"Today" = Saturday
Jun. 13th, 2009 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brennaI'm not normally the international-news type, but yesterday I was poking around the Big Picture blog and looked through this post on the Iranian presidential election. It was full of lovely pictures of people with ribbons and flags and signs and things (you should really go look). There were only six comments at the time, with a note that the election results would come out the next day, so I had to check this morning to see how it turned out.
It turned out that Ahmadinejad was declared the winner via many levels of insultingly obvious, over-the-top fraud. The results came in too fast for the tens of millions of paper ballots to have been counted at all, bypassed the mandatory waiting period for checking the figures before the officially-official announcement, and were not consistent with any prior polls or demographics or statistics or logic of any kind. The government came prepared for the massive crying of shenanigans by cutting off all text messaging service before the results were even announced (with phone lines and most of the internet soon to follow), house-arresting the main challengers immediately afterward for no reason, and meeting the protesters with police violence.
Apparently, hopes had been much higher for this election than normal. Whereas once the streets might have been merely loud, this time they are shut down and on fire. Literal shouting from the rooftops, as encouraged by the last round of Twitter messages before it was blocked altogether, continued well past midnight local time. People who know these things say the last public outcry of this magnitude was during Iran's actual revolution.
Overall liveblogs/roundups:
The Lede (NYT)
Andrew Sullivan collects, filters, and comments
Tehran Bureau - tons of articles
Individual items of note:
Look at this graph. No, ignore it. No, look at it. No, don't. And so on.
Beatings.
Riots.
Perspective.
I have only ever spent one hour of my life seriously thinking my government was all a giant lie that I would never get to participate in in any honest, meaningful way. It was a more awful feeling than I would have believed I could have about politics, and one of the most memorably terrible hours of my life. But then I learned some more information I had been missing, and it was over. I can't imagine what today has been like for the people of Iran, and I'm scared for them.
It turned out that Ahmadinejad was declared the winner via many levels of insultingly obvious, over-the-top fraud. The results came in too fast for the tens of millions of paper ballots to have been counted at all, bypassed the mandatory waiting period for checking the figures before the officially-official announcement, and were not consistent with any prior polls or demographics or statistics or logic of any kind. The government came prepared for the massive crying of shenanigans by cutting off all text messaging service before the results were even announced (with phone lines and most of the internet soon to follow), house-arresting the main challengers immediately afterward for no reason, and meeting the protesters with police violence.
Apparently, hopes had been much higher for this election than normal. Whereas once the streets might have been merely loud, this time they are shut down and on fire. Literal shouting from the rooftops, as encouraged by the last round of Twitter messages before it was blocked altogether, continued well past midnight local time. People who know these things say the last public outcry of this magnitude was during Iran's actual revolution.
Overall liveblogs/roundups:
The Lede (NYT)
Andrew Sullivan collects, filters, and comments
Tehran Bureau - tons of articles
Individual items of note:
Look at this graph. No, ignore it. No, look at it. No, don't. And so on.
Beatings.
Riots.
Perspective.
I have only ever spent one hour of my life seriously thinking my government was all a giant lie that I would never get to participate in in any honest, meaningful way. It was a more awful feeling than I would have believed I could have about politics, and one of the most memorably terrible hours of my life. But then I learned some more information I had been missing, and it was over. I can't imagine what today has been like for the people of Iran, and I'm scared for them.