Very little insight, but it seems a good sign that this is not limited to Tehran - stuff is happening all over the country and even in rural areas:
In a rural area called Balo, near Iran's border with Turkey, families of protesters who were killed last week set fire to a base used Thursday by the Basij paramilitary forces, Rahmani said.
Basij are particularly hated for their brutality
I got nuthin. All the channels my mom uses to talk to relatives have been shut down. Typically, they have these uprisings, and the regime increases the brutality until folks go home. This time feels a little different, but you need a lot of people who are willing to die to make a revolution, so we'll see. I'm hoping that Khamanei's ill health and possible imminent death will destabilize things enough to create an opening.
I don't know anything either, but I remember being pretty shocked at the demographic structure of Iran (and Afghanistan). Over 60% is under 30, says the internet. The Olds can't lock that down forever.
Rasha al Aqeedi writes about similarities between factional battles in Iraq and The Wire:
https://twitter.com/RashaAlAqeedi/status/1566766540078333955
IMO protest movements need leaders to keep growing, and the regime's first response will be to destroy any potential leader. Maybe extraterritorial leaders, or collapse/internal strife within the security services? Who makes up the basij?
I'm going to guess petit bourgeois shitheads.
Does anyone have good feeds? Mine are biased towards Europe and military involvement.
I'm actively trying to consume less news as a way to manage my anxiety without drinking. So I've stopped looking for live sources.
I've started following Laura Rozen's twitter feed after remembering I read her blog for non-US news back when I read blogs.
11: Yes, Rozen is excellent and very well-sourced on Iran specifically.
This is only passingly related to Megan's point, but I saw someone commenting on the Italian election who noted that the Italian fascism of the '30s was a movement of the young for a young country and the Italian fascism of, sigh, the '20s is movement of the old for an old country, and it was a really striking thought.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/
6 last, 7 the classic DD post "arseholes considered as a strategic resource" springs to mind
17: but that DD post is definitely not talking about petit-bourgeois types. He's talking about football hooligans, miners with pickaxe handles, that kind of thing. The marginalised industrial working class.
This book https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/sep/08/basij-militia-and-social-control-in-iran-book-interview is a few years old but makes it sound as though the basij are demographically very different both from the pro-regime thugs that DD was talking about, and from the MAGA thugs we've seen so much of recently. A lot of them are students, for one thing.