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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
The ultra feminists on hacker news are busy downvoting me after I pointed out that the way Iranian regime treat its women makes the regime the worse side compared to US and Israel. That is all one needs to know about the current situation honestly.
Wow, I did not have you pegged as someone who would judge stances on feminism as the ultimate proxy for ethics.
In the real world, anyone who wants to sell you on a world view of Good vs Evil in a war is either writing high fantasy or a partisan hack. If Norway (pretty swell country to live in, by all accounts) decides to bomb North Korea (rather terrible) tomorrow, I can not just compare their maternal death rates and conclude that Norway is the good guy. Rather, I would have to ask myself if Norway is trying to mold NK in its own image, and what their changes for succeeding at it are, and if the humanitarian gains outweigh the humanitarian costs. I would probably conclude that it is a terrible idea.
I would not want to be a woman in in Iran, but I also would not want to be a woman in Saudi Arabia. I most certainly would not want to be a woman in daesh, which popped up the last time the US liberated a ME country. Being a woman at the mercy of Israel depends a lot on your precise location, with women in Tel Aviv consistently reporting a higher satisfaction with Israel than women in Gaza City. (Sure, the women in Gaza do not get bombed for being women, but that would be little consolation for me personally.)
I don't judge stances on feminism as the ultimate proxy for ethics. I am just amused by the inability of the TDS to observe that there are worse people than Trump on this planet. And at this point some of them rule Iran. It may be good idea to leave iran alone - there are a lot of non interventionist arguments available. But in this case the Americans are not bad guys.
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What exactly do you think life is like for Iranian women? They don't have Western levels of feminism for sure, but you can watch man on the street videos from almost* any city in Iran and see an approximately even sex ratio, women walking around without male guardians, and very loose interpretations of the hijab law.
*Qom is still very conservative. It's basically the Iranian Vatican. Even so, women there wear chadors, not burqas.
I mean Iranian women are still under coverture.
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As with any country, it varies widely based on region, neighborhood, class etc. In the middle-class districts of the major cities with squishy lefty politics like all middle-class districts of all major cities? Yeah, women about, very loose interpretations of hijab etc. In the Iranian analog to Oklahoma or Alabama, not so much.
The pro-western, pro-israeli, pro-shah groups of Iranian society have always been around, their more vociferous members live in the west now. They are influential, because they are the economic middle classes, and secular elites. But they are not a majority of the country by any stretch. As with most countries, the vast majority of the population is lower and working class, more religious, more nationalistic, more bigoted against outsiders than the college professors and the accountants. And generally harder on their womenfolk.
There is a very direct comparison next door in Turkey, where the same western-oriented secular modernizers have the same political outlook, despite differences in culture and religion to Iran. It's just that Ataturk was better at it than Reza Shah, and so when the religious nationalistic backlash came, it stayed within the bounds set by his government, rather than producing a revolution.
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Probably not so bad compared to life for your average Iranian man. That's just the way of our gynocentric world.
Still, the fact that women are privileged in most parts of the world has never stopped western feminists from complaining about even the smallest (perceived) disadvantages suffered by women in comparison to men. Probably in convenience stores in Iran, they have women's disposable razors with pink handles and which cost an extra rial or so.
No, what stops western feminists from complaining is (1) they don't want to go against their allies in the progressive movement and any criticism of Iran is perceived as helping Israel, one of the big Bogeymen of the progressive movement; and (2) ultimately they care only about maximizing their goodies and gibs so it's more productive to complain about the lack of female tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
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Probably because it's transparently a bad faith argument. I'm guessing neither you nor trump care that much how $arbitrary_regime treats women and even if you did, would never advocate for starting military action on any nation that basis. if you did care about the women, starting a war is obviously not the most productive way to fix that, nor is there any guarantee that the women will be better off afterwards.
So this war is not about the women and your attempt to collapse the whole issue into "better or worse for women" is a cheap rhetorical trick to paint your adversaries as hypocrites for opposing it.
Maybe the feminist angle is not what most right wingers really hate about Islam, but for me at least it is the main thing. I’m somewhat of a western chauvinist and one of the important ways the west is culturally superior is in how we treat our women. Islam’s treatment of women is barbaric and disgusting in and of itself because women are human beings, but it’s also disgusting to me because of how alien it is to my culture. I’m a basic women-are-people equality feminist (a right wing position these days I’m afraid). Maybe I’m not the modal right winger (I’m not that right wing), but while there could be some people from whom the feminist anti Islam line is bad faith, I assure you that it is a real motivating concern for some of us.
Yeah, that's a big element for me as well, plus the weird double standard; western rurals/conservatives having slightly-old-fashioned views about women and gays that they can't really enforce = disgusting bigots, but downright medieval attitudes enshrined in law and actual gay-bashing from slightly browner people is a-okay.
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Calling it a "cheap rhetorical trick" is itself a cheap rhetorical trick to try to dodge a hypocrisy killshot. The alliance between Western feminist progressives and Islamic fundamentalists was always completely psychotic under any ideological framework other than "they just hate the West and don't believe any of their own bullshit". Rubbing their noses in it and taking the opportunity to diminish the extent that anyone takes progressive feminists seriously is points fairly scored.
Feminism is an instrumental criticism of fundamentalist Islam for American political conservatives. It is rightly seen as an instrumental criticism by people who disagree with American conservatism, but wrongly seen as 'not worth worrying about' by them. Women actually do have few rights under Islam.
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No, it's more like an attempt by you to satisfy yourself emotionally. To score points fairly you would have to distinguish between feminists who support fundamentalist Islam and feminists who do not, and you show no signs of wanting to do that even though I am sure you understand the distinction.
Yes, it's very emotionally satisfying to be proven correct.
Oh, I'm sorry, I must have missed that. Can you please point to the prominent progressive feminists who have been more critical of fundamentalist Islam than, say, the made-up, Iran-inspired Christian fundamentalists in the Handmaid's Tale?
Can you point to any who are showing any degree of hope for the current hostilities improving conditions for women in Iran? Or even a single progressive feminist who would rather see [women in Iran become more free plus Trump gets to count a win] than [thousands of women in Iran are massacred by their government, but Trump takes an L]?
Or if you don't like either of those framings, how would you care to distinguish those two groups? I am willing to be convinced that the latter exists. Make your case.
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So as long as I see feminists being fellow travellers for Hamas and for Iran, for Pakistani grooming gangs and Moroccan pickpockets, for shooters at the Bataclan and truck drivers at Christmas markets - it is a distinction without a difference. I have never heard a mea culpa from a feminist, about the Southport stabbings at a Taylor Swift concert. Even when girls are being killed and raped, they don't care because their overgrown mothering instinct sees brown people as babies who don't know what they're doing.
It's frankly insulting that you think that wordcel games like even matter in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
It's always 'but think on how it will affect the poor, innocent Muslims'. Norm Macdonald parodied this attitude thirty years ago, and your posture is exactly the thing he skewered. I don't know if you know this, but 'moderate' Islam is a spook. 'fundamentalist' Islam is just Islam, a liberal cope. We know it from the Muslims themselves that there is only one correct interpretation of the Quran and the Sunnah. The fact that feminists uncritically swallow lies about this is proof that no one should take them seriously.
There is no world leadership of feminism, no feminist constitution. You are talking about feminism as if it is a monolith. This is simply not an accurate view of reality.
Men and women are different.
Different people have different interests [and different motivating factors], and vice versa.
Thus, the null hypothesis is that people who share the same biological conditions are going to act the same way. (Feminists already make this assumption when it comes to men having different interests, and they are correct.)
The extent to which this is true, whose interests happen to dominate, and if those interests should be dominant vary due to local conditions. There are some cultures where men and women have learned to get along, there are some that define themselves by actively refusing to, and there are some where the overriding concerns are more pedestrian, like "where's my next meal coming from?". Women in the 1st tend not to be feminist because they've figured out gynosupremacy is legitimately destructive, and women in the 3rd tend not to be feminist because failing to deal means you starve.
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And yet, feminists all remain on the same page; you would be hard-pressed to find any self-described "feminist" who is as critical of fundamentalist Islam as of the West. For that matter, I stuggle to think of any willing to publicly criticize Islam at all, and would expect them to be summarily excommunicated from the broader movement, even if it has no "Moma" with the formal authority to do so. Yes, crushedoranges actually does have an accurate view of reality.
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It will be interesting to see how many sockpuppets are still around this time... as I recall, during the previous bombing, a lot of pro-palestine accounts claiming to definitely not be from Iran mysteriously went dark at the same time, although I can't find a source at the moment.
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I would definitely agree that progressives tend to be very selective in their outrage. And it's not necessarily a matter of choosing one side or the other. A lot of the time, Left-wing activists won't even open their mouths and condemn regimes such as that of Iran.
How hard would it be to say something like this:
But instead, progressives are deathly afraid that either the hated Red Tribe or Israel should get a win. Indeed, in a good demonstration of the horseshoe hypothesis, progressives tend to agree with neo-Nazis that Israel is the very worst country in the world.
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On the contrary, deciding which side is 'the worse side' is basically a side issue when forming an opinion about a military situation.
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The women of Syria / Iraq / Libya were not better off after our interventions, but substantially worse off.
You are likely correct. On the other hand, the Iranian people are a different stock compared to Syria / Iraq / Libya.
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Thankfully Trump's instincts how to do regime change seem to be better than those of the neocons.
Trump is 80 years old and easily impressionable. Jared has an outsize influence on his thoughts. I don’t see why Jared Kushner wouldn’t sacrifice millions of Americans for Israel, which is the homeland he pledges allegiance to in his prayers, and which he believes is God’s favorite place and people. Kushner runs American foreign policy according to Rex Tillerson via one FBI informant (Chuck Johnson), and there are some reasons to believe he’s telling the truth here, although he’s otherwise totally unreliable:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00090314.pdf
Trump is 80 years old and stubborn as hell. I expect he thinks "nation-building" is fucking retarded. Instead, he wants and expects clean, easy, impressive-looking wins that are over and done. There is no plausible scenario where we "sacrifice millions of Americans", and no reason to think Trump would volunteer for that sort of disaster beyond TDS or some variation of Israeli/Jewish/Epstein Derangement Syndrome.
Seems to me that what you're responding to was an attack on Kushner's character, and his loyalty and disloyalty to Israel and the US respectively, versus a claim of what Trump and the US gov't will do. In other words, he'd be willing to sacrifice millions of Americans because he's a terrible person and only cares about Israel anyway.
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Queers for Palestine levels of bizareness
It really isn't.
Wanting to genocide a population that largely consists of children because of LGBTQXYZ issues is beyond extreme.
Israel's policy of trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza and move millions of refugees to Europe isn't popular with a decent portion of the gay community in Europe.
What policy would that be ?
The policy of expanding Israel, attacking their neighbours and helping migrants get to Greece. Israel is a major refugee smuggler into Europe. Meanwhile they push millions of arabs out of their homes.
So zero ethnic cleansing ?
We can’t quibble about the word attacking here - their neighbors are the aggressors and Israel has been on the defense since its inception.
Also it’s a war - they aren’t pushing millions of Arabs out of their homes.
Their neighbors have been pushed back as Israel has stolen land and driven millions of people off it. Many of them are now in Europe.
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Who were they defending against when they bombed the King David Hotel?
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