Telephones Cut Off, Mousavi Arrested, Rafsanjani Resigns

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Postby sunny » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:29 pm

Jeff wrote:
sunny wrote:
Lila Ghobady wrote:5. No matter who is the president of Iran, I would be denied a university education


This is entirely false and she must know it.

Iranian women are among the most highly educated and socially active in the Middle East. Women have a 77% literacy rate and account for 60% of university students, according to local census.


I don't know anything else about Lila Ghobady, and I don't know much about this, but Baha'is complain of an unofficial policy of obstruction re admission to Iranian national universities.

http://news.bahai.org/story/657


Ah ok, I see that I misread her.
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Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:31 pm

Not wanting to digress, but I'm also remembering that Porton Down's David Kelly, before his murder, may have been somehow compromised by a Bahai group from Monterey, California. He was introduced to them by a charming military intelligence operative named Mai Pederson, who was also Bahai-affiliated...
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Postby Sweejak » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:37 pm

via Juan Cole's Twitter feed

Juan Cole: It Begins: AP reports that Iranian riot police have deployed tear gas and water cannons ag.. http://tinyurl.com/l8j2kk
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Postby Sweejak » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:46 pm

I don't think there is anything much worse in the political world than watching earnest people with legitimate concerns walk off a cliff. ... like the last US election imo. All my ecstatic Dem friends calling me up and singing "happy days are here again". I almost puked.

I think it is time, if possible, for the demos to stop and the people to reorganize and regroup. They have made a huge point, and the whole world IS watching.

What if el supremo calls for a re-do of the election? Isn't that likely to cut them off at the knees and cast them forever as the North Tehran elites?
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Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:53 pm

In his book Modernity and the Millennium, published by Columbia University Press in 1998, Juan Cole observes the Baha'i administration has increasingly come under the control of fundamentalists, "stressing scriptural literalism . . . theocracy, censorship, intellectual intolerance, and denying key democratic values (196)."

See also his article "Fundamentalism in the Contemporary U.S. Baha'i Community," Religious Studies Review, Vol. 43, no. 3 (March, 2002):195-217
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:K3F ... ndbhfn.htm
Or:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/b ... ndbhfn.htm

This article considers the ways in which the Baha’i faith in the United States has become more fundamentalist in the past four decades. It looks at trends toward an increasing emphasis on doctrinal and behavioral conformity, resulting in greater exclusivism and sectarianism in what on the surface appears to be a liberal and universalistic tradition... It also demonstrates that Baha’i fundamentalists see the civil state and academic scholarship on religion as their “negative counterparts.” It considers the impact on the community of the big wave of conversions of the 1970s and the influx of immigrant Iranian Baha’is fleeing the Khomeinist regime. It further notes that fundamentalist Baha’is have become powerful in some key sectors of the Baha’i administration and employ their authority to exclude Baha’i liberals. In some recent instances, Baha’i liberals have simply been dropped from the membership rolls with no formal procedure.
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Postby Sweejak » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:05 pm

Via MOA

With Khamenei's speech yesterday the political stage is set and now the real clashes have begun:

Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes near Revolution Square in central Tehran after some 3,000 protesters chanted "Death to the dictator!" and "Death to dictatorship!" Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, the witnesses said.

Simple rioting will not achieve anything but a sharper crackdown.

To morally win, the demonstrators will have to convene peacefully in one huge crowd in one place. The police will try to prevent that by blocking the access roads to the possible places in question and by disbanding any infant formation of a bigger crowd.

Having been in several bigger conflicts with riot police forces I see no chance for the demonstrators to achieve that goal. In a determined demonstration one can defend the ground one has if one is willing to take and inflict some casualties. But even with violence it is nearly impossible to get to an area like a big prominent place if a competent police force is aware of that goal and is willing to employ the usual anti-riot measures like teargas and water cannons.

The policeman in this picture seems confident and competent to me.

I'd think twice about outfighting the guy.
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Postby Nordic » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:13 pm

JackRiddler wrote:No Internet/media singularity development of the last 20 years has gotten quite the same relentless hype over a period of months, relative to its actual newness.


Glad somebody else noticed. :)

For this reason it is not to be trusted. The corporate media went 100% blanket promo with this thing. And now it's the hero of the Iran revolution.

Right ......

It's our savior!!
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Postby ninakat » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:13 pm

Nordic wrote:Twitter. My God.

Did anyone else just recoil in the past few months, before this whole Iranian thing happened, from the way Twitter was being shoved down our throats by the corporate media?

They were promoting Twitter ad nauseum, unlike, really, anything else I've ever seen.

Right then I distrusted Twitter. Plus the whole name of it, and "tweets" for describing something that anyone would try to communicate. A "tweet"? That's almost as bad as a "diary" over at Dailykos. Okay, it's worse.

And now we're being told that Twitter is the hero of the revolution, blah blah blah, the world would not know the truth if it weren't for this fucking thing called TWITTER.

I wanted to write about it, and now I wish I had because I would look very prescient. But at the time it was just a suspicion, just that intuition of mine telling me "this is being shoved down our throats and promoted for a reason".

Furthermore, we know, because we've been told over and over again during the last eight years or so, that the CIA has been clandestinely inside Iran pushing for a "Democratic" revolution, trying to ramp up the restlessness with the young, hoping that they will overthrow the conservative Ayatollahs.

So all of this most certainly could be a CIA-backed, orchestrated, fueled event.

Not that that wouldn't make it "real" because the young people there have plenty to be rebel against, i.e. old guys with beards and robes telling them how to live their lives in the era of the Internet.


I was listening to BBC radio the other night and they played several seconds of audio that was anonymously posted on Twitter -- people yelling and screaming -- supposedly to illustrate either the protests or something horrific happening in Iran. At any rate, what jumped out at me (because I know audio very well, having done a lot of audio recording, engineering, and mastering for several decades now) was the quality of the recording. It sounded like it was right out of a movie sound stage, complete with big Neumann microphones and the like. And the people sounded like bad actors. The main point is that it had to have been recorded professionally -- not something from a cell phone, laptop, web cam, or even a mini-disc recorder, which at least would have sounded more believable. FWIW.
Last edited by ninakat on Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby orz » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:19 pm

http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h2/

etc. You can get a decent recording using relatively cheap and portable gear these days, tho yeah you heard it and I didn't so not disputing what you're saying.
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Postby Nordic » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:23 pm

Soon, the Ayatollahs will be ripping babies out of incubators.
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Postby orz » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:24 pm

They were promoting Twitter ad nauseum, unlike, really, anything else I've ever seen.
... except Google, Myspace, Facebook, etc etc. Twitter is just the latest and increasingly dumb and irritating fad brand... couple of months and it'll be the next one. I predict a service where you can only post max 5 character emoticons and your exact GPS location auto-updated every five minutes. :)
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Postby StarmanSkye » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:25 pm

Thanks for the comments and observations about the media-pushed Twitter phenom; Sure makes ya wonder about how and why of it as a sophisticated psyop change-agent tool coopted by faux-democracy advocates, esp. the usual suspects. Sure gotta suspect a special branch of CIA tasked with maximizing Twitter's public opinion-shaping potential in so-called colour-revolutions.
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Postby orz » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:25 pm

Nordic wrote:Soon, the Ayatollahs will be ripping babies out of incubators.

They'll be doing abortions and endorsing evolution and global warming and empathy.
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Postby ninakat » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:27 pm

orz wrote:http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h2/

etc. You can get a decent recording using relatively cheap and portable gear these days, tho yeah you heard it and I didn't so not disputing what you're saying.


Interesting gadget. Admittedly, I'm old school and haven't been keeping up with technology.... but the sound quality was as good or better than other field reports on the BBC, at least that's how it struck me.... and since I was already skeptical of Twitter, I just found it very questionable.
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Postby Sweejak » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:32 pm

Nordic wrote:Soon, the Ayatollahs will be ripping babies out of incubators.


Never to be produced satellite photos of Iranain tanks massed at Iraq's borders!

Someone needs to write an opera for Colin Powell.
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