[somenameforme]

The most interesting thing to me is that he was apparently assassinated while working at his office. It's not like the US/Israeli actions were a secret, yet he seemingly made no effort to secure himself. It's hard not to see this as an intentional martyrdom. So it will be interesting to see whether his calculations were correct, or whether the US' were.

The one thing I think must be true is that I can't imagine an 86 year old cleric was an especially effective leader. So assassinating him is quite the gamble. I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.

[wiseowise]

Prophets are more dangerous when they're dead. At 86 he would either die from old age or fighting "imperialistic, evil" Israel/US.

[_DeadFred_]

This Prophet believed/taught that school girls should be raped before they are executed for not wearing hats so that they can't get into heaven (believing God would judge a child for being raped).

Should a believer/teacher of such things even be called a prophet? Old boy was straight trash with a horrific morality.

[arunabha]

> Should a believer/teacher of such things even be called a prophet? Old boy was straight trash with a horrific morality.

Sadly, that has been a fairly common attribute for a fairly large majority of people anointed as 'prophets' and 'saints'.

[cogman10]

He's not a prophet and he didn't teach that.

You don't need to lie about someone you don't like.

[hu3]

I have no horse in this race but I did find some daunting google results about that.

[cogman10]

I'd love to see a link to them. My cursory googles aren't finding it.

Look, not trying to defend the guy, but I don't like this sort of hyperbole. People have the wrong view on what Iran is like. It's ran by religious fundamentalists, which is bad, but it's also probably one of the more progressive muslim theocracies in the region. People tend to mix up shit that Saudi Arabia does with Iran.

In particular, Iran has a very progressive view on education. They have one of the best educated populations in the middle east (men and women).

[hu3]

I really don't want this on my comment history but here you go:

~redacted google serarch~

And I understand your point. There's a ton of bias. We must be careful with the "facts" on the internet.

Admitedly, these link results don't inspire me much confidence.

[_DeadFred_]

I don't have it bookmarked but he did teach that and had his friend Lajevardi whom he supported and praised carry it out. And his Islamic enforcement police regularly engaged in it. And he has defended his Islamic enforcement police the Basij, whose job is to enforce his teachings, when they have conducted systemic rapes.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmin...

Here he is defending the practice https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/27/iran-ayatollah...

Amnesty talking about his Basij Islamic enforcement police conducting the practice: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/iran-security...

Challenges to his systemic use of rape and if it disqualifies his legitimacy back in 2009 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/15/world/middleeast/15iran.h...

2011 Frontline coverage of the practice https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/0...

More coverage of the practice https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1890900/iran-rape-tortu...

In addition to the routine/sactioned religious police rapes how many executions have there been under this moderate? How many women arrested for religious reasons? Under his leadership the death decree against Salman Rushdie was never lifted. How many died of torture in detention after he called for people to be punished? If this is moderation then what does fundamentalism look like?

Hmmm, this may have been a 'mis-interpretation' but it seems odd that it wouldn't, you know, be corrected with a public 'correct' interpretation in all these years and with so much rape being done by religious police serving directly under him. Instead of easily issuing a public statement he defended the rapists indicating that in fact, it was a correct interpretation. https://wncri.org/2015/11/13/female-prisoners-virgins-raped/

[cogman10]

> I don't have it bookmarked but he did teach that and had his friend Lajevardi whom he supported and praised carry it out.

Look, I'm simply not going to believe this claim without evidence.

You are presenting terrible practices in Iran that I disagree with, but that wasn't your original claim.

From the links you've given, rape was because political prisoners were believed to be slaves. That's a despicable and gross practice. It is not, however "school girls should be raped before they are executed for not wearing hats so that they can't get into heaven". The reason for the rape of prisoners was because the prisoners were viewed as slaves, not to keep them from heaven (from what I've read).

> If this is moderation then what does fundamentalism look like?

Relative to the region. Iran has been brutal to it's dissidents and enemies of the state.

However, if you compare the rights of women under Iran vs Saudi Arabia, you'll end up finding that women in Iran have more rights and freedoms. That's what relative means.

I'm not here to defend Khamenei. The reason I pushed back was because, as I said, you don't need to lie about someone you don't like. These are the facts you should present and represent. Talk about how Iran rapes political enemies. That is a horrible practice. But the extreme "He said to rape girls without hijabs and then kill them to keep them from heaven" is just a lie. Hell, you can pretty accurately say "He taught that political prisoners are slaves, which his government used to justify raping female prisoners". That's a true statement that makes him look horrible.

[_DeadFred_]

It looks like it was the previous Ayatollah who was Khamenei's religious teacher, but this one could easily have corrected things but instead chose to defend the practice/practitioners and never on the occasion of abuse over decades chose to correct the interpretation.

"such as the rape of virgin girls prior to their execution, were conducted in a systematic way and were based on the interpretation of an order by Ayatollah Khomeini (1979-1989)"

So his spiritual teacher ordered it with the vague cop-out by someone else that 'maybe it was misinterpreted' yet even though his Islamic police were raping for decades he never corrected what his teacher/spiritual leader said/meant.

Undisputed facts: it happened and the people doing it thought that it was sanctioned by the Ayatollah. Even though it happened for decades, this Ayatollah never corrected people that they had misunderstood. Did defend his Islamic police and did on occasions when they inflicted the violence after him basically saying “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”.

Decades and decades of rape, and of government officials thinking this is the official Islamic position, and he NEVER chose to say otherwise even though his Islamic police were acting on it.

I'm throttled after this but I believe it was his official policy, and nothing indicates otherwise. There was systemic rape and he defended/protected those doing it and never corrected the believed edict from his predecessor. Also it is extremely rare to get these edicts externally. We only have what I pointed out because an insider (Ayatollah Montazeri) was trying to defend his reputation after word got out of the justification for rape by Khomeini.

[selimthegrim]

I know someone who was in prison with Lajevardi in the 70s and the latter was an asshole even then according to him so I believe this

[estearum]

AFAICT nearly everyone who is called a "prophet" by anyone is horrible, no?

Doesn't stop people from killing or dying in their name though.

[somenameforme]

I can't think of anybody, who has significant power, who isn't seen as horrible by somebody else, and often by quite a lot of somebody elses. With power people always end up trying to make the world a better place. The problem is one man's better place is another's dystopia.

[Cipater]

>I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.

What a mad world we're hurtling ourselves into.

[mindslight]

"You're thinking about this just like a professional warfighter would"

I'd say the main contemporary dynamic of the times is hallucination. Not necessary by LLMs per se, but rather by the humans wielding them to mainline their own bullshit.

In a way Grump himself is just society's own embodied hallucination from decades of Republican marketing hopium. Some scraps of dignity are surely about to trickle down any day now, once those mean libuhruls are out of the way.

(the "warfighter" terminology-coddling obviously coming from the user prompt)

[ifwinterco]

Supposedly he had a very deep bunker under his house but he came up for meetings.

So the real problem for Iran is that mossad seem to know exactly when he was vulnerable i.e. there are spies within the inner circles of the IRGC

Edit: Or some very effective high tech surveillance, but that's also not good news to put it mildly

[urikaduri]

He was assasinated during a meeting with many other high ranking members of the regime. I doubt they decided on collective suicide.

[throwawayheui57]

> intentional martyrdom

He didn’t play 4D chess. I’d bet on pure hubris.

[dotancohen]

Why would you assume that someone with decades of experience could not be an effective leader?

[throwaway173738]

People lose cognition as they age.

[sethev]

And gain experience

[somenameforme]

In every field where competence can be objectively measured, experience does not endlessly correlate with competence. There's always a growth phase but then there's a bell curve of age vs competence, that reaches a peak and then there's a constant decline from there. So for instance chess is primarily a mental game, yet the decline comes as early as one's mid thirties for world class players.

I'm fully willing to accept that for a field where scenarios are fuzzier and intuition more important, it may well be that peak on the bell curve comes somewhat later. But I think it's essentially inconceivable that one is near, or even remotely near, their peak, in their 80s, in anything.

[sethev]

>There's always a growth phase but then there's a bell curve of age vs competence

A bell curve tracks the distribution of a single random variable. You're mixing statistical metaphors.

[acdha]

That’s true, but it’s not always good—Americans have stark examples of the risks of octogenarian leaders whose experience leads them astray by discounting how much the world has changed since they were young.

I think of mental faculties and experience as two separate overlapping curves where there’s a sweet spot in the middle where both are high but either one being low can become a big problem.

They also just don’t have the same energy they used to so even if they have a good idea they’ll be less effective at motivating people to embrace it, and the younger people behind them are going to be acting with more thought to succession politics.

[foldr]

Biden's surely a poster child for the value of experience and connections in the Presidency. Whatever you think of him (and I would certainly agree that he should never have considered a second term), he was quite successful in furthering his agenda while in office.

[acdha]

Yes, I agree that he used his experience well for many things (and had competent staff he could trust to get things done) but I will say he made a huge mistake continuing to back Israel's actions in Gaza to an extent which I don't think someone too young to remember the Six Days War would have done. I think you could also make a solid argument that earlier in his career he probably would have had more energy to put into getting a few of the close votes in Congress over the line.

[simmerup]

But dude was 86, how many people in nursing homes would you trust to run a country?

[dotancohen]

Probably one in a thousand.

But as one whom the Ayatollah has sworn to eliminate, I can still state that man was sharp and brilliant and extremely well spoken. His worldview was internally consistent. He had vision and experience and knew how to motivate people. He was a one in ten million leader.

I give him that praise and more, even recognising that his stated mission was to exterminate myself and my children.

[maybelsyrup]

> But as one whom the Ayatollah has sworn to eliminate

What does this mean — did you stick him with the bill at all restaurant or something?

[leonvoss]

And as we can see with Biden and Trump, 86 is past the the optimal compromise between experience and cognition.

[cookiengineer]

Tell that to the US regime, too?

[polishdude20]

Many do!

[wvlia5]

Because he would be senile.

[simon666]

Being of an advanced age does not necessitate becoming senile. Do you have evidence that the Ayatollah was senile or trending in that direction?

[FireBeyond]

I'd say, too, that judging by the current President's speeches, there's probably good evidence towards him being or becoming senile/demented.