Alright, gotta go to bed. But two points I’ve been trying to articulate all night, but I keep getting derailed by shiny pennies.

Recently, we have become quite bad at being derailed on important threads by squabbling and troll-baiting. Hell, they’re baiting us.
Lots of room for legitimate arguing, but when it devolves into pointless debates about issues thrice-removed from whatever it was we were talking about—we’re being had.
I suggest a return to observation of the informally-enforced 100 comment rule: Stay on topic for the first hundred comments, even if it means waiting 98 comments to answer some troll, or tedious idiot.
Is the motion seconded?
Also, just an observation about Iran and the US. We seem to be pretty fortunate in that no matter how ham-fisted our approach, the Mullahs are consistently mis-managing their actions even worse. We have so far not seen the good guys lose only because so far, the bad guys have proven themselves not up to the task of winning. Oh, they’ll try, but by now, almost no matter how violent they get, the regime will fall. They would require a slave state as controlled as North Korea in order to preserve the regime, unless they get much better at this, and fast.

So far, so good. Godspeed, people of Iran.