veqq
5d ago
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
The plot of Heinlein's 1940 The Roads must Roll
veqq
5d ago
How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?
to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately
I 100% believe waiting for further developments is better. Unless you are a direct actor, I believe there is negative value and insight following the news minute by minute. Without greater context, everything looks random and chaotic, offering no clearer understanding of the world. My own community transformed into a news feed and we've faced insight collapse, although some lovely contributors track less popular things, contextualizing them etc. illustrating the problem precisely.
Iran launched missiles 30 mins ago. The ceasefire is over or rather is between certain groups, since multiple entities share/negotiate sovereignty within Iran. Let's see what this actually means, next week.
veqq
8d ago
Persians rising up against the Azeri controlled state, is more plausible, since in a purely national lens, Azeris currently control the government as both the current president and supreme leader are Azeri. (I don't think either will happen nor that nationalities are a useful lens here, because there are so many and very few people are "only" "Persian".)
veqq
8d ago
mass minority uprising against the Persians
Azeris staff most of the government, presidents, generals, ayatollahs etc. There is no racial animosity here.
veqq
9d ago
We have somewhere, somehow, but not somewhy nor somewhen.
If we had all of them, they would stop being words, with separate dictionary entries!
Holding uncouth, unnumbered unwords like amniocentesis as English vocabulary to call it richer is but a tawdry lie. (Indeed, the artificial medical vocabulary is a shared system used by many languages, with consistent prefixes, roots and suffixes.) While it is good and noble, that English speakers ventured around the world and named its bounties and wonders, perhaps a more interesting metric is how many given groups of speakers now, how many are used in day to day communication or literature etc.
A Rebuttal to Which Language has the Most Words
But it's easy enough to go through another language's dictionary and make Hungarian versions of everything. That's how most languages were modernized during 19th century nationalism in Europe and Asia. Translators of scientific documents may coin even newer words etc. But most people do not know them. I don't know all the bones of the body, various tissues or really ...biology. I do not know fancy woodworking terminology nor native English plants from our ancestral homeland, various brandles and burndlebushesand eeroughberries and what have you.
veqq
9d ago
is this guy not worried at all about his future employment prospects?
I've known many who openly state such views, who simply get jobs in the Middle East, Latin America, China or Central Europe. Many places are apathetic or friendly to such beliefs. (There are plenty of justifications, often internally consistent, often not, which vary by situation.)
veqq
10d ago
So you don't mean that Dewey talked to a small, wealthy, and unrepresentative set and made some mistake? Do you mean that the reporter, Arthur Sears Henning or the newspaper made this error? Or sample bias in early-available data?
Iran has 80% VPN penetration. How is that a "small, wealthy, and unrepresentative set"? Although I can be wrong, I'm specifically stating that this isn't just a narrow elite - that the Iranian people are majority friendly/not anti-American islamists.
Thomas Dewey
What are you referring to? I didn't understand but would like to!
veqq
10d ago
For context, I mentioned that I support regime change/oppose the government because people misunderstood my criticism of the government as "defending". I don't especially advocate for Cruz/Trump driven-regime change though I'd pray for its success.
Hussein was secular, Gaddafi was secular, Assad was secular...
Indeed. The powers that be do not care nor wish for human flourishing (to the extent they had good policies). Replacing the Khmer Rouge with something less bad is a net win for humanity, even if international recognition doesn't improve.
No total regime collapse? No neighboring countries swooping in to setup a puppet state? No civil war? No refugee wave?
I was describing the current situation, to explain apathy/lack of significant reformist movements. A civil war would naturally create a large refugee wave, but we don't know whether continued force will cause regime change nor what any of this looks like. As I stated before, I'm skeptical of the current admin's ability to engineer a positive outcome.
Syria ... "doctors and engineers"
Syrians were at a "higher" cultural and educational level, than other Arab countries. The "issue"'s that they supported the regime and didn't emigrate, which motivated groups deftly left out.
veqq
10d ago
genuinely sticking to the claim that the average Israeli citizen hates Western civilization more than the average Iranian citizen does?
Yes. I chose my words carefully. N.b. I don't "hate Jews" as someone above assumed. I just see that Israelis and Israeli media doesn't cargocult and follow the West, seeing it as the best thing in the world, as Iranians do. I can easily find statistics (which correspond with my (admittedly probably, but not intentionally motivated) beliefs and first-hand anecdata that Iranians are less religious than Israelis, with demographic trends only accelerating this, considering Hasidic demographics etc. who are not inline with what you call "Western cultural norms". But I oppose these "Western cultural norms" and see them as anti-Western^TM. I believe their pushers hate my people.)
gay sex
Well... Maryam Molkara convinced Khomeini to issue a fatwa in 1987, so that in Iran the government will (forcibly) pay for your sex change, so it's not gay, anymore. Only Thailand "leads". Overall, there's a cottage industry of cosmetic surgeons, with 2.5 million nose jobs per year.
what do you think is going to happen
It's hard to say as I don't know what the extent of the "stimulus" will be. I just want the regime to change, I don't know what kind of push is needed or where it will go.
Iran has significant brain drain as education levels are high and emigration's unrestricted. I see between 3 and 5 million emigrants for a population of 80 million 2010 and ~90 million today. I'd guestimate emigration up a bit, just for Turkey (official numbers in the ...5 digits), which has big communities of Persian speaking shop keepers, lawyers, hostels, restaurants etc. then massive communities of Azeri Iranians, who receive expedited Turkish citizenship. (N.b. much of the Islamic Republic's leadership are Azeri. Azeri Turkish and Turkey Turkish are like British and American English. There are more Azeris in Iran than Azerbaijan.) Particularly in the last few years, international students have stopped going to Turkey, yet the universities catering to them have stronger enrollment than ever, all from Iran. In the case I knew intimately, 1 of 200 foreign students in a department were Iranian Azeris (the other was Persian.) Anyway, the commonality is that most people of means or ability leave.
All things being equal, I'd expect some sort of secular military government, where the army puts down the IRGC. I'm not sure who'd lead it. Because Trump killed the liberal political movement, which spent its capital to push the nuclear deal through. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be much of a political base, as the youth are depoliticized/have no faith in change. I believe people are less "political" than in Russia on average, where people will at least riff of crazy ideas and conspiracies. Many people try to build identities around pre-Islamic Iran, being totally Western or... But most just don't. There are interesting parties like the technocratic "Executives of Construction" with low electoral support.
Anyway, I'm not sure what precisely would cause the regime to change. I don't believe the current US government is terribly competent or able to nudge things along, but Israel's success is shocking and impressive. Perhaps something can come out of it. Continued airstrikes degrading the security state and ideological forces, but not state forces, could lead to the military or civilian-military forces overthrowing the current regime. However, I've seen a few strikes on army bases, but have no clue who/what was targeted. It could easily devolve into civil war or see the state continue, as is.
re: the liberal movement, Rouhani (though a cleric, with a Scottish PhD with a credible plagiarism claim) campaigned on rebuilding relations with the West, personal rights etc. which saw the civilian administration asserting itself against the IRGC. After that project was destroyed, the regime brought back the morality police etc. Although these days, you still see women walking around without a hijab in Shiraz, Tehran etc. Yet to some extent, the current president Pezeshkian is a moderate (fun fact, he proposed free Turkish education in Iran) relative to his opponent, but nowhere near as much as Rouhani or Khatami, still he (as well as many politicians) opposed the governments reactions to protestors at different points, calling the repression unconstitutional etc. (before backtracking...) He's had women vice presidents (besides many governors etc.), and even a Sunni!
Sometimes the US pays lipservice to the fact that there's a civilian government and state military with a clergy and militia on top, but doesn't actually focus its efforts fighting the ruling clergy.
veqq
11d ago
Latin, Russian, Spanish- they all just come out and say things
Classical Latin had a rather small vocabulary (and little direct ability to discuss the abstract, instead personifying or loaning from Greek) but Russian and Spanish are very rich and less direct than English (though many are functionally illiterate, though if anything that means Spanish speakers have more room for crude innuendo...)
defenders of the proposition that rogue/irredentist regimes
You're responding to a post where I say foreign militias are holding the regime in place, which the people don't support. How do you construe that as defending?! Even the "30%" (I think that's a motivated number, but directionally correct that a majority aren't) of Shia in the country don't support the regime, with grand Ayatollas opposing Khamenei. I'm a am pro-regime change in Iran. @Hadad
Two understood it the same way, so my writing is the common denominator, but... I don't understand.
Most Iranians are not religious and do not support the government, which sics foreign militias to oppress them. I speak Persian and have spent much time among them. Every couple of years there are massive riots, with thousands of deaths, as people fight back.
Even then, much of the Shia clergy opposes the regime; Khamenei isn't even a marja let alone the first among equals nor most popular religious leader within Iran itself. To concede a bit, at any rate they're friendlier than the Saudis and Emiratis, Shia are far more compatible and friendly with our world (but again, religiosity's similar to Czechia. Here's a survey giving 30% as Shia, only 40% as Muslim at all.)
strictly bans Western music and most other Western cultural output - @Hoffmeister25
Khatami relaxed that, already. Besides nowadays, everyone has a VPN. You can talk to plenty of Iranians right now, even with the attempted internet lock down, even if this isn't real. Personally, I'd only wish success to someone banning Disney, rap etc.
To react to your bailey, @The_Nybbler haven't many in this community opposed this government and arana imperii, ascribing modernity's ills to it?
It would help to identify our enemies first. Iranians are friendlier to Western Civilization than Israelis.
veqq
11d ago
I would have guessed it's another Iraq, but it's two of them.
Iraq's population has nearly doubled since 2000, like Afghanistan and Gaza. So Iran is actually 4 2003 Iraqs.
veqq
11d ago
if [Afghanistan] had only half their population
Afghanistan's population more than doubled during American occupation, from 20 to 42-5 million. The Gaza strip similarly went from 1 to 2.1 million, at the same time.
veqq
14d ago
for alcohol or drug addicts
https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/modern-freedom-means-being-a-slave-to-impulses/
ayatollah overthrew the shah
Though the Iranian regime (and neocons) prefer this narrative, communists (and fellow travelers) and friends overthrew the Shah, then islamists stabbed them in the back (cf. the Bolsheviks). The Shah had thousands of communists in his prisons, not islamists. Khomeini was only invited back to Iran, after the Shah lost power, by the new civilian-military government. It took them a few years (until 1982) to definitively wrestle control, executing most of the military leadership and various leftists. Worse yet, the US helped Khomeini enter. Two examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mojahedin_Organization_of_Iran#1979_Iranian_Revolution_and_subsequent_power_struggles and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudeh_Party_of_Iran#Islamic_Republic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_guerrilla_groups_of_Iran
Tangentially, Mossadegh also backstabbed the communists:
Next the royalist officers moved to overthrow Mossadeq. On August 16, three days after the shah left for the Caspian to take a “rest cure,” Colonel Nasiri of the Imperial Guards arrived at the premier’s doorstep with a royal decree replacing Mossadeq with Zahedi as premier. The attempt, however, was a complete fiasco, for the pro-Mossadeq chief of the army, tipped off by the Tudeh military network, surrounded Nasiri and his Imperial Guards as they approached the premier’s residence. The following day the shah fled to Bagdad, the and the Tudeh crowds poured into the streets, destroying royalist statues. In some provincial towns, such as Rasht and Enzeli, the Tudeh took over the municipal buildings. The next morning, Mossadeq, after a fateful interview with the American ambassador, who promised aid if law and order was reestablished, instructed the army to clear the streets of all demonstrators. Ironically, Mossadeq was trying to use the military, his past enemy, to crush the crowd, his main bulwark. Not surprisingly, the military used this opportunity to strike against Mossadeq. On August 19, while the Tudeh was taken aback by Mossadeq’s blow against them, Zahedi, commanding thirty-five Sherman tanks, surrounded the premier’s residence, and after a nine-hour battle captured Mossadeq. Acoustical effects for the event were provided both by Sha'yban “the Brainless,” who led a noisy demonstration from the red-light district to the bazaar, and by the gendarmerie, who transported some eight hundred farm hands from the royal stables in Veramin to central Tehran. - Iran Between Two Revolutions - Ervand Abrahamian
Warhammer books were packing heat
Generally, they're not particularly memorable 4 hour reads. But the first 2 Fabius Bile books (Promogenitor, Clonelord) are solid. Maybe Eisenhorn? The Infinite and the Divine! Fehervari's Requiem Infernal has some of the best prose in the past 100 years (mixed with vague, wordy evocativity) and sits with you for weeks after; his others are good too.
veqq
17d ago
The whole movement is bankrupt. While I theoretically understand "imperfect instrument" or "who cares about corruption if they still solve problems", it's literally not clear that MAGA is better for libertarians, conservative christians or anyone with a desire for intergenerational stability.
Nietzsche's Will to Power (expressing a sense of agency, freedom, self-sovereignty)
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