Is this article genuinely accurate? If so, it's a marvel of allegorical journalism: I sense a strong Kapuscinski vibe here. Shah of Shas, indeed.
Sorry, thought everybody was on a Kapuscinski kick since he died the other day. Ryszard Kapuscinski was a polish foreign correspondent under soviet rule. Although wiki doesn't mention this, and I could be full of shit, he embedded criticism of the soviet regime into his vivid accounts of third-world despotism. Shah of Shahs was a journalistic account of the decline and fall of the Pahlavi regime, which 17-year old me interepreted as a crypto-polemic against the declining soviet union. I referenced him above because I saw so many parallels in the article between Ahmadinejad and Bush I found it hard to believe they were accidental. I mean, "neoconservatives"? Come on.
Anyway, is the article legit? Are these the main controversies in Iranian politcs? Also, read Kapuściński.
After I saw your comment, I read a bit about Kapuściński, and now I really want to read Shah of Shahs. But yeah, the Secor article gets it right, at least as far as I've been able to piece together from being there a few years ago, and talking to relatives and such.
"There, as here, only students and a few lefties get really worked up about freedom and human rights; the rest of the people just want to be able to provide for their families."
I submit that the reason most Americans don't "get really worked up about freedom and human rights" is because we have them.
5- I submit that most Americans would fail to get worked up about them even if we didn't. (Which would make us no different than anyone else.)
Most Americans, or Canadians or Britons or Russians or South Africans or Japanese people only get worked up about losing their freedom when it is brought home to them again and again on a daily basis. It is only a few lefties and students anywhere who get worked up about things like the legalization of illegal wiretaps, or travel restrictions, or the cases of a few dissidents or rebels. And unfortunately, there are lots of lefties and students who fail to make common cause with regular folks who worry about health care costs and food prices and rising tuitions. I would have been very surprised to hear that things were otherwise in Iran.
As we see from the article, one of the most insidious things about reactionaries is that they are often able to blend their ideological concerns into a false populism -- like Umberto Eco says: "Ur-fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say."
Well, maybe it would become a big deal if our lives changed as a result of not having rights, but by then it's normally too late.
I submit that the reason most Americans don't "get really worked up about freedom and human rights" is because we have them.
I think you mean that they don't get violated in practice much, or at least on obtrusively. Which is true.
Funny, my first reaction, before reading these comments, was that the author was having a bit of fun by writing as much of the article as possible so that substituting "Bush" for "Ahmadinejad" would lead to amusing results. The 35% approval rating was my favorite.
The young people profiled in the article sound cool and smart, and they're all about my age, which means in twenty years they'll be running Iran; can't we just buy them out? Kill them with kindness or economic bribery?
I submit a convo with my dad yesterday, who said that giving up civil liberties for security didn't seem like such a bad deal.
I expect that's a very common sentiment.
Depending on the details, it might be an excellent deal. That line commonly attributed to Franklin about one trading liberty for security deserving neither is profoundly dumb.
It's quoted in a whole bunch of variant forms, but the one I remember is 'essential liberty' and 'temporary security', which doesn't sound so dumb.
Maybe Labs is talking about a situation like, say, today's Iraq, where there's plenty of liberty, but no security. If so, he should say so, and maybe we'll give him his job back.
Good luck unpacking "essential." The problem is that as it moves toward plausible, it also moves toward trivial.
Just keep me talking, Cala, and there's a mechanism that will do at least part of that work for you.
(and 19 gets it right. you should still give me FL's job, because it would be cool to have a job where I could mix up ibn-bush mp3s.)
Actually, I'm thisclose to saying fuck the academy and leaving sans Ph.D. I am increasingly wondering why I'm in a career path that most of the time is making me stressed and miserable.
Right, Franklin's great insight reduces to: don't make stupid judgments about temporal distributions of goods. See, Ben, the Protagoras comes in handy yet again. Also, of course, there are many cases, as Ogged suggests, where the absence of security makes liberty either nonexistent or trivial, depending on how you parse it.
Leave it to a grumpy philosopher to try to parse a polemicist as if he's another philosopher. The fact is that we're temperamentally prone to make precisely stupid judgments about the distribution of liberty and security, and so it's important to be reminded that we should take particular care not to succumb to our bias when the issue arises.
Franklin's quote is the truest thing ever spoken, even truer than Godwin's law or 2+2=4.
Wow, I should try to irritated Ogged more often. This is fun.
I comment more in sorrow than in anger.
Just finish the degree, Cala.
But thinking is hard and it makes me sad.
Polemicists and philosophers make poor party guests. I love the Franklin quote, but it works best if you don't think about it too hard.
A lot of one's response to the "liberty vs. security" thing would depend on whether the government itself is seen as a threat to "security." You'd think that Americans would be more suspicious of the government, given our natural predisposition toward paranoia, but apparently not.
Sorrow away, my boy, as I further degrade your magnificent creation.
Cala, cut the crap and finish your dissertation. Walk away after that, but get the degree.
On Franklin's quotation. And as FL knows, the determination of which liberties are essential is a standing problem in American jurisprudence.
I guess I have this conversation every year, and the thing is I've managed to talk myself into giving it another semester for the past five years. I need to stop stressing about the job market.
FL is however correct, that if you have waded in this far, Cala, returning would be as tedious as going over.
(Goes out, turns around three times, spits.)
You know what will make you stress about jobs? Quitting your program and having to find one, and quick. Just speaking for myself (by which I mean "telling you what to do") I would have faced a lifetime of regret if I hadn't finished, but I could have been more or less fine with leaving the profession after that. Dr Cala! Cala, PhD! C'mon, it'll be fun.
18: That's actually what he was talking about, but still, as a generalized sentiment (which is how he expressed it), scary.
28: See? See?
Cala, just stop worrying about the job market. Think about it this way: if you leave now, you won't be an academic. If you finish, you don't have to be an academic, either! Once you decide that you don't care about academia, it becomes more fun.
I'm waiting for Persepolis to come out, so I can learn all I need to know about Iranian culture in convenient movie format. Let's hold off discussing Iran till then.
For what evil purpose are these people trying to control your mind, Cala? The only one you can trust is me.
the absence of security makes liberty either nonexistent or trivial, depending on how you parse it.
I don't think Franklin understood liberty to mean "no law". Also, while B's qualifiers make the statement more exact, I don't think we need them. As Ogged, I think, was saying, while the line may not be terribly revealing as a philosophical statement, that's a really limited view. Taking into account psychology, the line has a lot going for it (simple, catchy, authoratative), and it's brilliant. So don't call it dumb unless you want people to think you're a robot.
Michael, my programming requires me to eliminate you. Regretably, I must set my phallus to "kill."
I knew I should've specified "sex-robot" or I'd make you angry. A regretable, forseeable mistake.