Iran successfully launches indigenous Chamran 1 satellite into space
ilkha.com
ilkha.com
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39...
I'll keep to myself my thoughts on the Iranian ballistic missile program, because they're off topic for HN. I'm not going to be celebrating this achievement.
The US and UK were actually quite happy with the Shah they installed, he allowed western access to Iran's oil.
Edit: the post I'm replying to has been heavily edited.
Would you be okay if other countries messed with your government to cheat you out of your tax revenue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan#Contemp...
The taliban came to power by stopping socialist massacres, most famously in a "torture prison" the socialists built. That is what made people choose their side. They killed less people in open warfare than socialist revolutionaries did in peacetime, and much less than the Soviets did when "helping the socialist revolution spread".
Despite what happened since, sadly, I think you'll agree things never got as bad in Afghanistan as they did during the socialist revolution they had there. Not even now.
1) what happened in Iran? Socialist revolution, allied with a religious party ... followed by the religious side attacking their leftist "allies" when the state was toppled.
2) I find it hard to believe that Khomeini ordering his troops, after a referendum, to start executing leftists, and blinding yet more leftists (gouging one or two eyes out, which they have Hezbollah do again in last year's "woman, life, freedom" protests). It's a lot tougher to disagree with this strategy knowing that in the next country over leftists killed, tortured and maimed the clergy.
Like in most socialist revolutions (like in the red vs white terror in the Soviet Union), you were better off as one of the soldiers killing revolutionaries than you were as a "victorious" revolutionary. The reason leftists, at least the leaders, did a revolution turned out, surprise!, not to be social justice but power for themselves, and so they're far more scared of their allies than the police and army forces they need to keep control of what they've won.
Leftists brought the ayatollahs to power. Yes, this was partly in reaction to a British/US ("CIA") coup 20 years earlier, but ...
And I get it. Leftists have no allies willing to destroy western (or even non-Western) states for them anymore. So now they ally with islamists, who also want to destroy western states. What happened in Iran is a very in-your-face example of what would happen if a socialist-islamist alliance actually achieves anything: immediate terror attacks on leftists, followed by constant repression. And, to make matters worse, the Iranian population is screaming about this, regularly drawing attention to the problem. Which is a huge problem to grow leftist parties, because leftists don't have any other allies.
And yes, I'm not very leftist, but I must say, it is absolutely baffling to me that leftists would ally with conservative muslims, even if the Iran example did not exist.
Cairo-Bhagdad-Teheran - that was were its at, before they ran into the regions resource limit and adapted a religion that is great at eternal, zero-sum wars and paranoid delusions about external influence and bad at everything else.
Ever consider that it's humans that are warped, and they abuse any institution possible for their own selfish means? Many religions fall victim to this, including those you view more favorably than Islam.
They didn't 'run into the regions [sic] resource limit and adapt a religion'; said religion was forced upon them by the sword. Iran's state religion (if you could call it that) was Zoroastrianism. There are zero Zoroastrians left in Iran; most of them have fled to... India. And said religion ripped through the Indian subcontinent, too; it is why Pakistan and Bangladesh are separate nations today.
~70% of the current population was born under it, it's all it takes to completely destroy a nation
Autocratic hellhole that oppresses its people, sponsors terrorist groups and supports kleptocracy that destroys Ukraine right now.
You’re phrasing “don’t like” like we’re talking about food preferences or color of clothes.
I'm not religious myself. But in my country, if someone is actively suicidal (say they are standing on top of a building, planning to jump) they are (forcefully) stopped. I think that's a good thing. Now, of I was religious, I would believe that sinning (and therefore going to hell) would be way way way worse to do to oneself, even when compared to suicide. So just like I agree with forcefully preventing someone from following their will to commit suicide, I would probably agree with forcefully preventing people from sinning.
If you are religious (and believe that sinning = hell), these laws make a lot of sense. Perhaps they should be even harsher.
Firstly, you conflate your personal feelings with the rule of law. You may personally agree or disagree with preventing people from committing suicide, or violating religious norms, but that should be completely separate from whether you think the government should enforce your personal belief on people who believe otherwise. In a democracy, the government is not there to enforce your beliefs, it is there to prevent other people's beliefs from overriding your right to have your own.
[edit: This is also an aspect of democracy that is not well understood in countries with a history of authoritarian or majoritarian rule. Democracies are an engine of creating higher efficiency and flourishing because they tend to protect minority views and are thus open to constant change and debate, which in turn are the drivers of economic growth. In authoritarian minds, change and debate are viewed as hindrances or dangers to the status quo; thus such societies stagnate. I'm practically explaining how Lebanon can't generate a home-made pager whilst a similarly sized country next door and carved up from the Ottoman empire at the same time... which prizes individuality and debate... can, well... nevermind]
Secondly, you make a false assumption that just because a society agrees with you on one thing, you must agree with it on everything else. It would be perfectly rational to be against both the death penalty and against abortion, yet many people are for one and against the other. You make a case that if you lived in a society where the morality pointed a certain way, it would be natural for yourself just to go along without questioning its hypocrisy. That is, quite literally, you are making a case for not thinking for yourself as an individual or seeing anything wrong with the contradictions of whatever society you live in.
It is our duty as human beings to point out the contradictions and hypocrisy in ourselves and our societies, to improve them. You are making the most retrograde, anti-liberal case possible by saying you would not question the values you were surrounded by.
his so-called personal beliefs are shared and deliberately engendered through education. one may say, i think suicide should be prevented at all cost. but when they do so they’re not expressing a personal opinion but rather the result of their education and training. and education is conducted with the law in mind. ‘personal opinion’ from an adult who has been subjected to education is usually a misnomer. they’re not coming to it from independently perusing any data. so yes, the government is there to enforce your beliefs, the same ones they gave you.
democracy isn’t a minority rule, and conjuring up a so-called ‘majoritarianism’ is almost a dirty trick. the standout symbol of democracy is the election where the popular, by a mere enumeration of votes, wins the day. we are not allowed to disqualify ‘unqualified’ votes. do you have an example of a democracy where the minority wins?
> it is our duty as human beings to point out the contradictions and hypocrisy in ourselves and our societies.
not essentially our responsibility qua human beings but of heretics. the mechanisms for this sort of analysis and meta analysis are not by default available to all human beings. they’re acquired through education and through use. so whose responsibility is it to critique the current order? because most of us are blind to it. in the many challenges we face daily, bodily survival takes precedence, and when the current order doesn’t interfere in threatening ways, we can acquiesce.
Of course our values are influenced by the society we grow up in. If people weren't influenced by those surrounding them, I believe our society would significantly worse off.
(In my country the government does not have direct enough control over education to dictate the culture being taught. It's the teachers, or more general, the society as a whole, which teaches its values to young people.)
But I don't think it's reasonable to discredit someone's believes as their own, just because they were influenced by others. People who grow up within the same society do still often have opinions which differ greatly. So while people certainly are influenced by their society, they still shape their opinions themselves.
When I say 'personal opinion', I don't care where it arises from: Be it religion or heresy, or what your government has taught you or what your ancient culture dictates, that's just your opinion. Somewhere, someone believes otherwise.
Democracies which function well seek to strike a balance between those, not to obliterate the minority.
Minorities win in America, in every sense. Immigrant cultures and subculture and counterculture lead to innovation, to the extent they're allowed to thrive. The law recognizes this and, in large over a long time, adjusts to accommodate. Integration in the US is in many ways tolerance.
Hong Kong was a highly successful democracy until its freedom was taken. Taiwan is a democracy which respects minority opinion. Both are/were tolerant of protests which could never take place in mainland China. Who is even to say that China's government has anything to do with protecting culture or majority belief? A majority in China may well believe that their government is illegitimate, but simply cannot say so because "bodily survival takes precedence", exactly because the current order does interfere in threatening says. Although certainly, even this suppression of the majority pales in comparison to the horrific treatment of minorities there.
That's why I gave the example of forceful suicide prevention. That is the law in my democratic, non-theocratic country.
Tell me how forcing someone not to commit suicide differs from forcing someone not to sin.
In my view it's the same: You are limiting someone else's liberty; forcing them not to do something you consider a grave mistake.
You personally may view personal liberty as more important: If you think people should have the liberty to commit suicide, it would be morally consistent for you to think people should have the liberty to sin.
I do not believe people should have the liberty to commit suicide. So if I was religious, and believed sinning to be a mistake far worse than suicide, it would be morally consistent for me to believe people should not have the liberty to sin.
> Secondly, you make a false assumption that just because a society agrees with you on one thing, you must agree with it on everything else.
> You are making the most retrograde, anti-liberal case possible by saying you would not question the values you were surrounded by.
I don't know where you got this from. I do question the values of society. It is my very own personal opinion that we should legally prevent people from making certain obvious mistakes.
(And yes, I am very anti-liberal in that sense. Not only do I agree with forcing people to wear seatbelts and not to commit suicide, I would even support banning caffeine.)
If I was religious, I would consider sinning to be the most obvious and most serious mistake of all. Hence, I would try to legally prevent people from making this mistake.
I find it very understandable that a religious government makes sinning illegal.
Define sin first. Killing yourself results in death. Religious fanatics stretch definition of sin to whatever they don’t like.
Gays? Sin? Woman without hijab? Sin. Abortion? Sin.
> In my view it's the same: You are limiting someone else's liberty; forcing them not to do something you consider a grave mistake.
No, it’s totally not the same. And it’s not necessarily about mistake. Allowing people to commit unrestricted suicide would set a dangerous precedent. And on top of that a lot of inconvenience for people around.
If you were to be consistent, then the fact that someone else somewhere thinks you're sinning should be sufficient to ban your own behavior, whatever it is. Whether you're religious or not has nothing to do with it. Since you believe in limiting someone's liberty, you should believe that the most radical form of religion should limit yours.
In such a society, in practice, anything can be forced or banned. And it is. If someone dislikes you, any word you speak can be taken as an insult to religion or an insult to the government, and is punishable. Moreover, such a society might force you to take a drug, or decide to euthanize your disabled family member. Sure, it is "understandable" that a totalitarian government makes sinning illegal, but it's hard to think of anything more odious.
Once such a system is in place, your freedom to "question the values of society" or form your own personal opinion would cease to exist. Your view is only possible in a free society that prizes liberty, although it is essentially dangerous to the survival of the society you're lucky enough to live in.
The only way to avoid a totalitarian outcome is to tolerate other people having the freedom to make what are in your opinion mistakes. Which includes saying things you don't like. And not only to tolerate it, but to elevate it above all other frameworks.
The paradigm of "my opinion / our opinion should be the law" is what leads to totalitarianism.
Even if you're the government, you can't write a law or enforce a law against, say, adultery. You can stop - or at least reduce - the external behavior. But you can't change hearts by an external law. You just create people who are different on the outside than they are on the inside. "Hypocrites" is a term for that, which comes from the Greek word for "actors" - people who pretend to be something they're not.
That's not going to keep them from hell. It might keep them from jail, but that's not the same thing.
Since you live in a democratic county, the solution to this is very simple: Vote for someone who doesn't serve the west.
From what I see around the world for democracy to work it needs a certain degree of social cohesion, which some countries lack. The prevalence of some characteristics (ex: fanaticism, tribalism, corruption) are incompatible with democracy, and will ruin shortly attempts to have "working democracies".
Some western countries (not all, guess is obvious who :-p) tended to think simplistically that if the system works for them it will work for everybody so they try to "impose it".
What I have to admit now is that while this does not seem to always work, I don't consider "others" as having a much better alternative either.
It is amazing tho how they always impose it choosing the corrupt leaders that sell all state Enterprise and national resources for pennies to said western country "multinationals"
Did that change much for me as an individual on the spot? Not much - they were people taking advantage before an after and most people were poor.
Did it change the possibilities on long term? It did. 20 years later there are more developments and opportunities than before under the "authoritarian" regime. Is it equally spread and for everybody? No. But neighbor countries that did not go through the change have it worse...
I am sure not all countries have this trajectory, but some do, YMMV
all peoples are not the same. this is an error of abstraction. if you were to enumerate attributes of a society fit for democracy, what would you require of its people? do all peoples already possess these?
Are you sure that it's the democracy which is the cause of your country's trouble?
If we consider the counterfactual scenario where your country was not democratic, instead ruled either by some autocrat, theocracy, military junta or something similar, how would that go? While you can find examples of dysfunctional democracies, it still appears to have a better success rate than non-democratic systems.
My question is - what's the alternative which would work better for your country? Looking at your profile, you're from Africa, where the typical alternative is either a military junta or a theocracy. Why do you think that those would lead to better outcomes in your country?
> there still exists a strong allegiance to the tribe (original nation) over the independent, makeshift nation
Perhaps too strong allegiance? In places where the centralized state becomes weak / collapses, clan violence tends to intensify (Somalia, South Sudan). These larger "makeshift" nations seem to have a somewhat calming effect on the ethnic conflicts.