171–180 of 844 posts
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It is always different when a foreign group kills children/starves over extended time like Israel did to Palestinians, as opposed to a dictatorship (think Syria before its revolution succeeded or Iran right now) kills their populace. Syrias civil war cost 600-800k lives by many figures. It is difficult to cover civil unrest or civil wars within the same group, vs. genocide or wars between nations. Think just of how h…
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Disgusting to make that joke on a forum that strives towards reason and enlightenment. Disgusting to make light of 36,500 regular people potentially dead while seeking freedom and justice.
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The crucial difference is that the US is in no way supporting Iran but was and is heavily supporting Israel. So a protest in the US to stop that support is wortwhile. A protest to stop non-existent support is pointless.
You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures. You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.
> You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures.
If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering. I'm not sure why you'd expect to see people out on the streets asking for more of that.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.
True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.
I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing."
https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
That's crazy. That's like ~40% of the deaths in the current gaza war, except over just 2 days instead of 2 years.
There was a lot of death in 2 days but the revolution started about a month ago so it's not just those two days. I think you could compare Gaza to a single Iranian city, but Iran is much larger than this. Another important distinction is that - no matter what your beliefs are - civilians aren't the target in Gaza, but they clearly are the target in Iran. If the civilians had weapons, it would be a different story.
"No matter what your beliefs are"? Some people believe that Israel is trying to make the people in Gaza starve. If that was true, how would they not be a target?
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You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures. You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.
Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to. > You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures. If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their…
The point i was responding to was whether such protests [for Iranians] are pointless, and i asserted there can certainly be a point to them.
Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests because they seem just as popular in countries that dont provide aid to Israel, and people seemed to care a lot more about Gaza than say Iraq, despite much much more tax dollars going there and much more people dead. Nonetheless people are going to care about different issues to different extents for whatever reason and I'm not objecting to that.
> If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering.
I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.
Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.
> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing."
That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.
If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
How is this possible without explosives? Even with vehicle mounted machine guns it seems like a crazy high number. Did the protestors get boxed in somehow? And across so many locations, that seems to require a crazy amount of coordination to kill so many in so little time.
Quite a lot of detail in the nyt article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how...
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It is a source run by expatriate Iranians of the diaspora.. the fact that so many people just discount their point of view it's pretty frustrating. If you speak to Iranians that you work with it's pretty illuminating
It’s similar to how so many people dismiss Cuban American views on Cuba just because the cuban americans were mostly the ownership class that had to flee the revolution.
Leftists, with Western pro-Khomeini protests, not just in Iran, with the usual involvement from the KGB, and the CIA opposing, brought Khomeini to power with claims that he would bring a communist revolution. As per tradition in a communist revolution, first thing he did once in power is execute communist allies. Of course, Iran is still allied with the KGB (now FSB) and Moscow, currently delivering weapons and weapon designs for use in the war against Ukraine.
You could also point out that Iran is kind-of socialist, in the sense that the state controls, at minimum, 70% of the economy, and all those "companies" are directly controlled by the government.
So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:
https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...
Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
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I can’t even imagine how this could be done. Nazi concentration camps would have had trouble killing that many in 2 days.
that's because they weren't shooting crowds already assembled in the streets and going into hospitals nationwide to find the injured. Nazi Germany was aiming to maintain plausible deniability in the concentration camps for as long as possible, while parallel competing plans for what to do with the population were being explored and failing. (there were other solutions before and alonside the final solution)
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Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to. > You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures. If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their…
> Sure, but you can understand why US citizens and European citizens don't feel the same urge to go out and protest something that their taxes don't directly contribute to. The point i was responding to was whether such protests [for Iranians] are pointless, and i asserted there can certainly be a point to them. Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests becau…
> If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
I don't really see how you reached that conclusion from the quote. He's not saying it would be inconvenient, he's saying such an action could lead to a worse outcome for the people of the country. If he didn't care about their human rights, and was happy for them to be bombed, he'd go ahead and do it. You might disagree with his reasoning, but it's not showing lack of care.