The people who break the law in iran to protest the possibility that the election were stolen are doing the best they know to do.

Similarly, the people who enforce the law to protect public order, who try to stop the people who are breaking windows and starting fires and destroying automobiles on the street are also doing the best they know to do.

Just as in 1968 the protestors in the streets of chicago were doing right, as were the police who broke their heads. The rioters in detroit and Watts, at A&T in Greensboro and at Kent State were doing the best they knew, as were the National Guard who shot them.

Khamenei behaves correctly by maintaining law and order. The laws might need to be corrected to get honest elections, and if so that should happen. Do people make that more likely by breaking the law in the streets? I dunno. I used to think so. If we’d done that in 2000 maybe we wouldn’t today have touchscreen voting machines that allow no recounts.

Should we hve gone into the streets and protested in 2000 and 2004? Too late now

What Steven Attewell and others on the left like him has/have attempted to do is blunt the obvious reality of the utter corruption of the Democratic Chicago machine—a machine that produced our present President—by falsely charging that “the GOP did it too” and thus are no better—ethically or historically. Insofar as the State of Illinois and the 1960 election goes, the facts and history utterly refute that calumny. People like Steven Attewell should go elsewhere to find a more gullible and misinformed audience to which peddle their fairy-tales.

The original “stainless-steel-rat” short story is one of the all-time classics. I read it in the original in 6th or 7th grade in either “Galaxy” or “Astounding” (later Analog) SF magazine., IIRC. Great memories—but that’s all. My Mother threw out my entire collection of Galaxy and Astounding that I had stored in 3 huge creaking drawers in my room to make more room for linens when I went away to college in 1962. I could have killed her. (BTW, The author sure took an original concept and ran with it a long way with his later series of books, didn’t he?)

There is a goodish case for innocent selection bias…or maybe not.

you certainly don’t have to be a wild-eyed Photoshop theorist to think that pics like this have little value as reportage (evidence) rather than mere illustration – any more than footage of the Iraqi ‘liberation’ celebrations – 15 men hitting a statue, 3 men firing guns in the air on a 12 second loop. Or for that matter the vid used by Rumsfeld to downplay looting (as a friend put it: “man steals vase = nothing bad is going on anywhere”).

I have an Iranian colleague who has said similar things to me.

P.S. What is your opinion of Eric Hooglund?

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/06/who-voted-ahmadinejad

I don’t trust ANY poll taken of Iranians. None whatsoever. No matter which way they lean. I just cannot possibly see Iranians actually answering truthfully to the question “who are you going to vote for” posed by a stranger. A combination of experience of repression (not unique to Iran) and hyper-paranoia (particularly well-developed in Iranians for good reason, after all “just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not out to get you”) tells Iranians never to answer such a question to a poll-taker.

(‘ah yes but the situations weren’t comparable because blah blah blah’)

You really don’t know much about Canadian politics, do you?

As a Canadian (who has also lunched with Kim Campbell… she is a smart and very candid woman, but I never voted for her: I generally vote NDP), let me point out the obvious:

1. Kim Campbell was never elected as Prime Minister. She won her party’s leadership convention largely as a reaction to her predecessor’s – and party’s – deep unpopularity. Her stay in office (from assuming her party’s leadership until losing the general election was a grand total of 132 days). And, more importantly…

2. She was not any sort of “ethnic” or (“regional opposition”) candidate (only a Québécois would remotely fit that category in Canada and it often backfires: Stéphane Dion, the last leader of the Liberals, was more popular in Ontario than in Québec).

‘The Canadian federal election of 1993 (officially, the 35th general election) was held on October 25 of that year to elect members to the Canadian House of Commons of the 35th Parliament of Canada. Fourteen parties competed for the 295 seats in the House at that time. It was one of the most eventful elections in Canada’s history, with more than half of the electorate switching parties from the 1988 election. The Liberals, led by Jean Chrétien, won a strong majority in the House and formed the next government of Canada.

The election was called by the new Progressive Conservative Party leader, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, near the end of her party’s five-year mandate. When she assumed office, the party was deeply unpopular, and was further weakened by the emergence of new parties that were competing for its core supporters. Campbell’s initial efforts helped the party recover somewhat in pre-election polls before the writs were issued. However, this momentum did not last, and the Progressive Conservatives suffered the most lopsided defeat for a governing party at the federal level, losing more than half their vote from 1988 and all but two of their 151 seats’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_1993

(‘ah yes but the situations weren’t comparable because blah blah blah’).

To absolutely repeat, clearly and as explicitly as possible: I have absolutely no idea whether or not there was voter fraud in the Iranian elections and neither does anybody else contributing to this thread.