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Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

bbc.com

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Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#441

Post by thrance »

fortzi wrote: post #222
dataflow wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine > I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas activist Palestine ≠ Hamas Pro-Palestinian ≠ Pro-Hamas If you genuinely don't believe a significant number of people support the former but not the latter, I... don't even know what to tell you. It certainly says a lot that you can neither distinguish these two nor believe anyone else sees a distinction. >…

Maybe you should ask a few Palestinians before making such statements. Polls made by respected Palestinian surveyors show immense support for Hamas by Palestinians [1]. If you dig inti the polls, you’ll find great support in continuing the armed conflict. I’ll add: to the last man standing. While I agree with you that Hamas and the Palestinians are not one thing, Hamas would not be able to operate the way it did (and…

Yes, and if you poll Israelis about their views of Palestinians, you'll find that the majority want to exterminate them all. What does that say about Israel? Fucking nothing except that we shouldn't be funding either of them. And we aren't arming Hamas.

What matters is that pro-Palestinians aren't calling for the extermination of Israel, while Zionists are clearly calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Wanting the war to end does not automatically make you a Hamas terrorist, obviously.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#442

Post by martin-t »

don_esteban wrote: post #390
martin-t wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad. It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states. Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not mo…

Violence is a sometimes necessary tool. The problem is that it is routinely misused (especially by those who have overwhelming power), and the cases where it is really needed are really, really, really rare. Even in cases when it appears that the use of violence is justified, the long term consequences (e.g. on culture and mentality, and hence ultimately on normal daily life) are usually such that it would have been…

> the one deciding

And that's why it's important to establish publicly known and accepted rules about this. Nobody suggests one person deciding this, usually people who imagine this situation have some issues of their own.

But the threat of absolutely any citizen having a decent chance of successfully killing a dictator would probably lead to democratization of power - individuals would not be attracted to having so much power they would likely become targets and we'd hopefully see more effort towards establishing more direct means of decision making.

> This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?

No need for insults, it's a simplification. It's obviously a spectrum. But broadly speaking, people who regularly intentionally harm others for their gain or pleasure (or see nothing wrong with doing it or support those who do) are considered bad. People who go out of their way to help others are good. The rest is neutral. Most people are neutral - don't see injustice or wrongdoing as their problem until it directly negatively affects them.

And obviously, there are people who do both a lot of good and a lot of bad. I consider those bad because more often than not, they only do the good things to gain support or compensate so they can get away with the bad things.

That's my personal opinion and experience. Other people could for example argue for simply summing up the good and the bad and the total would neatly categorize them. Intent also matters and that's even more complex but usually unprovable from the outside.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#443

Post by thrance »

hunterpayne wrote: post #234
Rapzid wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine... > I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas... See how quickly things have turned from the first post manufactured to seem reasonable? No more "Curious" and "just asking questions". How many pro-Hamas friends can a person have?! I don't know a single pro-Hamas person myself. I believe you are being taken for a ride friend.

That's projection. Because it is nearly impossible in practice split support as you claim you are. HAMAS is the government in Gaza. They intercept any and all aid that isn't administered directly to Palestinians. Also the questionable version of the history of the region that you have to believe (or be completely ignorant of the history) to support the Palestinians is entirely a HAMAS narrative. If you actually knew…

So what you're saying is that Palestinians all deserve to die because they gave their support to HAMAS when their neighbor was slowly colonizing their land and expropriating them. Meanwhile, the US should provide Israel with as much weapons and funding as necessary to help them achieve their overt genocidal agenda. And the people that call for the killings to end are actually just terrorists that you don't have to listen to. Got it.

Speaking of projection, damn...

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#444

Post by SanjayMehta »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #435
SanjayMehta wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Iran has oil.

I think it has more to do with nukes than oil. North Korea is a good example that once you have nukes, no one can touch you. No one wants more nukes, especially in the hands of IR, in this world.

I have no sympathy for the Iranian regime but the US' unilateral actions are worse. At least the Iranians mind their own business.

At this point, every country which has natural resources which the US might want to steal should have nukes.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#445

Post by thrance »

Rover222 wrote: post #420
pydry wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I insist, as does the United Nations.

Yes, both unwilling to have an honest discussion.

Have you considered that maybe your opinion was wrong? What would it take for the situation in Gaza to be called a genocide and why isn't it already one in your eyes?

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#446

Post by dyauspitr »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #294
dyauspitr wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad it didn’t work in 1989 because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded. At the same time I don’t want China to succeed and export its brand of capitofascism purely because I don’t think most other countries can find their benevolent dictator. The cognitive dissonance is wild right now.

> because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology. Counterfactuals are always hard in history. But we literally have the nationalist government's democratic, capitalist successor kicking in way above its weight class economically and technologically. It's fair…

It’s much easier to increase the GDP per capita for 20 million people compared to 1.4 billion especially when Taiwan started with a 10x higher GDP per capita. If anything they have lost a significant percentage of their lead. I don’t think what worked in Taiwan would work in China because the scale is astounding.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#447

Post by remarkEon »

dataflow wrote: post #427
remarkEon wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re overwhelmingly white, conservative, American, and usually are religious. We may be indirectly saying the same thing. The Palestinian cause is wrapped up in a number of other issues where the demographic overlap is not likely to include the same people I observe being upset about the lack of coverage of this protest movement in Iran. I don’t have a good explanation for that phenomenon, other than the p…

I'm not saying you're wrong (or right), but that you're simply jumping to a much more complicated explanation than what I'm seeing. My point was much more straightforward than that. All I'm saying is: you addressed (b), but what about (a)? That is, if you believe this comparison is merited, then surely Iranians would at least be making it themselves reasonably frequently? Now I don't know I'm living in a bubble, or i…

In fairness (to myself, I guess) I did start this thread out by saying that I do think this is more complex.

With regard to your question, my mistake I thought I implied an answer to (a). Of the people I see complaining about this, a very very small fraction are actually Persian. It's really just one person, and she's someone I met through my wife while living in LA. There's not that many Iranian ex-pats living in the US relative to ... people who are not Iranian ex-pats, I guess, so if the point you're making is "Iranians who do not live under the regime don't care about this criticism" it's certainly possible you are correct, as I have n = 1 evidence to the contrary. My commentary was more on the general case, though, and I'm not sure how meaningful it is to try to discern the exact percentage of "Iranians not living in Iran are upset the media isn't covering the regime murdering its own people". This would be par for the course, no? It's not like it would be a surprise. So, what does it matter if the percentage of Iranians complaining about this issue is high, or low?

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#448

Post by JumpCrisscross »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #327
gambutin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the Arab conquest of Iran after 633.

It’s colonialism. Edit: a modern example of it is the introduction of arabic language in Iranian schools after the revolution because arabic is the language of the Quran. A similar thing is done by China w.r.t. uighurs, which are not allowed to teach their language, and culture in schools, it has to be only Mandarin. Or, in Turkey, where by constitution it is prohibited to use any non-Turkish language as a language o…

That isn’t colonialism or occupation, it’s straight up annexation. Romulus didn’t colonize Remus’s hills, they joined them into the whole as intended (and eventual) equals.

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#449

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #337
ViktorRay wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tolstoy was Russian. Russia is not a Western country. And Tolstoy was influenced by non-Western philosophical and religious figures.

> Russia is not a Western country. Russian culture, as it is practiced in the country's power centers, both historically and today is absolutely Western. It may not be liberal western culture, but guess what, there's no shortage of Western countries that have been, or are, quite illiberal. For a simple example, MAGA is western culture. United Russia isn't at all different from it, it just has a different coat of pain…

[deleted]

Re: Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown

#450

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dataflow wrote: post #359
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interpretation reeks of Western naivete The author is "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1]. > Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful. People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Ph…

>> They were provoked by the U.S. president, who promised support to take on the institutions, but that support never materialized > Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope. Sorry, but you're just wrong in this case. The US president absolutely had a huge impact here. Meaning it wasn't…

> if he hadn't said and done what he did, the protests and deaths absolutely would not have occurred at the same scale

The Guardian interviewing a handful of people, one of whom is a random protester in Iran, doesn’t establish this absolutely in any serious framework. The fact that the protests have recurred should give pause to your hypothesis.

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