The War On Fun

Velayat-e faghih!

Persia's Preacher Command won another battle in the War On Fun by busting cool kids with a video LOLing and dancing to the infectious tune au courrant "Happy"


Zooming out of Iran - the entire joint betwixt Atlas Mountains and Indus - is a war zone. And it's a War On Fun

Never mind a failed state; we’re talking about a failed civilization, even in the most culturally advanced m"Hammedist domain, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The root of their failure is the War Against Fun. They’re not only failures, but grim, humorless failures. This is the miserable common denominator of the M Bloc. As Jonathan Schanzer recently tweeted, “Saudi blocks Youtube. Iran blocks Instagram. We knew they could eventually find common ground.”

m"Hammedist world is a political and cultural disaster zone.

A dozen years ago, a group of Arab scholars did a report for the United Nations that ascribed the failure of Arab society to a lack of freedom, knowledge and womenpower. And things have gotten considerably worse since 2002; the authors could write that there were no ethnic conflicts then. That’s long gone.

They know it themselves, and talk about it a lot. Several writers in the Saudi press, for example, unloaded on the ban on celebrating Valentine’s Day:

[The answer] to most of our daily needs comes from the West, from the Christian world, of [the culture] we created in previous eras only a pittance remains… the prohibition on Valentine’s Day bears no relation to faith or belief, but [only] to desert thinking that lacks subtlety, targets women specifically and prevents a social encounter between men and women and normal life as in other societies. The guardians of values and customs went overboard in pressuring our society…it has become desiccated and coarse and adopted the thinking and behavior of the desert..

Or in this tirade, quoted in the same article linked above: 

What grabs attention is that those who ban imitating the West on Valentine’s Day see nothing amiss in imitating the West in other ways, and are completely immersed in [Western] consumer culture and in devouring new Western products…

See,

The War Against Fun is deadly because it stultifies and suffocates creative enterprise. If the regime wins, and fun is killed, it would mark the death of playfulness, which is the heart of creativity.

These are protest videos–music, especially Western music, is forbidden in Iran, just as it was in Talibanic Afghanistan–and the happy people are politically threatening to the regime, like the Saudis who celebrate Valentine’s Day threaten the stability of the kingdom. And it’s significant that other “Happy” videos keep showing up on YouTube. It bespeaks the depth of the contempt in which most captive youth hold their rulers

The tyrants can’t risk granting freedom to fun lovers, especially if they are women, so the fun lovers are targeted, rounded up, incarcerated, tortured and often murdered. So long as that goes on, there is no hope for the m"Hammedist world, nor for its best citizens.

Pic - "For democracy to flourish in the Middle East will it have to find a way to truly incorporate the UnFun parties and, by extension, will it have to be at least somewhat illiberal?"