christopher cocca

is it just my blog or is the whole system off today?  My layout is totally messed up.

Some new material I’m kicking around that will be up here next week:

-The End of Values Voting: please, let freedom and liberty be the values that inform your voting.  Yes, questions like “freedom for who? liberty from what? ” mean that we’ll need to employ other values to get to political decisions, but can we stop voting for people because they seem like they share our social values in broader strokes?  I also happen to think that Mark Sanford’s press conference was one of the more apolitical political affairs I’ve ever seen.  

-Churches in the Green, pt. 3: this will be about art as spiritual fellowship/mystic experience/grounding for common life

-Quaker meeting:  I think I’m going to a Quaker meeting this week.  If I do, I’ll probably write about it here.  That’s not the point of going, though.  

Also, I’ll have an interview with our friend Nathan Key here soon.  We’re interviewing each other for our respective blogs, something I’m really looking forward to.

Editors on Wikipedia have broken down the Chatham House findings nicely:

According to a scientific analysis by Professor Walter R. Mebane, Jr., from Department of Statistics of University of Michigan, considering data from the first stage of the 2005 presidential election produces results that “give moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud”.^[19] This notion is also supported by the NGO UK-based thinktank Chatham House for a number of reasons:^[20]

• More than 100% : In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.
• No swing : At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased turnout, and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that his victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent Conservative majority.
• Reformist votes: In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, and all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also took up to 44% of former Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.
• Rural votes: In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces in 2009 flies in the face of these trends.

You may have seen my open note to Barack Obama a few posts ago.  This question of Iranian sovereignty has deep implications for free people and for people who understand why freedom is worth wanting.  

I suggested that Obama’s wording around “respecting Iranian sovereignty” does more harm than good in the present crisis in this sense:  by grounding a refusal to become involved in the struggle on respect for “Iranian sovereignty”, he’s sending the message that the current regime’s understanding of sovereignty is intelligible and morally equivalent to the sovereignty of free nations. Clearly, it is not.  Yes, Iran is sovereign in the real politik sense and in the classic sense:  the regime is a free actor and is not a client nation in suzerain relationship with a greater hegemony. But is this really what we mean by sovereignty?  Is this what a century of sham governments, right and left wing juntas, appeasements, world wars, atomic bombs, cold wars, containment, police actions, terrorist wars, regime changes and blatantly stolen elections has done to the word?

The best of Western political philosophy (and yes, I will show preference here because I think classic liberalism rightly understood  is the most viable course for peaceful living in a pluralistic, global community) has always maintained that sovereignty comes from the ground up.  People, are sovereign, not regimes.  Not even perfectly democratic regimes.  Who, by God, is sovereign in Iran?  What claim to sovereignty does any government have if that government isn’t constantly checked by the consent of the governed?

Who is sovereign in Iran?  Who is Iran?  The answer in both cases is the same. The people, not the regime. But when world leaders speak of respecting “Iran’s sovereignty”, what they really mean is respecting the right of the current system to rule, a right not checked by fair and free elections or free expression, the right to assemble, or a free press.  That is, quite frankly, outrageous.  

Imperfect as the American system is and other Western systems are, Barack Obama was elected precisely because we have these checks.  You hated Bill Clinton?  Fine. You got George W. Bush.  You hated George W. Bush?  Fine, you got Barack Obama.  You hate them all?  Scream it from the rooftop.  Convince your friends and neighbors.  You hate the mullahs and Ahmadinejad?  Tough fucking shit.

Respecting Iranian sovereignty is about respecting Iran’s people (including the people the regime is oppressing), not the right of the regime to rule without popular consent.  

I’m not suggesting that any government or corporation or coalition of nations should take the electoral crisis in Iran as an opportunity to impose their own version of democracy on the ground.  That would be an unmitigated disaster and an illegitimate use of power by the international community.  Still, there are ways to show support, to instill hope, to inspire change and to strengthen the weary, and the best of these will come from people, not from governments.  If you don’t believe me, sign up for Twitter.  But the formal non-involvement of Western nations ought not be predicated on respect for the current regime’s sham government, but rather on a keen awareness of the way state-sponsored foreign involvement has hurt Iran at every turn for over a century.  

There are ways to support the democrats in Iran. So far, millions of ordinary people on social networking platforms around the world have been better at finding them than have our governments.   That’s why we, and not the regimes that govern with our anxious permission, are sovereign. We are the people.  We are the state.  We are the media.  We are the open-source, real-time locus of all political power.  Tyrants, tread lightly.  

Chad asked last week if I could elaborate on the relationship between sustainability and a holistic view of the arts in the most recent “Churches in the Green” post.  I think I can. 

Check out these posts, Sustainable Arts and Pedagogies, and Sliding Scales and Sustainability, while I think about exactly how I mean this.  The “healthy efficiencies” idea is central to it. 

Dear Mr. President,

I was not one of those calling for you to say more, necessarily. Now that you have said more, I’m afraid some of what you’ve said is unintelligible, this part about bearing witness to the abuses in Iran  while also being careful to “respect Iran’s sovereignty.”

Mr. President, the only true  sovereignty is popular sovereignty, an impossibility under the current Iranian regime. I am not calling for American nation-building or Iraq-style regime change or any other overt involvement by any branch of the US government or by any American corporation. I am, however, asking that you, as de facto leader of the free world,  please refrain from bastardizing a fundamental concept of our own polity and of that broader human freedom  Please be clear:  the Supreme Leader is sovereign.  Iran is not.  The People are not.  Referring to “Iran’s sovereignty” only makes it harder in the street.  This phrase, “Iran’s sovereignty”, is meaningless unless your criticizers on the Right are correct about your supposed Statist sympathies.  

You’re a smart man. Do better than this.  I know this can’t be easy.  But I suspect you can do better.

We’ve talked before about played-out adverbs and what Orwell called “dying cliches.” Below are some verbs and adjectives I’d like to see less of:

to mutter
to proffer
to offer (mostly when used as a synonym for “to say”)
to savor
savory
modest

here’s a noun for good measure:
morsel

What are some of yours?

“Iran’s election authority has rejected claims of voting irregularities by a defeated presidential candidate, while acknowledging that the number of ballots cast in dozens [of] cities exceeded the number of eligible voters in those areas, state-run TV reported Monday.”  -CNN.com

“In the conservative provinces of Mazandaran and Yazd, the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters, the survey by researchers from the University of St Andrews and Chatham House, the London think-tank, found.

 

• Four more provinces recorded turnouts close to 100 per cent.

• To achieve the official results in 10 of the 30 provinces, the ultra-conservative President must have carried all the new voters who did not cast ballots in 2005, all the votes that went to his centrist rival Ali Akbar Hasemi Rafsanjani and up to 44 per cent of the votes that went to reformist candidates.

• Those provinces include ones dominated by ethnic minorities who seldom if ever vote conservative. “The numbers from Ilam, Lorestan and Hormozgan almost defy belief,” said Thomas Rintoul, one of the researchers.

• Lorestan is home to Medhi Karoubi, the most liberal of the four candidates, who won 440,247 votes (55 per cent) there in 2005. Official figures suggest he won only 44,036 (4.6 per cent) this time.

• “The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result,” said Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian Studies at St Andrews.

• The figures also challenge the notion that Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent conservative majority and that he was particularly popular in rural areas.”

-Martin Fletcher, TimesOnline

 

 

One of my favorite nerdy in-0n-the-joke cliched references as a politics major on Election Days used to be “vote early and often!”.  I meant it as a subversion of machine politics (it was Papa Daly’s marching order when he ran Chicago), but apparently the government in Iran doesn’t see the problem with admitting more people voted than were supposed to and then still claiming no fraud in the “divine outcome” of the election.  

I said in the last post that a recount would be meaningless.  The cat is out of the bag.  No results will be believed.  

If there is a recount, the result will be the same.  Does anyone expect the international community to continue dealing with the current regime as if none of this happened?  Even if they come out and say the opposition lost by smaller margins than the clearly fraudulent 11 million they’re claiming, this government is still killing civilians.  This week still happened.  Even the clerics are divided.  There’s no going back.

Government has been murdering its own citizens for as long as we’ve had government, particularly when the people begin to pose a threat to those in power. The difference is that now, the entire world is watching. Iran’s brutality is on display for everyone to see, archived for history, in a way that we didn’t have even in Tiananmen, and haven’t had for most of human history. That, at least, is progress.”    - Radley Balko via Andrew Sullivan

This is more than progress.  This is the means of intellectual production in the hands of people.  This is open-source narrative and meaning-making and real-time historiography.  This is  people power in way we haven’t seen and couldn’t have imagined.  The best thing the regime did for the protestors was force them to become an army of citizen journalists, a vocal digital underground broadcasting on the most popular social networks and websites in the world.  This isn’t Radio Free Europe.  This isn’t Voice of America Radio.  This is raw decoupage from people on the ground. 

I understand that much of this can’t be confirmed by the main stream media.  Neither can much of anything else.  That the Islamic regime is losing by winning is one of the richest ironies of what’s going on.  A less-than-compelling irony is network and cable news reporting on their own meta-irrelevance as primary source.  They’re doing a great job of aggregating and presenting the flood of information coming in from Iran to the world, and I applaud them for it.   “We’re not able to bring you news” is the larger story they’re writing, because it’s the only one they have immediate access to.  Observing the phenomenon.  

I think we’re beyond that.  The American Revolution started as a tax protest that grew into an articulation about something much, much bigger.  Britain radicalized the colonists with oppressive taxes and then radicalized them to action legitimized by appeals to basic freedoms with things like the Boston Massacre.  Do tyrants never learn?  

The Green Revolution began as an election protest.  It’s now an articulation of something much, much bigger.  A tipping point, a sea change.  Mousavi isn’t even the symbol of this anymore.  An innocent girl shot through the heart on the street is.  

A recount at this point is unintelligible.