• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle



  • If so, then it’s just as inaccurate and ridiculous to say that Uganda, India, Algeria and Morocco have regressed in their development. What part of that do you consider controversial? Are you unwilling/unable to have a negative attitude towards the current regime, while also acknowledging that they’ve done more to develop the country than the Pahlavis ever did? There’s no contradiction at all in that in my view, those are just the facts. Iran has raised its HDI by +40% in the last 35 years, going from 0.577 in 1990 to almost 0.8 in 2018, with the international average for countries with high HDI being 0.75. Iran went from non-existent research output during the Shah’s reign to being number 15 in the World, placing 4th in Asia after India, Japan and South Korea. All of this happened within the framework of the “theocratic shitheads”, despite the existence of socially repressive laws, and not during the Shah’s time when the laws were more relaxed and all of the West supported his regime in any way possible. He was just uninterested in channeling that support into things beneficial to the people of Iran, and suffered the consequences of that by steering the country into revolution. So just comparing a picture of a woman in a miniskirt in the seventies to the mandatory hijab of today and concluding that the country has regressed in general seems like the most uncharitable and shallow analysis possible. It’s not helpful in understanding the World at all, and leads to foolish slogans like “they hate us for our freedom”, which in turn leads to disastrous decisions like the invasion of Iraq.

    I don’t know why it should be so difficult to acknowledge that there are different degrees of bad, and the record suggests that the current “shitheads” are still far superior to the former. Nothing I wrote was meant to imply that the current regime doesn’t do a lot of bad stuff, there are no governments that don’t do bad stuff. To make sense of international politics at all, I think it’s essential to be able to compare different degrees of bad and grade on a curve. Just pointing and saying it’s all bad doesn’t seem like the best of ideas to me. But to each his own.






  • I agree, while the head of state is the more important and powerful position, the president certainly isn’t exactly powerless and handles the day to day business of government. But calling the leader the Ayatollah is slightly misleading. While it’s a requirement in the constitution that the head of state be an Ayatollah, Ayatollah itself is a religious rank, not a political one. So there are many Ayatollahs around, even more since the revolution as many believe that the rank has become somewhat inflated.


  • Jesus brother/sister, come down. Most people on Reddit are like most people everywhere, regular normal people with an extra dollop of asshole because they can hide behind a handle online. Many probably don’t know about other alternatives, or find the somewhat convoluted sign up processes to be intimidating. Or they sign up and don’t find the content all that varied or interesting. God knows I’ve been tempted to go back from time to time, but I refuse to use the garbage they call an official app. Drugged up lost causes with an insatiable need to be righteous seems like a somewhat drastic judgement to me. Unless you think that of people in general, in which case yes, they are like people in general.







  • Buddy, if you really believe there are active socialist politicians within the US system, I don’t know what to tell you.

    Also, it’s kind of wild to call China “as capitalist as the US and EU”. Russia sure, its current system is very predatory capitalist in its makeup, even if they have particularly Russian characteristics to it. I mean, it’s hard to imagine Biden have Musk or Bezos dressed down on live television while stripping them of their assets, the way Putin did with a number of oligarchs early in his rule. But it’s very capitalist all the same. But China as capitalist as the US? That’s just nonsense. State capitalist I could understand, but capitalist like the US is just plain nonsense.




  • You can’t understand why or how communists and socialists would be anti-US and anti-EU? Really? Seems fairly self evident to me that that’d be the case. Why would you expect anything but hostility towards the ultra capitalist systems in the US or EU from communists and socialists? Seems like an odd complaint, anti-capitalist sentiment is part of the core of the ideology as I see it.