2) It’s a little frustrating that while the American public seems to be on the side of the protesters, there still seems to be a real disconnect. Americans seem to want the Iranian people to have what we Americans want, not what the Iranian people want for themselves. Americans have already decided that our brand of Free Election Democracy is what is best for all people everywhere, no matter what they may think they want (although they do, when not in this mode, acknowledge that the American political system is riddled with corruption, and doesn’t actually represent the will of its citizens). Thinking that you know what’s best for someone else, without pausing to think that maybe they know what’s best for themselves is part of this “American arrogance” we sometimes hear about. Not entirely our fault, we’re propagandized into thinking this since the time we are very young.

3) I’m really not sure what me and my fellow Americans should do if we truly want to help the Iranians. To be honest, I haven’t heard much in the way of Iranians asking for help. Clearly, all of the heavy work and sacrifice will have to be done in Iran by Iranians. Even worse, any public support by Americans can help the Iranian government to paint the protesters as Western puppets and claim that the whole movement is just another sneaky American regime change plot. I salute the folks who are providing telecommunications help (getting around censorship, etc.), but this may be a case where taking to the streets and marching outside in solidarity might do real harm.

4) Obviously, no one knows how this is going to turn out. At this point, it seems like either the government will crack down hard, and force an end to the protests through violence and fear. Or the schisms among political players and authority figures will grow wider, giving the protesters continued breathing room to keep the pressure on. But I don’t see this ending well for the protesters unless Supreme Leader Khamenei gets ousted, or his rivals (in the Iranian theological apparatus) become powerful enough to frighten him into calling for a new election.

5) Fun fact: did you know that the US is still occupying Iraq and Afganistan? If you watched the mainstream news, you might have forgotten.

So, the game (Resident Evil 5) has been out for weeks now, and here’s an article by a guy who played the game and discusses the game’s depiction of race and ethnicity. Thorough and thoughtful. And only a little nerdy.

I thought the video did a great job of showing people learning about their legal rights, working to help each other out, and fighting against the deceit of the banks that got them (and us) into this financial crisis in the first place. It’s good to see people saying “we won’t let you take our neighbor’s home” instead of just letting the corrupt lenders throw them out because they think they have no other choice.

The Bill Moyers page also has some good resource links for people who want to get involved, or who are in danger of losing their homes right now. Click for those.

4th-Grader Questions Rice on Waterboarding

In her first public appearance since leaving the White House, Condoleezza Rice had to defend herself from accusations of war crimes from a 9-year old. My hat goes off to you, young Misha Lerner.

Misha’s mother claimed that his original question was “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for torture?”, but The Man made him tone it down to more of a “are the things that Obama is saying about your administration’s interrogation techniques hurting your feelings?” type thing.

Cue right-wing nutjobs blaming the whole thing on his liberal terrorist parents, and sending the boy death threats at school in 3… 2… 1…

U.S. defense chief: Military strike won’t halt Iran nuke program

Implies that the US is not going to invade Iran during the Obama administration. Of course, then he goes on to talk about sanctions, which can do just as much damage. Damn, I went and made myself sad.

The reason the [right-]winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other…

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires.

Treating women like they are their bodies is the purest form of objectification. It’s why women are judged primarily by their weight and the number of penises that have touched them instead of things like what they think and what they do. It’s why so many people find contraception and abortion repulsive, because they indicate that a woman is control of her body, and not just a passive piece of flesh. It’s why female pleasure is considered suspect—because it reminds people that there’s a subjective being inside that flesh, one who experiences what her body does, one who controls it. We prefer to equate a woman with her body.

Feeling that your body belongs to you is a male privilege, and I fully intend to claim it.

Awesome.

Then, all of a sudden, he approaches you in a rational way, says he wants things to be right between you. He’s not offering apologies or wanting to make up for his past actions, but he seems to want peace between you going into the future.

Part of you thinks that this is a wonderful development, having this terrible weight lifted. And part of you is deeply cynical; he’s magically changing his ways overnight? Your response, then, is to take sort of a “wait and see” attitude. Words are words. You’re open to this reconciliation, but you’ll believe it when his actions start backing it up.

Of course, this is yet another of my attempted international relations analogies, regarding Obama’s recent video statement to Iran. It’s the first act of US diplomacy in Iraq in several decades*. And to my surprise, it uses the exact phrase I’ve heard from every savvy Middle Eastern scholar, journalist, or intelligence analyst about Iran: “mutual respect.” The Iranian experts I’ve heard all say that Iran wants the US to deal with it as an equal, not as a disobedient child. They want to negotiate differences between the two states on terms of “mutual respect” (of course, the fact that Obama promises “mutual respect” one week after renewing economic sanctions on Iran does weaken things a bit).

So finally, this seems like a reasonable foreign policy, “hey, let’s try to talk things out instead of massacre each other”. But already, the conservatives have their “appeasement” knives sharpened. “Our enemy is Evil! We cannot talk to Evil! This is just as bad as England giving the Sudetenland to the Nazis in the 1930s.” I’ve noticed their angry/snarky/gleeful pronouncements that Iran’s response has been “lukewarm” to Obama’s groundbreaking move. Which again, looking at my anaolgy above, is a pretty fucking reasonable response. The US overthrew the Iranian government in the 1950s and supported their dictator until almost the 1980s. Less than a decade ago, the US president called them part of an “Axis of Evil” (after, history has now forgotten, Iran actually tried to help the US fight Al Qaeda shortly after 9/11), and when Iran, presumably frightened by the US show of power in Iraq, secretly offered open negotiations with the United States, Dick Cheney essentially told them to fuck off.

So Iran’s not dancing in the streets just because Barack Obama spent three minutes in front of a video camera and hit the right rhetorical notes. Which both infuriates and pleases the war-monger neocon crowd. The fact that these “inferior” people from a “lesser” nation aren’t falling down to kiss our feet because we deigned to talk to them is as offensive as if they were rubbing fresh shit on Grandmother’s wedding dress. But with this new offense, they have one more ball of muck to hurl at Obama as they try to heave him off his pedestal, so that does put a spring in their vicious step.

I truly hope that this is the beginning of some sort of talks and settlement between the US and Iran. As the Iraq war and economic collapse have show, the US simply does not have the force, power, or money to push everyone else around anymore. It would be nice of the US government didn’t continue to use bombs and terror in their continued efforts to deny reality (even if history shows that this is far, far too much to hope for).

—
*well, unless you count secretly selling the Iranians weapons in exchange for hostages “diplomacy”.