Iranian democracy

nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
padraig (u.s.) said:
I would imagine but I've no idea really. It depends entirely on, I'd think, on the scope/intensity of the rioting - that is, to what degree the frameworks & limits, both official & unofficial, that keep people from doing "whatever they want" have broken down. Also the conditions that were present before the rioting - if there are more desperate, angry people around who'd look to take advantage of such a situation, or at least toss a brick, rather than take pains to avoid it. & what the motivation of the riots is - food riots are likely to be much nastier than an anti-G8 demo (which can be pretty bad, tbc) b/c, again, the people are more desperate. also to what degree protesters/rioters/etc are interested/willing/able to self-police (this is more of a peacetime thing tho - i.e. how anti-authoritarian communities deal w/sexual assault). & plenty of other things I'd think.

I think also that property crimes would be/are much more likely to go up than violent crimes - a lot of violence is of course economically driven (why mug someone when you can smash a window & grab a TV?) & a portion of what isn't is motivated by personal reasons. rape, yeah, that I could definitely see going up. I mean, warzones, yeah?

if I was more learned I'd have some more formally insightful comments about group psychology & the way people - both demonstrators & cops - initiate/react to/engage in violence, how social order breaks down - why & when that is & isn't a good thing, etc etc

sorry to get OT
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This is more OT, but I was just thinking in terms of how psychosis works, and what it feeds on.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Some interesting stuff on the Guardian liveblog today. Including this:

3.32pm:
Newspaper Roozonline has an interview (in Persian) with one of the young plainclothes militiamen who have been beating protesters.

UPDATE: Robert says the man is paid 2m rial per day, which would be about £1220 for ten days of work. A hefty fee, even by UK standards. A reader writes: "You can imagine what that kind of money means to a villager from Khorasan".

The Guardian's Robert Tait sends this synopsis:

The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault protestors with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as "Hajji", who has instructed his men to "beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won't be able to stand up". The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such as Khuzestan, Arak and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says, have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly-paid than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview provides a key insight into where Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests.
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife."

Fuck me, I had no idea there was still polygamy in Iran. I guess this guy was from out in the sticks, though.
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
a new angle on western 'timidity' (craner, this is for you)

One of the things Iran's President Ahmadinejad
is most known for in political and diplomatic
circles is his B.O. He has been described to
us as smelling "musty" and "like a billy-goat".
Our drunk Whitehall source this week gave
an interesting take on the West's attitude
towards him. The Chinese are said to be appalled
by Ahmadinejad's standards of personal hygiene -
it offends their cultural norms. And so,
despite everything - democracy, freedom 'n all
that, Britain and the US don't mind him staying
in power. The Chinese are not likely to
give political support to somebody so weird/smelly.
Which will help delay Iran getting nuclear weapons.
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Popbitch, of course
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
meanwhile..

Our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously Bush used to say
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the Fars news agency quotes Mr Ahmadinejad today criticising Mr Obama.

alas i fear all our nuanced discussions re the difference between Obama's saintly realism and Bush's gung-ho neo-conservatism have been in vain.

quelle surprise!
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
scottdisco said:
the Fars news agency quotes Mr Ahmadinejad today criticising Mr Obama.

alas i fear all our nuanced discussions re the difference between Obama's saintly realism and Bush's gung-ho neo-conservatism have been in vain.

quelle surprise!
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Disagree. It's not what the regime says that matters, it's what the people think.
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
that said Bush's reaction to the strikes and very overt violence of 2006 was quite good; i recall dissidents saying the youth knew that Bush was on the side of the people, not the regime.

anyway, sorry to derail somewhat.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Zizek just signed a letter (basically) demanding that the regime recognise the human rights of the protesters in Iran...!
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
more from the man here

and @Cracker, my bad on the sarcasm, i am sorry.
felt like discarding my usual emoticons which was not the best idea in hindsight..
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
POTUS hard-ass, smart

Chait in TNR on the Obama method

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.
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nice

(sorry to keep reframing horrible things in Iran through 'what Uncle Sam is doing' but seemed pertinent following recent, er, discussion :) )
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
craner said:
Guardian blog has seen fit to publish a statement by this very dangerous and/or stupid MEK/PMOI lobby group, without explaining who they are or what they do.
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that shower are smart. as i think i noted in the Iraq thread recently, they've been courting Christian Democrat MEPs and all sorts across Europe.

i had no idea they had that many fingers in the Westminster pie mind you.

there's a very stupid Sunday Telegraph columnist - who shall remain nameless as i, mostly, despise them - who's all for them under the enemy's enemy friend formulation.
 
S

scottdisco

rip this joint please
OT but tangentially: everyone remember the letter signed by the great and the good asking Brussels to delist HAMAS?

Jose Saramago, we (don't) salute you!
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
That'll do it--professors signatures always go a long way in halting human rights violations.
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Moreover,

Contemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-capitalist societies generally rest upon three assumptions. First, that such appeals function in opposition to modes of fundamentalism that would naturalize or essentialize contingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure (rather than to sacrifice it for some higher ideological cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form the basis for a defence against the ‘excess of power’...
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