The Gazprom Song:
The Gazprom Song:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Barack Obama is behaving just like George W. Bush. Reuters, June 25: Obama said on Tuesday he was "appalled and outraged" by a post-election crackdown...
I don't usually post on domestic policy issues. I'm even less likely to waste bandwidth explicitly seconding sentiments found on a big-time website. But, I'm afraid, that's what I'm going to do...
So starting this week I'm going on a six-week blogging hiatus to make an epic road trip west with my kids, visiting friends and family. Prepping for this trip while getting my book to the publisher...
Now this is pretty damn interesting:Researchers were scratching their heads earlier today at a meeting convened by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) over puzzling results from last month's nuclear test by North Korea. While the test produced a clearly recognizable seismic signal that was picked up by CTBTO's worldwide network of sensors, the organization's atmospheric detectors failed to pick up a whiff of the expected radionuclides in air. Even a deep underground test is usually expected to leak radionuclides, so their absence in this case caused quite a stir....
As the incredible events in Iran unfold--in the streets of Tehran and on Twitter--the obvious question is: is this the 'Green Revolution' or something else for which we don't have a pre-fab category.I would call your attention to two outstanding posts that give a very good insight into what to watch for. The unifying theme was perhaps best articulated by an anonymous Iranian commentator at Salon: "Legitimacy, much debated by social scientists, actually turns out to matter. It's not just force that rules..." (h/t). In short, this is a moment of contentious politics* where the legitimacy of...
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 protest, that prevents a calming down of anger is the very clamping down on all press that the conservatives immediately mobilised and which they thought would be effective in suppressing protests.Rumour has been intensely spreading about everything that it actually results in people in provinces feel they need to do "something". So...
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 all clear that simply recounting certain ballots is going to truly reconcile the apparent disparity between the expected results and the actual results. I would posit that right now you have the leadership in Iran scrambling to send signals both domestically and internationally that it will take the accusations seriously and act as an impartial arbiter, so as to avoid a number of unwanted outcomes...
... 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 computed by some impartial international authority, and actually have their opinions count for something?
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 associates a rhetorical loaded gun to use against the opposition.I don't know what's most annoying about this kind of accusation.1. Is it the narrow parochialism of people who just don't understand that some foreign populations react poorly to the United States--or, more generally, "the West"--picking sides in their domestic political disputes? I mean, this is Iran we're talking about: a country...
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....
Today's rally in Tehran was, by all accounts, truly massive. Now the BBC reports the security forces pro-Ahmadinejad militia members opened fire on at least some of its participants. I may have been premature in my assessment of the regime's ability to disrupt collective mobilization against it by targeting vectors of communication among members of the active opposition. With a united opposition still capable of turning out large numbers of people, it seems increasingly clear that the direction this all takes depends, in no small measure, on:1. Ahmadinejad's and his faction's ability to...