The Noble Lie

I have been purposely said very little about the ongoing situation in Iran. To me, it still looks like election theft, but I feel the reservation is warranted because of the not-so-pretty history of American intervention in Iranian democracy. I’ve read some strongly-worded attacks of the western media spin on events, but the response that I find most interesting comes from Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East media correspondent and ballsy combat-zone journalist who has covered the crises of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, making a great effort to remind us Occidentals that Arabs are human beings too.

I put some weight into what Robert Fisk has to say about the Iran crisis. Excerpt below.

In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows:

We have, in fact, reported all the censorship – of local newspapers as well as communications. The footage of a brutal police force assaulting the political opposition on the streets of the capital has shocked the world. Rightly so, although no one has made comparison with police forces who batter demonstrators on the streets of Western Europe, who beat women with night-sticks, who have kicked over an innocent middle-aged man who immediately suffered a fatal heart attack, who have shot down an innocent passenger on the London Tube… There are special codes of morality to be applied to Middle East countries which definitely must not apply to us.

So let’s take a look at those Iranian elections. A fraud, we believe. And I have the darkest doubts about those election figures which gave Mousavi a paltry 33.75 per cent of the vote. Indeed, I and a few Iranian friends calculated that if the government’s polling-night statistics were correct, the Iranian election committee would have had to have counted five million votes in just two hours. But our coverage of this poll has been deeply flawed. Most visiting Western journalists stay in hotels in the wealthy, north Tehran suburbs, where tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters live, where it’s easy to find educated translators who love Mousavi, where interviewees speak fluent English and readily denounce the spiritual and cultural and social stagnation of Iran’s – let us speak frankly – semi-dictatorship.

But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi’s support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.

This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded. For with their usual, clumsy, autocratic behaviour, the clerics behind the Islamic Republic may have decreed that only a greater majority for the winner could decisively annihilate the reputation of its secular opponents. Perhaps Ahmadinejad got 51 per cent or 52 per cent and this was preposterously increased to 63 per cent. Perhaps Mousavi picked up 44 per cent or 45 per cent. I don’t know. The Iranians will never know, even though the Supreme Leader told us yesterday that the incredible 63 per cent was credible. That is Iran’s tragedy.

I have also said little about the coup in Honduras, but Democracy Now reports the coup’s generals were trained at the infamous School of the Americas.

Douglas Hofstadter, author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid“, the first book to truly rock my world and massively expand the boundaries of my mind, also spoke at Singularity Summit with Ray Kurzweil. He offers a skeptical response to Kurzweil, and makes many interesting points in the process.

I think the potential is very real, and one thing that isn’t mentioned in these talks is the fact that the highest of high technology, the stuff that NSA and so on uses, is obviously kept secret from the public.

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, along with the mourning, I was bewildered when I reflected on how much life has changed in her lifetime. She lived on a farm when she was a child. There had been no world wars. There was no electricity, telephone, radio, television, or any of the devices that define modern existence and modern culture. It amazes me how much elderly people like her have seen in their lifetime, and how rapidly they adapted to a transformed world.

The amount of change my grandmother saw in her lifetime is nothing compared to the changes I have begun to see, and the changes that will take place over the next decade or two (or by 2012, depending on whom you ask). Ray Kurzweil, programmer of human-computer interactions and futurist, explains why in this talk. Molecular computing is just one example. The ramifications of what he talks about will transform society drastically, probably starting with the elimination of your job by a robot or computer program.

Watch the video, then think about how this technology can be used to control us. They claim it will set us free from the drudgery of labor, but that claim has been made about every piece of labor-saving technology that has ever been created, and look at us today.

Kurzweil has also written a few books if people want to learn more. The Age of Spiritual Machines I have read, The Singularity is Near I have not. As hinted in his Wikipedia profile, there is a form of religion at work here. In a backwards-telling of the Bible reminiscent of the Rosicrucians, he muses that mankind one day will turn the universe into a singular massive sentient intelligence, a Godhead.

This documentary by Robert Kane Pappas is an excellent look into the media oligarchy, information, and perception control. It focuses on the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election but is wide in its historical view.

Not to be outdone by the United States Pentagon, who recently brought their new Cyber Command online, the nation of China has been on an Internet offensive lately, taking measures to increase their online control over their citizenry. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and Paul) have been writing about, China has mandated all computers to come installed with government censorware titled Green Dam Youth Escort, which has security backdoors big enough to march the Chinese National Revolutionary Army through.

In a brand new salvo, it appears that China may have banned their citizens from Google, over concern about the amount of pornography. Google in the past has taken a lot of flack for supporting the Chinese government’s censorship demands, but it appears they haven’t done enough to win the nation’s favor.

Microsoft is eager to fill the gap. Their new search property Bing plays very nice with China’s censorship rules (see here, and here).

China is not only cracking down online. Very recently, Liu Xiaobo, leading Tiananmen Square protestor, was arrested for spreading subversive, anti-government rumors and information.

UPDATE: China’s ministry of health is announcing they are explicitly blocking sites related to sexual health. Censorware is notoriously bad for blocking health information regarding parts of the body we’re prudish about (like breast cancer), but that’s usually inadvertent due to bad filtering techniques.

“It is prohibited to spread pornographic content in the name of sex-related scientific research,” the ironically named Ministry said. “The health sections of web portals are not allowed to conduct sex-related research services.”

The word they’re looking for isn’t “ironic,” it’s “Orwellian.”

The timestamps on my blog are a constant nusiance for me. I think I’ve tried to fix it a dozen times, but I might just be falling off my rocker over here.

I think they are fixed now.

I liken an abusive government or institution to an abusive relationship. When an abuser commits abuse and gets away with it, subsequent episodes of abuse become easier for the abuser. The abuse also becomes more frequent and extreme over time. As the abuse becomes more frequent and extreme, the abuse dynamic comes to define the relationship more and more.

Excuses, justifications, and rationalizations are the currency of abusers. When excuses don’t work, outright lies are employed. Abuse is committed out of love for the abused.  The abuser keeps the abused safe from the dangerous world outside. The abuser has their own view of the world which the abused must adopt in order to placate the abuser. In an abusive relationship, the abused must consider the response of the abuser in every word they say and every action they take.

There’s an old saying that reads, “where the King goes, so go the people.” Abusers are often the victims of abuse themselves earlier in life. Abusive cultures create abusive people.

Reconciliation, if possible at all, is only possible when the abuser acknowledges their actions as abuse, vows never to repeat them, and atones properly for them.

Thank you, Keith Olbermann. Finally a mainstream media personality mentions the Manning Memo. The Downing Street Memo was disgusting, but does not betray the damning criminality revealed in the Manning Memo. I learned of this smoking gun reading Vincent Bugliosi, as the media hardly mentioned it at all.

At the moment, I have only one thing to say about the situation in Iran. What is happening now in the streets of Iran should have happened in the United States in 2000*. The people of Iran are showing more dedication to the democratic process than Americans did, and as an American, I say we have to do much better next time the establishment so flagrantly insults our intelligence.

I like to joke that we’re more advanced here in the United States because we have machines to do our vote-rigging for us. Instead of being rubber-stamped by a Supreme Leader, ours was rubber stamped by a Supreme Court.

* – Thanks Heraldo.