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> Iranian leadership is not crazy group of religious lunatics. Ayatollahs are very conservative group of politicians who use religion for political control. It
by TulliusCicero 7y ago
> Iranian leadership is not crazy group of religious lunatics. Ayatollahs are very conservative group of politicians who use religion for political control.
It's not the motivation, it's the use. From a classical liberal western perspective, the government explicitly using religion for control is being a crazy religious lunatic.
We're talking about a country where Islam is the official religion, renouncing it is illegal, and so is blasphemy against it. For Gods' sake, to apply to university you have to pass an exam on Islamic theology! With that as a baseline, you hardly need to go any further before you look like a completely kooky religious crazyman.
- nabla9 7y agoEverything you say applies to Saudi Arabia. There is no justification to not having Iran as an ally instead of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago> Everything you say applies to Saudi Arabia. Yes, Saudi Arabia is also full of religious crazies. Anyone who pays attention to the news knows about Wahhabism, and the morality/religious police there.
- simonh 7y agoFirst sentence absolutely, I've no argument there. For the second point, for that to work it has to apply to the Iranian regime as much as to the west. What justification do they have for not having the west as an ally? It has to cut both ways, for the two sides to be able to meet in the middle.
- nickik 7y agoBut Iran also has churches and synagogues, minorities in the parlament, by far the most empowered womans movement, an actual native republican and liberal intellectual tradition, a liberal, both economic and social elite (even within the regimn) and so on. The population is also far less 'bought in' to these rules and police has a hard time enforcing clothing regulations for example. In terms of religous freedom and religous pluralism Iran is leaps and bounds ahead of Saudi Arabia and many of the Arab states.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoSo you're agreeing with me then? Because I was arguing against > Iranian leadership is not crazy group of religious lunatics. And here you are saying that it's the leadership with all these crazy rules, enforcing them on a perhaps-unwilling populace.
- skitout 7y agoI think the point here is not that much about "moral" arguing for or against them in a very binary way, it is firstly to better understand the situation. The article and many comments point that there is a big gap between how we imagine Iran, and how Iran is really is.
- nickik 7y agoWell I wouldn't call them crazy. The are religious, but still conduct stategraft as rationally and pragmatist as anybody else. Even more so. Their idiology informs their forign policy, but so much is true for all nations.
- skitout 7y agoWhen they support Syria or Hamas (Sunni), their are not guided by ideology but by Iranian and regime interst
- nickik 7y agoThat a simplistic anaysis. A pragmatist ideology like Lenin often went against his prinicples but he is still an ideolog. That's one of the prime tendencies of leninism. The same for the guys in Iran. We should be carful of such simplistic binaries between idiology and state interest. My point is this, they way they go their national interest is defently inspired by idiological ways of thinking.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoYou could say the same thing about popular televangelists. They're not irrational, their very success speaks to that. But they're still often thought of as religious kooks, because of the views they espouse. Same kind of deal here.