These horrid, amorphous entities, almost certainly the mindless servitors of some terrible cosmic immensity whose notice we are nearly beneath, but not enough to spare us from its capriciousness, were just discovered in the dark, unwholesome tunnels carved beneath the squalid and degenerate hamlet of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Praise Nodens and pass the Elder Signs. Reposted from Pharyngula.
Iran’s Supreme Leader made the remarks everybody was afraid he was going to make during yesterday’s Friday prayers: that the “election results” [sarcasm quotes] stand, that the opposition are tools of the West, and calling on “vigililant” [direct quotes] Iranians to stand against the opposition movement.
Today, the Basij are answering Khameni’s call and the streets are filled with violence. Anybody with a camera or mobile phone is being targeted specially. Old women are being savagely beaten by misogynistic fundie thugs. People are dying in the streets.
I’m not doing much more here than reposting the highest-level bullet points. Go read Nico Putney’s liveblog at Huffington Post, as well as Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic. If you have a decent internet connection and a machine you can afford to lay bare to the web, and if you know enough about networking to keep yourself safe and anonymous, scroll down to where I’ve linked instructions about how to set up a proxy server for use by Iranian citizen journalists. Wear green, and mean it. Talk to people. Take the issue into the public.
We remember what it’s like to live under a government that does terrible things in our name but against our collective conscience. Our recent election was a free and fair chance to make things right; the Iranians weren’t given that chance, but they’re trying anyway.
BBC Sports reports that one result of today’s qualifying matches for the World Cup international soccer tournament is that the Iranian team, which lost to South Korea yesterday, has officially been shut out of the competition. For whatever reason, large parts of the world are rabidly, senselessly fanatical about the exhibition of 22 people having a savate fight over a truncated icosahedron. One would hope that the Iranians are too busy memorializing dead students and protesting their blatant disenfranchisement to care, but national pride is what it is, especially after yesterday’s demonstration of solidarity.
Of course the state media are going to use this loss as an emotional lever. I’m worried about the Green Movement’s morale.
Just took in this clip from TYT, posted yesterday, and Cenk is speaking to the same conclusion I’d drawn a few hours ago — the Iranian pro-democracy demonstrators are blowing their window. For two or three days, they were the only real force on the streets. The police were stretched thin and the revolutionary guard and Basij militias were working in hit squads targeting the flanks of the opposition rallies and isolated locations like university dorms. Sure, the militias have some strength in numbers, but they’re badly trained enough that Iran had to truck in a bunch of Hezbollah, and even then the hundreds of thousands of protesters could have moved to crush their oppressors.
Today, the government has organized “unity rallies” to fill Tehran with Ahmedinejad hardliners trucked in from who knows where, the press has had an anvil dropped on them, and the communications networks vital to organizing the opposition so far have been infiltrated by the establishment. Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard tried and failed to prepare for and contain a youth uprising; now they’re swinging back. The Guardian Council is going through the motions of agreeing to a recount and election probe, with representatives of all four presidential candidates involved to lend legitimacy.
If the people allow themselves to be appeased by this, if they relinquish their initiative and momentum, they will never have this window again without massive internal strife. The sitting regime will shapeshift however they need to in order to hold onto power, and once they feel secure, they will ensure that this kind of populist movement can never happen again in their lifetimes.
Found this in the liveblog coverage on HuffPo — how to help Iranians make an end-run around internet blockages by setting up a web proxy. Don’t do this if you don’t know at least a little bit about network security.
Khameni’s backpedalling is a murky omen. Thoughts?
Edit:
Look around the comments and other posts at the linked blog for important updates like this one.
This blog’s anniversary came and went, and still I haven’t posted in almost two months. It’s been busy. Bullets:
So, life’s been happening. The economy sucks, I’m a little over-scheduled, and the President disappoints me just a little more every week, but I live in a creative-class destination city in the most powerful nation on planet Earth, with technology in my pocket that would have made Einstein cross himself and enough leftovers in my fridge to feed a small third-world village for at least a day.
Meanwhile, Iranians are beating the crap out of each other in the streets over the issue of whether or not an election should be an exercise of popular self-rule or a theatrical event masking a clerical rubber stamp. I’m wearing the hell out of my green shirt lately, for all the good that does. Go read this and this, dig deeper here and here, and you really don’t want to miss what Hitch has to say.
That is all.
EDIT:
Okay, that wasn’t all. Andrew Sullivan’s blog is also heavily plugged-in to the Iranian story. Go read.
No, not Ed Schultz (not that I have a problem with calling Cheney on his crass political posturing, but yeezus, the guy’s a blowhard). Skip the video ahead (5:44) to the interview segment with Senator Patrick Leahy, who, along with Congressman John Conyers, has been the leading voice calling for the Bush administration to be investigated for abuses of power in the Department of Justice and in the conduct of the war in Iraq.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Some people have said to me, ‘turn the page’. I said, I’d kind of like to read the page before I turn it.
I heard that.
I’m a regular reader/viewer of Pharyngula, The Atheist Experience, Atheist Media Blog, and a few other rationalist/antitheistic web locales, partly because it’s fun to watch the fur fly, and partly because when you get bodies of well-educated people attempting to thoroughly refute not-even-wrong explanations for absolutely everything extant in the universe, you can’t help but learn something. Yesterday, I came across two lovely levers for unsticking rusty minds. First is this gorgeous video by YouTuber QualiaSoup about the absurdity of preaching “open-mindedness” while adhering to a non-falsifiable worldview:
(See also: Tim Minchin on open-mindedness.)
And second is this lengthy article, “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark” by Robert A. Moore, first published in the Creation/Evolution Journal in 1983. It’s a 43-page multidisciplinary debunking of the Noah’s Ark myth, hitting every point you’ve thought of and a hundred that never occurred to you. My favorite:
Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron, eat your hearts out.
Having some figure — a journalist, a politician, a celebrity — attempt to live on a poverty-level food budget is a common gimmick these days. Here’s an LA Times food writer’s attempt, notable for the writer’s recognition that he and his wife don’t live in a vacuum, and can share prosperity by pooling resources with friends or enjoying meals with family.
[Reposted from Boing Boing.]
Wikileaks needs some help paying the bills. I know that’s true of all of us these days, but if you value free inquiry, transparency, and the ideal that skepticism is the healthiest attitude toward authority, please follow this link and pump just a little life-sustaining cash into one of the most vital resources on the web.
For more information about Wikileaks, read their Wikipedia entry. There is no affiliation between Wikileaks and the Wikimedia Group, in case you’re confused about why they’d suddenly be out of scratch.
The night of March 16th and morning of March 17th mark the anniversary of a cascade of errors of judgment and personal failings that I’m still experiencing fallout from two years later.
For all the turmoil this night represents to me, there is an entire society, halfway around the world, for whom March 16th/17th bears an incalculably darker significance. Today is the 21st anniversary of the Iraqi chemical attack on the Kurdish residents of Halabja, a brutal and disgusting act of genocide that has never received the mainstream international attention it is due.
So I’ll mark this date for my own reasons, but its broader implications are humbling. Very few citizens of this country would know a real problem unless it flooded our neighborhood or blew the hell out of one of our braver overseas friends and relatives.
Here’s the video for Skinny Puppy’s “VX Gas Attack”, written about and utilizing visuals from the Halabja attack and its aftermath. Some of it’s hard to watch, but if they can suffer it, we can bear witness. It’s literally the least we can do.
