated using a single rail line even with constant back to back trains.

Iran "CAN" make a deal with Turkmenistan but they haven't. That's cope. Until it happens it's cope. The US also "CAN" lean on Turkmenistan HARD to not make a deal and maybe they'd fold, maybe the US would clandestinely bomb it like they did with Nordstream and like with Nordstream no one is going to hold them to account. They're bandits, they're pirates. No one is going to slap their face.

I agree on the idea of a certain scale being necessary for self-defense. Otherwise the west chokes you out easily using multiple methods. That or the US weakening significantly. Any division is exploited by the west. Sadly many peoples split and divide themselves over often petty historical differences, drama, religion, etc which makes the job of the west easier.

Is there an article to go with this? What has happened in Lebanon today exactly? Is it just more battles and invasion and the national military not resisting or what?

Real "we'll send in soldiers AFTER a ceasefire" for Ukraine hours. Just baiting the public and allies with nice sounding promises contingent on a solution that's not going to come.