Governments that succeed in fixing elections are, by definition, popular.
Or else they’d be an overthrown government that attempted to fix an election, like the Philippines overthrew Marcos. If the Iranian people were truly unhappy with their current theocratic government, they would overthrow it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you and your like will regain control, any more than Bautista’s crony’s heirs will regain control in Cuba.
Since I don’t feel like violating Pit rules
بورینگ
That is the weirdest definition of “popular” I’ve ever seen. By that definition, every government on earth is popular, except maybe the Syrian government.
If you write it in Klingon, its still “Fuck you!”,
Plus, Klingon is probably more readily understood on this MB than Farsi.
It’s “Batista”.
If you’re going to make a foolish comparison to Cuba at least learn to spell.
The U.S. itself has had at least four Presidential elections in which the loser of the popular vote was elected President, the most recent in 2000.
Damn right! At least the Iranians aren’t quite as bad as those damn Cambodians who enabled Pol Pot by relocating, starving and murdering themselves. Friggin’ Khmer Rouge symps.
Is this a game thread where we’re all supposed to respond with a non sequitur, but using one of the words in a previous post?
If so: There have been two presidents named Johnson, but they weren’t related.
Too bad the linked article wasn’t specific about the differences between Amir-Aslani’s beliefs and the ruling theocracy.
However, I can’t rule out the illicit sex charges, though. Religious zealots all over the western world WE LIVE IN have been known to get over on their followers sexually. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.
Uhm, not that he deserved to die for it, if it had been true, though.
In fact, you’re supposed to respond with an acknowledgement that popular doesn’t equal winning the election. No more here than in Iran.
It’s standard operating procedure for the government of Iran to make specious claims like that in such cases.
For example in virtually all the cases where they’ve executed people for homosexuality they claim they did so because the men were guilty of “rape”.
Similarly anytime a Jew gets arrested he’s accused of being an Israeli spy.
I can almost guarantee there’s no truth to the charges.
That’s not what you claimed. You claimed that a successfully fixed election, by definition, is a popular one. If you are using the same definition in the two cases, then it’s an absurd definition. Real, actual vote tallies are not the same as made-up vote tallies. Or vote tallies taken under duress.
I disagree, just because the regime is in power does not mean people are truly happy and content. Same goes with North Korea, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the crushing sanctions in the 1990-2003 time period. Overthrowing regimes is not so simple, and may not be successful. Look at Iran in 2009, Syria since 2011, China in 1989.
There are Iranians who do support this regime, but I would bet most want to see it’s back soon.
I should have worded my previous comment better, made me look like a sick, cruel prick. It’s just that nothing really changes there.
You know what, you’re right. You’ve nailed a failure in my argument. I have to retreat, regroup, and reconsider to make any further argument on what I sense is an accurate argument. Well, except that it hasn’t worked so far.
Frank isn’t wrong, you know.
If the Arab Spring taught us anything, it’s that the people can effect change any time they want to. It doesn’t come without cost, but when a government becomes so unpopular that the people it kept under its thumb want to throw off their oppressors it can be done. Anything else is tacit approval.
Further, the people that enforce the policies of those governments come from the people, and even if you want to make the argument that some of those people are forced to do things against their will it’s clear that most of them are OK with what they’re doing. There’s considerable evidence that the Iranian government isn’t popular with a large portion of the citizenry, but clearly there is a substantial portion that is perfectly OK with it.
The US system is not designed to guarantee that the winner of the popular vote is the winner of the presidential election.
Emphasis added. You see, there are degrees of unpopularity and Frank would have us think that it’s simply a binary situation. But for the word “popular” to be meaningful, it must mean that the most people prefer it. A government that stuffs the ballot box cannot be said to be “popular” in any meaningful sense of the word.
It may not be so unpopular that people are willing to start a revolution, but that’s not the same thing as being “popular”.
Sorry, Frank, but this argument—which is, unfortunately, not especially uncommon—is incredibly facile, and fails completely to take into consideration the way that power is often distributed within regimes like this. It is very difficult, even in cases where the population might be incredibly unhappy, to put together a concerted effort at resistance in a country where information is controlled, and where the consequences of being uncovered as an opponent of the regime can often be similar to the ones suffered by Mohsen Amir-Aslani.
There are certainly plenty of people within Iran that do, in fact, support the government. This is the case with any autocracy, theocracy, or dictatorship, because autocrats, theocrats, and dictators are smart enough to recognize that retaining power generally requires that you keep at least some groups happy in order to help sustain your rule. From absolute monarchs who rely on the aristocracy and nobles to keep the population in line, through to fascist dictators who play on social and racial fears to set some groups against others, to communist dictators like Stalin who create new classes of upwardly-mobile professionals (vydvizhentsy) who then support the regime.
But getting some groups to support you, such that you can retain your power, is not sufficient to make a government truly popular. And the level of intimidation that goes with some of these regimes is far beyond the political differences that characterize pluralist societies like the United States.
[QUOTE=Frank]
In fact, you’re supposed to respond with an acknowledgement that popular doesn’t equal winning the election. No more here than in Iran.
[/QUOTE]
But doesn’t this actually undermine your point?
Your first assertion was that people in Iran probably support the regime, but your most recent post also suggests that a leader might not, in fact, be popular. It is actually possible, as i suggested above, for both of these things to be true, depending on who the supporters are, and who the opponents are. If you recognize this fact, it’s at least an improvement on your asinine assertion that the lack of a revolution must demonstrate some sort of general satisfaction and support.
Rest in Peace.
If I might add, across the border and only a couple of weeks before, the dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Karachi, Mohammad Shakil Auj, was assassinated.
Brave men.