Good luck! i hope you will soon be able to call your congressman
https://archive.ph/2026.01.22-082913/https://www.aljazeera.c...
Another emerging country to watch out for is India. Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.
Hearing about this and calls about imminent genocide from the last 10 years. India never had free speech. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side too. YouTube is full of anti-govt. propagandists.
https://www.norwich.edu/topic/all-blog-posts/facade-democrac...
Though President Ebrahim Raisi’s sudden death in May 2024 prompted a new electoral cycle with six vetted candidates, all were affiliated with the regime and loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, ensuring little real policy divergence. The Guardian Council filtered out all but hardline male clerics and a nominal reformist, creating the illusion of choice while reinforcing conservative dominance. Moreover, the presidency in Iran holds limited authority — ultimate power resides with Khamenei, who, since 1989, has steadily centralized control in his hands, rendering both elected institutions and their leaders largely symbolic. In short, the article contends that no matter who wins, Iran’s domestic and foreign agendas — especially its nuclear program and regional interventions — will remain unchanged, as they are guided by the Supreme Leader's ideology.
Why do you think I'm wrong?
I said "we" as in the people not the government
You'd think that, after the last decade, people would've learned that demonizing and ostracizing your political opposition is not a great way to get them to join your side.
I do subscribe to the view that politicians like these, who seek the help of foreign powers to come to power, are definitely traitors to their country. Inviting foreign powers to meddle in your affairs is how civil war erupt and lead to the eventual breakup of a country.
It's not a lack of understanding, my friend, it's hubris.
I am from the US. There's a mindset that permeates through the west that somehow we are "better", because of our values, or our governmental systems, or our economic power, or our military power, or whatever. It is flawed.
We also have a rather naive and simplistic viewpoint that because we are "better", that our viewpoint is the correct one, and that people from non-western nations should just accept whatever we do because it's in their best interest. Oftentimes, though, that "best interest" is in the short-term capitalistic/economic interest of the actors from the West who in turn stand to profit handsomely from the setup they wish to impose on nations like Iran or Venezuela. There is no concern for human life, no concern for the economic or societal health longterm of the impacted countries, nor for the country's internal affairs.
This has cost us dearly over the years. Sadly, the irony here is that a lot of these countries have a very "westernized" populace who just want to control their own resources. If we weren't such assholes to them, they'd be on "our side" as opposed to the overractionary path they have taken.
Iran looks more complicated. Pretty much the only insight we get is from the diaspora and cosmopolitan people from Tehran. There seems to be a very significant armed force clearly in favor of the Ayatollah, so removing him without their complicity will likely lead to turmoil.
As for Iran, you need to look beyond the perspective of "repressive" regime or an "army run" nation. It is only culturally "repressive" when you compare it to the western cultural norms. For a muslim middle-eastern country, it is actually quite moderate. And it is the only middle-eastern nation that has a functioning stable hybrid-democracy while most of the other middle-eastern countries are run as kingdoms by their Shieks (supported by the west). Moreover the Ayaotallah does have a huge support base amongst the religiously inclined, who do belive that their country's political system should have an Islamic influence. To understand this better, just look at the right-leaning politics emerging in the US and Europe about preserving the country's Christian culture - many of them are elected on that platform and if they come to power, can anyone say it is undemocratic? Further, it is important to understand that the Ayatollah is the equivalent of a Pope to the Shia muslims. Imagine the politco-religious turmoil that will take place in the west if an attempt is made to get rid of the Pope from the Vatican. I am sure many Iranians don't want to mix religious with politics. But I can assert with confidence that they are currently in the minority.
They live under a theocratic boot heel and are struggling to get out. They can use all the support they can get.
Imagine economic sanctions for much more than 30 years, western spy agencies actively engaged in espionage and injury against your country. What would your economy be like?
Is it any wonder nations are engaged in BRICS to escape American global hegemony?
(the above are facts, not opinions)
Yet your comment gets downvoted. And others get to say how Israel is a harmonious place for Muslims/Palestinians/Arabs ... and their posts are ... untouched.
Even George Orwell didn't envisage this ...
(and its a sad commentary on those who run this site)
There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.
News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.
Here is an excellent podcast from a Washington post journalist that was captured and held as a hostage - it’s called 544 days (that’s the amount of time he was jailed there)
The Iranian government then used Chinese tech to block Starlink, shutdown the external internet and the violence stopped.
Do you have evidence of this? At least in the USA, mobs angry at the government will conduct arson and property destruction without being paid a dime.
These days, I think the business model is selling influence rather than selling subscriptions and generic ads.
As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.
I’d call that digital apartheid.
This is simply turning down methods of communications to reduce protestors ability to coordinate and enable mass killings
I still stand by the term. Apartheid literally means "apartness". Even though the segregation in this case is not on a racial basis they still classify their population into two major blocks. Some have full rights, others have none.
https://eh4s.eu/publication/sino-russo-iranian-tech-cooperat...
>> Like in Europe then. :o)
"It's to protect the children"
Picture of Tehran (hybrid warfare)
https://archive.ph/2026.01.21-041206/https://www.aljazeera.c...
And even when the blackout was not present, my friend had to used some complex V2Ray server (in Iran) to another server (in Germany) to connect and it was shared by other people, so if he cannot connect probably 99% of other people in his area cannot also connect outside.
Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [9], and China [9]
My understanding is that during the current 5 year plan in Iran, they are trying to fully transition the Iranian internet to the NIN, as all ".ir" domains are supposed to be hosted on the NIN.
If someone wants to find a techno-authoritarian state I'd say Iran is probably closer to that vision than most other countries, as a large portion of their leadership are Western-educated (Stanford, MIT, UPMC/Paris VI, Supélec, UNSW, etc) Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by training (eg. Iran's VP did his PhD under Thomas Cover at Stanford [8] and Rouhani's Chief of Staff studied EE@SJSU). Even Iran's NSC and former IRGC head (who's daughter is a surgeon at Emory - so much for marg bar amreeka) was a CS major turned Kantian philosophy PhD.
[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/
[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa
[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...
[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...
[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545
[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...
[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/
[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home
[8] - https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1011657
[9] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...
Assuming Iran didn't follow the path that it did, Iran would have also ended up becoming a tech hub like Israel became today.
But this recognition should not be used to glaze a regime that has officially admitted to killing at least 5,000 protestors [0] in just 2 weeks and in reality killed significantly more people than that.
Being adept at understanding the applications of technology doesn't make one a humanist.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...
That expertise wasn’t just gonna disappear in a couple of decades.
And yes, the Iranian regime is brutal and terrible. This was one time the opposition was strong enough that they may have had a chance and yet our fellow in chief decided to launch incendiary words, which only allowed the regime to paint the opposition as western funded, while not providing any actual support (there’s a reason Israel, which is at least led by competent leadership, kept quiet about the protests in Iran because they understand how their words of support would undermine them).
https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
>The Iranian Information Technology Organization (ITOI) even set precise rules to evaluate candidates based on three different standards: ISO 27017 (cloud security controls), ISO 27018 (protection of personally identifiable information), and NIST SP 900-145, which concerns the American definition of cloud computing. “They want a comprehensive offer with its three components— IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
As for China, they would be more wealthy without the meddling of their government. There's no reason they couldn't be like Taiwan, but bigger. The Chinese people got to where they are in spite of their anchor.
They kept predicting collapse, too.
Nobody talks much about the ricardian theory of static comparative advantage today. China's rise kind of invalidated it.
America was taken by surprise by its rise because of this. The cordial relations and trade flipped almost overnight to hostility once it was realized that China's economic power now rivaled that of that of the US and was poised to grow even more.
Huge GDP/capita in certain places is because of outsized industries that don't really translate to the average person. Ireland is another example where it's nearly twice as 'rich' as the US by that same metric, but it's just a nuance of it being an international hub for tax avoidance, not because the Irish are doing especially well.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1jmhhk1/realistic_s...
China could have been like Japan per capita. Protectionism puts a big cap on economic growth potential.
By contrast this [2] is China's GDP/capita which is something really close to a vertical line. But for all the talk about economic systems, I think it's just because of good leadership and a motivated population. There's plenty of capitalist countries that aren't going anywhere, and there's endless examples of hybrid/social economic systems that have also gone nowhere. So I think there have to be explanations outside of the economic system itself.
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
"current dollar valuations are more appropriate. Nominal GDP measured in these units are plotted in Figure 2." https://econbrowser.com/archives/2009/06/how_important_i_2#:...
(What do those bumps correspond to?)
What’s the excuse for not having the same GDP per capita 80 years later?
The curve became exponential way too late. And only after they (partially) opened up.
https://citizenlab.ca/research/2025-10-ai-enabled-io-aimed-a...
Iran is not Syria, there's a lot of wily people in the leadership and they won't be rolled over so easily
So actually.. getting the nukes was the right play for them because eventually they would get sold out by China or Russia. Having nukes gets you to shake hands and send love letters to Trump. Frankly Trump sees Europeans as total cucks and has more respect for Kim Jong-un
If Iran actually had nukes, the Israeli lead bullying would immediately halt.
I should probably put an outside bet on the next country to get the Bomb being Poland, maybe by 2050. They've only just started building a civilian reactor, but weapons would make strategic sense for them.
Not sure if Trump understands that he is playing quite a dangerous game in terms of nuclear proliferation because if the US deterrent goes away, the small countries will start thinking about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
This is already repeated by the Google Search AI summary, which is unfortunate since your reference (from 2012) doesn't seem to back it up.
Many of you are genuinely deceived by such claims, though I can only imagine the depth of ignorance / self deceit required for that.
Others repeat them knowing they are lying, thinking to themselves that the important thing is that they themselves are not living in the midst of civil wars caused by foreign interventions, and that eventually what is robbed from the miserable prople who are living in such hell, will trickle also to ther own pockets.
But the residents of the countries you bomb, either by yourselves or using the hands of others, and even these "others", they do know what is happening..
Parent is what we call a cyber soldier in Iran. They probably were on the streets in the past weeks shooting at protesters.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/19/in-iran-the-us-...
It is irrelevant with regards to conversations about the Iranian NIN and is essentially a form of whataboutism.
But, wait, this is Iran ran by the revolutionary guards... What did anyone expect? Was it right to tell this people - help is on the way, when there was none?
Sorry, downvote as much as you like, but I'll reiterate - the brave Persian people will do it better next way, as they now know tis entirely up to them, no help comes. And they are super brave to do what they did, where did you exactly got wrong what I wrote??
Honestly - the weakest point is and will always be communication, once you loose it you fire in the dark. Like many other revolts, this also was heavily dependent on internet coordination, means controlled by the government.
So perhaps being able to organise is much more challenging to the status quo than having a pistol in every house. I would also argue 21st century revolutions are perhaps a little different from others before.
I can easily imagine a very massive cyber revolt where communications are brought to a standstill for the ruling elite. But while imaginable is hard to enact in practice and someone else in the comments noted many top Iranian officials had an IT or engineering backgrounds which makes them better prepared and the whole effort much more challenging.