Google 1970s Iran vs now. It’s an interesting contrast of how quickly societies can change; and some would argue, not towards the future but backwards.
Google 1970s Iran vs now. It’s an interesting contrast of how quickly societies can change; and some would argue, not towards the future but backwards.
If so, then it’s just as inaccurate and ridiculous to say that Uganda, India, Algeria and Morocco have regressed in their development. What part of that do you consider controversial? Are you unwilling/unable to have a negative attitude towards the current regime, while also acknowledging that they’ve done more to develop the country than the Pahlavis ever did? There’s no contradiction at all in that in my view, those are just the facts. Iran has raised its HDI by +40% in the last 35 years, going from 0.577 in 1990 to almost 0.8 in 2018, with the international average for countries with high HDI being 0.75. Iran went from non-existent research output during the Shah’s reign to being number 15 in the World, placing 4th in Asia after India, Japan and South Korea. All of this happened within the framework of the “theocratic shitheads”, despite the existence of socially repressive laws, and not during the Shah’s time when the laws were more relaxed and all of the West supported his regime in any way possible. He was just uninterested in channeling that support into things beneficial to the people of Iran, and suffered the consequences of that by steering the country into revolution. So just comparing a picture of a woman in a miniskirt in the seventies to the mandatory hijab of today and concluding that the country has regressed in general seems like the most uncharitable and shallow analysis possible. It’s not helpful in understanding the World at all, and leads to foolish slogans like “they hate us for our freedom”, which in turn leads to disastrous decisions like the invasion of Iraq.
I don’t know why it should be so difficult to acknowledge that there are different degrees of bad, and the record suggests that the current “shitheads” are still far superior to the former. Nothing I wrote was meant to imply that the current regime doesn’t do a lot of bad stuff, there are no governments that don’t do bad stuff. To make sense of international politics at all, I think it’s essential to be able to compare different degrees of bad and grade on a curve. Just pointing and saying it’s all bad doesn’t seem like the best of ideas to me. But to each his own.
Fucking what.
More people are literate now than were under the monarchist OR communist governments of Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan more ‘advanced’ now under the Taliban? Christ’s sake.
Oh, yes, as we all know, the policies of the Shah’s government definitely didn’t develop massive improvements in Iran’s economy, making a firm middle class which would later bite him in the ass.
So your argument is, what, that a shared photo on a community about sharing photos isn’t a sourced and cited essay?
You’re fucking kidding me. You don’t see how “Their government is bad but all governments are bad” is some vile fucking apologia for a totalitarian government? If I said that about the Shah, would it be just as valid? Was SAVAK torturing people just “Well, yes, Iran under the Shah was bad, but all governments are bad”?
Oh, cool, we’re grading countries relative to their circumstances? Cool!
Let’s compare women’s rights in Iran to… women’s rights in Iran. That sounds like a fair curve to grade women’s rights in Iran on to me.
Here’s a link based on data also from the UNDP, but from a couple years later and going back further. Except for a few years around that revolution, it looks like a pretty stable trend, which isn’t really damning or praising for the progress under either regime, imo.