Iran has banned a weightlifter from sports for life and dissolved a sports committee after the athlete greeted an Israeli counterpart on a podium.
Mostafa Rajaei, a veteran weightlifter, finished second in his category in the 2023 World Master Weightlifting Championships in Poland and stood on a podium with an Iranian flag wrapped around him on Saturday.
On anther step of the podium stood Maksim Svirsky from Israel, who finished third.
The two athletes shook hands and took a picture together, which led to the Iran Weightlifting Federation banning Rajaei from all sports for life due to what it called an “unforgivable” transgression.
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You’ve gotta be pretty insecure to have a complete breakdown over a minor issue. Really makes Irans government appear weak.
Hold up, assigning traits to a government made up by people (a group of people) is weird, but assigning traits to a different group of people isn't? I don't really disagree, but you can't agree with the comment above you and agree with your comment also.
you can't agree with the comment above you and agree with your comment also.
of course i can; if i couldn't, i wouldn't, but i did it, which is proof that i can do it
You can't while being a reasonable, logically consistent person. You can if you argue in bad faith, which I expect but usually people don't take pride in that.
Did he assign a trait to liberals? Because if not, there's no inconsistency.
Then a follow up question: is there a difference between 'liberals' as a group (i.e. not liberalism) and a government (i.e. an institution)? If so, there may be no inconsistency.
What I mean is, when people talk about governments it's often as a non-human legal person, which can act, omit, sue, and be sued, but which does not have the full range of human traits, like insincerity. Whereas a group that does not have legal personality and only describes a collection of humans, albeit in the abstract, like 'liberals', can demonstrate a fuller range of human traits.
Then, as an experiment, switch the terms and see if it has the same ring to it:
politics for [governments] are just a big reality show
Does this anthropomorphise 'governments' in the same way as attributing human emotions to them?
I don't necessarily have answers to these questions but it seems that you can't be calling someone out for bad faith unless you can strongly argue yes, no, yes, to the above questions.
i admire the willingness to spell it out lol but that other guy has big reddit debatebro energy and i don't think it can go anywhere
Did he assign a trait to liberals? Because if not, there's no inconsistency.
Let's see...
politics for liberals are just a big reality show
It sure seems like it. Liberals treat politics as a reality TV show seems to be a trait described.
Then a follow up question: is there a difference between 'liberals' as a group (i.e. not liberalism) and a government (i.e. an institution)? If so, there may be no inconsistency.
Sure, there is a difference. They're both institutions though. They can both be assigned traits in perfectly valid reasonable ways.
I don't necessarily have answers to these questions but it seems that you can't be calling someone out for bad faith unless you can strongly argue yes, no, yes, to the above questions.
I can strongly answer that "anthropomorphising" things made of anthropomorphic beings is perfectly reasonable. Giving traits to a building can be silly, but sometimes still useful literarily. Using human characteristics to describe humans is totally normal, useful, and reasonable.
Well, yeah it's obvious, but when people say that X company or country looks weak/happy/pissed, they are refering to the board of directors or congress that are taking the decisions, naming the country instead of the whole sentence is easier.
You can still find it weird ofc, I was just trying to explain why people do it.
Please teach me more of your liberal ways, I'm really starting to understand how the world works now.
I really don't get the need of being so passive aggresive with someone trying to hold a conversation. Have a nice day.
If you were actually interested in a conversation you would have answered my other replies to you.
Some hexbear users really hate being decent when conversing.
No, its pretty true. It was very mild sarcasm lol
Are you okay?
This is the problem people have with Hexbear specifically. You can almost never have a normal conversation with them. The other day someone (who happened to be from hexbear, but I didn't realize it at the time of posting) posted an article and said it said something totally different than the actual contents. I pointed out that they were wrong, and they then went through my entire comment history to pick things out and misrepresented them to make themselves feel better I guess. It was weird, but it's similar to at least half of my interactions with hexbear users.
Thank you for calling them out.
Well governments are made of people...
If you're assigning human traits to the building the government is in, sure it's stupid. Recognizing the traits of the people representing the state is pretty normal though.
A reminder that we dont know if this is true or not. And if its true what really happened. Most western news on iran are like those on north korea greatly exagerated or completly made up.
Qatar, and by extension of cash money also Al Jazeera, is very anti-Iran.
I’m not seeing any news of this at all in Iranian media, which actually is fairly tabloid and weight lifting is a big thing in Iran. Even if you want to tell yourself the regime has absolute control over information, which isn’t true, they’d still need to provide a cover story due to the high profile nature of it and I don’t see one.
Also Iranian social media is vibrant and also I don’t see anything in Persian but maybe I’m using the wrong search terms?
All I see are the bbc and the telegraph and cnn etc etc etc repeating almost exactly the same story word for word.
It seems like fake news to me. The classic case of one biased journalist writing a story, sending it to AP, and the entire western media just repeating the thing word for word because it’s free news inches and posting propaganda of this nature is oddly enough free in our modern system of journalism.
It seems unlikely to actually be true to me. It seems more likely that it’s being syndicated without any critical enquiry because it agrees with the establishment narrative about Iran.
Yeah that’s a good point. I don’t see Iran denying this if it were true either so radio silence on the topic makes it seem like it was just made up.
Damn, I hate waiting on confirmation of whether or not Iran is this based.
Usually take Iran's side on stuff, but this is kinda pointlessly petty tbh
the Iranian government? the one killing citizens who speak out against it or women who don't wear a headscarf?
the one killing citizens who speak out against it
Truly, the most dastardly invention of the Iranian government was killing people who oppose it. No government before or since, especially not in the West, has steeped to such lows.
Even if you include 'killed by police' (or, in some cases, killed by militia) this stands true.
US pigs killed nearly 1100 people in 2022 and we're not even getting into all the social murder committed by our for profit medical and housing industries. I can't believe I'm seeing this whitewashing of American government malfeasance from a Hexbear user.
Well you edited your original response right after seeing this but your original comment talked about how the US only killed 18 people last year but these foreign countries in the middle east were more violent and killed hundreds, and how, even if you include police brutality this still "stands true."
It's hard for me to include your exact words since you took steps to obscure them but I think if you're honest with yourself you can admit you were downplaying the violence committed by the US on its populace relative to Iran.
Even if you include 'killed by police' (or, in some cases, killed by militia) this stands true.
Over the last decade, police in America have killed at least between 950 and 1250 people a year.
The actual numbers are probably higher because police don't report all the people they kill, so statisticians are limited to searching news stories that contain the relevant data.
For instance: In 2022, Iran had minimum 596 executions (likely more), Saudi Arabia had 146, the US had 18,
The US had in excess of a thousand killings by cops that were officially reported that year as well (likely more that were unreported, and I have at least some evidence for my claim).
If you're talking about violence used to uphold their rule, you can't separate domestic and foreign violence. All those people living, working, and dying young in atrocious conditions outside of the US for US prosperity, all those people gunned down in the dark or in protests against their government's subservience to the US, and all those people murdered in wars and 'conflicts' and by sanctions to further US interests must be counted.
Otherwise you're doing that thing where you redefine violence in such a way that distorts the picture. It doesn't matter whether you now explicitly mention the US because by nature of a comparison, the US is implicated, anyway. Likewise, replace US for every other government in the above equation for the true figures of how violent a state is in its own protection.
Hey! So I very much understand wanting to take the side of people who are oppressed in some way.
I think a way to do this without supporting oppressive regimes is to specifically support the people, and not the government.
Your comment was unclear, and because of that people are taking it as you supporting the government of Iran. I think most sane people agree that they suck. The people though - they are some of the kindest people I have ever met, and do not deserve the violence that they have experienced.
I think a way to do this without supporting oppressive regimes is to specifically support the people, and not the government.
On Hexbear we have seen this line of reasoning a hundred thousand times and so we just laugh now whenever we see it; I thought you were making a joke until I saw your instance.
The cause of so much of the suffering of "repressive regimes" like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the DPRK, etc is specifically because of the sanctions that the West puts on it that are designed to impoverish the people and try and make them overthrow their government, because they refuse to engage in the global economy according to the United States's rules, and not really because of those "regimes" themselves. Of course, it's taken for granted that what the United States wants is what everybody should want, but considering the billions being exploited abroad for tiny wages in hostile working environments for the West's benefit, perhaps America's "international rules-based order" isn't the best for anybody except for the West themselves! Of course, America has all the military bases, and those countries do not, and bullets and bombs tend to be quite persuasive.
For liberals, which I assume you are, these sanctions exist in a weird doublethink space. Working through it, liberals basically end up saying something contradictory like "The suffering that the people here are experiencing is because those countries are Bad. We need to put sanctions on Bad Countries. The sanctions aren't what's causing the suffering, it's the Bad Countries' fault (which thus implies sanctions don't work and have little to no effect), but we still need to put sanctions on them to punish them (thus implying that sanctions do have some negative, disciplinary function)."
Sanctions both do and do not function depending on the rhetorical frame you're taking at any particular time. When you're talking about the repression that Iranian women feel and why that sparked the protests, the sanctions will never be mentioned - this is purely Iran. When you're talking about the fact that Cubans struggle with food insecurity and don't have enough fuel and sometimes some of them protest or complain, then what caused those shortages is, again, never mentioned - it's purely the Cuban regime. If, on the other hand, you're talking about how repressive regimes must be punished in general, then westerners online clamour and shout for sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.
This is why we laugh about such "support the people, not the government" rhetoric a lot of the time. Of course, in the case of Iran and similar countries, they aren't left-wing and so we only really have critical support (in the sense of "they are better than those they are opposing, but they are not good in a vacuum") and there is genuinely nuance about how the Iranian bourgeoisie are worsening conditions by exploiting the people, and repressive religious institutions, etc, but by and large American sanctions are the larger factor. In the case of Cuba, or the DPRK, such a line about supporting the people, not the government is quite ridiculous. Liberals (usually of the chud variety) who just come right out and say what they really mean - that, yes, the sanctions are explicitly designed to make the population overthrow the government so that Western compradors and corporations can loot it of its resources and exploit its people - are horrific monsters, but at least slightly refreshing compared to the mental knots that most liberals tie themselves in to not say that line explicitly, invoking "restoring democracy" and "fighting authoritarianism" and other such meaningless cliches instead.
Apologies, the Hexbear motto is usually to be Polite, Precise, and Brief (our writeup of our PPB motto can be found here, only a hundred words or so) so I went a little overboard!
Why’d you bother writing this reply then lib?
Should have just said “I’m an ignorant lib”
I made a comment on a Hexbear post and somebody from Hexbear replied back and now I'm angry.
In future we will add a disclaimer:
CONTENT WARNING THE FOLLOWING REPLY REQUIRES THAT YOU CONSIDER YOUR ASSUMPTIONS AND THINK CRITICALLY
Is that a reasonable compromise?
This way you can maintain your thought free information bubble and we can still point out the ways in which mainstream propaganda shapes your world view, and you can just comfortably ignore it.
Yes, but then how might you learn to be a better person if we, your kind hexagonal comrades, don't help you?
We would never say “libtards” and we don’t have to. Liberal is enough of an insult on its own.
On a personal level, as soon as per-account instance banning is possible, hexbear will take pride of pace in my ban list. And I know what hexbear users think about that - that I’m swimming in a sea of US hegemony propaganda and I’ve got everything wrong and I’m totally fine with that. The judgment of hexbear users concerns me not one iota.
btw, we don't in fact use ableist insults.
If you don't want to talk to someone from Hexbear don't reply to someone from Hexbear'd comments for a start.
Of course since you're not OP it's really not your place anyways to say which instances can and can't respond to them.
The person you were replying to before is also on Hexbear (and so am I, just to save you the trouble of pointing it out). It seems like we're working with inconsistent standards here.
also can we just lose the "hexbear is so hostile for no reason" shtick. Every other instance is hostile and has its trolls, the only difference is that there are for more of us than you.
With the greatest of respect, and in my personal opinion, hexbear users have the reputation they deserve.
I completely agree civility is a two way street. I also agree that I have started to dismiss users from hexbear apriori. I’m a very courteous person generally and I’m not happy to engage in these discussions with hexbear users (I’ve done it a few times by now and my sole purpose isn’t to convince hexbear users that I’m right, which I never could, but to convince others that Lemmy isn’t just full of “so left-wing you’ve flipped to right-wing” hexbears. In some ways I feel it’s a fight for the soul of the wider Lemmy community. I’m but a drop in that wider ocean, but I wish more people would speak up against the extreme viewpoints you generally espouse. If the tone doesn’t change, I’ll probably drop off and see myself out.
72 trillion runs the whole news mega, he knows what he's talking about
In various circumstances critical support of problematic governments is support of the people when harm to their state by outside actors will bring harm to those people. Most communists have a general understanding that the way Iran is today is in fact America's fault and that the change it needs won't come from outside of it, particularly when the people using various problems as a political weapon do not have the improvement of the lives of the people as their goal but instead various other geopolitical and resource interests.
The most recent historical example of this would be Syria, with Libya a close second and Iraq a close third. All of which are objectively worse off thanks to western interventionism.
You can and should oppose interventionism and outside actors fucking with the situation there if you do care about the people, while also not defending the theocracy and support real local political movements for change (ie the ones not funded by NED or various other cia or nato affiliated intermediaries).
I’d only change one thing and say most of the problems for Iran started because of the UK/US being imperialistic and has never recovered as a result
Most communists have a general understanding that the way Iran is today is in fact America's fault
I'm not sure what I said differently here, I was referring to the historical events of US backed revolution and bombings that led to the existing Iran when I wrote the above. Modern Iran exists because America wanted to stop us socialists from getting power there. Everyone on this website should remind themselves of this when they see anticommunists screaming about "tankies". Anticommunism leads to backing the far right consistently throughout history.
Yeah usually I find it absurd when anti Israel (Israel, for the lobs reading this, is a murderous fascistic apartheid state actively doing a genocide) stuff is painted as antisemitism, but this is sure seems to be
What makes this antisemitic? As far as I can tell, the issue is that the other competitor was an official representative of Israel, not that they were Jewish
should have specified that it was purely vibes based analysis, i apologize for my liberalism
Israel has a history of employing incredible violence against Iran in the most literal sense of that phrase.
Didn't a Ukrainian women get disqualified from Fencing recently for understandably not shaking hands with a Russian opponent? What are the rules, would this bloke have been disqualifed if he hadn't shook the others hand?
Fencing is kind of different, as far as I know you shake hands (or tap swords) before fencing to indicate that you aren't actually going to try and murder each other. Weightlifting isn't the same in that regard. Though I'm just speculating on the specific rules around this
With the protective gear they're wearing, I'm pretty sure that you couldn't murder your opponent even if you wanted to.
The injury rate in fencing is just marginally higher than the injury rate in synchronized swimming or table tennis.
Did she think some random fencer was responsible for a war? Nationalists are so fucking insufferable
No, but there were plenty of of social media posts said fencer had made supporting the war and her brother fighting in it. So I guess nationalism sucks on both sides huh?
Only one side threw a tantrum over matters of basic courtesy in the competition over nationalism.
In other words, "whataboutism"
So Hexbear no subscribe to "both sideism" now do they? Not shaking hands at a sports competition is clearly an equal offense to invading a neighbouring nation an killing their civilians isn't it?
She's shown support for her country doing so to the other contestants nation.
Let's try an analogy, if a hate group burn down your house, then a month later you end up in say, a darts tournament, against a member of said hate group. Not the one that burned your house down, but someone who made it clear they were happy that the event happened, do you think it's fair you should be expected to act civilly to said person?
Let's take the "Nazi bar" analogy people love to quote, do you think in that scenario the bartender was in the wrong to kick out the Nazi, since he's never kicked a BAME persons head in, he just likes the people who do an their iconography?
The official US policy to kill civilians. Between the coup and the proxy war we have more ukrainiajn blood on our hands than anyone. Did she shake a US competitor's hand?
If you can't behave civilly with another person you have no business swinging a sword at them. You should protest the event hosting them if you feel so strongly about it. You certainly shouldn't be participating in the event. If you decide to show up and compete against the other person you're already past all that, and now you need to behave civilly with them.
The point is, sure, there are people who don't deserve respect. But respect is a necessary prerequisite for this kind of competition. If you can't respect your opponent you shouldn't be competing against them. You can't disrespect them and also compete against them, you pick one or the other.
Meanwhile, Iran actually has a seat in parliament that is reserved for a Jewish representative.
Based. Genocidal Colonizers should be shunned. Free Palestine 🇵🇸
Yeah none of that politics stuff like how Jackie Robinson playing baseball definitely wasn't political, and the US vs Soviets 1980 Olympics definitely wasn't politically charged, and people definitely were expressing their dislike of the Soviets during the game or the entire point of the Olympics being a peaceful gathering of nation states for competition ia definitely not political, or all the taxpayer money that goes to building stadiums also isnt political, or that the owners of sports teams are politically active isnt... political. Oh... wait.
Sports have always been political
Always.
How are you a star trek fan yet this is somehow a shock for you lol
Hitler's Ubermenschen getting owned by some Black dude was definitely not political.
No no no, it was political they let a black guy compete! Damn wokeness
This sounds fake to me. I know the media always lies to make the state department happy so I shouldn't be surprised. I am just no used to them putting out propaganda in this direction
Why does it sound fake? Iran's made its position on Israeli athletes quite clear. It will not allow its athletes to compete with Israeli athletes.
That's a different story to being told, for shaking hands after competing. So at the very least, if you're right, there's another plausible story than the one presented. Which casts doubt on the narrative. Which means we'd be wise to suspend our belief until there are better sources than unreliable western media that have a firm track record of being number one and refusing to shake hands with numbers two and three in making shit up competitions.
Far more eloquent than I could have put it myself. Thank you comrade.
There are references in other reporting to a broadcast by Iranian state media. It's of course in Farsi so I'm having trouble finding it let alone reading it.
That is a perfectly coherent take for 1994 and even for 2015, but these last years Israel has been aligning itself more and more with the anti-US axis in its spirit and rhetoric. The US says "we approve of this, we disapprove of that" and the Israeli elected government responds "who are you to criticize us after what you did in Iraq and Afghanistan?", like if Putin were there in the flesh he could not have been more on-brand. Geopolitically right now Israel wants to be Hungary, and the only thing preventing that is the historical accident of spending all those years as a US proxy state, and all the strings that came attached to that. And some people waving flags and whining "we liked it as a US proxy state" but clearly no one cares about them.
I am not saying you can't make an argument for that succinct manifesto above, just that it used to be self-explanatory how one part is exactly aligned with the other, and nowadays it's much less self-explanatory than it used to be, and that's a point of interest.
They are opposed to even the most basic form of civility. Yeah, we already knew that, this just makes it clear to the doubters.
That’s ridiculous. Zionists should be lucky if people don’t shake their hands and should be greatful they aren’t punched. Iran would be civil by refusing to engage with the evil Zionists. Do you think the Zionists are being civil when they kill Palestinians?
