Additional nightmare fuel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTR-ER1ibXw

Everyone should have to watch the Neda video. Watch her father pressing his hands over the wound while she bleeds from the nose and mouth and her eyes stare off into space as she dies.

As long as this shit happens in the world, we need to see it. Everyone needs to SEE it. You hear about it, and you think it's terrible. But you don't get that felling in your chest unless you SEE it.

I'm pretty sure most people in this country are rooting for the protesters over the regime in Iran. Other than the people who don't know who to root for when it's a Muslim vs. Muslim fight.

Do you even know who the protesters are supporting?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir-Hossein_Mousavi

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1245184852609&pagen ame=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Mousavi is a fundamentalist fanatic, even more so than Ahmadinejad. He was a foreign minister under Khomeini, for God's sake!

It doesn't matter if they're backing cyborg Hitler. If they are successful, this will probably be a good thing for Iran in two ways: a) it will severely weaken the clergy's grasp on Iranian government, and b) it will be a testament to the Iranian people's insistence on authentic democratic elections.

Also important is the fact that the U.S. doesn't have its enormous imperialist dick in things this time (or at least to a lesser degree.) And FUCK jpost. An Israeli newspaper calling someone else's government fundamentalist or fanatical is patently ridiculous. Israel only starts to get worried when Islamic countries begin to become more progressive and moderate. Cf. Lebanon.

That wikipedia article is not very damning.

phalsebob: really? Mousavi was behind the Freedom Movement of Iran (a theocratic, anti-Shah organization) and one of the founders of the Islamic Republican Party (characterized by "its strong clerical component, its loyalty to Khomeini, its strong animosity to the liberal political movements, and its tendency to support the revolutionary organizations". This guy is a hard-line fanatic.

wtf japan: Mousavi was the favorite of the clergy before the election.

Manfred, it says in the wikipedia article you cited that Mousavi has denied allegations that he was handpicked by the clergy. It also practically amounts to a grocery list of his progressive, moderate stances on a variety of issues including freedom of speech and press. What you have to understand is that in Islamic countries, especially Iran, in order to gain any kind of political foothold, you have to take a stance that seems fundamentalist or fanatical in the eyes of the West. Those are the rules of the game. You have to obey the rules at first if you want to change them later on.

Even if it wasn't contentious that Mousavi was favored by the clergy, doesn't common sense dictate that the Supreme fucking Leader of Iran would insure that his pick won the election? I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and Mousavi was not elected.

I'm pulling for Iran to solve their own problems without anyone external having to get involved. I don't care which side "wins" as long as they don't start dragging Israel or the US into it.

I'm not apathetic, I just choose to actually, you know, try to be moderately educated on a subject that I admittedly knew very little about, unlike 99,9% of most Americans who see the protests and are retarded enough to think that it's like the 4th of July, the Boston Tea Party and the signing of the Constitution all rolled into one, which it isn't. Not even remotely. In fact, the American reaction, by and large, to what's going on in Iran is the ultimate litmus test for how stupid Americans really are at the core. So many are just blindly supporting the protesters YAY FREEDOM WILL RING FROM THE HIGHEST TOWER without really understanding what's going on there or what the underlying issues are. In fact, in my conversations with people on this subject, almost none of them actually even understand the Iranian government or the fact that the Supreme Leader and the President are two wholly different people. So, that's great that people think that wearing green armbands and changing their Twitter icon is some kind of advanced social movement, but the reality is that what's going on in Iran is complex and if you really think that if Mousavi is president this will bring happiness and pink unicorns into the land of Iran, you would be very wrong. I admire the protesters and I am happy to see so many young people so passionate about wanting to change their country or, at least, see democracy improve there. But, there is the issue that democracy doesn't really exist there when, ultimately, a stone age religion dominates the country and its laws. If these people REALLY want to change their country, these protests and this defiance must last well beyond just deciding the election and must continue into the future where the root of all these problems is radically changed.

I'm not apathetic! To prove it, here are FOUR THOUSAND WORDS on the subject, "Things I Think I Know About Iran." Will four thousand words be enough to prove to you that I'm intelligent and informed enough to care?!?

Arabic and Persian women are smokin'. Too bad cable news in this network only show footage of women in hijabs or burkhas when they cover an Islamic country. That is not the norm, for the most part. The norm is hot.

So you're saying that the US rigged the election for Ahmadinejad in a ham-fisted way so that when the results come out it becomes obvious that it was rigged and the population thinks that it was Ahmadinejad who did it, thereby causing massive protests which are sure to be put down violently, which then cause an escalation of the protests into a full-scale revolution which then destabilizes the country.

Damn, only James Bond could solve that one.

obvious guy: too successful to be a cia op

9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB MAN! WAKE UP YOU SHEEP!

Witty Pop Culture Reference attempts to take the side of the Iranian protesters by being against the CIA, assuming CIA was involved significantly here, however, this position actually insults and discredits the protesters by assuming they legitimately don't care or wouldn't care if their electoral voice was disregarded. What a joke, you sound like a member of the ruling class in Iran trying to convince it's populace the problem is the fault of the West and not an internal one.

I mean, I know sarcasm doesn't bleed well into type at all, but my post should have been pretty obvious. What I wrote is exactly what the anti-protest crowd is trying to forment, the same thing that happened in Liberia when guy was booted and he ran claiming it was all the US, I just happened to be remarking that it is sad that the US has actually done this kind of thing in the past, albeit in a much different time period with far less unrestricted flow of information (see Latin America).

There are folk in postions of power who are genuinely trying to get these ideas believed in order to discredit the protests. I thought this was common knowledge by now, or perhaps the fact that I can be both bitter and jaded towards both sides of the east-west 'who can be the biggest scumocracy' competition in equal reprehension makes it slightly obfuscated.

Long story short? Obviously it's bullshit; what's both terrifying and sad is that it isn't obvious because the US has actually done similiar things in the past. If there was absolutely no past history of doing anything like that, it would be blatant how ridiculous the claims are. It should scare us all that it wasn't.

No... fruit... companies... in... forget it.

Also, Simon666, I have no idea what you are saying. It's like you only read every other word of my first comment, then ran with whatever your imagination used to fill in the gaps.

GOOGLE RON PAUL!