Ahmadinejad wins re-election

[Skeptic]

Oh, I'm sure the elections were perfectly fair. Yup. No doubt about that.

 

[Skeptic]

Useful idiots? Oh dear oh dear. Do you know nothing of history? Right now you are far closer to being a useful idiot in the classic sense than anyone who feels that iran can become more moderate.

Feels being the operative word. You feel Iran can moderate, dammit, so you were all a-flutter over its coming "democratic elections". So what if the facts disagree, and Iran is obviously a vicious dictatorship in which the elections are about as "democratic" as those in the USSR? What's important is what you feel and hope and believe about Iran.

But why is it so important for your to deny the obvious facts? For social reasons. To agree Iran is a vicious dictatorship is to agree with the stupid and unsophisticated people who think terms of black and white (blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda). And you can't do that no matter how obvious the facts, as it will hurt your self-esteem and belief in your own "sophisticated" superiority over all those "simplistic" thinkers.

Yes, it's true that the "simplistic" thinkers are repeatedly proven correct and that the "sophisticated" thinkers show, as a class, more dogmatic uniformity of belief than the members of most religious cults. But such trifles are of no relevance, since the real point of the "sophisticated" thinker is not to look at the facts, or to be correct, but to declare his allegiance to the "superior" social class.

It is precisely the same sort of denial of obvious facts, driven by the same social snobism and self-satisfied belief in one's own "sophistication", that made the useful idiots deny the obvious facts about communism's vicious dictatorships, too.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

Oh, I'm sure the elections were perfectly fair. Yup. No doubt about that.

I would like to know that 63 percent didn't vote for that guy. I'd just like to have evidence of the fact. I'm asking sincerly, do you have any?

 

[Travis]

I would like to see some hard evidence of voting malfeasance myself. That said it is not cool that the Federal authorities arrested the opposition and instituted a massive media blackout. If nothing else it sure makes them look like they have something to feel guilty about.

 

[tomwaits]

I would like to know that 63 percent didn't vote for that guy. I'd just like to have evidence of the fact. I'm asking sincerly, do you have any?

How could we have any evidence? Independant election observers were banned from polling places.


ETA: From CNN...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/14/iran.election/index.html

Moussavi disputed the results, blaming "untrustworthy monitors." Independent election observers were banned from polling places.

Angered by the returns, Moussavi's supporters took to the streets Saturday. With handkerchiefs and surgical masks shielding them from the pungency of tear gas, they clashed openly with police in a rare challenge to the regime.

Foreign reporters were blocked from covering the demonstration. And the government reportedly shut down access to networking sites, such as Twitter, making it difficult for information to seep out to the outside world.

Iranian authorities closed Al-Arabiya's Tehran bureau for a week without offering a reason, the Arabic network announced on its Web site Sunday in Arabic and English. Two female reporters were attacked outside Moussavi's headquarters on Friday, according to Reporters Without Borders.

 

[Cleon]

The Iranians are really pissed off, and now Ahmadinejad has all but threatened Mousavi's life.

 

[I Ratant]

That's why the loser is in house arrest now.
For his own safety, I'm shure.

 

[Kay]

But there is some evidence of fraud, from what I have gleamed (don't have a specific link, but I will say that Andrew Sullivan has done a terrific job on this event)....
1. Mousavi lost in his own hometown. Yeah, right.
2. There is practically no variation in between the various regions of Iran - Ahmadinejad won around 60% in all regions. This is ********, as there is of course massive differences throughout the various parts of Iran, and would be comparable to if Obama won 55% of the vote in every US state. Of course you wouldn't buy that.
3. And of course, there's the fact that Ahmadinejad received more votes than when he was elected with the Iranian economy spiralling into disaster. Um, sure.

Those are a few problems. There's some more, and I'll be sure to say those later.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

Gore lost his home state.. I'm not saying this isn't something the mullah's wouldn't like to do, but I feel we need good evidence on this issue. How does one frame an election on such a huge scale (I'm asking sincerly).

 

[Policenaut]

I don't know what happened. It is possible the Iranian people did vote him in for a second term. It 'looks' like a rigged election but there are no facts and I doubt we will ever find out the actual results if they were manipulated. There is no oversight so you have to believe (or not believe) what the government says in this case. The opponent claims he won only based on his polling. Who knows how accurate that was? I don't trust Ahmadinejad as far as I can throw him but like others said there are no hard facts to dispute his win.

 

[dudalb]

The Iranians are really pissed off, and now Ahmadinejad has all but threatened Mousavi's life.

I thought that Ahmandinejad sort of looked like a Mafia Thug, now he is acting ike one.

 

[dudalb]

That's why the loser is in house arrest now.
For his own safety, I'm shure.

I fully expect some of the Apoligists for The Mullahs who hang around here to make that argument.

 

[Merko]

Are you kidding me? Show me where, in 2004, there were widespread and violent street clashes with police as a result of Bush's re-election.

Uh. My comparison was about how the European press covered the election before it happened. I think that should have been very clear. My comparison was not about the reactions to the election result, or the tie colours of the candidates, or their opinions, or anything like that. Only about the pre-election press coverage.

The reactions remind me of something else entirely: Tiananmen 1989. A freedom movement mostly built around urban students. No signs of support by any faction of the military, police, mass media, or local government officials. Crushed in blood by an oppressive regime.

If it weren't, then the Iranian state security agency wouldn't be attempting to shut down mobile phone networks and popular websites like Facebook. You can bet they are taking this seriously.

Of course they are taking it seriously, just like the Communist Party took the Tiananmen protests seriously. But again, I don't see this leading to any meaningful change. All it will lead to is some dead students. And as the Chinese example shows, even exceptional pacifism is no guarantee that the suppressed freedom fighters will capture the hearts and minds of the general population in the longer run. I don't think rioting works any better.

 

[Merko]

But there is some evidence of fraud, from what I have gleamed (don't have a specific link, but I will say that Andrew Sullivan has done a terrific job on this event)....

Andrew Sullivan is a person whose opinions I respect and whom I read with great interest. But I'm not impressed with the pro-fraud arguments so far.

1. Mousavi lost in his own hometown. Yeah, right.

Nothing particularly strange about that. His base is in Teheran, not Khameneh. There was some speculation by western journalists that he would win support also from his home region, but I never saw any basis for that except wishful thinking.

2. There is practically no variation in between the various regions of Iran - Ahmadinejad won around 60% in all regions. This is ********, as there is of course massive differences throughout the various parts of Iran, and would be comparable to if Obama won 55% of the vote in every US state. Of course you wouldn't buy that.

I think this fails the basic conspiracy theory test: on the one hand, we are to believe that the Iranian government (or their puppet masters in the Guardian Council) would be able to secretly manipulate the poll results without anyone being caught red-handed. That's not trivial. On the other hand, they would be unable to come up with a 'believable' forged result. When they have access to all previous results, and they are supposedly in full control of what result will be presented.

If they were not in full control, the relatively even spread would be very hard to explain. Remember that Mousavi had the right to put observers in every polling place. For a wholesale forgery of the results, all those observers have to be bribed, fooled, otherwise circumvented, or prevented (on a massive scale) from reporting concrete acts of wrongdoing. The fraud theory would be much more plausible I think, if Ahmadinejad got very high numbers in the areas where Mousavi did not have so many observers, and very low numbers in areas with reliable observers.

3. And of course, there's the fact that Ahmadinejad received more votes than when he was elected with the Iranian economy spiralling into disaster. Um, sure.

That's pretty selective. There are a number of factors favouring Ahmadinejad:
1) Last time he was a fresh face, coming from nowhere. This time he's the incumbent.
2) National security. Israel and the US indicated that they may attack Iran, perhaps at the end of this year. The Israeli PM have compared the Iranians with Amalek, which, according to the Torah, it is every Jew's plight to exterminate, including women, children, and even cattle (Netanyahu surely didn't mean it that way, but Ahmadinejad probably didn't try too hard to explain Jewish theology in any great detail). Ahmadinejad has tried to frame the dovish Mousavi as weak on national security, and he may very well have been successful.
3) The economy. Yes! Mousavi has essentially been running on a pro-market economic platform. Ahmadinejad on the other hand, has been running as a populist, promising support for the poor and the rural areas. Although Iran's economy has been failing for years, the global financial crisis has given him a great cover.

 

[Skeptic]

It's amusing how some people who are positive that "Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections" just cannot see any evidence of cheating in these Iranian "elections"... next thing they'll tell us that they want to see some hard evidence of Saddam cheating in the 2001 (I think) elections in Iraq. Maybe 99.5% of the population simply really wanted him to continue to rule?

For some useful idiots, Iran is a democracy while the USA is a dictatorship. There is no point to discuss anything with someone who holds that view of the world, I'm sure we agree.

 

[geni]

Feels being the operative word. You feel Iran can moderate, dammit,

Based on the availible evidence there is enough public support and mechanisms in place for it to do so. Instead certian factions have chosen to take a high risk course of action.

so you were all a-flutter over its coming "democratic elections".

The elections were fairly democratic. Results? Not so much.

So what if the facts disagree, and Iran is obviously a vicious dictatorship

vicious dictatorship? Oh please how would you discribe Burma.

in which the elections are about as "democratic" as those in the USSR?

History suggest that the iranian establishment is prepared to accept a certian level of change through democratic means even if they did not do so on this occasion. The USSR not so much.

What's important is what you feel and hope and believe about Iran.

Not at all. What is important is what can be deduced based on all the availible evidence.

But why is it so important for your to deny the obvious facts?

I could ask you the same question. Difference is you don't spend much time trying to work out what the facts are.

For social reasons. To agree Iran is a vicious dictatorship is to agree with the stupid and unsophisticated people who think terms of black and white (blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda).

Iran isn't a dictatorship by any reasonable definition of the term.. Even if we were to take the position that the institutions apointed through elections held no power it would still be an oligarchy rather than a dictatorship. Interestingly Mousavi was part of that oligarchy.

And you can't do that no matter how obvious the facts, as it will hurt your self-esteem and belief in your own "sophisticated" superiority over all those "simplistic" thinkers.

I would suggest that at this point you are projecting.

Yes, it's true that the "simplistic" thinkers are repeatedly proven correct and that the "sophisticated" thinkers show, as a class, more dogmatic uniformity of belief than the members of most religious cults.

Evidences?

But such trifles are of no relevance, since the real point of the "sophisticated" thinker is not to look at the facts, or to be correct, but to declare his allegiance to the "superior" social class.

Class warefare in a disscussion about Iran? You are Ahmadinejad and I claim my £50.

It is precisely the same sort of denial of obvious facts, driven by the same social snobism and self-satisfied belief in one's own "sophistication", that made the useful idiots deny the obvious facts about communism's vicious dictatorships, too.

All in all a rather complex strawman you are setting up there.

 

[Merko]

It's amusing how some people who are positive that "Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections" just cannot see any evidence of cheating in these elections...

I think Bush 2004 is a great comparison, actually. Some people, like Greg Palast, who is no obvious crackpot, put together a case for fraud based on various statistical analysis, isolated reported incidents of fraud, etc. In the end though, their case just isn't believable. Even though it may have been hard to accept by Europeans and liberal Americans, Bush did increase his vote from 2000 to 2004.

As for 2000, it's a little different. The claim there is merely that someone who won maybe 47.8% of the vote legitimately, snatched the elections by a few interventions at the margin. I certainly would not have any problems with believing that Ahmadinejad may have won 0.1% or even a few percentage points by intimidation tactics, ballot stuffing, or other tried and tested methods. Of course, even that would require some actual evidence.

But that's something completely different than claiming wholesale fabrication of the results, without any concrete arguments to offer except 'we all know what these guys are up to'.


Again, the Guardian Council openly disqualified 471 of 475 registered presidential candidates. Which is more to say that they selected 4 candidates. Nobody contests that they did that. In other words, they were in full control. Now we are to believe, without any tangible evidence, that they would then proceed with a risky and so far unexplained fraud to prevent one of their chosen candidates to win over another. This doesn't make any sense to me. What reason is there to believe that they would be so invested in Ahmadinejad personally to take this risk? Why wouldn't they just rather select 4 candidates that they found acceptable?

 

[Skeptic]

I don't know what people are so up in the air about.

Why, when the Republicans made sure, in the last election, that every single state will have a 60% of the votes for McCain ... despite Obama being very popular and leading in most polls ... and that this 60% majority included even Obama's own state and home town ... and, oh, by the way, that Obama was put under house arrest for his own protection, just to make sure no right-wing lunatic hurts him, or something ...

... nobody even suspected the USA elections were rigged, right?

Hey, I sure didn't. Some paranoid fools, who think in a simplistic manner, said so, but I'm too sophisticated for that. They never found any hard evidence for the election being rigged, so as far as I'm concerned, it was perfectly fair!

And they wonder why I call the pro-mullahs' folks over here "useful idiots".

 

[geni]

I think this fails the basic conspiracy theory test: on the one hand, we are to believe that the Iranian government (or their puppet masters in the Guardian Council) would be able to secretly manipulate the poll results without anyone being caught red-handed. That's not trivial. On the other hand, they would be unable to come up with a 'believable' forged result. When they have access to all previous results, and they are supposedly in full control of what result will be presented.

It's posible they paniced or this is a show of force. A don't even bother trying next time statement.

If they were not in full control, the relatively even spread would be very hard to explain. Remember that Mousavi had the right to put observers in every polling place.

He wasn't allowed to.

That's pretty selective. There are a number of factors favouring Ahmadinejad:
1) Last time he was a fresh face, coming from nowhere. This time he's the incumbent.

Iran's ecomony is a mess. Being an incumbent under those conditions is not ideal.

2) National security. Israel and the US indicated that they may attack Iran, perhaps at the end of this year. The Israeli PM have compared the Iranians with Amalek, which, according to the Torah, it is every Jew's plight to exterminate, including women, children, and even cattle (Netanyahu surely didn't mean it that way, but Ahmadinejad probably didn't try too hard to explain Jewish theology in any great detail). Ahmadinejad has tried to frame the dovish Mousavi as weak on national security, and he may very well have been successful.

Indeed that was his strongest card.

3) The economy. Yes! Mousavi has essentially been running on a pro-market economic platform. Ahmadinejad on the other hand, has been running as a populist, promising support for the poor and the rural areas. Although Iran's economy has been failing for years, the global financial crisis has given him a great cover.

Ahmadinejad's tactics in that area were flat denial not blame the global financial crisis. The issues predate that too clearly.

 

[geni]

And they wonder why I call the pro-mullahs' folks over hear "useful idiots".

I'm sorry I neglected my right wing ranting studies of late. Who are the "pro-mullahs' folks" outside of islamic countries?