Thoughts on violence in Iran

It appears they are having their Tiananmen Square moment. The police and paramilitaries are attacking civilians, hard. As with previous days, Andrew Sullivan is providing up-to-the-minute Twitter summaries. As he says, take it with a grain of salt. But it looks like there's a bloodbath going on. People getting shot in the streets, people opening their homes to wounded protesters getting shot in their living rooms, hospitals full of police looking to arrest or worse.

As a Canadian I'm conflicted on this, but have to admit that it would be a lot harder to do that kind of thing in the USA thanks to the Second Amendment. People protesting in the street would still not be permitted to carry them, but you could keep the paramilitary thugs out of your house a lot longer with an M-60 than with a stern warning.

Also, people are apparently being tortured to obtain information about how they're organizing. This is the problem with Guantanamo Bay - the USA has very little moral high ground to protest this activity. This is a government that has identified what it believes to be a challenge to its survival by a group of ought-to-be-unorganized people who are somehow able to act in concert, and is attempting to obtain information from them by any means. The only real difference is that we over here sympathize with the people being tortured in this case. This is a real difference - the Iranian protestors deserve support and sympathy and anyone who tries to find equivalency between them and battlefield combatants needs their head examined (although it certainly appears that Guantanamo contains more than battlefield combatants, also). But our moral authority is diminished here. A shame.