A word about elections, sour grapes, and conclusion-jumping

Robert Fisk knows rather more about Iran than I do, he's actually there and reporting at the moment, and has written about it extensively over the last few days, so instead of going on about it more than I'm already going to I'll link him and use a quote he quotes in one of his articles:

"The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.

And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.

If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).

As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?

And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.

And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.

Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:

Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.

May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.

Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.

But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.

Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.

Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.

Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?

There are a lot of things to love about this photograph

But one of them is certainly that Jayne Mansfield had an IQ topping out 160. Quantifiably measurable genius is what quantifiably measurable genius does and off the chart or not, based on this photograph alone I know I'd rather give Sophia Loren the keys, and I mean that with almost every permutation of significance and taste you can imagine. Still, I wish it was in colour.

Speaking of Sophia Loren, more Chaser:

Given the history of US and Iranian relations . . .

So considering what's happened with Iran, the US, and regime change over the last 40 years, I was rather relieved to read this this morning. It's really fantastic that people are demonstrating there for what they believe in, in the face of a repressive security apparatus. It's really awful that the repressive security apparatus is being repressive. And if there were irregularities or corruptions in the voting patterns, I really hope they're exposed and dealt with. But take a deep fucking breath.

The percentage Ahmadinejad's supposed to have got this time - low 60%'s - is about the same as he was supposed to have got in 2005 without raising eyebrows. That was in the second round, true - but his opponent in the second round wasn't a 'reformist', he was another conservative. A reformist candidate came third in 2005, just topping out 17% of the vote. 'Reformers' performed worse in the last election, without everybody screaming foul.

We've known for a long time that educated urbanites in Iran thought Ahmadinejad's a dangerous hick and that everybody else there rather liked him. And now he's spent the last five years offering politically popular subsidies to the bulk of the population against any rational economic advice. When they've caused piss-off, his domestic policies have mainly pissed off middle-class urbanites - not really the bulk of the electorate. And his posturing on Iran's nuclear programme hasn't resulted in the disasters people warn about yet, and indeed surely Iranians have remarked that without Ahmadinejad tempering his speech, the US has nonetheless voted for the man who didn't sing 'bomb bomb Iran', and whose administration has spent the last few months indicating it's interested in a better relationship.

Based on what we know - why would we assume that now, in 2009, it's impossible for Ahmadinejad to get the votes he got in 2005? Why would we assume there has been a 30% + shift in voting patterns that has been fraudulently covered up, just because the educated urbanites who are sick of the dangerous hick - and yeah, he's a dangerous hick - are bravely and efficiently hitting the streets? Why are we assuming so readily that democracy has failed, instead of asking if the demonstrators are just extremely disappointed about the way democracy has gone? Why are so many Americans assuming that just because they managed to vote for the least embarassing candidate for once last year, every other country is going to start doing the same?

I'm very, very sorry people are getting killed, and apparently getting disappeared into the bargain, and that it's a big fucking mess. Election or not, this government, like so many Iranian governments before it, bears the responsibility for murder. But look - this is a country where, 45 years ago, democracy was snuffed out - with a great deal of international help - under the guise of massive protests. This was followed by a quarter of a century of extremely repressive absolutist rule and massive international resource exploitation. The revolution that ended the situation in 1979 was attacked with both barrels by the international community, up to and including arming a thug like Saddam Hussein to the teeth to fight a brutal proxy war.

Morally revolting or not, it's not a surprise that the government is trigger-happy now. History and our common sense has to tell us there's a very real prospect that the election results were legitimate, and that it wouldn't take a paranoid schizophrenic government to imagine that the massive anti-government demonstrations represent yet another internationally-sponsored, anti-democratic coup attempt. Is murdering and disappearing the right way to deal with that? No. It's an awful way to deal with that. But - given the history of US and Iranian relations - I understand why it's being dealt with this way. Tragic. But there you are. You spend forty years fucking a country, and what have you got? A fucked country.

Obama knows what he's talking about, which I'm really not used to thinking about things American presidents say. I hope he means it.

Talking shop

This post is a post of praise about my home and natal land. Oh yes . . . Canada. The national police may be taser-happy goons and the city police may be mind-bogglingly incompetent and the situation with the natives might be second in Anglo retardation and murderousness only to the fucking Australians (that charming little chestnut about driving natives out of town on extremely cold winter nights and dumping them on the side of the road to avoid dying of hypothermia as best they can comes up with monotonous and vomitous regularity), but nonetheless, when it comes to me, my job, and my relatively po-po free life - oh Canada, you big beautiful bastard.

Here's the thing. I'm putting together a feature about the Canada/EU free trade talks. Our focus is Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, so I don't talk to Canadians working for the national government much; this was the first time in more than a year. I'd forgotten how good it was. Generally, talking to national/continental government workers is my least favourite job when researching articles. Call a private company, industry organization, or local government body, and you can usually get a straight answer one way or another. But call a national government body, and sigh.

Here they are, listed by quality:

1. Sub-Saharan Africa. The best in my normal field. Everybody who picks up the phone speaks either French or English, everybody who picks up the phone is polite, helpful, and competent, and it takes a very brief time to get a cellphone number for the appropriate minister or minister's assistant or whatever. The main pitfall with calling African governments is that 3/4 of the time, the landlines just don't fucking work, and even once you get a cell number, 1/2 of the time the reception is so fucking bad the conversation sounds like a shouting match and you wrap it up understanding only about 50% of what's gone on. So the best, but still a massive pain in the ass.

And then a precipitous drop in quality as we head to:

2. Mainland Europe -national governments and EU institutions. A near impenetrable-wall of ringing phones without message services. Get past that and reach another imposing barrier of aggressive, monolingual secretaries or receptionists who have no demonstrated grasp of the fundamentals of the departments they work for, and whose mandate, very obviously, is to prevent you, as a member of the media, from speaking to anybody in their department with a title. As if that wasn't enough of a roadblock, call anytime between the hours of 11 and 15, and there's no chance of speaking to anybody whose lunches are subsidized. Call after 16, and the fuckers have all gone home.

3. The Middle East and north Africa. Complete gas factory. Combination of sub-Saharan African phone services and European monolingualism, which is a rather bigger problem for me as I don't speak Arabic but do speak a few European languages. The most frustrating port of call has been Iraq, to follow reconstruction projects wherein they were soliciting international funds with English press releases from departments where no-one willing to talk on the phone spoke English. More on that another time.

4. United Kingdom. Far and away the worst. In the case of mainland Europe and the Middle East I suspect part of the problem with getting in touch with anyone governmentally significant over the phone has to do with civil service sinecures and nepotism and the wrong jobs going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. In the UK it's rather more surreal and much, much more fucking annoying than that.

You call the media contact at the pertinent organization. The media contact never has any idea what's going on; their function, seemingly, is to try to determine the right person for you to talk to. They get back to you with punctilious efficiency, generally about three hours later, with a name and number. You call that person; not quite the right one. Lather, rinse, repeat. You call a total of no less than five people. Each one takes down your details and enquiries, and each one refers you on to someone who would no doubt be helpful who isn't, but at least everybody answers their phone.

The next day, your phone starts ringing. Everybody who you've spoken to the day before, everybody who has referred you on to someone else - everybody gets back to you. And creepily, everyone tells you the same thing - a bland, anodyne message obviously dictated by some eerie centralized intelligence that answers absolutely no questions, no matter how innocent or factual. Call the HSE with a series of questions about a spate of employee deaths and get a five-paragraph answer about how the HSE would like fewer employees to die. Call Defra with specific questions about breakdowns in the recycling chain, and get a five paragraph response about how Defra would like more things to be recycled. And get the same responses from four or five different people. You've wasted your time calling them and now they're wasting your time calling you back, refusing to engage with facts that are already part of the public domain, as if they're all scared they'll be sacked if they deviate an inch from the party line.

Ugh.

But Canada however - darling Canada. Give the trade department a holler about free trade negotiations with the EU and the media contact has an in-depth understanding of subsidization issues. I didn't speak to a single secretary yesterday, or if I did, they understood their department enough to give out information on its nuts-and-bolts operations, like the base duty rate with Most Favoured Nations and prior difficulties and roadblocks with NAFTA. Oh god, it was so good to call back home. Everybody is so polite and so much less retarded and Kafkaesque and ghost-hacked there. It lit up my whole afternoon but I won't lie to you, it also made me as homesick as fuck. Oh well.

Of gas factories and titties

Dreadfully domestic weekend. We were going to go to Lille and buy some fabric at Toto, the place where I'd dropped Euro 70 in ten minutes in Bordeaux, but there was a big cave of a shop I'd heard about here that I wanted to try before springing the Euro 10 or whatever it'd be for the train tickets, and it was the first Saturday of the organic co-op drop-off. Both the cave and the drop-off were gas factories.

While Le Berger looked like a treasure trove when I walked in, and may have been, nothing was labelled (except by price), and it's quite key that for all the projects I have in mind that we have zero polyester. I haven't been at this long enough to tell the difference by touch or sight; I tried a few burn tests on things I thought were cotton (on the sidewalk, of course, though it did strike me I could cause a jolly blaze with just a little carelessness), and they melted. And then I got sick of the whole thing. The women working there were mammoth sourpusses - too busy telling each other what a hard time they'd been having sleeping the night through recently to be able to do much more than bark single-word responses to my questions - so Toto it is. Lovely, organized, clean, labelled, cheap Toto.

The organic pick-up went rather better, and would have gone impeccably, but for, once more, half the body of the co-op being space cadets. By the time we arrived for our hamper, an insurrectionary movement was brewing, because AS WARNED REPEATEDLY some orders were missing some items that had turned out to not be available that week. The price was adjusted down, of course, in consequence, but that didn't stop ten rabble-rousers having a scene in a small basement. It took me a solid ten minutes to pay my bill instead of the three seconds it should have taken, mostly because it took that long to wade through a small lake of wounded Francophones who thought they had a right to their absent carrots. Fuck.

And - okay. I don't feel so great writing this next sentence, but here it goes. They had a blind woman on the cash till. I mean, an absolutely blind woman. Of course she was managing, because Euro-money is blind-friendly with its sizing and edges and everything, but she was managing slowly. At about the quarter of the speed of a sighted Belgian - which, you may have noticed if you've ever got change at a shop here, is about half the speed of a sighted anyone-the-fuck-else. I understand that it was more practical for her to make a contribution through money-processing than food-sorting, because of the blind-friendliness of Euro money, but she had already made a significant contribution through her organization of the electronic ordering system, so - well, I don't know. All I know is that added an extra four minutes to my time in a sweaty basement of Gallic indignation and it annoyed me.

The rest of the weekend was reasonably hitch-free. Notable was the sewing; sewed the F-word another pair of boxers because he'd liked the last pair so much, and sewed myself a dress. The dress is pretty awesome but not for me. It's shirred all around the bust, which I think is a much better look for someone who doesn't already have a big old heaving bosom; it makes me look like some sort of repellent, sexually professional child-impersonator. But I wanted to practice shirring, because it's so great for kid's clothes, so there you are. Discovered halfway through that shirring in a spiral after the garment is sewed up on the sides is definitely the way to go, much easier and much faster, though it made me a little dizzy. Next time I'll try giving shirring the titty area a miss and doing the waist instead, so as to look like a buxom pirate. Arrrr. The freedom of the unshirred boobies for me.