Kamangir (Archer)

Excerpt: Oblivion is a Bliss

Kamangir — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:38:34 +0000

Twenty one years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous Fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his writings. The Fatwa was in effect suspended ten years later by the reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

Maybe it is actually a good thing that we forget things. Otherwise, we, Iranians, should have been actively annihilating Macedonia all over for the past two thousand years for what they did to Persepolis. Yet, fundamentalists do not seem to like it when it comes to forgetting things.

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Links for 2010-07-28 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Iranian Social Networking, Hard-Line Style
"The website of the followers of Khamenei has been created. Please enter with your hijab and after completing your ablution."

With that Facebook post, 29-year-old Iranian Ahmad heralded the arrival of a new social networking site, called Velayatmadaran, launched by the Iranian establishment.

Excerpt: The Green Traitor

Kamangir — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:14:24 +0000

Moussavi and Karoubi recently published a one-hour-long video of their first “Cyber Press Conference” on Youtube. At the end of the video the producers appreciate what they call “helps from anonymous friends of the Green Movement in the state-run broadcasting body”. I interpret this as evidence that people from the inner circles of the Iranian political system are gambling on the end of the regime, and this is text-book example of what the advocates of the non-violent movement have been theorizing for long, i.e. the possibility of finding converts in a political regime and to have the system tremble without shooting a bullet.

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: Dysfunctional Yet United, or how to rule a country with Google

Kamangir — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:36:33 +0000

An MP recently suggested that if everyone in the political system of Iran adheres to the Supreme Leader, then there would be complete unity. Well, you can replace “the Supreme Leader” to virtually anything in that sentence and the same assertion would still be correct. Take this, for example; if the whole political system writes a list of all the decisions to be made on any particular day and then someone, anyone, looks them up in Google and collects a list of semi-random answers which are then taken to heart by everyone, then we will have “complete unity”. But is “complete unity” something a political system would be looking for and benefit from?

On a similar note, a banner in Tehran reads “cover yourself up and not get harassed by men”. That’s another completely correct assertion which misses the point entirely.

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: The Necessary Disasters: BP Oil Spill and Ahmadinejad

Kamangir — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:24:28 +0000

The BP oil spill will give the industry more incentive to consider safety precautions more carefully and the world in large another reason to take alternative energies more seriously. Is Ahmadinejad Iran’s “political spill”?

Maybe we needed Ahmadinejad to occupy the office and make the future generations alert the next time someone like him has their names on the ballot. Of course that is assuming that there is going to be a future. The same goes for the BP spill. Does anyone suggest that everything can be returned to how things were before the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: Heros or Child Soldiers?

Kamangir — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:13:29 +0000

The similarities of Mohammad Rigi, the 14-year-old suicide-bomber of the Zahedan terrorist attack, and Hossein Fahmideh, the iconic child-hero of the Iran-Iraq war, are striking. Can we dismiss Rigi as a brain-washed terrorist but praise Fahmideh as a hero? What is heroism and who defines is? Aren’t these two kids both victims of two different violence-seeking political systems?

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: Was that a love letter sir?

Kamangir — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:13:23 +0000

The state-run Fars News published a piece in Persian about Concepcion Picciotto and how she has protested in front of the White House for 28 years. The main question is, is this supposed to be a criticism of the “Imperialist Evil” or an acknowledgment of American democracy?

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: Social Networks of Hostile Islands

Kamangir — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:09:15 +0000

We, especially here in the Persian blogosphere, take it for granted that online social networks are good vehicles for engaging a society in mutual and expansive discussion. The experience of being a member of the Persian subsets of the most significant social networks, including Facebook and Friend Feed, however, paints a grim picture. The fact is, these networks are partitioned into other-hating islands inside which members bash the “others”.

Social networks are good at dismantling the grip of state ideology. But are they also good for developing an environment in which citizens tolerate and cooperate despite differences?

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt

Excerpt: Postcolonial Nonsense

Kamangir — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:13:53 +0000

There is significant interest in a concept generally known as the Postcolonial discourse in the Persian blogosphere. The sympathizers of this mindset are active in different social networks such as Facebook and Friendfeed. I believe this discourse is fueled by laziness and the fact that it is easy to nag and put down western liberalism and all its achievements than to produce alternative content.

Persian Post – What is an Excerpt?

Links for 2010-07-06 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Toronto Was No Tehran – A report on the G-20 protests | Persian2English
Kamangir Blog - There are several similarities and differences between the recent G20 events in Toronto and the post-election events in Iran. It is imperative to heed such parallels and to call up the distinctions as the media under the repressive Iranian regime will try to portray these separate issues as identical and assume that the post-election brutality is a natural phenomena and that “it’s the same all over the world.”

Links for 2010-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Iran: Mir-Hossein Mousavi Cartoon Upsets Greens
A leading Iranian cartoonist and blogger based in Canada, Nikahang Kowsar, posted a cartoon this month of opposition leader Mir-H0ssein Mousavi that has caused numerous reactions in Iranian citizen media.

It shows Mousavi sitting at a desk 10 years from now, writing his 300th statement.

The Bush Institute Conference and More

Kamangir — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:42:54 +0000

I recently attended the Cyber Dissidents Conference at the Bush Institute in Dallas. A wrap up of the conference can be seen in this video from Ideas in Action.

(Direct Link to Video)

While the last post on this blog dates back to December last year, I have never been this active in my five plus years of blogging. The Persian Kamangir was recently nominated for the best Persian blog by DW-World and I have had closer contact with the Persian media organizations outside Iran. To put it shortly, blogging for the Iranians needs to be done in the language they use, and that’s exactly what I am doing. As of today, Kamangir’s feed has over 6,000 feed subscribers, according to Google’s Feed Burner.

Follow my Persian blog at persian.kamangir.net (feed). You can also use Google Translate, which suspiciously manages to produce some form of poetry out of my mostly social-oriented posts.

Links for 2010-04-12 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Global Voices Online » Iran: State Reaps Real Dividends of Double-edged Persecution
There is no doubt that citizens protesting the results of the June presidential election have made efficient use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs to ‘immortalize’ their movement and to broadcast evidence of the violence committed against people by the security forces. However, the cornerstone of this movement is not technology – it’s the people.

Links for 2010-02-26 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

Iran showing fastest scientific growth of any country - science-in-society - 18 February 2010 - New Scientist
Scientific output has grown 11 times faster in Iran than the world average, faster than any other country. A survey of the number of scientific publications listed in the Web of Science database shows that growth in the Middle East – mostly in Turkey and Iran – is nearly four times faster than the world average.
Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine | Video on TED.com
Eric Topol says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

Links for 2009-12-10 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 PST

A Whole New Democratic Discussion Forum? From Neda Agha Soltan to the "Shooshoo Joon"s: Discussion is Safer in Blogs than in Streets | Azad Tribune
I met Neda the day bikers were leaving for New York. Throughout the time that speeches were given she was there, standing right in the middle of all the other people who were wearing green T-shirts and were singing at the height of their voice: "We have been all beaten up by repression and injustice". The sight of Neda Agha Soltan was shocking to me, not only because I had watched the video in which she bleeds to death over and over in the past couple of weeks. I was here in Toronto, thousands of kilometers away from Kargar Avenue, where a bullet hit her in the chest, and Neda was staring at me.

Links for 2009-12-07 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 PST

The land of Goder and Ferfer, blogging with a Persian accent | Weblog Awards | Deutsche Welle | 07.12.2009
Wondering what it's like in Weblogestan? Iranian blogger Arash Kamangir highlights the real tricks and turmoil that make up the Persian blogosphere.

The land of Goder and Ferfer, blogging with a Persian accent

Kamangir — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:05:08 +0000

This is the title of an article I wrote for DW-World about the Persian Blogosphere. Read the article in English here and in Persian here.