> Dennis Claxton wrote:
> > It's curious to me that you have such a dim view of voting in your
> > own country but in the case of Iran you find it so meaningful.
Well, yeah. Context is pretty important, don't you think? And if (like me) you're an anti-universalizer, you're likely to feel that elections, like anything else, can mean different things at different times and places.
Incidentally, what I have a dim view of is not voting *per se*, but voting for Democrats in the USA. In fact, I think third party voting (even in the USA) can be quite wonderful, especially when there's some "spoiler" potential.
But here again, what I think doesn't much matter. What matters is what folks in Iran think.
Apparently 85% or so of the Iranian electorate turned out -- when was the last time we saw anything like that in the US? It would appear that all those people thought something important was at stake. And Ahmadi won a victory that was very lopsided indeed by American standards (unless of course you believe the we-wuz-robbed story; do you?).
If we want to arrive at some sense of what the various elements of the Iranian public want, don't we have to pay attention to these data points?
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org