Iran’s ‘Generation Normal’

This is also a big issue with reporting in Turkey. Sadly, humanity has yet to figure out how to keep rural types form falling into theocracy, hate, and discrimination. Insular cultures are often terrible and progress, at lead in the modern world, comes almost excursively from the bourgeois. Communism, be it Lenin/Stalin, Pol Pot, CCP, N Korea, etc all suffer from this mistake. They think the bourgeois is the problem, when in reality its the non-bourgeois who are.

Theocracies have the same problem. The Ayatollah's and Erdogan's voting base are the non-bourgeois.

This is usually why revolutions occur during times of famine. When they can't even feed your kids, then you have no choice but to seek 'radical' options.

I would not be surprised, emil. I am an American who spent a couple grand to visit Iran for two weeks. I am a wannabe Arabist (so it is fun to guess all shit on the walls) and even more wannabe Farsist (because it sounds hilarious, and more importantly because no one can keep it straight for me which side of the divide likes the word Persian in Persian, and Farsi, which is the A-rab name that stuck for the region). I went on to study Farsi in official courses abroad. I like to think I tried heard than the average douche touristo-journalist, but hard to tell.

In any event, as an American, I had a minder, as this is required for US toursits (you cannot simply walk around by yourself, you get caught by the police and it is a hassle). A cool dude, very educated finishing his doctorate work in German lit, and decided to pick up English and wing the tourism to have spending money. Unlike the kids in this article, he is like them in sentiment and style but from Nothern Iran (think Beverly Hills for the SV folks and Americans here), but he showed me the struggle their for kids like him was awful.

But there is a side of Iran that is not hipster and trendy like these dudes (I say this from the pictures, not the content of their opinions, but the opinions do it just the same for me). I will say the hipster kids are the ones I bonded with, and this is true of my time in Egypt, because their rebellion clued me into their personal politics, and that they were cynics like me. In Iran and Egypt, I saw much of the same. You as foreigner cling them to, and they to you, even though you hate the attraction. It says a lot about yourself, and them the same. These jouranlists amaze me when this goes unnoitced by them.

This to say, listen to this dude emil. Even Iran has hipsters. And it also has Republicans, just with cooler beards and weird congruences in politics with the American ones! I mean this as a joke, but is scary how minor the changes seem in the diverse insanity of human variation, to see in the Douglas Adams sense the universe is increasingly vast in the same shallow craziness.

Oh, and I recommend every American go there: you can see the receivng end of our foreign policy in all its splendor with the rabid terrorists!

It's a a sad truth that a single famine or economic depression can turn your whole life to risk-aversion and only valuing physical security.

You'll effectively ruin your life, next gen life, probably more. You survived but you died inside, like a zombie apocalypse.

What is your source?

http://www.amazon.com/Islam-Without-Allah-Religious-External...

This "Iran has been this way" bullshit is the same nonsense I called out in a previous article about how Hezbollah is some Iranian cleric + Syrian Asad backdoor meeting became a movement BS.

Iran's history is more complex than that.

TL;DR Iran was not Shi'a, it became Shi'a, for political and politicized reasons, and was racheted up and down over the last few centuries and the authoritarian isolationism is a product of that now.

So maybe I am wrong, but what do you base this on?

(There are many books on this topic, not just this one, I just know even this one was translated to Arabic by a reputable publisher; more factual academic works exist and this is the modern Western analysis of Iran coming from when I was in school 5-10 years back in these BS Arab/regional courses, and Iran is lumped in.)