Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. Sam “No It Won’t” Harris
there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we’ll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)
The best thing an unpopular regime can ask for is the enemy they have been bigging up as literally The Great Satan starts dropping bombs and missiles on the populace that hates it.
“If we bomb people and show their government can’t protect them, they will turn against the government and we will win” has been tried by the Germans on Londoners, the Allies on Germany and Japan, and the US on Serbia, and it didn’t work.
That’s cute, how about you find me a source that isn’t a spooky blob think tank?
Or better yet, enlist and we can rid the world of another Sam Harris fanboy
i don’t give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn’t be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct
While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn’t satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn’t like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you’re going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.
Let’s also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn’t exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.
Harris’s take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they’ll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.
And I’m not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?
Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.
the answer is definitely not to sanction and attempt to destabilize them on behalf of your two equally evil regional client states. The corollary to that is that you cannot produce the necessary conditions for future prosperity by destroying their economy in a way that harms the average person more than the elites.
And that’s assuming that we (the west) even want them to prosper or care about their future as a nation. Perhaps in an alternate universe, that would be the motivation for regime change but that is not and has never been the case.
From the outside? I’m gonna be honest and say I don’t know that you do.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn’t happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain’s clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.
Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.
@cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don’t see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn’t seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.
Starting a war now is not the answer, I’m pretty sure, but the question remains.
@Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Bear in mind they’re also locked in a long-term cold war with Saudi Arabia (sunni v. shi’ite islam) and Israel (increasingly resembling a religious ethno-supremacist fascist state with regional territorial ambitions). Peace with Iran is a non-starter unless Israel and the Saudis can be forced to back the fuck off at the same time.