If you've been following Iranian social media, they don't want hijab reforms, they want this regime gone. And this is their Berlin wall moment.
Sorry, I am teasing but I want to highlight that the problem with pre-selected candidates is a widespread problem undermining democracy in many places. Same applies to Hong Kong were China heavily influenced candidate selection.
Get over yourselves and give us space to talk about other countries too. This conversation is not about you.
In most elections, the candidates were ones the rich elites wanted there. But there have been exceptions.
Utter nonsense. Clinton beat the next candidate by a double digit vote percentage in the primaries. That's a landslide. Sanders won a bunch of party caucuses, and it's caucuses that ignore the will of the people and only consider the preferences of party insiders. The only reason you believe the will of the people was subverted was that you were hoodwinked by a coordinated social media campaign whose purpose was to destabilize the democracy.
This sort of muddled thinking is exactly what the disinformation campaign was aiming for. No such campaign happened in 2008, or you might even be crying about how the nomination was stolen from Clinton, who lost the primary vote by a percentage point margin two orders of magnitude less than Sanders.
The reason why any geopolitical player would not want their opponents to have this is because it makes it very hard to take out decentralised structures, its not easy to do a coup, and even if you manage to do a color revolution, you can at best remove the head of government- Which is the president and his cabinet(who are nothing more than managers) which really doesn't change much given the next team will have to live with the same decentralised structure, and they too will have powers no more than being managers.
Iranians and Chinese are a tough nut to crack for this reason. The head of governments, really aren't all that powerful. Protests don't change much.
Main difference being that one system is run by religious group, and the other by the influence of the super-party-donors (aka capitalists).
Either way reform does not happen. Political prisoners (Assange in the west) still rotting in jail. Change is a word reserved manly for election rally banners, once elected they seem to change as little of the status quo as they can get away with.
The idea that all flawed systems are equally flawed is a really weak argument and one that is used by oppressive forces to further their purposes.
This “all imperfect systems are equally imperfect” is utterly detached from reality.
> This “all imperfect systems are equally imperfect” is utterly detached from reality.
I wanted to say they are similar in resisting reform. Sorry if that was not clear.
"There is a concept of law and punishment" is where the similarity ends. To observe that a system resists reform is the same observation as "there is a system." That is what they do. All the systems that have no resistance to reform aren't systems. They don't exist!
Assange is far from an isolated instance, but it takes only one to prove the case. Assange is perhaps not the best choice, since he illustrates UK's failings more than US's, even if US is the one driving. We might take Manning as a local example, with their heavy use of isolation as torture.
But we have very many more than one, though it is hard to keep more than a few in the public mind.
An edge case in one system having some vague similarities to the base case in another system indicates that they are dramatically different, not similar.
This distinction all seemed pretty academic to me too until I actually went to one of these theocratic countries - one way more liberal than Iran - and asked a local for their thoughts on [local authority figure]. The reaction was absolutely chilling. They didn't go into a rant about all the horrible abuses of power and how evil this leader is, how another country has it better, etc. They instead clammed up, looked around, and ended the conversation immediately.
No, "convicted leaker of state secrets got treated poorly" does not in any way substantiate "we see the same sort of railroading."
Years of torture by solitary confinement demonstrate something else.
Compared to Canada, the US is like India: huge difference between poor and rich, gated communities everywhere...
Just my take.
This isn’t news!
Foreign agent would describe his actions much better.
Ps. In other countries you can go to jail for holding up a blank paper. Where would you want to live?
Im sure there is a part of the population that is vested with the current system but that is generally a smaller part that is working in that system and which is somewhat propped up by manipulted rural masses who may also have had enough of this too.
[removed: a reference to The Troubles] A minority of people can feel very, very strongly about something without the majority of people feeling that way.
> [the] part of the population [that supports the Iranian regime] is generally a smaller part
Happy to believe that, but where’s the data? That some people are clearly very angry at the monstrous and evil regime there doesn’t imply that it’s the majority or even close to.