Comrades, I’m stuck working on some university bullshit and thus I am bored. So, let’s shoot the shit. I am an Iranian computer engineering graduate student (have a bsc degree in CompSci) and I have noticed that my country Iran is completely… opaque, so to speak, to even leftist of various denominations from the outside. So, let’s talk comrade to comrade. Ask me shit about the daily soulcrushing grind of life in Iran…
How’s art over there? Persia has such a long and rich history of art. There’s speculation some techniques we attribute to the Renaissance may have originated in the Middle East. Do universities offer degrees in art and art history? Are there painters and sculptors who make a living from their work? How much shit has been stolen by North America and Europe vs. stuff that gets loaned out on tour?
A few years ago I saw some Iranian paintings made around 1200 to 1550 AD at a museum here in the US and was impressed at how well preserved the ink was. 800-year old ink on paper doesn’t usually hold up that well, but the pigments were still incredibly vibrant with little to no cracking.
What’s military service like (idk if you’d know anything about that)? What’s the general public opinion on Israel?
What is public transport like in Iran?
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
What’s the political situation like in Iran? Are there any real leftist parties? What do you think could be done to improve Iran’s current situation?
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!
Hey brother. Persian diaspora here. I wanted to ask some questions regarding to pursuing higher education in Iran.
How much of an impact would you say that the combination of:
- west sanctions such as AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.
- slow internet speed (I’ve only heard stories of this one that the internet is limited to ADSL2. Is that still the case?)
- brain drain from the country
has had on your education. Also, curious what your thesis is on comrade :)
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)
How accessible is higher education? is it reasonably priced? free? is it hard to get into a university?
also how is k12/lower education divided in Iran for example in amerikkka it has 3 stages 1-5 6-8 9-12 and my home country has 3 but its 1-6 7-9 10-12 but i also know some countries have 2 stages. Im always curious about this cuz every country seems to do its own thing.
I answered this before, look into the thread (it was the first question I think). Iranian k-12 uses a 6-3-3 system, 6 years primary, 3 years Highschool (stage 1) and 3 years Highschool (stage 2)
Why are you hiding all the good food from the rest of the world? It is a crime that kashk e bademjoon, mast o moosir and many other Iranian foods aren’t more popular and known to the world!
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)
Thank for sharing food names with me, I’ll endeavor to try and do them justice when I practice making them!
What do you do on a free evening, how do you and the average person unwind from work? How does nightlife differ from the west? I absolutely hate the amount of drunkards in México.
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
How do you get alcohol if it’s illegal? is it sold like contraband or people homebrew their stuff lol
Moonshine lmao, people who are called “Saghi” brew and sell it + you always have to watch out for menthol poisoned supply
how religious are young people? i imagine younger generations are less than the past generation.
Pretty much not at all, unless they’re like born-again or conservative or like that
You know… It’s funny how Farsi is widely known across Central Asia, but under different names, like, idk, Dari
Tell me, what do you think of people who speak Dari and such?
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…
What’s the average person in Iran like? I feel like we hear a lot about your government in the west but never hear anything about the Iranian people themselves.
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.
Makes sense. I figure we are all the same in most places around the world. I do watch a lot of food tour youtubers and I always like when one is in Iran. The hospitality of the people seems out of this world and I can’t image my own country doing stuff like randomly inviting people over for diner lol.
Iran is a country is definitely want to visit one day. The northern coast especially, it looks beautiful. The Badab Soort springs in particular look amazing.
Also, i need pistachios. The californian ones suck.
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!
All of those places look incredible, thank you. Urmia in particular seems to have a vast history that i could easily fall into reading about.
didnt yall get a new prime minister fairly recently? how’s that working out? i heard he claimed he would no longer enforce head coverings
im half persian and my dad lives in iran, i should be better informed about the place but beyond following some skaters on instagram im really out of touch
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 :(
lol funny, i typed president first but miscorrected it to PM.
when you say a population pacifier do you mean he more just says he will make progressive reforms to stave off riots with no actual intent to change things?
we all have to participate in these fake ass bourgeois politics at some point or another so dont beat yourself up over it
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
damn. would you consider him a step up from previous administration at least?
Well I’m sure if you put the bar in malbolge, satan can hop over it too… Raisi was a disaster
What is the position of women? Are divorces, abortions and birth control accessible?
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).
What is the job situation for young people like? In the West, it’s absolutely fucked.
In the West, it’s absolutely fucked.
Same lol the job market is brutal but it’s (maybe?) slightly less fucked here
What’s with Iranian diaspora almost all universally being opposed to the government? Because theres a common dislike of both the US and Iran’s leadership, and a bizarre way of rationalizing it. I’ve heard on more than one occasion from Iranians that they believe that the US backed the Ayatollah during the revolution and it was their plan all along to bring about the Islamic republic.
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
Noted, also just to mention, nearly all of these I’ve encountered were students who had come to study from Iran, constantly complaining about their country and going on about the “oppression”. Sort of sucking up to the locals by trying to distance themselves from their “backwards” homeland.
How hard is it for most people to go to university?
Well, in Iran we have a 12 grades school system which is under the Ministry of Education and Development. You can do this for very little to no money, however, the quality of private schools which cost ridiculous amounts of money is of course better than some average public institution. Unless you’re an overachieving gifted kid who can then enroll in development programs from the state by that.
After that 12 years, you do a “Konkur”. It’s a SAT of literally the entire population of people who want to go to undergrad. You compete in the Konkur exam for a seat in the university. You provide a list of universities/degrees you want to enroll in, and you get accepted in one of those based on the order of your preference and your rating in the SAT. There is also some equalization factor here, people from less developed areas and other special cases get varying degrees of bonus % in the SAT scores. This has lead to some village kids from bumfuck nowhere villages getting into top public institutions before.
NOTE: Iran has both Public and Private universities. Unlike the west, Public ones are better by a -massive long shot-. Private and Public institutions use the same SAT; but you have to declare your willingness for going into private institutions separately.
Private institutions are generally much more lax, lazy, and really shitty in terms of education quality. You also pay for tuition. This is to the point that many parents will straight up soft-disown your ass if you only get accepted for private institutions. Public institutions are the scientific backbone of Iran and are much more difficult, but they are free (at the time of admission) so everyone wants a piece of that particular cake! The competition is fierce.
Personally, I have done both my university degrees in Public universities, and I gotta tell you they are fucking brutal. I don’t honestly yet know if the insane pressure was worth it yet. I sure as shit have more knowledge than my peers, tho.
Now there is a thing if you’re unfortunate enough to be born male you HAVE to do mandatory conscription which is -hell- so if you fail konkur they put your ass in the trains and send you off for 24 months of torture, so the pressure levels (and suicide rates) are really high in the male 17-19 years of age range.
EDIT: The universities are under Ministry of Science and the SAT is under the Sanjesh Organization but primary education is under Ministry of Education and Development. Bureaucracy is fun!
