It's So Bad in Iran It's Almost St. Paul!

The great thing about television news is that it doesn't need to make sense. 24 hours is a lot of time to fill with news, so no one seems to bother to see if what they're saying makes any sense at all as they desperately try to fill far too much airtime.

For example, they show scenes like this from Iran:



And then they talk about how repressive the Iranian government is that it would call out riot police simply because freedom-loving citizens were protesting the election of an abusive, reactionary government. Certainly this means the Iranian government is corrupt and beyond contempt -- after all, what kind of sick government abuses its own people when all they are asking for are democratic rights to speak out and be heard?

Of course, just under a year ago they were showing scenes like this from St. Paul:



But these were accompanied with stories about dangerous anarchist protestors intent on destruction and those poor police, who despite being heavily armored and carrying nearly a half-dozen weapons each, were afraid for their safety against these unarmed people and reacted like anyone would when faced with the menacing threat of hippies carrying poster board.

Just an interesting little example of how a simple change of location seems to make certain behaviors suddenly perfectly fine (like protesting an abusive government) while others oddly become suddenly deplorable (like beating and mass-arresting innocent protestors).