I'm fucking stunned at the number of people who claim to be "Progressive" but sincerely believe protests in Iran are a vast Mossad operation that should be put down.
Intelligence Agencies don't operate like that. Mossad agents don't go around distributing bags of money to thousands of protesters in 40 different cities.
Ali Khamenei's regime has committed human rights abuses and crimes against humanity since 1989, including killing thousands of protesters, rape, ethnic persecution, torture, systematic political repression.
If you get arrested in Iran, this is what they do to you:
On 11 July 2003, nineteen days after she was arrested, Kazemi died in Iranian custody in Baghiyyatollah al-Azam Military Hospital.
Shahram Azam, a former staff physician in Iran's Defence Ministry, released a statement saying that he examined Kazemi in hospital four days after her arrest and found obvious signs of torture, including:
Evidence of a very brutal rape
A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe, and a broken nose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zahra_Kazemi
Just because Iran opposes Israel doesn't make it a good government:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62793573
Saddam Hussein was a murderous psycho who also opposed Israel.
Hafez El Assad was a butcher who screamed "Syria stands against Israel"
I'm genuinely horrified at the number of people who think Iran's regime is right to shoot protesters because "they are paid by the Mossad". Or those who say "it's a Western conspiracy theory, they aren't killing anyone"
I know a woman who kept quoting Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports about Gaza for months.
But now, strangely, she thinks Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are no longer credible sources:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/12/irans-internet-blackout-concealing-atrocities
Fucking tankies.
Sorry for the rant
Here's a crazy statement.
What if... all governments are bad?
Then I’d say you have an insular knowledge of the world, and are probably an American whose knowledge only extends as a far as what’s been fed to him by nightly news.
Between the UK prostrating themselves to Donald Trump while trying to regulate consensual adult sexuality, Denmark rallying the EU to eliminate digital communications privacy, France still arresting people for cannabis, Italy oscillating between incompetent governments every few years, Greece being broke, Hungary being ruled by nazis, etc., I'm not so sure the smug Europeanisms are really warranted anymore.
America is, without a doubt, a fucking mess run by evil fascist idiots. But when it comes to strength, democracy, civil rights, and standing for something, I'm also not overwhelmingly impressed by the leadership I'm seeing elsewhere on Earth.
If anything I think it just shows that it's impossible to reduce something like a government into something as binary as good and bad.
You could accurately claim that all governments do bad things.... But claiming all governments are bad or even that there is such a thing as a good government is pretty nonsensical imo.