Persian food

Eating persian food.

Actually, we're going to talk about the political situation in Iran, not the food, but if you're thinking about eating something while you listen to me do a historical deep dive on the present Iranian protest movement, well maybe think twice about eating while interneting. Alex: My name is Alex and my question is, is there any scientific research that suggests that you should be concentrating on eating while eating? My wife keeps playing the mobile game every time during our meals. I'm sure I've read somewhere a long time ago that looking at the screen during eating is not great for you, so I tried to discourage her from doing so. But she really likes doing it. It helps her to have a mental break during the work day. So I was wondering if there is any actual reason for her to stop or should I just leave her alone and playing the game won't make her guts explode or something? Adam: Just as scientists must declare any conflicts of interest when they investigate a scientific question, so must I declare my own glaringly obvious conflict of interest here.

So keep that in mind when I tell you that no, I could find no scientific literature indicating that your wife's guts will explode because she eats while staring at her phone, nor is there any scientific literature indicating that internet beams will shoot down her throat and give her gastric cancer or anything like that.

There is, however, a 2018 experimental study of 62 young adults in Brazil. 62 Brazilian young men and women between the ages of 18 and 28. Scientists got them together on four separate afternoons and offered them an array of snacks. Cookies, chocolate, toast, yogurt, apples, bananas, water, and soda. Scientists tried to make all the food options look as appealing as possible and they laid them out in such a way that gave no item more prominent placement than any other. The scientist said, "Hey, thanks for coming out guys, thanks for coming out.

Thanks for signing the release forms. Go ahead, help yourself to some snacks, take whatever you want, take however much you want, and then why don't you just head on over to the individual cubicles where we can observe each of you in isolation." . So everybody got their food and they sat alone in a little booth with a video camera on them and they ate whatever they wanted to and then they left and then they came back the next day and the scientist said, "Hey, thanks for coming back. Same deal as before, everybody. Just take whatever food you want. Head on over to your little booth. And oh, hey, just do us a favor and don't look at your phone or don't look at a book, don't do anything else that's distracting you while you eat. Just eat however much you want with no distractions at all and we'll see you next time." .

So everybody shows up the next time and the scientists say, "Hey y'all, same deal. Just do whatever you're going to do again." I mean, I guess they said whatever the. Portuguese equivalent of "y'all" is. What is that? I'm curious. Anyway, they said, "Same deal as before, y'all. Just take whatever food you want. Head on over to your booths and do us a favor this time. Use your phones.

"Eat however much you want while you

Look at your phone and we'll see you back again the next time." the fourth and final afternoon, the scientists say, "hey, get your food, whatever you want.

But this time no phones allowed. Instead, you'll find a magazine in your little booth and it will be something relevant to your interests based on the questionnaire that we gave you before. So go ahead and read the magazine while you're eating but no phones." And thus endeth the experiment. And the results? Well, when people ate without any distractions at all, they ate fewer calories.

They ate less food and/or they ate lower calorie foods because remember that they could choose between apples and bananas and cookies and chocolate. When people ate with no distractions, they ate an average of 535 calories in this afternoon snack. When they ate with their phones out, they averaged 591 calories. And when they read their magazines as they ate, they averaged 622 calories, though, the difference between the magazine calories and the smartphone calories was within the margin of error and was therefore statistically insignificant. None of these findings is terribly significant in the colloquial meaning of that word. I don't think that 40 calories here and there makes much of a difference for most people. However, little differences do really add up over time. So if you are trying to reduce your calories, you might want to put down the phone or the book while eating.

Not that everyone needs to worry about that. Not that that everybody is trying to reduce calories nor should they be trying to reduce calories. Not everyone. When I was in Michigan a few weeks ago hanging out with Dr. Mike of Renaissance Periodization, we did this absolutely grueling workout. Then we taped an episode of my podcast and then we went back to Dr. Mike's house and we showered, separately, of course. And then we ate.

Dr. Mike said, "Hey, what do you want to eat?" . And I said, "Give some of whatever you're going to eat post-workout. Whatever you eat post-workout, give me that." Dr. Mike is a giant enhanced competitive bodybuilder, in addition to being an exercise physiologist and he gave me what he was having, which was an extremely giant, like a mixing bowl, of steamed white rice and ground turkey and some vegetables.

Mike.

A big guy, Dr.Mike.

I found that I am both more muscular than I thought and slightly fatter than I thought. It was surprising, but yeah, hey look, I'm doing okay for a 40 year old cook who's not on steroids, I think. Happy with how I'm doing. Anyway, I'm a pretty big guy with a pretty big appetite and I had just done this monster workout and I was absolutely dragging ass trying to jam this dog bowl of turkey and rice down my gullet. It was so hard to eat that much food. Competitive athletes often tell you that they struggle to eat all of the food that they need to eat for optimum performance in their sport. It sounds like a wonderful problem to have until you actually have it. Until you're staring down a dog bowl of chicken and rice and broccoli slaw or whatever that you're supposed to eat and you really don't want to, but you have to.

If you are in such a situation, well, I suppose the research indicates you might be able to cram that food down easier if you stare at your phone while eating or if you stare at a book. Of course, that Brazilian study is just one study, but it's hardly the first study on this general topic. Smartphones may be new, but TV is not, and there are many older studies where scientists tracked people's eating while they watch television and people consistently eat more when watching TV as opposed to just focusing on their food. There's also a number of studies on mindful eating. Mindful eating is a kind of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is when you don't count your calories or adhere to any diet prescriptions, you just eat what you want, but you try to listen when your body tells you that you've had enough. You try to listen when your body tells you that you're full, you try to listen when your body tells you that one food makes you feel bad and another food makes you feel good. That's intuitive eating.

And mindful eating is a kind of intuitive eating that's inspired by the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of mindfulness, which is all about being in the moment, focusing exclusively on what you are doing as you are doing it. Focusing on the sensations of what you're doing, most notably your breath, for example. So mindful eating is when you try really hard to focus on nothing but your food. You don't do anything else. You don't think about anything else. You focus on the food and you enjoy the food. You savor every sensation and perhaps most importantly, as a sort of side effect of this kind of mindful eating, you might slow down. The impact of mindful eating on calorie intake is unclear.

There are studies where people get trained in mindful eating and then they end up eating less than the control group that doesn't get trained in mindful eating. And then there are studies where there's really kind of no difference. I am looking at a 2017 literature review out of the UK where they looked at 68 studies on mindful eating and calorie intake. They conclude, quote, "There is a lack of compelling evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness and mindful eating in weight management." End quote. However, there is a really clear link demonstrated in many studies between calorie intake and speed of eating. When scientists do experiments where they force people to eat slower, people almost always eat less when they eat slower. I'm sure most of us have noticed that in our own lives. As I record this, yesterday was our Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States and I bet that a lot of people listening had a Thanksgiving day that was basically like mine.

I cooked all day long, tasting a little bit here and there.

Little bit there, here to check for

Seasoning and such.

Tasting tiny little bits all day long as I cook. And when I finally brought out the turkey and the gravy and the potatoes and the stuffing and the peas and the broccoli casserole and the rolls, I just wasn't that hungry. I ate two full plates because tradition demands it, but I wasn't that hungry and as a result it didn't taste that great to me. Flash forward to earlier today, I get a bunch of turkey and gravy out of the fridge, I heat it up in the microwave, I dive in and this is like the greatest thing I've ever tasted. I clear an entire giant plate of microwaved turkey and gravy because I had not been tasting little bits of turkey and gravy all day. I was fresh, if you think about it that way.

When you eat slow, you give your body time to process the food and then to send you various satiety cues which are generally hormonal in nature. When you slam your food all at once, you get it down before your body can even react and tell you that it's had enough. God help me, that is my favorite way to eat. The way I would eat if there was going to be no tomorrow, my death row meal would be inhaling an entire giant pizza alone in a dark room before I have even gotten to the theme song of an episode of Garth Meringue's Dark Place on YouTube. I love doing that because I am a food addict. An addict in recovery. These seem like classic addictive behaviors to me. There is an episode of the TV show West Wing, which is a show I don't think has aged very well.

I don't really like that show, but Aaron Sorkin, the writer creator of West Wing, that is a man who he knows from addiction. And so the stuff he writes about addiction in his TV shows, in his films, rings really true. Such as in this particular episode of West Wing where Leo McGarry, the character, is trying to explain his alcoholism to a non-alcoholic character and the non-alcoholic character says something like, "Why don't you just have one drink?" And Leo says, "Because I don't want one drink.". In other words, one drink is just as good as no drink to an alcoholic. That's not what the alcoholic wants. The alcoholic wants all the drinks and that is simply a totally different thing from one drink. I could kind of take or relieve one slice of pizza. I don't really care that much for it.

What I want is all the pizza, and if I cram it down fast, I can eat a lot of it before my body sends me satiety signals, thus ruining all of my fun. The fun part is eating a lot while feeling very hungry. That's what feels great. Eating when you're not hungry isn't that much fun. I'm a food addict, but I'm in recovery. I'm working hard every day to develop a healthier relationship with food and a big part of that is slowing down and listening to my body as I eat. I would guess that staring at my phone or my computer while I eat is not conducive to these goals. Incidentally, there are several studies on phone usage as it pertains to kind of the opposite problems.

Anorexia, bulimia, those kinds of eating disorders. And they have observed a pretty strong correlation there. Like people with eating disorders are more likely to also be screen addicts and vice versa.

Correlation is not causation and even if

There is a causal link, no one knows in which direction the arrow of causality points, but.

I've seen enough evidence to convince me

That eating while staring at your phone is one of these things that feels great in the moment, feels great in the short term, but it probably lowers our quality of life in the long term.

As you might know, for the past two months, Iranians have been revolting against the oppressive rule of the Islamic Republic regime. They have been oppressing women, minorities, and other religions for the past 40 something years. So my question for you Adam, the former professor of journalism and Adam, the internet personality, not necessarily Adam the internet cook, is how do you think we could share our voice with the international community? How could we amplify it? 

You seem to have already executed these two steps impeccably, so you obviously need no advice from me. I will however, talk for the rest of this episode about the situation in Iran and how I see it. Not that my point of view matters any more than any other random person's point of view.

You all just happen to be listening

To me and not some other random dude.

So I might as well talk about something that I think is very important. I have been watching this latest popular uprising in Iran with very great interest, with very great excitement and with great fear. I am afraid for you Hirad. I am in awe of your courage and that of your compatriots, but I am afraid for you. I'm excited because it seems, from where I sit, that this really could be the end of the Islamic. Republic as we know it. It has always seemed to me that it's only a matter of time until a successful, I suppose you could call it a counter revolution, finally happens in Iran. Iranians are just too educated, too economically developed, too cosmopolitan, too young, too strong, to live under an oppressive, regressive theocracy for much longer.

I'm confident it's only a matter of time. And now might be that time. So I'm excited and I'm afraid for the physical safety of people like you, Hirad. Because I have people listening from all over the world and because many of them are very young and therefore haven't gotten a chance to learn about a lot of stuff yet, I will start at the beginning. Let's get everybody caught up on what's happening in Iran and hey, let's literally start at the beginning. Iranian just means Aryan. Did you know that? All you white supremacist, Aryan Brotherhood idiots out there, listen up if you think that you are racially superior to Iranians or whatever you call them. Iranian is just a different evolution of the word Aryan, meaning people descended from the proto Indo-European homeland of the Pontic step just north of the Black Sea and the caucuses.

Nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse about 6,000 years ago and then proceeded to ride out all across modern Russia and Europe, southwest Asia and all the way down through India, which is why most of us who are ethnically and/or culturally descended from that vast swath of the globe, that's why we are currently speaking Indo-European languages.

From English to. French to Greek to Russian to Iranian to Hindi. They're all different branches of the same mother tongue spoken by different branches of the same people who rode out of the central Asian prairie 6,000 years ago, according to the dominant anthropological theories on the topic. Aryans rode down into modern Iran about 4,000 years ago, displacing and/or conquering and/or assimilating the indigenous paleolithic inhabitants. These areas found a somewhat arid but still rich and beautiful and fertile land in what we now call Iran. They found tall, defensible mountain ranges enclosing drainage basins, conducive to grazing animals and some farming. It was and is a good place to live and thus this land gave rise to some of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world, most notably the Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, 2,500 years ago.

In the West, we would call him Cyrus the Great and we would call his empire the Persian Empire because it was founded by the Persian people from the region of Persis, which is now the. Fars region in southern Iran. So referring to the whole Achaemenid Empire as Persian was kind of like referring to the whole British empire as being English. Might be a slight misnomer, but I'm going to call it the Persian Empire anyway, just because that's what we call it here in the west and it's generally a term of respect. It's not a derogatory nickname. We have pretty high regard for the Persian Empire here in the West. Kind of like how we refer to the greatest of the 12th century counter crusaders as Saladin, even though that was not his name.

I made reference to Saladin and an Arabic speaking guy in the comments got all offended.

And from my perspective, I wanted to

Tell this guy that, "look, saladin may be westerner's name for the man, but it's not derogatory." saladin is revered in the west and has been for centuries.

Western Christians have historically regarded Saladin as

Their most honorable, most worthy adversary in the crusades.

So it's really a term of respect, which is why I feel comfortable using it 800 years after those events. Also, because I cannot pronounce so Saladin's real name. Anyway, that's what I'm going to call the Persians. Even though they weren't only Persians. The empire of Cyrus the Great and his descendants was massive.

It was Rome, 500 years before Rome. A few generations after Cyrus, you had Xerxes, the super tall, sexy, bad guy from 300. Speaking of politically incorrect Euro-American representations of West Asian culture, the movie 300. Can I say some things about 300 real quick? I've always wanted to say some things. Like most people who hate that movie, I also love that movie. It's a heap of contradictions, isn't it? It's explicitly homophobic and yet it's like the most homoerotic major Hollywood film ever made. This movie cries, "Freedom!" And yet it somehow just kind of skates right over the fact that the Spartans could afford to all be professional warriors because they had slaves who did the actual farming and work and stuff, thus allowing the warrior aristocracy to train with their spears all day long and occasionally to spear each other.

Contrary to what the movie would have you believe, the Spartans were the real, quote, unquote, boy lovers, not to the Athenians or at least institutionally sanctioned same sex relations were common in Sparta, at least as common as they were in Athens, and perhaps more so.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The movie does seem to throw a little shade at the Spartan practice of tossing physically imperfect babies off of cliffs, which probably didn't happen in actual history. At least it was not an institutionalized practice as it is portrayed in the film. I don't think the movie wants us to cheer when it shows us the tiny skeletons of babies the Spartans deemed too small or too weak to bother raising. However, the movie does traffic in classic ableism when the hunchback character, Ephialtes, becomes the traitor who takes the Persians along the secret goat path to go outflank the Spartans at the end and thus defeat them. That character's physical deformity is portrayed as being intertwined with his moral corruption, perhaps even as an outward indication of his inner corruption. Just like Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard III, the Hunchback usurper who murdered the princes in the tower. God knew that Richard was evil, so he cursed him with a deformity that was Shakespeare's subtext in that play, and this is the absolutely awful way that disabled people have been portrayed in literature since antiquity and yet, ironically, none of the ancient sources describe Ephialtes as being a hunchback.

That appears to be an invention of Frank Miller, the graphic novelist on whose work the movie 300 is based, and I suspect that Frank Miller based his characterization on Richard III. Shakespeare's Richard III, not the historical Richard III. The movie 300's glorification of violence is disgusting and shameful, and yet the fight sequences are undeniably badass and make me want to hit the gym like nothing else. The movie's portrayal of the battle of Thermopylae, which really happened 700 years ago, that portrayal is so historically wrong and yet it's kind of right in a number of ways, because we must remember that the story in the movie is propaganda. Within the universe of the film. The story that we are watching is not meant to be real, it's meant to be propaganda. The film does not tell us that we are watching actual events. The narrative structure tells us that we are watching a story being told by Dilios, the David Wenham character who was also Faramir in Lord of the Rings.

In 300, we're watching Dilios spin a yarn. He's not trying to give a factual account of the events that he witnessed. Instead, he is singing the ballad of brave Leonidas and his 300 Hoplites. Dilios is telling this story to rally Sparta and the rest of Greece to battle. The story is propaganda within the narrative of the film, so naturally the story is unrealistic.

Dilios portrays the Spartans as morally righteous

Super soldiers, right? and he portrays the persians as incompetent, ephete, subhuman monsters.

Monsters that are only able to defeat brave Leonidas with treachery and overwhelming numbers. This is not what actually happened at Thermopylae.

The Persians of that battle were just as human as the Greeks. But the movie 300 does not purport to show us what actually happened at Thermopylae. It purports to show us what this character, Dilios, who's based on a real guy named Aristodemus, the movie purports to show us what Dilios went back and told the rest of the Spartans about what happened in order to motivate them to come and fight and repel. Xerxes's attempted conquest of Greece, which in real life they did. They won in the end. It's a movie about propaganda, which is why I might argue that contemporary Iranians should not be as offended by the movie 300 as many of them are. On the other hand, the distinction that. I just drew between a filmic portrayal of racist propaganda and actual racist propaganda, that's pretty fine.

Hence, my current monologue on Iran and we were talking about Western attitudes about Persians reflected and perpetuated by the 2006 movie 300. I would defend 300 on the grounds that it does not purport to show actual historical events. Rather, it purports to show how a character in the movie described those events to other people, for the purposes of rallying them to war. The movie tells you that it's showing you one Spartan soldier's propaganda. But, when Zach Snyder made the movie, 300, he should have known that very few viewers would actually grasp this fine distinction. He had to know that most white dudes who watched this movie, they would just see a whole bunch of jacked, white, hetero supermen mowing down a brown-skinned, faye, untermensch hoard.

And most viewers would simply thump their chests and cheer and take those attitudes out into the streets with them when the movie is over, and that would be dangerous. It was dangerous. It still is dangerous, and that's why I hate the movie 300, despite the fact that I love the movie 300. Anyway, Iranians. Iranians, the Aryans who settled between Mesopotamia and India. The Persians. One of the great ancient civilizations with its own Indo-European language and its own monotheistic, messianic religious and philosophical tradition that was known as Zoroastrianism. Islam came later with the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, which was not that long ago in the scheme of things.

But the thing was, Iranian culture and Iranian language were so strong and so developed and so robust that Arabic language and Islamic culture could not fully displace it. A fusion occurred contributing greatly to the Islamic golden age, which roughly corresponded to the European medieval period. There is a longstanding, popular perception that during those centuries, the Islamic world was far more advanced than the European or Christian world. Better technology, better science, better medicine, stronger political organization in the Islamic world. As I understand it, most historians today regard this view of the Middle Ages as a gross oversimplification but not totally baseless. It's definitely true that the intellectual rise of the West, the Renaissance, was enabled in part by the reintroduction of classical learning into Europe via contact with the Islamic world where they had never lost classical learning. Flash forward to modern Iran. By the time you get to the 19th and 20th centuries, Iran continues to be one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan Islamic countries due in part to its physical location between so many different spheres of influence.

They've got Russians, they got Turks, they got Arabs, they got Indians all around them and in them. And Iran doesn't get colonized or conquered by anyone. The Ottoman Empire tries, it fails. The Russian Empire tries. They seize a lot of the historically Iranian territory and the caucuses, but the Russians never get into the. Iranian heartland and eventually the Russians come to support the Persians as a counterbalance to the. Ottomans, the Turks. The Brits manage some corporate colonialism in Iran.

The British India company bribes its way into a monopoly on the. Iranian tobacco business in the 19th century. This is extremely unpopular with the Iranian people, resulting in a minor revolution.

In the early 20th century, you get

The anglo persian oil company, the brits discover oil there and they negotiate exclusive rights to drill it.

In World War II, the Brits and the Russians invade Iran and they deposed the Shah who was seen as pro. German, pro axis. So the allies invaded Iran to secure Iranian oil for the war effort and perhaps more importantly, to deprive the Germans of that oil, which Hitler really, really wanted and needed. I'm not sure how I feel about that invasion, but I'm sure that I'm glad that the allies won the war.

It's better than the Nazis winning the war, so there's that. Anyway, the Iranian king that the allies deposed, Reza Shah, he had been a force for secularism and modernization in Iran. Also a force for nationalism and militarism and many things that we would describe as fascism elsewhere. The allies kicked that guy out and they installed a new Shaw, the son of the old one, and it looked for a minute, like Iran could be a modern constitutional monarchy. There was a parliament and a prime minister, to which the Shah seeded some power. But the. Brits still owned the oil company and the Iranians came to feel that their king was in the pocket of. British oil, which he was.

So in 1951, the Iranian parliament votes to nationalize the oil company, boot out the Brits, drill their own oil, and that's when all hell breaks loose. A fight ensues between parliament and the Western backed Shah and into this mess rides us dumb ass Americans. The CIA covertly engineers a coup to reinstate the Shah as a western puppet ruler and thus the stage is set for the Islamic Revolution. Iran is ruled by an unelected, western, secular, oil Barron, autocrat. Everyone in Iran who doesn't like that, they now find themselves in an unlikely alliance. The hardcore Islamists who don't like secularism, the nationalists who don't like the foreign interference in their sovereignty. Some of these groups may have hated each other, but they hated the Shah more because the Shah was an American puppet. It has been argued that anti-Americanism remains so deep and widespread in Iran because anti-Americanism is kind of the one thing that most Iranians have in common.

So yeah, the hardcore Islamists, they are the ones who eventually gather the strength to topple the. Shah and boot out the West. And since 1979, it has been the Islamic Republic of Iran. An unusual revolution resulting in an unusual country. The revolution was unusual because it happened in a relatively prosperous country. Iranians were not starving in the streets. And it's an unusual country because it's a hardcore authoritarian theocracy under a supreme leader who exists to enforce religious sovereignty over the state and the military. And yet Iran does also have a parliament and a president and elections that aren't a total sham, from what I understand.

And much of Iran, particularly urban Iran remains as it ever was, vibrant, prosperous and educated. Women in Iran arguably enjoy more rights and higher social status than women in Saudi Arabia, cherished ally of us in the United States. But by the moral standards of someone like me, for me, a secular humanist who believes individual liberty is paramount, well, Iran is still a horror show. For example, consensual same sex relations remain punishable by death. Though, such sentences are, it should be said, rare apparently.

But lesser forms of persecution remain incredibly common.

I got into some trouble on Twitter

This week when, in reference to the rights of sexual and gender minorities, i said that western values are superior.

Rather, I said that that particular western value is superior.

My wording was deliberately provocative, though I don't think it provoked the people I intended to provoke. I intended that as a dig against my fellow Western liberals who embrace moral relativism to a fault, IMHO. I actually think that moral relativism is usually like a pretty good practical philosophy, mostly because I don't know who is right and who is wrong in most situations. Ironically, I pride myself on my epistemic humility. I know that I don't know most things. I know that I probably think my culture is better than other cultures, purely because it's my culture and it's what I know. And that's not a good reason to think that your culture is better than another culture. But there are situations where I am damn sure I know what's right and what's wrong.

I don't believe in any God and therefore I don't believe in any divine law, but to the extent to which any natural law could exist, I think the natural law is live and let live. Leave other people alone. As long as they're not hurting you or taking resources necessary for your survival or anything like that, leave other people alone whenever possible. The state has absolutely no right to forbid benign behavior between consenting adults. Let people be who they are as long as who they are and what they do isn't particularly harmful to anyone else. To the extent that a natural law exists, that's it. I'm pretty sure. I think that's a superior value to the alternative.

And just because people have historically made false claims of their own superiority, that doesn't mean that the concept of superiority is inherently false. Some things are better than others. Leaving gay and trans people the fuck alone is better than ostracizing them. It's better than persecuting them or imprisoning them and potentially even killing them, simply on the basis of who they are and their basic, practical expressions of that identity, which harms no one. I also think this is a superior view because it tends to be the view of educated people. Generally speaking, the more people get to know about the world, the more socially tolerant they become. This usually takes multiple generations to happen. A society needs to be prosperous enough and lucky enough to afford universal good education for several generations before old and less enlightened values fade away.

I don't believe that my values are more enlightened because I am inherently superior. I believe my values are more enlightened because. I have been privileged enough to get a good education like my father and mother before me. Multi-generational access to education. Learning about the world and about history leads me to the logical conclusion that religion is a thing made by humans, not by God. I don't think God exists, but there are very educated people who believe that God does exist and they believe that religion at least partially flows from God, but they also know that religion is at least partially the invention of human beings too. And therefore, religious absolutism is an expression of human will, not God's will. We can change religious law if we want to because we made it up in the first place.

Or we can choose to erect a wall of separation between religious law and real law, secular law, or we can choose to ignore religious law.

We certainly have no divine mandate to

Impose religious law upon other non-consenting humans because religious law is at least partially made by humans.

That's something all educated people tend to come to know, even if they believe in God and religion to some extent. This is something educated people tend to feel that they know because they do know it because it's true. Education is a privilege. One that has been enjoyed in Iran, in some form, for thousands of years into today. We have an educated, prosperous young population in Iran who understand that Iran can be something like a modern secular democracy without necessarily being a western puppet state as well. That would be a bad thing too.

To be a western puppet state. That's bad says this western puppeteer. You don't have to be pro-American to be anti ayatollah. A fact that I suspect was known by the Iranian protestors who went to Ayatollah Khamenei's boyhood home turned museum last week and they set it on fire. Pretty righteous. Why did they do this? Well, in September, the capital Tehran, you had a 22 year old woman named Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the government's religious morality police for not wearing a "proper" hijab or hair covering. Should be said that pretty much every society says that people, and often women in particular, have to cover up their bodies to some extent in service of modesty. We draw the line in different places about what must be covered when and where.

But if a woman walks down the street, totally pantsless here in Knoxville, Tennessee, the cops are probably going to arrest her. But they probably won't take her back to the station house and beat her to death, which it seems is what happened to Mahsa Amini. Though of course the Iranian government denies that. The protests across the country are remarkable, though not wholly unprecedented. There have been popular movements against the Islamist government before, like the Green Movement in 2009. I really hope it doesn't fizzle out this time. I really hope that a new revolution happens and Iran can just go back to being a normal country, a great country, as it has been for thousands of years.

I hope Iran can just join the rest of us in the 21st century. They deserve it, I think. But I don't know what to do to support that cause, other than to talk about its historical origins on my little podcast for a half hour. The tragedy of the US' intervention in Afghanistan has convinced me that no outside force can save a country from itself. You can save a country from another country, as we are currently trying to do in Ukraine, but you can't save a country from itself. If there's a despotic leader with almost no real popular support, sure, yeah. Maybe another country can come in and knock that guy out and let the people elect their own leader, but that's not what's happening in Afghanistan and it's certainly not what's happening in Iran. Lots of people in Iran, especially the older generation, they still sincerely support the status quo.

And especially given the fact that the US arguably created this whole mess in the first place by covertly deposing an elected government and installing a puppet strongman so that the Brits could have their oil company back. Especially given that fact, I think the US government can have absolutely no substantive role in supporting the protests in Iran. For us to interfere would be self-defeating. It would backfire, horribly. If anybody in Iran thinks I'm wrong about that, I would love to hear why. From where I sit, it seems to me the US has done enough damage and it's time for us to sit down and shut up. We can watch, we can hope, we can give you encouragement on our little podcasts, but that's about it. It's up to people like you, Hirad and I salute you.