Iran has lots of nature to offer, but I highly recommend finding a tour as a foreigner. For visiting history, visit the cities of Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz (inc Persepolis!), Yazd (definitely do go to Yazd), Isfahan and Kashan. If you want to visit ancient history sites, places like Izeh have a few historically significant sites. All of Iran is built on the grave of history, you’ll find no shortage of old ruin to keep you busy…

What’s the political situation like in Iran?

theocratic shitshow

leftist

Got mass executed in the 1980s and there are no real vanguards in Iran to my knowledge. Only anarchist student groups here and there.

What do you think could be done to improve Iran’s current situation?

Socialism is the only path forward!

It can range from bad to actual living hell. The first 3 months of bootcamp is really bad, and if you luck out and get a cushy assignment the rest of it will be easier. But if you don’t you will get deployed to border areas and have to actually fight smugglers and shit (causality rates exist) that’s if you don’t die to some bullshit accident (Buses carrying conscripts have crashed more than a few times)

Public transport is rather decent! Most cities have metro, BRT, and Taxi lines to use. Tehran’s walk ability kind of sucks badly tho; in the enclaves it is good but going from one area or district to the other on foot may need some pathfinding abilites. Depends on the area tbh

Ah, I have to deal with this shit everyday!

Living here you will quickly learn how to use VPNs for accessing foreign services. Sanctions and domestic firewall definitely have a large impact. Internet speeds have improved BY LOTS in the recent years to the point of being quite modern. ADSL is mostly for shitty old homes who don’t have anything better than decades old copper lines, in which case I recommend getting a rooftop antenna for so-called “air fiber” service.

Brain drain is certainly a huge issue, but Iranian public institutions are quite good. We still have the old, experienced generation of professors who teach in public universities. Private ones are a fucking disaster tho (education quality is garbage)

They are Iranian people who got separate due to imperialism; they are literally Iranian and the efforts to rename their language like Dari are basically historical revisionism projects. I remember an anecdote from an old Afghan lady who said “They came to our schools and changed Farsi to Dari on the book covers one day”. Sadly I cannot source this because I was it on Discord and it’s almost impossible to find now…

Pretty much not at all, unless they’re like born-again or conservative or like that

Look the short answer is that the Iranian diasporoids are notoriously quirked up and they’re usually part of some monarchist/MEK cult/zio cult nonsense, so it’s better not to try rationalizing their positions because they come straight out of a crack pipe

There are people who say Khomeini was a plot against the gLoRiOuS mOnArChY and shit, there are people who fled Iran with lots of stolen money in 1979 and live in LA, there are doomer new gen immigrants who are the most anti-immigration hitlerites you can find

just don’t bother with them they’re mentally fucked

Moonshine lmao, people who are called “Saghi” brew and sell it + you always have to watch out for menthol poisoned supply

The northern coast is filled with rich people’s bullshit and over tourism. Try to check out Lorestan/Chaharmahal Bakhtiyari/East and West Azarbaijan^1 provinces. They have much nature to show you…

WARNING! IRANIAN HISTORY RANT AFTER THIS POINT!

1- Iranian Azarbaijan is the real “Azarbaijan”, the country “Republic of Azarbaijan” is actually historically called Shirvan. That country was separated from us in Russian imperialism before the bolsheviks took over (due to a lengthy war with Ottomans and Iran being weakened) and then later on they changed the name to Azarbaijan in order to eventually conquer all of Iranian azarbaijan. USSR then managed to add fuel to the fire with their short sighted cultural revisionism projects which tried to establish a fake “Azarbaijan” identity out of thin air and distance them from Iran, which 80 years later has resulted in rise of pan-turk ethno-fascism. Those sons of removed ain’t got Iranian Azarbaijan yet and they never fucking will!

Do you want to roam nature or visit historical sites?

Go out with the lads, get high on cheap weed, do some work on personal projects, play video games

We sometimes get drunk but only in parties and such because it’s illegal over here lol

Pretty decent, especially compared to how it was under the shah (and oh boy, it was shit) in terms of literacy rates, participation in society, participation in economy, etc. (definitely MUCH better than any US ally in the region lol)

Abortions are only permitted in special cases, I think? Before 4 months of pregnancy but I’m remembering this VERY loosely

Birth control is readily available (although to the dismay of fundamentalists) and divorce is not my area of expertise so I don’t know how hard it is etc, but the woman in the marriage can ask for an arbitrary amount of money (mehriye) from the man upon termination of marriage who can even go to prison over this (obv, there is no marriage other than man/woman under the ‘Islamic’ Republic).

huuuh who decided on this being the default behavior lmao it works now

Well I’m sure if you put the bar in malbolge, satan can hop over it too… Raisi was a disaster

Pretty much yes, he hasn’t done much to provide economical relief or to ease the internal contradictions, he’s just yet another lib who lib’s

President*, but yes, his name is Pezeshkian and he got the young people’s vote by touting progressive horn (including mine, woe is me to have voted in a bourgeoisie election)

On the other hand he seems to be very lib and more of a population pacifier so I don’t really think he made shit any better :(

For some reason I can’t see some of the comments, so if you said something and I didn’t answer it’s some BS from Lemmy or inter-instance issues or something

In the West, it’s absolutely fucked.

Same lol the job market is brutal but it’s (maybe?) slightly less fucked here

I mean, imagine the average normie, Probably has some weird political line, spends the day on Instagram, probably thinking about money (economy is rough here man) and just going day to day trying to survive. “average” of any population is more or less the same.

Mostly because the west is dead afraid of Iranian cultural influence (even in areas which have literally been part of Iran until like 200 years ago)

But you should spread the gospel! Go out there and be our ambassador! There are many lesser known Iranian foods that you should tried. Try some kuku, Morghe torsh, Aashe Dooq, Aashe reshteh, etc… I could find you recipes from Iranian internet but you’d have to translate them yourself (I recommend locally running the Aya-23 LLM if you have a powerful PC, it has decent multilingual capabilities)