Can’t Sleep, Mullahs Will Eat Me…

Yeah, Ok…so, I figured world history in action should trump the no politics rule. Besides, I’m not going to talk politics in the traditional sense (D Good, R Bad, etc), but more in a holistic sense.

At any rate, I’ve been really fascinated with Iran, and the current situation. I’ve been getting my coverage from a variety of sources, The BBC in particular, so if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about it, I’ve just given you enough info to Bing it. Or Google it. Or Dogpile it. Or Yahoo it. I never liked Webcrawler.

I’m sort of saddened at my knee jerk cynicism. Basically, I think the clerics got greedy: Wait for a few days, say the election is “too close to call”, then announce Ahmadinejad had won, with 50.5-51% of the vote. I’ve been trying to figure out why in hell they didn’t simply do that. I think they would be having the same issues, because, as an aside, this is what I think the legacy of Florida 2000 will be: If you don’t like the election results, sue. I believe the House will elect a president in my lifetime, and I believe that I’ll see more than a few elections where the popular vote and the electoral college don’t square.

But Iran, in its isolation, neglected to even give the appearance of legitimacy. WTF? In other words, if the Theocracy had, say, international certifications from the EU (like, for real, not the EU minus Spain and Germany) and the US, the demonstrators would look less like revolutionaries and the people refusing to accept the will of a corrupt system and more like spoiled children that take to the street every time they feel, um…”outrage”.

Protip: After the billionth time you do that over a cartoon, you look stupid, not like a defender of the faith.

Ah faith…and now, the point emerges. I’m trying VERY hard to leave religion out of this and find an alternative explanation, because…well, this has gotten too easy. So, for the curious, here’s my Occam’s Razor version: The clerics decided that god had told them Amadinejad won, and figured everyone would fall in line once they announced this. Save everybody some time and hassle. I forget where I read this quote, but I got to paraphrase the idea today: the beauty of metaphysical conversations with the divine is that you’re never wrong.

But I’d like to get out of my rut, and think differently. And here is ACTUALLY the point. How do we do this?

At this point, I’d like to tell everyone two things: The Lucifer Principle should be required reading on your summer reading list. No, they don’t pay me to plug the book.

Theocracy. It should only be in textbooks, video games, and itunes.