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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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Fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Iran.

I don't quite want to take the position that the current unrest in Iran is bad, but I do want to consider it. There is a lot of discussion downthread about the insidious effects of pervasive and assertive civil disobedience on the legitimate exersize of state power, and I wonder why that same logic doesn't apply here. It's common in the American conciousness to assume that Iran = bad, but I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why? Is it because Iran isn't a full democracy? The United States props up lots of countries that are less democratic than Iran. Is democracy in Middle Eastern countries even desirable? It doesn't quite feel right to categorically rule-out theocracy as a legitimate form of governance, even if most of us would find living under one alienating.

The elephant in the room is geopolitics. Iran is aligned with Russia and opposed to many US allies. It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay, another form of spooky moral action at a distance?

I am not an expert on Iran, so feel free to tell me if the Khamenei Regime is actually the second coming of the Khmer Rouge or Third Reich.

It's common in the American conciousness to assume that Iran = bad, but I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media.

American media, which is still enthralled with the Obama administration, which wanted to empower Iran, is constantly churning out pro-Iran propaganda. That the average American still thinks Iran is pretty bad is an example of reality winning out over forced media narratives.

I think most mainstream media linked the Iranian regime to the Hamas attacks and the Assad regime. If I were to search for op-eds on Iran in the Guardian or the NYT, do you predict that the general consensus would be "Iran is a peace-loving democracy, and we should definitely trust them to enrich uranium as much as they want"?

The Guardian recently decided to publish an opinion piece written by the Iranian foreign minister. I don't think the Guardian editorial staff are dumb enough to plaster their website with "WE LOVE HAMAS" or "DEATH TO THE WEST" but it's pretty clear where their sympathies lie when it comes to the Israel+US vs Iran+proxies conflict.

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