Iranian Election Part 4

Jrootham can you provide a link for Mouseland?

Cueball

"right wingnut internet militia" is funny, thanks you have made my day.

Cueball wrote:

Not that I am necessarily against burning of cars and so on and so forth, but is the NDP suggesting that all of this protesting has been peaceful? Or is it saying that the pro-government militia are the ones who were lighting cars on fire, and so on.

There seems to be a bit of the usual NDP discconect going on here.

The demonstrations I saw were all peaceful; in some of them people were doing nothing but walking in silence. While there was no hard evidence, the general public view in Tehran was that a major part of the destructions, e.g. attacks on banks, damage to cars, and even setting up a mosque on fire was done intentionally by the pro-government militia so that the government has an excuse for crack down. The fact that after the second day of protests the state TV immediately dedicated all its news programs to reports on damages, and that the government immediately started to call protestors "terrorists", supports this theory to some extent.

I do in fact agree with that statement still. As you can see, I posed it mostly as a series of ideas, juxtaposing them with how media bias is expressed in the United State, as a contrast, not a justification, because in fact the United States of America, is indeed just as much of a represesive authoritarian state, with rampant police brutality, daily human rights violations, and a government run by an elite corporate autorcracy, which occassionally seems to feel the need to fix elections, and allows a very narrow band of opinion to be expressed in the media that the autocracy controls.

Nor, does is there anything in there where I say that I support the Iranian regieme.

Adam T wrote:

In regards to quoting you on whether you sympathize with the despots in Iran.  First of all, I've been advised here to ignore your posts, and I've been trying to do that, and will go back to doing that as soon as I respond to this specific request.

Oh. I am not talking necessarily about me. I long ago gave up the idea that anything you say about me would be anything but a mish mash of baseless assumptions, conjecture and smears. But now I see you have added a few other people to the list, so perhaps you could furnish a quote from Remind or Martin D., where they express their sympathies for the Iranian religious oligarchy?

You have cast a rather wide net there with you black list, so Adam its time to come clean with your evidence and tell us exactly how many "Communists work in the State Department", and how you established these "facts", as opposed to throwing around wild accussations.

No, Remind is on the correct side on this.  I wonder about your reading skills given the above quote from Martin D:

Then, discussing the merits of the Iranian election from our POV is a moot point. According to your logic, it's a theocracy, period, in a space of its own, and not to be judged by our (allegedly) non-theocratic standards. How can you avoid taking into account that the West challenges election results and tries to rig coups whenever tresults disagree with its plans for a country of "strategic interest"? Interesting that bombastic odes to "the people" are reserved for the countries where the Pentagon and CIA do all they can to bring down elected governments..

To be sure, it's hard to discern from that exactly what Martin D thinks of the government in Iran, but it's pretty clear that Martin's main interest is America bashing.

I also haven't cast a wide net at all, I agreed that there were no more than about 5 anti American despot sympathizers here. You are part of an extremely fringe element.

It's interesting that you accuse me of making 'wild baseless accusations' and yet it is you who sanizadeh has corrected on now about 4 or 5 occasions.

(sorry to drag sanizadeh into this)

I'm really tired of discussing anything with you and our discussions do seem to make other people here unhappy, so please, after this, don't respond to me anymore. I'm not going to respond to anything more you have to say.

I.E, I am giving you free reign to respond to this post. So, please, if you choose to respond, be classy and limit your reponse to just what I said in this post. I only responded at all to your last post because you accused me of unfairly tieing others in here with you (I'm glad that you're unhappy with the notion that others would support you here :)) and I felt that was absolutely deserving of a response.

Seeing as you edited your post:

I do in fact agree with that statement still. As you can see, I posed it mostly as a series of ideas, juxtaposing them with how media bias is expressed in the United State, as a contrast, not a justification, because in fact the United States of America, is indeed just as much of a represesive authoritarian state, with rampant police brutality, daily human rights violations, and a government run by an elite corporate autorcracy, which occassionally seems to feel the need to fix elections, and allows a very narrow band of opinion to be expressed in the media that the autocracy controls.
Nor, does is there anything in there where I say that I support the Iranian regieme.

1.I posted a couple quotes of yours where it is quite clear that you are, at least, sympathetic, if not in outright support of the Iranian theocracy.

2.So, you're entire point of posting here is to use the tragedy of what is occuring in Iran as an opportunity to bash the United States? And you accused me earlier of trolling...

Adam T wrote:

It's interesting that you accuse me of making 'wild baseless accusations' and yet it is you who sanizadeh has corrected on now about 4 or 5 occasions.

You should be if you are authorizing your view that I am sympathizer with the Iranian regieme based on his authority, because in the last thread, we had this exchange:

sanizadeh wrote:

cueball wrote:

I guess I am kind of hoping that however it turns out in the short run, that the end result is the strengthening of secular authority, and that there is some kind of negotiated settlement that moves the country in that direction, without total chaos breaking out, or severe repression.

We are on the same side then.

Perhaps he has changed his mind since then, but regardless you still have to explain how someone, such as myself, who is according to you, as sympathizer with the Iranian regieme, identifies them as "the forces of reaction", as I do in the very first post of this thread:

cueball wrote:

Exactly. How could that be! So, lets not pretend that the USA "is speaking out in support of those seeking to moderate and change", they are really projecting their interests. And is this assertion of their presumed moral authority, doing anything to moderate and change anything for the better? I highly doubt it. If anything it is strengthening the forces of reaction, because the forces of reaction can always paint the opposition as agents of the empire, and in fact have already done this. The more preassure the US asserts, the stronger the reactionaries become.

Calling Amedinejad and co. "reactionaries" is an example of my sympathies for the regieme?

sanizadeh wrote:

Cueball wrote:

Could be. Do all states use police provocateurs then? Television new here routinely focusses on splashy shots of damages, everytime the police crack down on demonstrations, is that evidence that the violence at the G8 summit was a set up, too?

I don't know about here. Do demonstrators often get violent in G8 summit? All I can say is that the demonstrations I saw in Iran was peaceful. For good reason. In Iran it is unwise to get violent in front of the anti-riot guard. The demonstrators knew that violent actions would only hurt their cause.

There were several break-ins. Banks windows were smashed. A bystander was killed by the police.

And as for Iran, I was just watching film footage of demonstrators throwing rocks at the police, from CNN, posted above as well: CNN

Adam T wrote:

Sanizadeh, it is generally assumed in western countries that when peaceful demonstrations turn into riots that it is due to anarchists hijacking the situation.  I highly doubt that occurred in Iran.

I doubt it too; for one thing: I don't recall ever meeting any anarchist in Iran (even when I was living there). You don't often find anarchists under revolutionary governments. There is enough action in a revolution that cools down any urge for additional anarchism.

Cueball wrote:

There were several break-ins. Banks windows were smashed. A bystander was killed by the police.

And as for Iran, I was just watching film footage of demonstrators throwing rocks at the police, from CNN, posted above as well: CNN

Possibly in recent days? I was there only during the first week of the protests.

sanizadeh wrote:

Adam T wrote:

Sanizadeh, it is generally assumed in western countries that when peaceful demonstrations turn into riots that it is due to anarchists hijacking the situation.  I highly doubt that occurred in Iran.

I doubt it too; for one thing: I don't recall ever meeting any anarchist in Iran (even when I was living there). You don't often find anarchists under revolutionary governments. There is enough action in a revolution that cools down any urge for additional anarchism.

But in the clip I just posted the witness is saying that she handed the stones to the boys because they (the women) could not throw them very far. You just said: "In Iran it is unwise to get violent in front of the anti-riot guard."

The video says the film was taken on June 20th, Friday.

Adam T wrote:

Sanizadeh, I've read from a poster in the comments section on the Washington Post website that in this election all of the ballots were counted at a central location rather than at the polling stations, as normally occurs.

Is that true?

I don't really know. Considering the geography of Iran, it would have been really hard to do so. Unless that "central location" just had a computer to generate random numbers :)

Sanidazeh, actually I've posted a link a couple times to a Washington Post story written by a couple statisticians that they did a terrible job in generating the numbers and that is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the numbers were just made up.

It may be possible that they took the ballots to assigned locations in each of the provinces, maybe not one standard location for the entire country. There are, I believe, approx 30 provinces, so if that is true (and I don't know that it is), it would still be virtually impossible to have "172,000 counters" (actually at least twice that would be needed because approx twice as many people voted in Iran as in Canada) in 30 buildings.

That more hasn't been made of it suggests to me that it isn't true, and all of the ballots were counted at the polling stations, simply because the speed of the vote count with all of the votes counted at a central polling station (or 30 central polling stations) is such an obvious impossibility that it would have been noted long ago by people much smarter than me.

Edited to add:

From further reading, it does seem that the ballots were counted at the polling stations, though it is possible that some of the ballots in the cities may have been transported to central locations for counting.

I don't know where that commenter at the Washington Post site got that from, it was clearly mistaken.