Iran

After much fuss and muss, the “Irani govt. finally admitted to election fraud”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=all:

bq. Iran’s most powerful oversight council announced on Monday that the number of votes recorded in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters there by three million, further tarnishing a presidential election that has set off the most sustained challenge to Iran’s leadership in 30 years.

The interesting part about the whole protesting the elections bit is how little the country actually listens or even respects their leaders. “Khomeni”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khomeni must be turning over in his grave.


p. In other news, just to show how out of touch he’s with reality (he’s busy communicating directly with God, after all), Khamenei once again played chicken with reality:

bq.. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, said that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s margin of victory was so great — 11 million votes — that there could be no doubt it was legitimate. He never addressed any of the specific charges of fraud.

“Sometimes the difference is 100,000, 500,000 or even 1 million,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in his speech to the nation during Friday Prayer. *”In that case, one could say that there might have been vote-rigging. But how can they rig 11 million votes?”*

p. There are only two possible options here: He doesn’t know his own government rigged the elections, or he’s lying. Either means he’s damned incompetent, or if both are true, he’s incompetent and a liar. Whats even more interesting is the lag time between reality happening and when Khomeni starts to see it.

The other interesting news is, which Pakistani politicians are probably taking note of is, that these days you need to hire a behaviorial economist and probably a mathematician as well before rigging elections. A number of people had looked at the election numbers and concluded that they looked “statistically improbable and consistent with numbers generated by human beings, not a poll”:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/karroubis-unlucky-7s.html.

For a supposedly religious country, formerly part of the “Axis of Evil”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil, it seems like the man on the street couldn’t give a hoot about their religious leaders. A bit like Pakistan, where despite all the seemingly Islamic nature of the country no one votes for the Islamic parties. Given a real election in Iran, minus the “guidance” of it’s Supreme Religious Council aka the real rulers, it seems they would end up installing a somewhat secular govt as well (with the usual fake religious trappings).

h4. More

* “The oppositions statement”:http://iranfacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-translation-of-mousavis-latest.html

1 thought on “Iran”

  1. Dear Ko,

    While I was working on something, I chanced on an article on your blog about the ban on bollywood movies in Pakistan. You must have written it a few years ago and have perhaps forgotten about it. Over time, I should read more recent writings by you. But I am writing this to ask one question out of curiosity, as I have never been to Pakistan.

    Most of the present-day movies produced in India have a 5+1 channel sound-track for which our theatres have several speakers fitted in the walls all over the hall. As a result you get a very good surround-sound effect, especially in good theatres in the cities. This may not be available to the audience in Pakistan who watch it through cable Tv without the 5+1 surround sound. Also, here we watch movies on a huge screen and the movies in the theatres in cities are projected from DVDs rather than through the oldstyle projectors. This makes the quality of reproduction very goood.

    Do I take it that most people in Pakistan have never seen a bollywood movie in its full glory? I am just curious to know this. If this is the case, those who visit India must be keeping the watching of a movie in the theatre very high on their agenda!

    Your article was well-written and open-minded, although, unfortunately, most discussions on blogs tend to become an India-Pakistan mud-slinging match. As nations, both of us enjoy painting the other black and take pleasure in one-upmanship. May be this is our way of reducing tensions by letting off aggression through words and thus prevent wars!

    Many of us here are curious about what type of cities Lahore and Karachi must be. Are people in Pakistan equally curious about Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore?

    Regards,

    Dogra, Chennai, India.

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