Iran

Update No. 3.

On the web, I've been following as much as I can via Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post.  On Twitter, @BoraZ has been busy. 

Please leave any other helpful links in the comments.

Update 1: Juan Cole. Mandatory.

Update 2: Tom Watson doesn't share Andrew Sullivan's faith that the Revolution can be Twittered, keeping in mind that Iranian politics can't be sorted out quite so neatly:

...we're all too quick to align the Iranian "reformers" with a westernized liberal ideal of free elections, free speech, and tolerance. Like in the "Twitter revolution" in Moldova, it becomes cartoonishly easy to choose sides based on Tweets. Further, Iran is an old and complex society that simply doesn't fit our Democrat vs. Republican mindset. It's easy to forget, I guess, that Moussavi isn't exactly an American constitutional scholar like Barack Obama. This is a man who shut down the university system in Iran on the orders of Khomeini, and a former prime minister who managed his country's disastrous war with Iraq and has refused to answer questions about his role in the 1988 massacres of political prisoners.

Update 3:  Nate Silver at Five Thirty-eight does what Nate Silver does.  He looks at the numbers, and the numbers tell him that it's possible that Ahmadinjad won.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

You know about the hashtag #iranelection at Twitter, right?

[Ken Houghton]

I'm still trying to figure out how everyone is claiming that the Revolution is Being Twittered when the first thing the government did before announcing the, er, results was shut down Twitter, FB, etc. from the end of the voting until the announcement.

But I'm just too dumb to understand how modern technology saved the world in that situation.

[Tom W.]

Moussavi also had a hand in approving the fatwa against Salman Rushdie - and was neck-deep in Iran-Contra, of course - but what the heck, Tweet on! Wear something green! I'm making freedom with my iPhone, dude!

[Apostate]

Obama isn't perfect either but I should hope we would've exploded in rage if McCain had stolen the election.

Who cares what Moussavi's many faults are? Ahmedinejad isn't a saint and the people's votes should count, even if they, like us, only have a couple of scoundrels of varying degrees to choose from.