I’ve been scouring Andrew Sullivan’s blog for information on the turmoil in Iran. It’s apparently the best source for news/rumor about the protests.
Like Sullivan, I’m hopeful that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have bitten off more than they can chew. It will be a great moment for freedom and democracy if their regime falls – hopefully in a way that yields a stable representative government. I worry that Sullivan’s coverage is a little bit Pollyanna-ish. On his blog every twitter-reported protest seems millions strong and the police stand aside like lambs. But there are also plenty of videos where the police do beat protesters, and there has been at least one large pro-Ahmadinejad demonstration in Tehran, so we’ll have to wait and see.
If Ahmadinejad falls, the main question in the US will likely be – which party gets credit? It’s probably mostly nonsense to talk in the short-term about credit for a country’s internal politics, but it’s likely nonsense. The leftist position seems pretty clear: Obama, by offering to negotiate with Ahmedinejad, undermined his hostile rhetoric and created space for more dovish politicians. By contrast, neoconservatives will argue that the close proximity to Iraq’s less managed democracy sharpened Iranians’ hunger for the real thing. Which argument is better? Check your political affiliation and decide accordingly.
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Wallace Forman
@ 11:03 PM.
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Via Andrew Sullivan, this McClatchy graph:
The chart’s title pretty clearly indicates the intended answer to Andrew’s question (which class is most charitable?): the poor.
I might, however, have included the somewhat relevant figure of actual average amount given to charity by each income group (calculated as average income times giving as percent of income):
Each richer income group appears to give more to charity than the next poorer group. The rich give the most to charity, and the poor give the least.
If someone truly cares about charitable giving, they ought to desire that as many people as possible should move into the “less generous” groups. Fetishizing the poor as the “most generous” group is a rather banal demonstration of the too-human tendency to confuse intentions with results – when results are clearly the desired metric.
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Wallace Forman
@ 5:50 PM.
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…do you explain to a crazy person that people don’t take crazy people seriously?
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Wallace Forman
@ 5:34 PM.
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In an apparent attempt to explain why America is still a greater evil than Russia, Andrew Sullivan writes,
Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power?
Making, of course, an analogy to Abu Ghraib.
But for all we know, Russia is doing all these things to activists, rebels, and dissidents across Russia. There is little freedom of press in Russia, and dissenters are frequently jailed. In Russia, if you did have evidence of appalling prison abuses, you would do well to keep them to yourself, lest you join the inmates.
said
Wallace Forman
@ 3:45 PM.
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