Iranian woman who bravely stood on a pillar box in Tehran waving her hijab is missing

Assuming this is true, how and why does this happen?

 

Worse yet we did it to help the British oil companies who apparently couldn't be bothered to do their own dirty work.

 

I'm an atheist, personally. I don't care what anyone else believes as long as they aren't a theocrat or a fascist.

 

I am responding to what somebody else ranted,.. thank you very much.

 

Our military is an agent for the international financiers and Oligarchs that run the Establishment. These folks own the defense contractors (Military Industrial Complex if you prefer), the banks, Energy corps, Transnational food companies, the healthcare Oligopolies .. and most everything else that is not nailed down.

Peace is not good for business and there are other economic reasons - economic hegemony. US foreign policy is almost always out of economic motivation and almost never for the moral platitudes used to justify these actions.

Sometimes the economic motivation is readily apparent ... other times it is not but, what is always clear is that our military activities are rarely for the stated moral platitudes.

I am not sure exactly why we have been so committed to the cause of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in general. What I do know is that in at least 5 wars (4 in the two decades and 3 in the last decade) we have been firmly on the side of Al Qaeda.

You can read a more detailed summary in post 22 of the thread below.
http://www.politicalforum.com/index...-cypriot-waters.526203/page-2#post-1068712080

What is perhaps more disconcerting is the general media silence in relation to putting the story together for the US public. Sure you can find individual accounts of the older examples (Afghanistan and Iraq) but not for Libya, Syria, Yemen.

Even stuff that was reported early on in these conflicts by the NYT and others... is intentionally forgotten if it conflicts with the Establishment false narrative of the day.

 

So, you are against Muslims being president or holding public office and against

anyone who wants to be a dictator suppressing all opposition. Sounds good.

 

I can't disagree.

I think we use others where we can to achieve our goals. Seems that way.

I don't get Yemen or Libya, but Syria could be to keep them from attacking Israel, though that hasn't worked perfectly. I think Yemen has pirates attacking vessels and making it difficult to trade with others. Libya, except for Khadafy, meh.

Agree.

Thank you.

 

I take no issue with Muslims holding public office. Muslims have a wide variety of political viewpoints.

 

It's the truth. He was losing the military, the religious establishment, the economic elite, the political elite, and the people. Foreign powers cannot simply fabricate successful revolutions unless the political landscape is already tilted towards one.

The fear, not unjustified, was that he would turn to the Tudeh for support.

It worked out okay. The Iranians got something they desperately lacked, an assertive government, willing to bow neither to the Americans nor the Russians.

Had someone like the Ayatollah come to power a generation or two earlier Iran would've been a world power.

While most in American leadership have seen the Islamic Revolution as a significant problem, we will come to see at as a gift rather than a curse.

 

theocracy......

is bad

 

No, you just don't like it. Me either.

But the important fact isn't the theocratic nature of rule, it was the new geopolitical outlook.

Imagine if the Iranians had been more assertive during and between the World Wars. The concessions they could have extracted from the British and Russians could included the following: The Persian Gulf region, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and parts of Central Asia. They would have dominated the oil market at the height of it's importance.

But the Iranians were not assertive. Their elite found it easier to go along to get along.

 

That doesn't mean much to me because I detest states, especially what they do when they get up to geopolitics

 

Interesting comments. I don't feel totally comfortable expressing my views on the subject, as they might be a bit unorthodox. The one thing I disagree with you, however, is the idea that Iran would become a world power if the revolution had occurred a generation earlier. I think it is the reverse: I think Iran would have become a genuine world power if the revolution had occurred a bit later. The aspirations of the Iranian revolution outstripped Iran's abilities and potential in the late 1970s, but I believe within a decade or two, they could have been more realistic.

I am not religious, but the Iranian revolution did represent what you alluded to: the quest by Iran to be genuinely independent. The main slogans of the revolution (Independence, Liberty, Islamic Republic) were all fine too, even if I am not religious per se and would have liked the latter slogan to be somewhat different. But Iran, which had been a monarchy over several millennia of history, could have developed a far more profound system of government based on much of the rubric envisioned by its current structures: a system that would allow representative government under rule of law under the "guardianship" of a jurist/philosopher king chosen, not by heredity, by by an Assembly of Experts (cf. Plato's Republic). A little tweaking of some of the elements in Iran's constitutional structure and the way the power is divided, and a leaner document in some other ways, and Iran could have established itself as an ideological, economic and military power. The revolution, however, at least in my mind, was a couple of decades too early, not too late.

 

Thats an odd way of looking at it

Iranian women were more free under the shah who was a US ally

The mullahs are throwbacks that would have reented liberalization under mossadegh just as much as they resented the shah

 

It's how the world really works. Even during the revolutions of 1848, for example, geopolitical concerns trumped ideological concerns. Liberal and radical Croats found themselves allying with conservative royalist Austrians in a battle against liberal and radical Hungarians. Liberal Italians found themselves taking up the banner of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.

Communism didn't result in a single geopolitical entity, but in three blobs dominated by three ethnic groups: Russians, Han Chinese, and Serbians. The tensions between them ratcheted up quickly.

I respect Marx as the first man to really attempt to formulate a theory of history, but the neo-Marxists are partially on the right track. Identity is far more fluid, and far more complicated, than Marx's economic relations. The result will be large groups of humans distrusting and finding themselves in conflicts with other groups of humans.

This will not change in the near future, and probably never.

 

Neo-marxism isn't a thing. I'm more annoyed by the implication that such a body of thought exists, that anyone has ever identified it as a coherent position, or that anyone has ever described themself as such far more than anything else.

That said: The ultimate aim of folks like me is the complete destruction and obsolescence of the nation-state. We don't care what happens between nation states. Identity is a function of difference, and in a world where the social functions that create difference between people are rapidly dissolving the concept of identity becomes more and more irrelevant on a global scale.

 

Sure it is, just like "Protestantism" is a thing. It's a wide net, but it catches something specific.

The general position is under this mish-mash: The theories of Marx can be mashed with other ways of looking at the world to approximate some fuller worldview. It usually revolves around analysis of social hierarchy, economic and especially otherwise.

It was necessary in the post-colonial world. I know that you probably don't think such a thing exists, but it does. Not fully, but in an important sense. Especially as it relates to Marxism.

I think we're seeing just the opposite. Identity is becoming MORE relevant. We're in closer contact than ever before. The former Yugoslavians will tell you, close and constant contact are not precursors of peaceful coexistence.

But maybe you're right. Maybe the End of History is nigh.

We'll see.

 

Maybe not by design, but the status and position of women in Iranian society has grown by leaps and bounds since the revolution. On the surface, that might not seem to be the case, but all the more important data and facts show this to be the true. Of course, if your litmus test on progress on women's rights is focused on whether a minority are allowed to mimic the latest western fashion and follow the same cultural norms, then yes: Iran has gone backwards. But as much as some might not realize it reading the headlines, and even if this wasn't by design, and admitting some of the archaic rules and limitations that exist in Iran, ultimately the fact is: as a result of the revolution, Iranian women have been empowered in ways that no amount of dicta from above and forced westernization could accomplish.

 

There are marxist perspectives on different aspects of social hierarchy, but these perspectives don't break with Marx in any meaningful sense, but rather examine how things like homophobia and racism interact with class. It makes no sense to equate all forms of social egalitarianism with marxism just because they have an overlap zone.

I think you'll find that young people generally have no reason to really give a **** about their country except through the lenses of self-interest and a misplaced nostalgia for an idyllic racially homogenous past that never was. We don't have communities. We don't have functioning social institutions. The closest thing we have to a town hall is watching people intentionally give themselves ringworm on snapchat or whatever dumbass trend is in. We don't know what it means to be part of a functioning society at all.

 

They absolutely do. One cannot take a simple, causal theory of history and insert non-causal or more complicated factors without it becoming a completely different theory.

This may be where we differ. I don't view Marxism as a "form of social egalitarianism" at all. I view it as a theory of history. This, I think, is where Marx shined, where he was really on to something. A Copernicus of history.

But like Copernicus his view was much too simplistic and, ultimately, wrong.

I think you'll find that you're taking your experience within your subculture and stretching it well beyond it's application. The irony of Western leftism, from moderate liberalism to collectivist anarchism, is that it is the most self-assured, imperialistic culture on the planet. They view their culture as the future, full stop.

You'll have a hard time finding a serious anthropologist who agrees with you. And for good reason, because neither of these statements is close to the truth.

You haven't escaped history. You're it's new plaything.

 

There are basically two Karl Marx's which, while complementary, had somewhat different focus: the young Marx, whose main contribution was his dialectical materialistic view of history. And the old Marx, who tried in grandiose fashion, to set down the "laws of capitalist motion". Both versions of Karl Marx were profound and instructive in teaching us a lot about historical, social, and economic forces. But both aimed a bit too high and, in simplifying the laws of history, social behavior, and the laws of economics -- and then finding a cast of followers who would further erode from the force of those lessons and simplifying them even more -- what we ended up with was Marxism becoming another dogma that did more to mislead than to educate. That is sad because there was a lot to learn from Karl Marx, both old and young.

 

It may come as a surprise for you ... But Most Iranians do not want to live under those barbaric laws.
They have no choice ( for now ... ).
Everytime they tried to demonstrate , thousands were arrested , torchered and many just vanished.
By the way .. those laws are slowly entering Europe .. go visit London.

 

I am far from being a male feminist so I dont measure womens freedom through the eyes of liberal feminist wackos in America

And here its all politics with left wingers

So in order to protect the reputation of obama little to no criticism of iran will appear in the dominant liberal news media

But even I as a very conservative male have my doubts about the status of women in iran when its not even safe to remove a scarf in public

 

Iran isn't as bad as many other places in the region for women.

Although I do not believe it right, I don't find it entirely unreasonable for the women being required to wear a head scarf. At least it's not a full body burka that covers their entire face.

 

Women in Iran make up 60% of university graduates, a significant percentage of the work force, represented in all professions - from doctors, lawyers, dentists, architects etc, to university professors, to even truck drivers and cab drivers and pretty much everything else. In many of these professions, their numbers are approaching those of their male counterparts. There are even a growing number of women executives and CEOs. Frankly, regardless of the "dress code", if you are sick and go to the doctor, your doctor will as likely be a female as a male. If you go to a dentist, you might start imagining that female dentists are outnumbering their male colleagues and that is definitely becoming the case in the legal profession. And you are now days almost as likely to have a female "boss" as you are someone who is a male.

But, at the same time, you do have the "dress code" requirements and a few other things that might suggest a picture of Iran which isn't exactly accurate. The dress code here has become almost like a uniform. At times, it is inconvenient and limiting. At other times, it is annoying. But it isn't what some otherwise assume.

In the meantime, within the family, women are quite often the boss. That is because of something called "mehriye": a huge sum that men who marry agree will be payable to their wives on demand (not just in case of divorce). The sum, which is negotiated and is almost always well in excess of what the groom can actually afford to pay, creates a huge leverage. Many Iranian men are in jail because they couldn't pay this sum.

Here are some articles which should open your eyes on how things are in Iran in reality.

https://www.thenational.ae/world/iran-pre-nups-land-thousands-of-men-in-jail-1.81305
Iran pre-nups land thousands of men in jail
The 'mehrieh' (affection) system, in which future husbands agree to pay a certain number of gold coins to the bride in the event of divorce, has left thousands languishing in Iranian jails and many more destitute.


https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welco...ww.google.nl/&referrer=https://www.google.nl/
Set To Take Over Tech: 70% Of Iran's Science And Engineering Students Are Women

https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-seeks-balance-women-advancements-medicine/25358442.html
Iran Seeks To Offset Advancement Of Women In Medicine

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-white-marriage-20150529-story.html
'White marriage' a growing trend for young couples in Iran