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Enemies of Enlightenment

Brian Leiter on Representative Cynthia Davis, a Republican from Missouri:

"Hunger can be a positive motivator." Not feeding children can help solving the "rapidly growing health problem[]...of childhood obesity." Just because parents lose their jobs "doesn't mean they stop feeding their children...Laid off parents could adapt by preparing more home cooked meals rather than going out to eat."

How did people in this part of Missouri elect this individual to office? Are they as ignorant and devoid of rudimentary ratiocination skills as their representative? Can one defend a political system that produces elected officials this shallow and depraved?

The American pseudo-democracy lumbers on. Civilized people breathed a sigh of relief with the departure of Bush and his bestiary of madmen from the world stage, but President Obama has shown himself to be no progressive, and not much of a leader. And in the bowels of America's increasingly dysfunctional political system are hundreds and thousands of Representative Davises, enemies of Enlightenment, apologists for hunger and misery. We do have a lot to celebrate today in America!

We'll return with our irregular, unscheduled programming on Monday.

Iran at a crossroads

Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

In one direction is a slide toward greater xenophobia and ultra-nationalism, in part because the radical forces stirred up among Ahmadinejad's electoral base will be hard to put back in the box. The broad consensus behind Iran's system of rule-by-clergy has been shattered, and the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime has lost its legitimacy. To shore up support, it's blaming various greater and lesser satans in the United States, Europe and Israel for Iran's troubles, making it exceedingly difficult for the country to re-establish ties to the West. At best, Iran will remain embroiled in the stalemate it has faced since 2005, with the economy continuing to unravel. At worst, it could fall into North Korea-like isolation, with fundamentalists and the security establishment preaching that subsistence-level economic privation must be endured for the sake of Islamic purity.

At the very least, the clergy-run, quasi-democratic Iranian state has been replaced by something that looks a lot more like a military dictatorship. Since his election in 2005, Ahmadinejad has installed scores of ex-commanders from the IRGC throughout government ministries and as governors and local officials in all thirty provinces. Ahmadinejad's cronies have created a powerful clique loyal to Khamenei but, at the same time, encircling the office of the Leader. The conventional wisdom--that the Leader is the all-powerful commander in chief, while the president is an elected figurehead with little real power--may be tilting, if it has not already been turned on its head.

In the other direction, a victory by the opposition--as unlikely as it appears in the wake of the regime's crackdown--might let in a lot of fresh air. It could smooth the path for an accord with the West, pave the way toward greater cultural and civil liberties, and reverse the downward economic spiral. Under this scenario, Iran could still cling to much of its current form of government, though it would be less rigid. But what scares many conservatives, and no doubt much of the establishment, is that this time it might not be so easy to stuff the genie of reform back into its bottle. A large number of those supporting Moussavi--it's impossible to know how many--want far more than reform. They want an end to the very idea of an Islamic Republic. Their hero is Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized Iran's oil in 1951, challenged the shah and was toppled in a coup by MI-6 and the CIA in 1953. Reform in Iran is a slippery slope, and once reforms get started the very fabric of the Islamic Republic could unravel.

It's that scenario that Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their IRGC and Basij allies are determined to resist at all costs. And they're prepared to unleash Tiananmen Square levels of violence to make sure it doesn't happen.

The rest here.

Oddly-shaped fruits and vegetables to be allowed in Europe

From FP's Passport (via The Morning News):

The European Union has lifted its ban on oddly-shaped fruits and vegetables enacted 20 years ago. The move has overcome an obsession with perfection in efforts to lower the price of fresh produce and reduce agricultural waste. Bendy cucumbers and forked carrots are now welcome on supermarket shelves across the region, which is good news for British chains like Sainsbury's that launched a campaign against the strict EU regulations last November. Also surely rejoicing is the Prince of Wales whose home-grown carrots were deemed too "wibbly-wobbly" to sell.

Saddam read some of his own poetry to FBI interrogator

Transcript here (.pdf). Via bookslut.

A letter from Ronald Reagan to Michael Jackson

Dated February 1st, 1984:

Dear Michael,

I was pleased to learn that you were not seriously hurt in your recent accident. I know from experience that these things can happen on the set—no matter how much caution is exercised. All over America, millions of people look up to you as an example. Your deep faith in God and adherence to traditional values are an inspiration to all of us, especially young people searching for something real to believe in. You’ve gained quite a number of fans along the road since “I Want You Back,” and Nancy and I are among them. Keep up the good work, Michael. We’re very happy for you.

Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan

From Harper's.

The rye whiskey revolution

In The Atlantic's Mixmaster (h/t: Alex L.):

On a side table in my grandmother's dining room sat three cut-glass decanters, each with a brass label around its neck: Scotch, Bourbon, and Rye. Long ago, this was the standard trio of the American bar; tequila and vodka were bare gleams in a sot's eye.

Whiskey is no longer the beginning and end of the American liquor experience. Of the three, Scotch has more or less kept its ground, especially after the late-'90s fad for "anything Glen." Bourbon has faded, though Jim Beam and Jack Daniels (not actually a Bourbon, but let's set that aside) remain old standbys. But what happened to Rye?

Rarely has a liquor fallen so quickly and completely from the public's favor. Why? For one, rye lost out in the great wave of distillery consolidations during the middle of the 20th century. That's because, second, Bourbon, being sweeter and more palatable, was easier to market to a public increasingly averse to straight hard alcohol.

Rye, which has to be made from a mash bill of at least 51 percent rye (though the rye content is usually much higher), is not for the faint of heart. It is full of spice and kick. Spice is fine in wine, but when we're talking about 100-proof quaffs, it's a bit much. Rye, in other words, got caught in a reinforcing spiral: A growing aversion to strong alcohol led conglomerates to cut rye production; less rye on the shelf meant less familiarity and thus even less demand.

Nevertheless, rye abides, and even flourishes. Several of the stalwart old labels have survived--Old Overholt, Sazerac--and a bevy of new brands hint that a Rye renaissance may be afoot (aided, I suppose, by the sudden popularity of pseudo-speakeasies and Prohibition Era chic).

More here.

A vision of love

Kaite Roiphe reviews Cristina Nehring's "A Vindication of Love":

We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” she [Nehring] writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring’s literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections. Her heroes and heroines tend to die, like Young Werther, who shoots himself; or try to die, like Mary Wollstonecraft, who throws herself off a bridge; or suffer, like Abelard and Heloise, one of whom is castrated and one of whom ends up in a nunnery. And yet Nehring admires these flamboyant men and women for the creative force of their affairs, for their ability to live outside the lines, for the ferocity of their feelings. She sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad, and quotes approvingly Heloise’s statement to Abelard: “ ‘I looked for no marriage bond,’ she flashed. ‘I never sought anything in you but yourself.’ ”

[...]

The book raises practical questions. Can one actually live according to the rich and exhausting principles Nehring sets out? In the final pages, she offers this glimpse of her own life: “As I write these words, I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.” Here is the essence of her vision: brutal, vivid, demanding, deranged. It is perhaps a little easier to fulfill this vision, to love fully, to surrender practical daily concerns to the whims and ardors of strong feeling, if you are not responsible for anyone else. Nehring also mentions that she has a newborn baby girl, and one wonders if this will temper her freedom and the storminess of her view. She does, however, give the example of Wollstonecraft, who took her illegitimate baby on a boat to Scandinavia, on a dangerous adventure unheard of for a woman alone, in the service of a difficult man she loved, and managed to write an excellent and popular book about it.

The rest here.

Deception and thinking about the past

D. Graham Burnett interviews Anthony Grafton:

When I sat down to write Forgers and Critics, what I wanted to do was think my way through the long tradition of reasoning about the coherence and character of the past, but I ultimately came to a slightly disturbing conclusion: forgery was deeply rooted in this tradition, as deeply rooted as ways of thinking about the past that we might now call historical or philological. After all, that notion of the integrity of an historical epoch—that sense of what is possible and impossible in a given period—is literary as much as it is historical. Critics like Valla could spot inconsistencies, but in many cases it was the forgers who took on the most ambitious projects of historical recovery. They were the ones who were trying to make the past live again, to animate, to resurrect the lost worlds. They had to steep themselves in these worlds enough that they could actually inhabit them creatively.

The rest here.

“A man should either be a work of Art or wear a work of Art”

In Intelligent Life:

North of Oxford Street, in the heart of Fitzrovia, where Dylan Thomas once drank and sang, lies Windmill Street. Here the passer-by will see an oddly Parisian-looking shopfront, rose-red and decorated with gold flowers and curlicues. The legend, in gold script on the window, says “Jonathan Quearney: Tailor, Outfitter & Clothier”.

To a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, Windmill Street would be an unthinkable place to go for the sort of hand-tailoring London is famous for. Indeed, anywhere outside Savile Row would be unthinkable. That’s why the zenith, the apogee, the ne plus ultra of tailoring is, throughout the world, referred to as “Savile Row”. Because that is where it comes from: the Row.

But Quearney, as affable and as voluble as his Irish roots would lead you to expect, is a Savile Rogue: one of a relatively new breed of tailors who are faithful to the great traditions of English tailoring, without nominating themselves as a branch of the heritage industry. Old-established tailoring houses may adorn their interiors with stuffed stag’s heads and curious wooden horses on which a man can sit to check the fit of his breeches. The Rogues are having none of it. Edgier, more in tune with the spirit of the times, they cater for a younger, hipper clientele. If fashion is about advertising the “designer”, and the Row is about declaring one’s affiliation with a (partly imaginary) tradition, then the Savile Rogues are about bending the conventions while respecting the craft.

The rest here.

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

SAN FRANCISCO—Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran. "Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation. "When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means—such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime—I couldn't believe they'd ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless." Dorsey said he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.

From the Onion.

Video: Bernard-Henri Levy - "Nothing will be ever the same again in Tehran"

Message to the Young People of Iran by Bernard-Henri Lévy
by BernardHL

The price of cocaine around the world

From The Economist.

Intentionality, disgust, and homosexuality

In Scientific American:

In one experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 44 undergraduate students from the University of California, Irvine, to one of two different conditions. Half of the participants were asked to read a brief story about the director of a risqué music video which turned out to have the side-effect of encouraging gay men to French–kiss in public. (Think Katy Perry’s homoerotic “I Kissed a Girl” but, for this study, a male-on-male “I Kissed a Boy” equivalent.) The remaining participants read the same story, yet in this other version the video was said to have caused straight couples to French–kiss in public rather than gay men. It was stressed to participants in both conditions that the director knew the video was likely to induce public French–kissing but this was not his primary goal in making the video.

The participants were then asked the following questions: (1) Did the director intentionally encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French–kiss in public? (2) Is there anything wrong with homosexual men [or straight couples] French–kissing in public? (3) Was it wrong of the director to make a video that he knew would encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French–kiss in public? The second two questions in this list, the investigators reasoned, tapped into the participants’ explicit beliefs about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of French–kissing in public. And as predicted, these mostly college-aged participants agreed that there’s nothing wrong with either straight or gay couples displaying this type of affection in public, nor, for that matter, was it wrong for the director to encourage such behavior in either case. Intriguingly, however, in response to the first question, participants viewed the director’s actions as being more intentional when he encouraged gays to kiss in public than straights.

This peculiar finding is interpreted in relation to the well-documented “Knobe Effect,” a phenomenon first discovered by Yale philosopher Joshua Knobe whereby people are more inclined to say that a behavior was performed intentionally when they regard that behavior as being morally wrong. (In his original work in this area, Knobe asked people to suppose that the CEO of a corporation is presented with a proposal that would make the company a lot of money but, as a side effect, either “harm” or “help” the environment. In response to this scenario, participants who read the harm version of the story reasoned that the CEO harmed the environment intentionally, whereas those in the help condition said it was only accidental that he helped the environment.) To Inbar and his coauthors, this incongruous finding regarding the director’s intentions therefore reflects a visceral, intuitive and largely unconscious moral judging of homosexuality by otherwise open- and fair-minded individuals.

But what makes the authors’ position even more compelling is the finding that participants who were easily disgusted (as measured by the Disgust Sensitivity Scale, which assesses individual differences in aversion to things such as feces, rotting meat, bodily secretions, blood, gore and corpses) were especially likely to see the director’s actions as intentional—but only in the gay-kissing condition. In other words, people who have a weaker stomach in general are more prone to find expressions of male-male sexual behavior morally wrong. However, because these implicit (often unconscious) moral judgments are often in conflict with social prescriptions of fairness and equality for gay couples, such individuals are usually completely unaware of their own prejudiced attitudes.

The rest here.

Fake antiquities and eBay

In Archaeology (via Idea of the Day):

A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare--the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts. The black market for antiquities has existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the world's cultural heritage. But we could at least take some comfort that it was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints of transporting and selling illegal artifacts kept the market relatively small. But the rise of online auction sites promised to drastically alter the landscape. And so it did, just not in the dire way we had anticipated.

Back in the pre-eBay days, the cost of acquiring and selling an antiquity was high. The actual looter was usually paid little, but various middlemen down the line added huge costs. During my 25 years of working in the Andes, I have often seen this dynamic at work. In years past, transporting an object was a big expense, even for portable artifacts, and the potential for arrest added to the total cost of doing business. In addition, the expense of authentication, conservation, and occasional restoration of the pieces, made buying and selling quality antiquities a wealthy person's vice.

Our greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking and lead to widespread looting. This seemed a logical outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin, with everything from potsherds to pieces of the Great Wall on the auction block for a few dollars. But a very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade.

How is it possible? The short answer is that many of the primary "producers" of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities. I've been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and from what I can tell, this shift began around 2000, about five years after eBay was established. It is true that fakes have been around for centuries. In 1886, the celebrated Smithsonian archaeologist W. H. Holmes described countless bogus antiquities in Mexico. A few decades later, Egyptologist T. G. Wakeling noted that many ancient Egyptian artifacts were, in fact, fakes. In the 19th century, American and European museums purchased large numbers of "Etruscan" ceramic vessels and sarcophagi that came straight from the kilns of rural Italian farmers. But these were usually the really good fakes, labor-intensive pieces that required lots of work and skill. Today, every grade and kind of antiquity is being mass-produced and sold in quantities too large to imagine.

The rest here.

Stiglitz on American corporate welfarism

From Project Syndicate:

Some have called this new economic regime “socialism with American characteristics.” But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the United States has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance, too.

America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance, and now to automobiles, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of long standing corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; there is no evidence that these behemoths deliver societal benefits that are commensurate with the costs they have imposed on others. And, if we don’t break them up, then we have to severely limit what they do. They can’t be allowed to do what they did in the past – gamble at others’ expenses.

This raises another problem with America’s too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-be-restructured banks: they are too politically powerful. Their lobbying efforts worked well, first to deregulate, and then to have taxpayers pay for the cleanup. Their hope is that it will work once again to keep them free to do as they please, regardless of the risks for taxpayers and the economy. We cannot afford to let that happen.

The rest here.

Video: Hamid Dabashi on Iranian protests

On Democracy Now!:

A reminder about the unpredictability of politics

Charles Kurzman on the current situation in Iran:

Some protesters are giddy about the possibilities. "We have removed the rubbish that was injected into us by the regime, which turned people against one another," one student e-mailed to friends outside of Iran. "We are entering a new day. Our heads are high and eyes focused far on the horizon. Every single day the scope of this horizon expands, and in every single cell of our bodies we feel that we are ascending and rising up towards greater beauties."

Others despair that the future looks bleak. "Where are we today?!" a young oppositionist asked in distress on her blog as the protests began. "We don't know what to do. We don't know where to take refuge." Organizers of the protests aim to calm these concerns with the promise of safety in numbers. "Do not fear, do not fear, we are all together," demonstrators chanted in Tehran.

Opponents of regime change are also confounded by this week's events. "Why isn't the security apparatus getting involved?" a pro-regime Web site complained after the first large demonstration. The site then helpfully listed the names of 42 opposition leaders "in hopes that the security and military apparatuses will respond with less leniency and greater severity of action toward this situation."

Such moments of mass confusion are unsettling and rare. They usually fade back into routine. Occasionally, however, they create their own new routines, even new regimes, as they did in 1978-1979. In later retelling of these episodes, especially by experts, confusion is often downplayed, as though the outcomes might have been known in advance. But that is not how Iranians are experiencing current events. Their experience, and their response to their experience, will determine the outcome.

So this week, while the political future of Iran seems undecided, let us take note of the undecidedness, so that we won't forget it.

The rest here.

Stop making sense

In New Scientist:

At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science. So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student in library and information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who revealed yesterday on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that he got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

[...]

So Davis teamed up with Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at The New England Journal of Medicine, to put Bentham's editorial standards to the test. The pair turned to SCIgen, a program that generates nonsensical computer science papers, and submitted the resulting paper to The Open Information Science Journal, published by Bentham.

The paper, entitled "Deconstructing Access Points" (pdf) made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

Neda, student of philosophy

At Leiter:

Many readers have sent me links about the murder of Neda Soltani, an Iranian philosophy student shot dead by the theocracy's stormtroopers doing what all lethal agents of the state do, ending life indiscriminately. Some links here, here, and here. She was attending a protest against the fraudulent elections with her philosophy professor and some fellow students. As J. Brendan Ritchie, a grad student at Maryland, wrote to me: "This terrible tragedy is a graphic reminder that there are philosophical colleagues (professors and students) who are fighting on the streets of Tehran for the ideals they have no doubt passionately argued for."

Video: Nightfall in Iran

Punishment for one's critics

Literary critic, James Wood, in an interview with LA Weekly (Via Bookslut):

My true enemies skulk in a deep Dostoevskian Underground called the Internet, and never see the light of day — that is their punishment for hating me so much; it matches the sin, as in Dante.

Video: Beck covers 'Sunday Morning'

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

From beck.com:

We've been working on changes to the website for the last few months. We'll be adding new sections as they're ready. The first one to be added is called Record Club, an informal meeting of various people to record an album in a day. An album will be chosen to be reinterpreted and used as a framework. Nothing rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track will be uploaded once a week on beck.com as well as through the web sites of those involved with the project.

For this first edition, after lengthy deliberation and coming close to covering Digital Underground's Sex Packets, all present voted in favor of the 'other' Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico. Participants included this time around are Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian Lebarton, Bram Inscore, Yo, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Holmes, and from Iceland, special guest Thorunn Magnusdottir, and myself. Thanks to everyone who helped put this together, and to all of you for indulging in this experiment. More soon.

Bek

Video: The culture war of our time

John Hodgman at the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner

[via darushimo]

The National Library of China

[via Marginal Revolution]

Obama cooks keema and daal and reads Urdu poetry

In Dawn (via 3 Quarks):

‘Any plan to visit Pakistan in the near future?’

‘I would love to visit. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook,’ said Mr Obama.

‘What can you cook?’

‘Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’

‘You read Urdu poetry?’

‘Absolutely. So my hope is that I’m going to have an opportunity at some point to visit Pakistan,’ said Mr Obama.

The rest here.

Teaching philosophy in prison

Robert Garmong in The Chronicle:

I have been on the adjunct treadmill for many years, running as fast as I can to grab up teaching sections before my money runs out. In the spring of 2008 I moved to southern Virginia, desperate for courses to teach but without many contacts. I found a job posting for an introduction to philosophy course at Southside Virginia Community College. I applied, got the section, and was happy. Days later, I received an e-mail message from the hiring manager, requesting that I attend an orientation session — "at Lunenburg Correctional Center." Gulp!

Upon further inquiry, I learned that the job I had accepted was not at a traditional community college campus, but rather at a medium-security penitentiary for men. I have lived through some tough times, struggling through graduate-school poverty and piecing together a living on the adjunct market. But I never thought I would go to prison for philosophy.

[...]

One of the great joys of teaching philosophy is the after-class conversation. In other institutions, students could follow me back to my office or my car, pursuing new thoughts and ideas and questions that didn't get answered during class. At Lunenburg, my students were required to leave the building (getting patted down on their way out) and go directly to their "dormitories." Often, my students and I took advantage of indulgent guards and stood in the quad discussing ideas for half an hour or more after class. Inmates were not supposed to be outside without permission, but they stayed anyway, and the guards let them. Some nights, we stood shivering in the cold Virginia winter while guards clicked past us two or three times.

The rest here.

A generational schism in Iran?

Ramin Jahanbegloo writes:

Ever since the first days of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there have been two sovereignties in Iran: one divine and one popular.

The popular part of the equation is codified in Iran's Constitution, which calls for the popular election of a president and parliament. Divine sovereignty is believed to derive from God's will, as interpreted by Shiite institutions that bestow power on the faqih, or supreme leader -- currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Increasingly, the divine sovereignty has been less about religion than about political theology. As for the popular sovereignty, it has found its due place in the social work and political action of Iranian civil society. The presence of these two incompatible and conflicting conceptions of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy has always been a bone of contention in Iranian politics, often defining the ideological contours of the political power struggle.

The present crisis in Iran after the presidential election is rooted in the popular quest for the democratization of the state and society, and the conservative reaction and opposition to it. Another factor distinguishing the current political crisis from the previous instances of political factionalism and internal power struggle is a deep-seated ideological structure inherited from the Iranian revolution.

The rest here.

Clashes in Iran escalate

A reminder: excellent live-blogging here, here, and here.

Mousavi's art

More here (via Huff Post).

Who are the Basij?

In The Guardian:

Iran's basij militiamen do not wear uniforms or insignia, but they are still easy to spot on the streets of Tehran and other cities. With their short hair and camouflage jackets or trousers, and armed with batons, knives, iron bars and chains, they are the shock troops of the Islamic regime as it struggles to contain the biggest wave of unrest since the 1979 revolution. Basiji have been "in action" for the last week, beating protesters without embarrassment and with impunity in broad daylight.

Basij (the name means "mobilisation") are commanded by a senior cleric but are subordinate to the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which in turn answers to the supreme leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fatal shooting in Tehran's Azadi Square during Monday's massive protest march — the peak of the unrest so far — arose from a clash between basiji and pro-Mousavi demonstrators. Basiji are also said to have attacked students in Tehran University dormitories, along with police. Seven other people were killed, apparently also with the involvement of the militiamen.

Basiji are mostly young men from poor, religious families, but there are older volunteers too. Membership brings privileges in the form of guaranteed university places and access to certain jobs.

The rest here.

What we should do (but governments shouldn't) about Iran

Michael Walzer in TNR:

We boast of our lively civil society, and those of us on the liberal left call ourselves internationalists. So let's use all our organizations and associations to act internationally--in support of liberals and leftists, friends of democracy, wherever they are. Confronting mass protests in Iran, where at least some of the protesters, perhaps many of them, are our political friends, let's help them through our parties, and unions, and religious groups, and magazines. Let's write about them, publish their stories, raise money for their activities, condemn their arrests, hold meetings, sign petitions, picket Iranian embassies in every country where we can mobilize the picketers. Let's explore every possible means of agitation and advocacy on behalf of our principles and our friends.

This is an ideological struggle, and that kind of struggle isn't first of all the business of governments. It is the business of politically committed men and women. We need to be clear about who we are and what we stand for and why we oppose the religious zealots and tyrants who have ruled Iran for the last decades.

The rest here.

The uprising continues

Meanwhile, in New York...

"A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing"

Peter J. Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press, writes:

Second, university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don't traffic in hard ideas. They're too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly. More free-form modes of communication (blogs, wikis, etc.) cannot do justice to hard ideas in their fullness. But we university presses luxuriate in hard ideas. We work the Hegel-Heidegger-Heisenberg circuit. As the Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters notes, even when university presses succeed in publishing so-called trade books (as in Charles Taylor's recent hit, A Secular Age), we do so because of the intellectual rigor contained in such books, not in spite of it.

Hard ideas define a culture — that of serious reading, an institution vital to democracy itself. In a recent article, Stephen L. Carter, Yale law professor and novelist, underscores "the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share." The challenge for university presses is to better turn our penchant for hard ideas to greater purpose.

More here.

Obama and Rawlsian consensus?

From Progressive Historians:

If you want to understand President Obama's soul, read his books. But if you want to understand his beliefs, read John Rawls. The Harvard academic, who died in 2002, was the most important philosopher of liberalism in the twentieth century, mostly because, in so many ways, Rawls' ideas describe the world we live in. That has never been more true than today, when our President has, consciously or unconsciously, exalted Rawlsian ideas to the position of the greatest possible good.

Sadly, we live in that Rawlsian bizarro-world. There have been plenty of presidents in our history who have elevated the overlapping consensus to a high art through the ideas of "bipartisanship" and "getting things done" -- think of Bill Clinton's "triangulation" or Eisenhower's inveterate moderacy. But few (perhaps only John F. Kennedy) have venerated the overlapping consensus as itself the supreme good of the nation in the way Barack Obama does. Few have failed to spend political capital on expansive policies, not because they feared losing reelection, but because they believed doing so would be breaking a sacred trust -- but Obama is one of those few.

Read his books and you'll see that, despite the fact that Obama holds strikingly liberal views on a variety of issues, his anger at the Bush administration is directed not at its policies, but at its politics. For Obama, Bush's supreme betrayal was in breaking the Rawlsian consensus. Bush's extreme partisanship, his utter disregard of the Democratic members of his government, turned Americans against each other and polarized the electorate. For Obama, that was Bush's greatest crime -- because to the President, we are a nation of consensus before we are a nation of laws or dreams or anything else.

The rest here.

Video: "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged"

Via Alex Ross:

The great Iranian kemancheh player Kayhan Kalhor and the New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider play "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged." Part 2 here.

Resistance in Iran

Hamid Dabashi weighs in:

We need to have a careful and accurate summation of what has happened so far. On 12 June upward of 80% of eligible voters, about 40 out of 46 million, have voted. This has been the most magnificent manifestation of the political maturity of Iran as a nation and their collective democratic will. This nation does not need, nor has it ever needed, either a medieval concoction called the Vali Faqih in Qom or Tehran to patronize it or else a Neocon chicanery called "Iran Democracy Project" in Hoover Institution in California to promote it. This nation, as always, can take care of itself. It needs nothing but the active solidarity of ordinary people around the globe to be a witness to their struggles and demand from their media an accurate and comprehensive representation of their movement. So please, hands off Iran! No "democracy project," no sanction, no threat, no military attack, no regime change.

The day after the results were announced, on 13 June, there was a spontaneous demonstration in Tehran by supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi demanding recount and charging vote rigging. The following day, on 14 June, the government staged a major pro-Ahmadinejad rally in which his supporters were bussed in from surrounding villages. It is important to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad's supporters come from the poorest and most disenfranchised segments of Iranian society, subject to his and his campaign's populism and demagoguery. From this fact one should not conclude that all the impoverished segments of Iranian society, suffering from double digit inflation and endemic unemployment, are on his side or fooled by his charlatanism. The supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the Reformist movement come from a vast trajectory of Iranian society.

Today, on 15 June 2009, the uprising has assumed an entirely different dimension and may have already transmuted into a full-fledged civil disobedience movement, with hundreds of thousands (according to BBC, which is usually quite conservative in its estimations), demonstrating peacefully and joyously between Meydan-e Enqelab and Meydan-e Azadi. Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami have led the demonstration and made speeches, as has Zahra Rahnavard, now an inspiration and role model for millions of Iranian women. Please take a good look at her and keep a print of her picture and the picture of other women participating in these demonstrations in your files before some other charlatan comes and crops it for the cover of the next edition of Reading Lolita in Tehran, or else puts together a collage of it for yet another book on "Sexual Revolution" or "Sexual Politics" in Iran. Whoever has won this particular presidential election, lipstick jihadis, career opportunist memoirists, obscene and fraudulent anthropologists on a summer "field work" in Iran, useless expatriate "opposition," and comprador intellectuals in general are among its main losers.

The rest here.

#twitterfail

Andrew Sullivan:

I'm told that Twitter will go down tonight for an hour and half for maintenance. All I can ask is that they reconsider if they can. Taking Twitter down when it is the critical tool for organizing the resistance in Iran is Ahmadinejad's dream. This event has been Twitter's finest hour. Don't spoil it. They need you.

Via Huff. Post Live-Blog:

5:06 PM ET -- Twitter going dark now? Reader Kevin emails over an important point: "I think one thing that we can do right now is to get Twitter to cancel it's 90 minute maintenance at 9:45 PDT. This is 9:15-10:45 AM in Iran. If they must do it, they should do it around 4 AM Iran time. While it may be inconvenient for us, it would be helpful to them." Here here. If you're on Twitter, make your feelings known. The hashtag is #twitterfail.

Also, #nomaintenance.

Update:

7:00 PM ET -- Victory: Twitter to delay maintenance work. Here's the full statement:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide -- we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today's decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.

Photos from the protests in Iran

From The Big Picture (click to enlarge):




Many more here.

More from Tehran

From live-blogging at Huffington Post:

12:21 PM ET -- Gunfire at Azari Square. Oh no.

# URGENT -- People were seen running in panic after the gunfire but it is unclear if anyone has been shot. Details to come.4 minutes ago from BNO Headquarters

# URGENT -- Iranian state TV says gunfire has erupted at the pro-Mousavi rally in Tehran where hundreds of thousands of people were protesting4 minutes ago from BNO Headquarters

# BULLETIN -- GUNFIRE ERUPTS AT PRO-MOUSAVI RALLY IN TEHRAN, PEOPLE RUNNING.

11:12 AM ET -- Mousavi appears. "Mir Hossein Mousavi (C) raises his arms as he appears at an opposition demonstration in Tehran on June 15, 2009, for the first time since an election that has divided the nation. Opposition supporters defied a ban to stage a mass rally in Tehran in protest at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide election win, as Iran faced a growing international backlash over the validity of the election and the subsequent crackdown on opposition protests." (Getty).

Tweets compiled by Andrew Sullivan:

People are getting killed in Azadi Sq.

Demo spread from Azadi sq, to streets and hwys around it. Cars honking horns, smaller groups marching. False hopes?

Dispersed fights in Tehran; sound of shooting heard

Tho today's protest is illegal, police not moving in. Possibly too big to handle, or images of attax beg. to embarrass ldrs

Just returned from Mousavi demonstration. Huge, easily 100s of thousands. Mood is peaceful, even happy.

unconfirmed as yet - mousavi newspaper offices raided.

Students are being surrounded in Shiraz Uni civil police (Basij) is in fight with people.

There are too many people just watching. Watching argument between forces and youth. What are they thinking about?

I hear that NPR is claiming that it is false news that Mousavi is in crowd now. IT'S NOT! Tell them pp, we have pics!

Mousavi now; "these masses were not brought by bus or by threat. they were not brought for potatoes. they came themselves"

@BabakMehrabani is saying that he was beaten by a baton and his right hand is numb. He is twitting with the left hand.

They blocked all the streets ends to university!

Tens of thousands of protestors are chanting "No fear, No fear, we are with each other".

Tweets from inside Iran

Here and here.

Iran cont.

Good coverage here (Huffington Post), here (NIAC), here (NYT Lede), here (Andrew Sullivan), here (Twitter - #iranelection), and here (Twitter - 'Mousavi').

Twittering the revolution?

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:

ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

More here.

Tehran erupts

[photo via Andrew Sullivan]

BBC video here.

More coverage here.

Most frequently looked up words in the NY Times

From Nieman Journalism Lab:

If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.

As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.

More here.

[via 3 Quarks]

The Genomic Revolution

Details here.

Video: Breyer, Posner, Nussbaum, and Strier on Shakespeare and Law

What does Jacques Pépin eat?

In Gourmet:

Well, let’s see… yesterday morning—I don’t eat in the morning. I have some coffee with milk and that’s about it. We have a very fancy machine here at the house in Connecticut—a Jura—which costs millions of dollars, and it grinds coffee and foams milk and makes espresso and cappuccino and just about anything you want. So I make a big bowl of café au lait, and I probably end up having two of those. I’ve never been a breakfast person. Occasionally, if I’m on a cruise or something, I may have a croissant. I love English muffins, so sometimes I’ll have half an English muffin with some jam that I might make, but that’s the most I would ever do for breakfast. [The voice of his wife, Gloria, in the background: “Corn flakes!”] Oh yes, I love corn flakes. I have them sometimes for lunch, but I haven’t had them in a long time.

So that brings us to lunch. I had a nice big leek, so I made a soup with it—just the leek with chicken stock and tomato and pastina, with grated Swiss cheese on top. I have leeks in the garden, but they’re not ready yet. So I went to the market the other day—we have an organic market on Friday here, and it comes every summer for about three or four months—and we bought some good stuff. To drink, Gloria might have a Coke and I might, too, or just water. Five in the afternoon, when I start cooking, is when we start drinking wine. We probably drink too much of it. Yesterday we had a bottle of Cambria white wine from Santa Barbara Valley, a 2004, I think, and then red later on, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape—the Bosquet des Papes Chante le Merle Vieilles Vignes—from 2000. Gloria and I had a few slices of saucisson and some red caviar on a little bit of toast.

More here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary recalls the author's final act

In the LA Times:

As Fitzgerald zeroed in on the novel, he dictated notes and character sketches, outlined chapters and scenes. "The book was meticulously planned," Ring says. "By the time he started to write, he knew who his characters were and what the struggle was between them."

"The Last Tycoon" is the story of Monroe Stahr, a Hollywood boy wonder who Fitzgerald saw as a sensitive soul, artistic even, in a cutthroat business. The key, Ring suggests, was Fitzgerald's notion of the novel as redemptive, a way to make use of everything he'd observed in Hollywood, to take its degradation ("I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred," he wrote to his agent in 1935) and transform it into literature.

Fitzgerald wrote "on long sheets of paper," Ring remembers, "yellow pads. He had a big, scrawling hand. I would type it up triple-space. And then he would redo it." He worked all the time: on the novel; on various film projects, including an adaptation of his own "Babylon Revisited"; and on the 17 "Pat Hobby Stories" that he wrote for Esquire, which were published, beginning in January 1940, at $250 apiece. In his introduction to "The Pat Hobby Stories," collected as a book in 1962, Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich quotes from the many wires Fitzgerald sent seeking payment: "Again the old ache of money," the author writes. "Again will you wire me, if you like it. Again, will you wire the money to my Maginot Line: The Bank of America, Culver City."

The rest here.