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Comment by blodovnik | Hacker News Reader

I know lots of Iranian people and they are universally kind generous lovely people.

I hate the way Iran is demonized so politicians can point out an enemy.

We were flat out lied to about Iraq. Demonization of Iran is no different.

Irans government is pretty backwards. The Iranian society is and was much more open a few decades ago. Truly a sad story of development in the completely wrong direction.

Have you seen the US lately? We're en route to undoing Roe v Wade, the Civil Rights Act, years of progress on other matters, etc, and we've already basically given up on functional democracy by allowing corporations to spend as much as they want on candidates. What do they say about those in glass houses...?

The female lawyer who defended a woman who refused to wear a hijab was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. [1]

Homosexuality is punishable by death. [2]

Please don't act like the problems you see in the U.S are the same problems they have in Iran.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/she-... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/14/countries-wh...

Don't forget it was the US that destroyed Iran's democracy in 1953, installed a puppet dictator, leading to the islamic revolution we see today.

In the US the backlash is unfortunate but explainable. While conservatives could probably have been convinced with data that liberation did in fact not increase abortion cases and showing that prohibition doesn't stop them either while just increasing suffering, a lot of liberal proponents put some twitter nut jobs at the forefront of the discussion. Or maybe conservative media just put them in the spotlight. That is my impression at least. The result is predictably bad. I don't know how that abortion topic came up in the first place, but here we are.

Money in politics is a serious problem. Obama was very honest about that. While basically being bankrolled by citybank, he made that fact clear multiple times and basically asked for people holding their representatives accountable. Obviously that doesn't seem so easy.

But all that doesn't really compare to the theocratic rules the Iranian regime implemented. That is on a whole other level.

It was the CIA backed coup of 1953 that led to this "wrong direction" in the first place.

It's more like the Iranian government.

Not like the US government is any better right now

The US government is executing people for being homosexual and imprisoning women for being individuals? Really??

Of course they don't do that. However, that is certainly not the reason why the relations are so bad. The US government has absolutely no problem in having very good relations with government/regimes that do those things and worse (Saudi Arabia?). The thing is that whenever a country decides to do something that the USA don't like, they begin hostilities in different levels until they a) get what they want (almost never happens) or b) completely destabilize the country.

As long as the government just calls people names instead of invading them, I am completely fine with that. Progress, I guess.

Because the US government hasn't invaded other countries...?

Of course they call it something different, but they do tend to start wars periodically. For flimsy reasons.

Not lately at least. While I think Lybia was a big mistake, I tend to blame France more than the US. Iraq, Uganda, Somalia and Yemen are the wars the US is involved in to my knowledge, some of them not actively anymore. Say what you will about Trump. Him not starting wars seem to be an exception, although I don't think Obama is responsible for the Lybia situation. Politically perhaps as he omitted congress, but I still wouldn't call it a war that he started.

Hell, Gaddafi was air-striking civilians. The African Union was against foreign intervention and today civilians probably suffer more than under the regime of Gaddafi. Hard so say what would have been the right thing to do. We still feel the repercussions of that...

Trump just needs a war to be in by election time...

At no point in the last 40 years has the US government held a higher moral ground than the Iranian government. The USA has killed far more innocent people under far worse pretext than any other nation on Earth.

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