A volunteer member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was killed in a western province during widening demonstrations sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, authorities said Thursday, marking the first fatality among security forces during the protests.
Spontaneous protests, driven by dissatisfaction at Iran’s economic stagnation, began on Sunday in Tehran’s largest mobile phone market, where shopkeepers shuttered their businesses, and have since drawn in students across the country.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t downvote you.
There’s just so much anti-US sentiment around these parts that it’s hard to even take it as a joke, the default assumption is that everyone’s got such a stick up their arse about the US that they HAVE to make everything about the US and some people actually seem to pretend that the US is the ONLY horrible dictatorship on the planet.
The same joke might’ve worked on another platform, but here the environment itself isn’t conducive to it working as a joke IMO.
A simple /s tag might’ve helped also because at this point we’re all so poe’s law’d up that it’s impossible to tell who’s being serious and who’s joking sometimes. Yes, I hate that it’s necessary sometimes. Yes, I’ve also made plenty of jokes that got taken seriously because online discourse and the world itself is so fucked up.