14 years ago
it’s ‘official’. ahmadi (ahmadinejad) has been formally declared the winner by the guardian council via their 10 percent recount. assuming they actually even bothered to do any counting, they actually found 1 town that had even more votes for ahmadi. yeah… right.
the dust up between the uk and tehran over diplomatic personnel has settled into a mexican (honduran?) standoff. the eu (european union) is threatening to do a massive pull of the countries ambassadors en masse.
the twitter stream #iranelection got hammered by the great celeb death binge. first farrah fawcett goes into that great love story deathbed in the sky … then the king of pop (yes, that king of pop) decides to forego the final concert and go straight to the top of the charts, the obit charts that is. the resulting twitspike will be used as a comparative peak statistical value for … ever. the jacko value will be whispered among twitanalysts and twitarcheologists as a mystical, seismic data point, once in a lifetime, never to be equalled moment. it took out google for god’s sake! google! Apparently the news media couldn’t handle the overload of walking and chewing gum (i.e. covering iran and jacko 'at the same time’). spooky how all news outlets dried up at once. late to the party, billy mays here… well, no longer here actually. going to be a bit wierd seeing billy yelling at me late nights… lately, i see dead celebs!
meanwhile, back in crazy-ville, err, tehran… the good twitters (@change_for_iran and @persiankiwi) were having difficult moments. rumors ran rampant that @persiankiwi had been taken into custody, later reliable (?) sources say that no, he/she is fine, just without intranets. reports of great howling anger from the tops of roofs (aluhu akbar!), a human chain of protesters getting roughed up for … being a human chain of protesters. tehran’s central jail, evin prison, filled to the brim - and reports that 2 soccer (excuse me, football) stadiums being used as temporary prisons.
the major news outlets (cnn, fox, network news, pbs) have all gone into quiet mode on iran. a few blurbs a day basically. sad, really. sad.
the net provides some interesting 'human interest’ tales and a few reporters are doing their summations (roger cohen in particular). even youtube has 'dried up’. you know it’s over when youtube dries up.
now it looks like its settling into grudging 'acceptance’ by the green movement. a retrenchment. the hardliners may have forced their will upon the people, but … in the long run… this … rape of iran… will not stand. it will be resented, resisted in 'small’ ways. quiet ways. strikes and that sort of thing. passive resistance. at least that is what seems to be the 'end game’. the situation is still volatile and therefor any long term strategy analysis is, to say the least, 'iffy’. insert fog-of-war here.
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