If so, then it’s just as inaccurate and ridiculous to say that Uganda, India, Algeria and Morocco have regressed in their development.

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.

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.

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 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.

So your argument is, what, that a shared photo on a community about sharing photos isn’t a sourced and cited essay?

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.

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”?

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.

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.