When you talk about using force for social engineering, it implies that you don't understand how it is done. Social engineering is done by media which heavily relies on arts and entertainment, particularly music and cinema. Both of which have been suppressed by the IR since its inception. The IRIB has lost its audience among Iranian people. Nobody watches Iran's TV channels anymore, unless it is for sports, mostly Persepolis and Esteghlal matches or volleyball/football matches.
You don't seem to have understood what I wrote. I didn't claim social engineering relies on the use of force. I stated the enemy is resorting to social engineering and Iran will not be able to counter them on the same playing field. For in this area, it's not so much a matter of quality or ingenuity, but of quantity and financial resources above all. And when it comes to these, Iran will continue lagging behind her enemies for many decades to come.
In the media realm, the enemy also has another inherent advantage in terms of efficiency over Iran: its propaganda and soft power are appealing to the base instincts of humans, especially sexual ones (and others too), because the enemy operates outside of any moral framework. Of course Iran cannot start adopting similar techniques, since it would defeat her entire purpose by definition.
So the response must necessarily come elsewhere, in the media department Iran won't stand a chance in promoting religiosity, no matter what she does.
You don't need to talk to an overwhelming majority of people in Tehran, Karaj or Esfahan if you know what sampling is in statistics. All you could ask is if my sampling was fair and not biased. And yes, it was not biased. Because I went to a public university that attracted the most religious kind among public universities in Tehran, my high school classmates were from all groups of ordinary Iranians including religious people, I have worked in Iran in different jobs that included ordinary Iranians, so yeah, my sampling was not biased towards a particular group of belief. And yet, I have never seen even a single person that defended the current compulsory laws for hijab, including women who wore chador and were practicing Muslims.
Professional opinion polls suppose a tad more than this. Else anyone could present their subjective experience as a valid social scientific finding for as long as it conforms to certain sampling criteria. But it doesn't quite work this way. There are requirements in terms of sample size which can't be fulfilled by a single person putting questions to their acquaintances. There are also requirements in how the questions are precisely worded, it must be the exact same formulation every time, and more.
Mashreghnews.com is a very conservative website and all it takes to see their sentiment about the death of Mahsa is to read the comments of their viewers that I posted before. Again, I have to remind you that mashreghnews.com is by far one of the most conservative online newspapers in Iran. We are not talking about newspapers like Tabnak or Entekhab, for example.
Mashregh attracts a fair share of secular nationalists because of its exclusive reporting on military-related topics. There are also liberals posting there. The enemy's social engineering has started affecting some religious conservative milieus but this is a recent phenomenon (facilitated by the likes of Omid Dana, who generally speaking is a double-edged sword for
nezam and must therefore be held in check by more fervently religious Hezbollahi factions).
Maybe we should ask Turkish members here?
@dBSPL could be of help here. I could be wrong, but from Iranians that have frequently visited Istanbul since several decades ago until now, it is generally believed that the appearance of the citizens is becoming more Islamic compared to 1980s.
Anecdotal individual experience doesn't mean much to qualified social scientists. Even the subjective perception of one and the same objective reality will vary from person to person depending on a series of factors. So no amount of traveler's impressions can substitute themselves to proper empirical field research, and in this regard numerous studies conclude to tendential regression of religious practice among the Turkish population and especially younger generations. Like I said, user Homajon has shared various papers to this effect in the Middle East section, you may look them up and decide if and why they are supposedly wrong.
No, it's not. The very fact that you see millions of Iranians in places like Twitter or Telegram posting all sorts of comments against the law and even the Supreme Leader is a solid evidence that internet censorship has failed terribly.
It's technically possible, all that's needed from there on is sufficient political will.
Now I'm not entirely sure where this lack of political will is stemming from. Several different explanations are possible, but I don't have the time to get into these in detail. All I will say is if decision makers are of the belief that loosening Islamic regulations and laws will dialectically lead to social re-Islamization after a while, they will be sorely mistaken. But I doubt they're this naive.
