In this case, the US was pretty involved in destabilizing the country. If the us and the uk hadn't intervened in 50s, Iran would have made a successful transition from monarchy to democracy. I guess we can discuss if the US owes anything to anyone, but a case for the us correcting earlier mistakes can definitely be made.
Og course there's so much more to the story.. but the fact is that the monarchy was effectively overthrown and shah had given up power and fled the country. In this particular instance it's very simple.. the us and the uk was bad
Pahlavi was basically disconnected from the West by the middle to end of his reign, not an ally at all. Pahlavi's Iran cofounded OPEC, nationalized their oil in 1973, and pressured OPEC to raise prices. Really makes me wonder.
just bc the shah fled the country doesn't mean the us and uk were bad or even the root cause. same kind of simple-minded ignorance that led to Mossadegh's rise in the first place.
I can't assume that Iran would've successfully transitioned to democracy, or that it's even what should happen there. All those Arabian Gulf countries are monarchies.
I don't know Islam's exact role in Iranian government, but it clearly has one, as it determined the last revolution there. But more importantly, they're in a region of monarchies and dictatorships. Not saying they can't be a democracy, it's just a big assumption to make that they would've been, like I really don't see any reason.
Btw, lots of Arabic influence in Iranian culture. Yeah separate Indoeuropean language, but Arabic alphabet, tons of Arabic loanwords, and required Arabic lessons partially to help read the Quran. There's a reason the Pahlavis wanted to emphasize Aryan pride instead.
Not everything, only stuff that are suddenly in higher demand that can't increase supply. If you take food as an example i don't imagine demand would increase? And if it did we could probably just produce more? And also it's not like everyone will have unlimited money, so you'll still have to prioritize and luckily we don't all have the same priorities. I'm pretty sure the idea is to fund this by taxing production and not by printing money, so inflation shouldn't be a problem.
One big thing your missing is that there simply is no way imaginable that a regime change can happen without the US, it's simply impossible at this stage. I can certainly understand why many if not most Iranians want the US to intervene, it's simply the only way regime change is ever going to happen.w
I don’t necessarily contest that, but I also wouldn’t trust the current administration to be the ones to succeed in that undertaking in a way that promotes lasting peace in the country/region. And no, I wouldn’t trust Biden/Obama/Bush either.
Fair enough, and yes it might fail, but what i gather from all Iranians I've talked to (family), the consensus is that it can't get much worse than it is now, so they'd rather live with the consequences for even a small chance that things will be better.
I have lived through regime change in Eastern Europe in 1989.
A year before the change, one cannot imagine the regime change. And yet, it did happen. Bloodlessly (except Romania).
Any external meddling would have probably made it much bloodier.
You can be assured most Iranians do NOT want US to intervene. How many Americans want China/Russia to intervene to 'help' you get rid of Trump?
Get off your high horse and use a bit of empathy and common sense.
Empathy in this case apparently meaning allowing continued funding of terrorism across the ME and continued killing of any and all political opposition inside of Iran. So empathetic you are. Also, I'm totally sure your memories of what life was like when you were 5 are totally and completely accurate and captures the entirety of the geopolitical realities of the situation.
Empathy means understanding that nationalism is a powerful force and even people who are against their government would support their government against external aggressor.
Empathy means that you understand that what YOU consider terrorism might mean 'supporting self-determination of oppressed and occupied people' by somebody else. Is it so difficult to understand that ordinary Iranians do not see their government as international supporters of terrorism?
I was 19 in 1989. While I do not claim to understand geopolitical realities in their entirety, I was old enough to distinctly remember how surprising the fall of communism felt. Despite almost all people I knew being (low-level, passive) anti-communists, nobody saw it really coming until the last few months. In fact, in June 1989, I had a choice to make - either to go to a competition to West Germany, or go with friends hiking to Caucasus. The choice was obvious - go to West Germany, who knows when will be the next chance to see The West. On the other hand, I could go to Caucasus anytime.... we know how that turned out to be.
I'm sure there was tons of external meddling in most of eastern Europe before the many regime changes. It's very hard to draw any comparison between 80s eastern Europe and today's Iran. I don't think you really fathom how ingrained the regime really is. First of all Iran is huge and very rich in resources which makes the regime very rich and iran is technically self sufficient with food and energy. second, the regime has evolved and learned from the mistakes if other regimes making sure to have large foreign armies that don't give a shit about the Iranian people as long as the money keeps flowing, i could go on.
Also you seem to not grasp that the current regime are viewed as invaders forcing Islamic rule which I'm pretty sure is very very different from the scenarios your mentioning. And even in your scenario, if Trump really succeeds in destroying American democracy and takes everyone's guns away and closes the internet to the world and starts killing every and all opposition and terrorizes America for 40 years I'm pretty sure you'd like who ever the duck is capable of removing that to intervene. And it's not like I'm making it up, i happen to have many Iranians in my family, and many of them living in Iran still and i can assure you that the vast majority in the big cities want the US to kill off the regime. I'm sure there's some kind of rural population that loves sharia like the us has maga, but i don't think they are the majority any more.
Equating Trump to the systems in China/Russia is absurd. You have no concept of what losing free speech really means if you think that's an accurate comparison.
Not saying that what's happening with ICE is okay. But it's a very sheltered view to think that is at all equivalent to what happens in those countries if you actively protest against the govt.
For Iranians, USA is strong foreign country that is hostile to them.
For Americans, Russia/China are (relatively) strong foreign countries that (they think) are hostile to them.
As Americans would NOT like if Russia/China was influencing their internal matters (Russia gate ?), so would Iranians NOT like if USA was deciding who is going to govern over them.
First, they are a proud nation with long history. Second, they have a very good reason (many historical precedents) to believe USA will not act in the interests of Iranian people, but in their own (and Israel's) interests.
We know what losing free speech is like, we are living it with Trump. The Chinese and Russians don’t know what it’s like to lose free speech because they never had it.
It’s exactly because we compare against a just a corrupt government directly over a short period of time that our experience is fairly unique in the world.
I really hope you guys are getting propper help, this state of being must be horrible, especially since nothing happened in the end. Nothing happened because your wife after all made sure to not be too far away and was alert enough to hear her call. We're all 2 minutes away from death should we somehow stop breathing, best we can do is to minimize risk.
Me and my wife had a horrible experience ourselves where our 2 year old daughters best friend(also 2 years old) drowned in their family swimming pool after figuring out how to open the door herself. I know this wasn't nearly as close to heart as the other stories in this post, but receiving that text on a Saturday evening was super tough and me and my partner was crushed for months after it happened. It's now been 10 months and we rarely think about it anymore although we did end up in a house WITHOUT a swimming pool, so in a way it's still with us.
One of my childhood friend lost his little brother in a similar accident. 25 years later, I have a similar phobia of private swimming pools, ponds or any unsupervised water surface. I cannot see a private swimming pool and not think about him. He was a happy toddler, just like my kids today.
can't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
Crisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter?
Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
Evolution is not primarily driven by the mutation rate. It's primarily driven by differential success of already-existing genetic variation. Over the very, very long term, you need mutation to be the source of that genetic variation, but over the short term mutation is mostly just harmful, and this:
> Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
is correct.
> So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
This is conceptually wrong; in this context "survivorship bias" bears a technical name you've probably heard of, "natural selection". A stronger survivorship bias means faster evolution.
I think i misread your comment a bit. i thought you where making the point that evolution was only about mutations on a large scale and that individuals doesn't really matter. But what you are writing is true even though populations can become very small where these small populations that survive have sometimes been selected for because of traits that mutated in a larger population earlier. Sometimes though it's just the lucky ones that weren't in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well.
I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former
you are right that hydrogen is a fantasy.. but wait.. what is this solar and wind plus storage you speak of that overdeliver, specifically what storage are you talking about? the wind industry has heavily been pushing hydrogen as this storage at least in Germany and Denmark and as far as i know there's absolutely zero success here despite maasny years of trying
