u/drhuggables

insta: pouyacomedy

Both 16 oz. Just wanted to show the ridiculous difference in size. Ironically the Windy has the tighter fitting hand compartment, but the liner bunched up in the fingertips (at least on mine). The strings were also comically short.

Just a PSA for anyone looking at thai brands. I have some other fairtex gloves too and Twins 16oz if anyone wants to see comparisons to them. Just let me know.

I've seen this article quoted by a few people on reddit recently because they are ironically ideologically driven to reject the results presented here. While there is no doubt that GAMAAN's survey results are not perfect representations of Iranian society, this article is being weaponized by the usual NIACi/chapi crowd to dismiss any of their findings. We all know who they are.

Anyway, it revolves around saying GAMAAN has ties to anti-IR organizations and their data supports anti-IR sentiments so they just can't be true. Yawn.

It then criticizes the methods in the same manner which we've seen before, totally forgetting to acknowledge that Iran is an authoritarian dictatorship in which one cannot safely conduct traditional methods of polling.

"Using this unorthodox methodology, GAMAAN’s survey results have often surprised observers and contradicted the findings of long-established pollsters like Pew Research and Gallup, which employ conventional face-to-face and telephone polling methods."

yeah, no shit. People in Iran are not going to give out their views in face-to-face and telephone polls, are the authors on drugs? That's a good way to get yourself in prison or worse.

The main critic in this article is Daniel Tavana, who himself runs a rival polling agency, IranPoll, which has it's own article dedicated to it's dubiousness:

https://www.iranintl.com/en/20211109864466

Oh, and what a surprise, the article was reproduced by a website por roo enough to title their article: Gamaan: The Polling Op That’s Gaslighting The West About Iran and another website which literally quotes Mohammad Morandi as their authority on Iran: https://www.mintpressnews.com/gamaan-iran-polling-regime-change/290306/

The article really focuses on the 26% prior participation rate as a way to dismiss its legitimacy, and they do this by asking Tavana's literal partner in crime (per the article itself) Kevan Harris, and then "reinforce" their claim by misleading a 3rd party analyst who agrees with them that yes a prior participation rate of 26% is concerning ("without further information"), and failing to mention the didn't tell their analyst that there are 17 total GAMAAN surveys: https://gamaan.org/survey-reports/. If each survey gets a similar amount of 77k that's 77k x 17 = 1.3 million people, about 1.8% of the adult population and about 16% of the daily Psiphon users in Iran (assuming the upper 11 million quoted by the article, much less if you use the 5 million lower limit)

This article is just a hit piece by two biased authors who have published absolutely nothing on Iran besides two articles attacking IranWire and IranInternational.

edit: See also this response by u/Kosnagooo

"It's always telling when people use these obscure fringe far leftist anti-western "independent" outlets to criticize and silence the voice of Iranians. Over 70% of Iranian households use satellite dishes. Everyone stays informed precisely through outlets like Iran International. 80% uses internet and 90% of those internet users utilize internet censorship circumvention tools.

The attempt to discredit them as 'unscientific' is also idiotic considering their work has been cited in academic journals such as the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology of the Middle East, and Secular Studies, and in books published by Oxford University Press, New York University Press, De Gruyter, and Routledge. They also were awarded the Market Research Society's President’s Medal, which is literally the world's leading research association. The fact that Utrecht University's ethics board approved their Data Protection Impact Assessment also confirms they take respondent safety and data integrity seriously.

Regarding accuracy: see these 3 tests they did, where the co-founder Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab cross-references their data with data from other polls and even data from the regime in order to verify accuracy. It show they're actually reaching regime supporters too. 1) household income level data shows they're reaching people from all socio-economic layers, 2) comparing data to that of Ethnologue demonstrates that people of different ethnicities are also participating , 3) regime-backed 'neutral' polls about health insurance show they're even reaching those with Armed Forces Insurance.

Their main rationale for conducting polling in the way they do is also irrefutable: non-representative data can still be attempted to be made representative through weighting, whereas if people don't answer truthfully (through conventional survey modes like on-site interviews and telephone interviews, for fear of giving true opinions about politically sensitive topics) nothing the researcher does can make the results valid."

SAVAK was formed in 1957 to serve as the Shah's secret police. The Washington Post, in a contemporary article summarizes SAVAK's role as such:

>One begins with SAVAK. Formed in 1957, SAVAK, the National Intelligence and Security Organization, was handed far-ranging powers to go with a loosely drawn penal code. SAVAK investigated opponents of the Shah, arrested them, could and did detain them indefinitely without filing charges, and encouraged them to confess. In the next stage of the legal process, SAVAK switched hats and, in the role of hearing examiner, remanded prisoners to trial after weighing its own evidence. Persons accused of political crimes were sent before military tribunals which, after 1972, tried cases in secret. Guilt or innocence was determined by the evidence in the SAVAK dossiers alone, without witnesses and, of course, without defense lawyers.

Of note, what changed in 1972 was that in 1971 leftist terror groups killed 3 gendarmes in the remote Siakhal village outpost, SAVAK director Parviz Sabeti announces the formation of the "Joint Anti-Sabotage Committee" which essentially was SAVAK's declaration of war against such leftist terror groups, and the scope of their "counter-terrorist" activities was greatly expanded. This is when SAVAK got their notoriety, as political prisoners expanded greatly as did the commencement of the use of torture against these prisoners.

The question is then: how many people were "disappeared", how many people were tortured, and just how many prisoners did SAVAK actually keep?

Amnesty International was the first "major" HR organization to report on this in 1976. They themselves do not narrow it down to any specific number and report simply that it's "impossible to give a reliable estimate": The Pahlavi regime themselves reported 3200 (corroborated in now declassified sworn congressional testimony in the USA) political prisoners; some foreign journalists estimated as high as 100,000! The former was most likely an accurate reporting, as it was later verified by The Red Cross, whose figures came exclusive on-scene inspections and put the prisoner tally at 3,500 for 1977, down to 2,100 for 1978.

So how many people were actually killed by SAVAK? The answer comes ironically from the Shah's declared enemies. During the Islamic revolution, the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi "oppression" in a fact-finding mission for the Martyrs Foundation, led by Emad al-Din Baghi. Andrew Scott Cooper in his work The Fall of Heaven (pgs 11-12), writes about Mr. Baghi's conclusions:

>...lead researcher Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims' names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths Baghi could confirm only 383, of whom 197 were guerrilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant that 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture.

This estimate is again corroborrated by Abrahamian again in Tortured Confessions, where he himself estimates that SAVAK and other Pahlavi federal agencies killed 368 guerrillas, and executed up to 100 political prisoners. For context, Canadian federal agencies (Canada is comparable in population to Pahlavi-era Iran) kill about 400 people every 10 years. See attached image for Abrahamians detailed account of how these guerrillas died and their political associations (Table 4 pg. 103). Interestingly, in another chart later on in the same book (Table 5 pg. 104), it shows almost all of the people killed by SAVAK were college students or college-educated. And as one can see by the image here, all were associated with either leftist or islamist groups.

As to the number of people tortured, there is obviously far less objective information. What we do know is that the period of time in which torture was performed was effectively 1971-1976. The AI reports and the Carter admin put significant pressure on the Pahlavi regime, who "accomodated" the criticisms, and by what we can tell made a genuine effort to change. Once again, I'll quote the Washington Post:

>Prof. Richard W. Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh, an Iran specialist, told the subcommittee that the shah "had responded in ways that are not simply cosmetic." "Iran is a country in which the Carter human rights proposals have had a major impact," Cottam declared: "The shah is willing to accommodate President Carter's human-rights eccentricity." Butler told the subcommittee the ICJ was unaware of any cases of torture in Iran in the preceding 10 or 11 months.

And once again, the Red Cross seems to be our best measure of objectivity to these claims:

>Two visits to Iran by the Red Cross in the spring of 1977 had uncovered complaints of torture and marks on inmates at 16 of 18 prisons, according to a New York Times dispatch from Geneva. Returning in the fall, Red Cross doctors found no new marks, and "virtually all" of the prisoners denied that they were being ill-treated. Trips the next spring and summer disclosed further improvements in prison conditions....The Red Cross had access to all prisoners for physical checkups and private interviews.

This is corroborrated by Ervand Abrahamian, who in his book Tortured Confessions writes:

>The regime did more than ban torture. It allowed the International Red Cross to make two separate visits to the main prisons. It agreed to try future political cases in civilian rather than in military courts—which broke the precedent set in 1953 and gave defendants access both to the media and to proper defense lawyers. Amnesty International was allowed to observe one such trial in 1977...

Regardless, SAVAK's actions left them with a reputation that to this day is one of brutality. But the reality is, in a country of 35 million people, the chance of the average Iranian citizen having any interaction with SAVAK or political prisons, let alone being killed or executed by them, was slim to none, based off the information we have. Of course, we have absolutely no objective way of knowing the amount of people who were interviewed or "intimidated" by SAVAK, which was no doubt higher and contributed to their notoriety.

Injecting my own personal bias, I think the reputation of SAVAK's brutality is highly exaggerated to the point of being borderline disinformation, and was no doubt used as propaganda by the succeeding Islamic Regime and Pahlavi's opponents from the leftist political spectrum. But then again, one could easily argue that even one political prisoner and one execution is one too many, and make the case that the the aforementioned actions still make the Pahlavi era "bad" for those reasons alone. That's up to you to decide for yourself.