Parastoo Ahmadi sang while wearing a sleeveless dress during a concert livestreamed on her YouTube channel in December 2024. Iran’s laws ban public performances by women and require them to wear headscarves and modest clothing.
Iran’s judiciary launched proceedings against the 29-year-old after the video went viral, gaining millions of views, saying the performance was “in violation of the country’s legal and cultural regulations”.



Women are better off under the Taliban than under US occupation?
US intervention created the Taliban
Yeah I know Afghanistan was really at the forefront of womens’ rights before the American showed up
https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/afghanistan-1960-bill-podlich-photography-112__880.jpg
Before US - Taliban alliance
This photo is from the late 60s, so 25 years before the Taliban was created.
Because US intervention began with the Taliban. 🙄
If you want to only look at the US intervention in Afghanistan holistically, then sure, you can make an argument that overall it has been negative, especially given the disastrous pull-out.
But to me a “case of Western intervention” is not the complete history of one country’s interactions with another - it can be divided into separate cases. US funding of the mujahideen was one case, and the US overthrow of the Taliban was another case. Not disconnected cases. But maybe this explains a point of view that you hadn’t considered when you wrote your original comment.
The other issue here is that when you responded on US intervention in West Germany you seemed only to really focus on Operation Paperclip. But viewed from further out, that didn’t really impact the BRD significantly in comparison to the huge effort put towards rebuilding.
It strikes me though that probably you didn’t mean quite so absolute a statement, which to me seems outlandishly, unrealistically strong. There’s no way you’ve done the level of historical research necessary to really conclude that with any great confidence, right? Surely you’ve seen a lot of instances of harmful interventions and concluded, “they’re all, or at least mostly, harmful”? Maybe that’d be a statement a lot of people could agree with.
I think you have to look at overall outcomes not what it was like under the occupation. In Afghanistan things were probably slightly better in the larger population centers during the occupation for the average person and especially for women. In the rural settings things were worse from the constant skirmishes. And as we saw basically everything was reversed as soon as the troops left.
probably slightly better