Harry's Place

According to the indispensable Sullivan, it’s no worse than Rove and Palin. So no big deal, I think. Hitchins is better, as are the tweet lists and video compendiums.

Anybody obsessed with the paternity of Trig Palin is dispensable. Sullivan is a loon.

Iran is a fascist theocracy because only the military and the police have guns. If the general population were armed, this thing might be over by now.

Biff

Is that a general corrolation? Monopoly of force by the state=fascist theocracy?

Here are the videos. One of the many tweet lists can be found here.

“According to the indispensable Sullivan, it’s no worse than Rove and Palin. “

Yeah but Sullivan believes that Karl Rove orchestrated the invasion of Georgia,last year and Sarah Palin was involved in some unspeakable conspiracy to fake her pregnancy to… actually I can’t recall the motive, so that’s a pretty damning comparison by Sullivan.

“Is that a general corrolation? Monopoly of force by the state=fascist theocracy?”

No. States by definition have a monopoly on legal force.

I am making a statement about to Iran. Iranian liberals and moderns and democrats need guns. If they had them, Iran would not be a fascist theocracy.

Some photos on Flickr

via the now-indispensable Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan has always been indispensable when you are looking for crazy partisan and/or misogynist commentary. He’s especially good at big leaps in logic and sneering at views he espoused himself 6months earlier.

Sullivan’s latest attempts to get links from the moronic left:

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove – the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.

Best of wishes for the Iranian people during another dangerous, trying time for them. Hope the theocracy falls soon.

(yes, basically a “get well soon” card internet-style, but it’s earnest)

Unsurprisingly, this is one of 5 hits for “indispensable Andrew Sullivan” on google. (well, there’s a 6th on Andrew’s on site)

You don’t need Sullivan to follow what’s happening in Iran:

Watch the tweets flooding in from protagonists in Iran and commenters across the world who are also picking up other Iranian protesters’ tweets:

http://tinyurl.com/n46o7z

Particularly extraordinary– “Change_for_Iran”, a student with a group of protesters under siege in Tehran University

Its fascinating the degree to which the predictions are off. There is a persistant tendency to overstate the size and importance of those sections of the middle class hostile to Ahmedajad’s populist rhetoric and a persistant underestimation of the size and importance of those social constituencies towards which this rhetoric is aimed. The same is true in Lebanon where analyses of the recent election ignores the fact that the victory of the ‘pro-western’ camp was largely the result of the sectarian voting system and General Aoun being unable to bring in the votes of that section of the christian vote he traditionally controlled: as opposed to any sea change in the popular base of Hezbollah.
johng | 13 Jun, 09:00 | #

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lenin/3247929418430569332/

Its fascinating the degree to which the predictions are off. There is a persistant tendency to overstate the size and importance of those sections of the middle class hostile to Ahmedajad’s populist rhetoric and a persistant underestimation of the size and importance of those social constituencies towards which this rhetoric is aimed.

Yeah, which could even explain why Ahmedinejad managed to beat his opponents in their home villages! No, what’s actually fascinating is how crashingly stupid you must be discuss this ‘election’ as though it was anything but an obviously rigged farce – and an amateur production at that.

Legitimising a sham election by fundamentalist thugs – you don’t have any shame do you, johng?

johng translation – I love any kind of fascists as long as they’re anti-Western.

That’s the idiot farLeftRight in a nutshell.

@ MoreMediaNonsense.

I possibly don’t come here often enough to get a clear sense of most commenters’ general take on things and you may have your reasons for attacking Johng but I see nothing in his actual comment of 8:58 to justify what you wrote at 9:25.

The Iranian middle classes, in my experience, do tend to underestimate the popularity of the Islamic Republic among the rest of the population. They may need to do so, for all sorts of psychological reasons. It isn’t nice to think that most of your compatriots might be happy enough to live in a
represive theocracy.So tThis election may have been stolen. Then again, it may not have been.

I know, preview exists for a reason.

And, just to be clear, I hope that the election was stolen (well, you know what I mean: I hope that Iran in 2009 is a place where more people really voted for Mousavi than for Ahmadinejad). I really, really hope so but I’m not fully confident that it is the case.

George – johng used to post here nauseating comments of his deep admiration of Nasrallah. He is the embodiment of “We are all Hzezbollah now”.

No wonder he is now bigging up the case for the Hezbo’s biggest fan.

On the other hand maybe I’m wrong – perhaps he and the SWP idiot Left willl be delighted when and if Iran emerges from tyranny.

Lets see shall we.

Actually to be fair, I’ve just read all the Lenins Tomb thread and it appears Lenin at least is claiming to be not a Ajad supporter.

He still doesn’t know whether to support the protestors though as they might be “neo-liberals” and that might be worse.

johng on the other hand is probably only interested in what might happen to his beloved Hezbollah.

Given that all johng can come up with is that the demonstrations against the fraudulent election in Iran are supposedly “middle class” and supposedly “persistently underestimate” Achmadinejad’s popularity with supposedly ‘authentic’ Iranians, he & Seymour undoubtedly, in absence of evidence to the contrary, approve of the IRI’s blatantly fraudulent vote manipulation and police crackdown.

It’s boring to watch Seymour & johng squirm as their pro Syria, March 8 heroes in Lebanon and their pro Achmadinejad/Khameini heroes in Iran meet unpredicted resistance from Lebanese and Iranian voters. Just another hackneyed page out of: The Swuppie Case for Brutal Dictatorships Abroad and ‘Democratic Centralism’ at Home.

To johng’s non-point, and George’s as well:

As an HP poster pointed out on another thread, if Ahmadinejad was really the choice of 60%+ of the eligible voters, you’d think we’d be seeing numbers of supporters out in the streets of those parts of Iran that support the regime celebrating on Press TV.

Instead, we’re only seeing and hearing about truncheon wielding regime flacks beating up on the anti-regime demonstrators.

Not that I’m an expert on vote counting and election rigging, but I think you have to question the fact that if it takes the UK from Thursday night to Sunday to declare the result of the European elections, how is it possible to verify and count the votes of a country as large as Iran in a matter of hours?

@ Lynne T.

I appreciate your point here but the problem may be that there are a couple of threads running simultaneously on this issue and on the other one I do mention that the results certainly appear to have been manipulated to increase Ahmadinejad’s share of the vote. What I hesitate to pronounce on is whether or not the results were manipulated enough to actually change the outcome of the vote, i.e. to put Ahmadinejad ahead of the real winner. And we have seen pictures of Ahmadinejad addressing a huge rally of his supporters after the results were announced. Maybe I’m over-cynical about this but I do think that we sometimes take our desirtes for reality. Make no mistake about it, when I talk about the Iranian middle classes being perhaps not as representative of the Iranian population as they think they are, I do not in any sense mean to delegitimise them.