Open Thread #105

” In short, Korea (Asia) doesn’t interfere in the market as much as we do”

Domestic market, that is. Trade is another story.

Ha! That’s rich. The most miserably unhappy teacher ever to occupy a Korean classroom tells me to let it go, as he types on the MH from Vancouver! You’re the best, Mao.

Just wait, when I’m mayor of Medicine Hat, the first statutes I’ll enact will be allowing corner stores to put tables out front, and eliminating the requirement for small businesses to provide a certain no. of parking spaces. Then we’ll take Berlin.

3000 people in downtown Tehran? That’s nothing. Ahmadinejad wins; game over.

I was at a party tonight, and the offline me was well outed as the online me. So, to clear up the confusion about this drawn-out withdrawal from Korea: I have turned in my biz license to the tax office, and can no longer write invoices or do business in Korea; my company is done. I remain here for another 2 or 3 weeks for some paperwork (taxes, mostly) to be completed. Mrs Linkd and Baby Linkd left Korea 4 weeks ago, and are now in Canada. I’m crashing with a friend in HBC in the meantime, skyping every morning to follow my little girl’s progress. Sweet as that sounds, 1 hour ago I was refereeing a game of Twister. I know there’s more than one girl out there who’s going to be clicking around to remove facebook tags tomorrow.

And yes, when my offline self leaves the peninsula, that will be it for “Linkd”. I have no date for that yet, but I expect it will be in the first week of July. For you young fucks who can only grasp “Dude, when I wanna go, I just GO.” Yes, I grasp that, too, cuz that’s what I was all about 10~15 years ago, too. Enjoy it while you can. Youth is…..beautiful.

Wonderful. Now forever after anyone who Googles me will get directed here. If any admin has a shred of mercy, please delete or at least change a few letters around in my name in #52, and accept my thanks.

You do owe me a twist of the knife, don’t you? Caught between a lawyer and a lunatic. Watch me squirm, but I won’t beg.

To answer snow’s question, I was pretty sure I had read of some poll results showing that the Iranian public had become significantly more pro-American (OK, less anti-American) since Obama took power. Throwing in some key words to find a link to prove it, I found this:

our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election…While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.

Now, the results may be bunk, because I don’t know what goes on in the head of an Iranian when someone calls up and says “How are you going to vote?” So I don’t really have an opinion on how good or bad those poll results are. But I have to recognize at least the possibility that Ahmadinejad did actually win the popular vote, and that we now have a minority urban elite going postal against the political ideologies of a more rural-based majority. After all, this is what happened in Thailand with Shinawat.

We’re never going to know for sure, of course. But the existence of that possibility means that any statement from the US that sounds like supporting regime change might mean that the US is supporting the overthrow of a properly democratically-elected president (admittedly, this would also mean the overthrow of the regime, the power structure of which isn’t wholly democratic, but that’s a bit more complicated). And, while most Americans have forgotten, the Iranians haven’t forgotten that the US played an active role in overthrowing one of its previous governments and installing the Shah – a regime so faulty in its construction that it led to the Islamic revolution.

So the US has to be very careful in what it says now. Its most recent activities at regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq have hardly been stellar successes, and going back a little further through various Latin American dictatorships, better examples are equally sparse. All it can do now is condemn the violence and speak in favor of the principle of democracy and individual rights. Speaking out directly in favor of Mousavi’s faction would enable the incumbent regime to declare that it is fighting a foreign-backed insurgency, something that any nation may legitimately take up arms against.

If American wants some sway in the Middle East, it knows what to do: close Guantanamo, stabilize and then withdraw from Iraq, kick the Taliban’s ass without killing civilians, provide heaps of aid that tangibly benefit common folk who have suffered from conflicts the US was involved in, and….the hardest…keep Israel in check when it feels like going on a turkey shoot or a building spree in the territories.

Just saying that in order for a democracy to impose its will on another country, it needs to establish its legitimacy, both at home and in the target nation. Bush/Rove et al effectively drummed up domestic legitimacy with a neocon PR campaign that convinced a critical mass of Americans that America’s political system was so supreme that it was right to impose it on other nations for their own good. This view has lost sufficient support at home, and therefore its legitimacy. This view never had any support abroad, and so was never seen as legitimate at all.

However, there remain many founding American principles which everyone at home and many people abroad do see as self-evident goods, and which therefore give America a lot of moral legitimacy when it comes to promoting those principles. Philosophically, those values remain good even when what the US actually does is bad. But in practice, when the US does bad enough times to enough people, while still using the PR talk of claiming moral legitimacy, then its message weakens.

So, now, at this point, the US is right to stick to vocal statements of support for its founding principles, and staying the hell away from any words or actions that can be taken as imposing its will on people of other nations. This has a record of proven failure, and I’m hard-pressed to think of examples of its success, although any such judgments are I suppose subject to how long of a timeline you use to make that judgment.