Some comments from a friend of Iranian extraction, who kindly agreed to allow me to repost them here.As someone who has family members primarily outside Tehran and who has been following the revolt via them, I can say that what drives everything, that intensifies...
The news yesterday that the Iranian Guardian Council has ordered what amounts to an inquiry into certain disputed ballots may at first glance appear as a positive development. However, it is not at...
... a mechanism existed by which citizens of countries around the world could weigh in on the elections of a particular country, proportional to that country's impact on their country's politics, as...
I apparently missed the memo, because I only just discovered that the right-wing chattering class is accusing the Obama Administration of "moral cowardice" because it won't hand Ahmadinejad and his...
From a recent article on social-science methodology:For example, gravity is a trivial necessary cause of revolution, because gravity is simply always present regardless of whether or not a revolution happens.Clearly, not everyone in my field is a science-fiction fan.nb: someone has suggested to me that the authors mean "revolution" as in "Venus revolves around the Sun." But gravity is certainly not a non-trivial cause of such revolution; given the context of the article, I'm pretty sure the authors use the term in the "grab the pitchfork and storm the castle" sense....