In the real world it generally means to order, with the implication that there are consequences to failing to appear, and the consequences in this case are clear from the juxtaposition of wanting to shut up exiled journalists and summoning their families.
In mythology it typically implies incantations etc. forces the entity to appear.
There's nothing soft about that wording. If anything "to summon" is often used to imply a level of disdain and lack of legitimate basis that is not implicit in "to order"
To summon is the correct word in this case. The fantasy meaning comes from thee power politics between one that summons (usually: a king) and the one being summoned (usually the serf).
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/12/1166481
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
Maduro imprisoned and sentenced to maximum time (30 years) the son in law of the president elect Edmundo Gonzalez in the stolen 2024 election, simply to pressure Edmundo to stop denouncing the election sham.
It’s Sippenhaft.
Do you have similar presence, vulnerability, and defiance in spite of it? Or are you casting stones from a position of comfort while doing, comparatively, nothing?
"Our actions are guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence, and neutrality." - They are obviously not impartial nor neutral and this is just one example. Don't give them money unless they actually start acting as their mission statement states.
https://kagi.com/search?q=msf+statement
https://www.msf.org/msf-statement-sharing-staff-information-...
Frankly, if you hadn't lost faith in those already...
I'm no historian but this point doesn't sound very noteworthy unless it was the leadership who wanted that surrender. It took two bombs to make them surrender; they didn't surrender after the first.
Edit: actually this is much more nuanced than I think either of us make it sound. Japan did send out "peace feelers", but they were more like "we want peace but we don't accept your terms." The Japanese required that the US allow retention of the emperor, no occupation, self-conducted war crime trials, and even possibly keeping some of their conquered territory. The US wanted an unconditional surrender.
Furthermore they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities.
After which Japan surrendered.
This logic is like arguing 99% of a drug doesn’t do anything because the bug is only eradicated by the last effective molecule.
> they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities
This was considered. The bombs’ unreliability (and cost) made it a non-starter.
Well yes. The question is how many more would have had to die to get it. This question doesn’t have an easy answer. To the extent there are wrong ones, it’s anyone claiming confidence.
I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.
So yes, I do feel sorry for those who died. But make no mistake - whatever the result, their death will be in vain. Whoever ends up taking the reins in Iran will be as corrupt and as bad as the mullahs. It’s just that they will acquiesce to US priorities.
This looks maximally stupid given the American hardware in the region. But there may be internecine angles I’m missing. (Which factions benefit from American air strikes?)
Then it turned out to be bluster, there /was/ damage.[0]
It's /really/ hard to get good independent coverage of most politically charged events (The fog of war, etc)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_strikes_on_Al_Udeid_Ai...
This writer has developed a model of the situation
But frankly, Iran as it stands today is structurally similar to pre-1976 PRC, and requires an Iranian "Deng Xiaoping", but the only reason Deng even got as far as he did was because the Sino-Soviet Split made the PRC an attractive partner against the USSR and because it took someone with the stature of Mao to host a "Nixon in China" moment, which made partnering with America politically palatable.
The key economic and political institutions in Iran (Army, IRGC, Bonyads) would need to be incentivized to flip to being pro-EU and pro-America in order to sustain the semblance of democracy and secularism because frankly, Russia, China, India, portions of the Gulf, and much of ASEAN is fine working with Iran as it stands today because it is a critical regional power.
Turkiye, the UAE, Qatar, KSA, and Pakistan are probably the best regional players to push a gradual re-opening of Iran.
Short of an unignorable mass attack on the homeland, America has a proven track record of turning the other cheek.
No one should be. But only idiots, today, are not fearful of the largest and most-comprehensive war machine in human history.
> America’s response has been essentially non-existent
Are we starting the clock after the Israeli campaigns that established air superiority over all of Iran?
Yep, that’ll show them.
[1]: https://www.mintpressnews.com/iran-international-saudi-funde...
It’s a blatant translation of Islamic Regime propaganda websites.
see KhabarOnline, IRIB, etc.
When it comes to politically charged events (especially wars) both sides tend to only release articles that make themselves look brilliant, and the others as shite, and it's really REALLY hard to get an accurate picture of what's happening on the ground.
Purely yelling that everyone else is producing a "rag" isn't really helpful either, for the same reasons.
TL;DR iranintl is a rag (if you are a worker!) because it's by and for the Saudi aristocracy. But if you are a powerful aristocrat, then I'd say its an adequate news website.
This is government blackmail upon threat of death of any family they could find.
Or go to a few judges to try to get journalists imprisoned and when the judges say no that's not legal, they'll go to grand jury and just lie instead
Oh wait that's US not Iran, the tyrannical "lite" government
Sorry but we're going to need a more credible source than a propaganda site.
I think we should always default to skepticism no matter our priors, even if that ends up being wrong, its not a fruitless position compared to the alternative.
Every authoritarian regime does this, and some legitimate non-totalitarian governments do too.
What I’m saying is that a lot of people are extremely interested in seeing Iran fall and that Western media paid by Saudi Arabia has exactly zero credibility. So get better sources, that’s all.