My post above got posted too early by my poor keyboard skills. I had a lot more to say (surprising I know), tried to edit and took too longs. I hardly remember what I was trying to say now, and am giving up.
I did want to, however, say that iiandyiii is one of my favorite posters. I do not recall disagreeing with him,so of course he is one of my favorite posters. Also, one of the best informed IMHO.
That’s his whole deal. He needs to be in fights and will go out of his way to make it happen.
ouch!
I believe this is true, therefore PITTING FAIL
very well put, thank you
ah! I love a Happy Ending!
QFT and 100%
Thirded!
Says the guy who started being a contrarian dick first with your assholish “that wouldn’t be a reasonable interpretation” i.e. “if wolfcur didn’t think it, it’s unreasonable”. My first reply to you was just a “yeah, I know, I’m just bitching” - until to you it was not and you had to say somethiong.
Fuck off, not particularly invested in you, of all people, policing of my tone in the fucking Pit, thanks.
Seriously, only assholes try “Calm down” after they stoked the fire in the first place. How about you just don’t reply to me, instead? That’s the only kind of “out” I’d like.
And you can fuck right off too. I didn’t “go out of my way” to post wolfie’s assholish reply to my completely vanilla “yeah, I know, just moaning” post. That’s on him.
On the contrary, flying into a rage at the gentlest attempt at clarification is pretty much one of the textbook definitions of “asshole” (the persistent, predictable use of “fuck off” is another one).
Congratulations, starting from a simple misinterpretation of your poorly worded post, you’ve now started two fights, and If there’s anything that assholes love better than one fight, it’s two fights!
Anyway, don’t bother to respond, as I’m done with you.
Yay Pit!
Honestly, I’m not sure you need the second part of that sentence. Does “Calm down” ever do anything productive? It’s up there with “bless your heart” as a passive-aggressive way to say “fuck you,” as far as I can tell.
If I’m wrong–if the world is full of people saying “Calm down” and the person they’re talking to saying, “You know, good point, I WAS upset, but now your words have calmed me and helped me see reason, thank you!”–please lemme know; but that’s sure as shit not my experience.
Principal Tamzarian
IMHO, not adversarially, no. Used supportively by a trusted person as soon as one has started entering rage mode—-as in, ”Wait! Calm down, I know that sounds outrageous but you haven’t heard the context, please don’t throw that!”—-it can be beneficial, IME.
(Even in those situations, though, the ”calm down” part of the dialogue isn’t handling much of the lift in the actual defusing.)
Agreed
I guess you haven’t seen many police bodycam videos. “Calm down” is not a medically endorsed term out of a textbook of abnormal psychology; it’s an instinctive reaction to signal to a raging asshole that they’re out of control and that they’re escalating the conflict, in the hope of getting through the rage to the more rational part of their prefrontal cortex.
But when even the slightest trigger – even an imaginary one – triggers explosive rage and profanity, even kind and reasoned words may be ineffective. Some people are just naturally combative.
Well, depends what you define as “productive.” For me it often an expression of annoyance as in ‘calm the fuck down’, so it is productive for ME to be able to express my righteous annoyance 
.
I have meant it sincerely, as in ‘calm down, I don’t think they meant it like that - I think they meant you just LOOK like you’re a necrophiliac pedophile, not that you actually ARE one’ or something along those lines. Is that ever productive? Probably not. But it can be hard at times for us usually conflict-avoidant types to stop the impulse to play peacemaker.
And in the cultural context of the Pit is one an asshole for saying “fuck you” in a passive aggressive way anyway? Is the Pit’s primary purpose to be be productive?
I haven’t looked into the current Wolfpup/Mr Dibble spat but the possibility that Mr Dibble might need to calm the fuck down is not - in my experience - an improbable proposition.
The only way a phrase can become an instinctive reaction is through repeated practice. And this is a bad habit to create in yourself.
You’re right about what it signals, but that’s exactly why it’s a bad thing to say. Telling someone they are a “raging asshole” who is “out of control” is far more likely to escalate the situation. What “cuts through the rage” to the “rational part” of the brain is connection, understanding, compassion. You want to agree with them that their issue is legitimate.
Cop videos are a bad source for learning conflict resolution. For one thing, they often actually exacerbate situations. And when they don’t, they are often relying on fear to motivate. They do not try to reach the “rational part,” but to give a clear command to an overwhelmed brain which can result in compliance–though it can also severely backfire.
You have only to have the phrase used on you once to know it just makes you more angry. You likely weren’t remotely that upset. It’s dismissive, implying you are “out of control” because you expressed a bit of anger or frustration. Clearly the other person doesn’t “get it” so why would you listen to them?
The desire to mediate is fine, but “calm down” is a horrible way to do that.
Public attitudes [among polled Iranians] toward Donald Trump are almost evenly split: about 44% held a positive view and about 44% held a negative view of him. Attitudes toward Benjamin Netanyahu are also polarized, but positive views were more common than negative views: about 51% held a positive view and about 38% a negative view. By contrast, Vladimir Putin was the most negatively viewed of the three leaders, with about 73% negative evaluations.
• Regarding the preferred form of political system, about 34% of society preferred some form of monarchy (25% “non-federal monarchy” and about 9% “federal monarchy”). About 28% preferred a republican system (17% “non-federal republic” and 11% “federal republic”). By contrast, about 13% chose “Islamic Republic.”
So 13% of Iranians support an Islamic republic, but Netanyahu has a 51% approval rating among Iranians.
You guys keep confusing ‘ignorant’ with ‘doesn’t agree with me’. Those are 2 different things. You guys also keep assuming that the louder, angrier and more certain you are, that the more correct you are.
The mentality that ‘right wing theocratic fascism is abhorrent, unless a non-western, non-judeochristian, brown person does it. Then its defensible’ is not persuasive.
French New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has described Islamo-leftism as a “grand new alliance between the reds, greens and the new browns”[25].
Writing in 2010 for the thinktank of the European People’s Party, Maurice Fraser of LSE’s European Institute, listed “what is dubbed in the UK ‘Islamo-leftism’” as a “curious ideological bedfellow… spawned by” the recent abdication of the Enlightenment project of human rights, freedom, secularism, science and progress on the part of much of the non-mainstream left.[26]
According to Mark Silinsky of the United States Army War College, Islamo-leftism is alliance of Islamists and leftists in opposition to Western values that can also be referred to as the red-green-brown axis.[27] Silinsky characterizes the black-green alliance between Black Lives Matter and the Council on American–Islamic Relations as an example of Islamo-leftism.[27]
Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld describes Islamo-leftism as the hope, entertained by a revolutionary fringe, of seeing Islam become the spearhead of a new insurrection, engaged in a jihad against global capitalism.[28]
According to Robert S. Wistrich, “[a] poisonous anti-Jewish legacy can be found in Marx, Fourier, and Proudhon, extending through the orthodox Communists and non-conformist Trotskyists to the Islamo-Leftist hybrids of today who systematically vilify the so-called racist essence of the Jewish State”.[29]
Writing in 2022 for the Hudson Institute, Lorenzo G. Vidino argues that the alliance between some Islamists and some on the left (exemplified by the UK’s Stop the War Coalition) is built upon their shared commitment to anti-colonialism, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.[30]
Or, they’re looking for something they can use as after-the-fact justification. See also “Freeze, get on the ground, hands above your head, don’t reach for it, show me your ID”.
No matter how often you bring up this silliness, it still has no relevance in this discussion. No one on the board has remotely claimed that the Iranian regime’s oppression is okay because they’re not white.
French New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has described Islamo-leftism as a “grand new alliance between the reds, greens and the new browns”.
Sounds like some “Axis of Evil” brilliance there.
Abstract. This article examines the use of political polling in authoritarian regimes, focusing on Iran and the recent surveys of the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN). While GAMAAN presents its work as “scientific” and “representative,” its online snowball sampling fails to meet the standards of statistical rigor or ethical neutrality. Under repression and surveillance, genuine political preferences cannot be measured. What emerges is not public opinion but the architecture of fear.
This is the second critique of GAMAAN. Our earlier response to its 2022 survey exposed the impossibility of unbiased polling under dictatorship. The 2025 report repeats the same flaws while elevating controversial figures such as Reza Pahlavi, whose contested record is mirrored in the bias of its producers.
Drawing on historical examples and documented repression in Iran, the article argues that such surveys are scientifically invalid and morally indefensible. They distort reality, erase dissent, and risk legitimizing tyranny. In authoritarian contexts, legitimacy cannot be polled. It is measured only by resistance.
Iran
Iran’s national census is the source of our religious composition estimates for the country. In the census, more than 99% of residents formally identify as Muslim.
We are aware of data describing a different picture. Recent surveys conducted by The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) paint a very different Iranian religious landscape. GAMAAN assumes that legal pressures influence how Iranian respondents answer the census and that “fear of the state” could affect responses to most surveys in Iran. Therefore, the group uses anonymous, nonprobability, online surveys to measure religion in the Iranian population. In the U.S. context, nonprobability polls can produce misleading results. However, in an effort to make the Iranian results nationally representative, GAMAAN weights the results to census and workforce parameters. Across surveys conducted in 2020, 2022 and 2023, the research group finds that a considerable share of Iran’s population does not identify as Muslim.
GAMAAN’s surveys provide an intriguing perspective on Iran’s religious landscape, but they are not suitable for measuring religious change from 2010 to 2020. GAMAAN did not conduct surveys around 2010. Furthermore, GAMAAN’s findings have not yet been replicated by other research organizations. Some of the most anomalous results, such as a relatively large share of Zoroastrians, have led scholars to wonder whether “participating in surveys beyond the government’s control” gave discontented Iranians an opportunity for “performing alternative identity aspirations.”
Relies on online, non-probability sampling of people living in a repressive theocracy and calls itself “scientific”. Is shit on by repeatedly by both actual research groups and actual Iranian dissidents. Color me unimpressed by Gamaan’s “research”.
Here’s another bit from Free Iran Scholar’s Network:
GAMAAN’s survey on the 2026 protests and the 39-Day War presents itself as a large-scale measure of opinion inside Iran. A close examination of its technical design, sampling pathway, undisclosed controls, demographic imbalance, and politically selective interpretation shows something very different: a nontransparent online exercise whose findings are repeatedly arranged to promote monarchy, elevate Reza Pahlavi, legitimize external military pressure, and marginalize rival opposition forces.
So yeah, they openly want the return of the Shah. I’m sure they have no axes to grind in their ‘polling’ data to completely misrepresent Iranian’s opinions of either TFG or Netenyahu.
So what? Nobody here is suggesting that Iran’s government is popular with the Iranian people. It certainly is not. That doesn’t mean that the Iranian people can or will overthrow that government. Nor does it mean that providing the Iranian government with an external enemy (the USA) is more likely to result in the overthrow of that government and history suggests the opposite.
I understand why you think that the USA doing what it has recently done might result in the overthrow of the Iranian government. It’s a common mistake to make. But experience shows it is not what is likely to happen.
An inability to look past one’s immediate assumptions and consider the evidence no matter how counterintuitive is common, but ignorant and stupid.
You seem like you should be old enough to understand that the following are two completely different concepts:
“I want a particular result”
“I do not think that certain actions will lead to a particular result and may indeed be counter-productive”
Please tell me you understand the difference between these concepts. If you don’t, you are dumber than a stump. And if you don’t know why I am raising the need to give you a lecture on the difference between these concepts, you are also dumber than a stump.