Crooked Timber

Tomorrow is international women’s day, and in the past days the Iranian regime has, once again, shown its oppressive face towards grassroots women’s organisations who were peacefully demonstrating for their rights. On Sunday at least 31 women were illegally arrested during a peaceful gathering in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran. They were demonstrating in solidarity with women’s rights activists who had organised a peaceful demonstration on June 12, 2006, which was brutally ended by the police, and who had to appear before court last Sunday. They were also protesting the increasing oppression and criminalisation of the non-violent Iranian women’s movement, who has launched the one million signatures campaign to educate citizens about gender-discriminatory laws, and who are collecting signatures to demand an end to such discriminatory legislation. The correspondent for a Dutch newspaper was also arrested, but quickly released. Yesterday some women were released, but there are also reports that others were beaten and are in a bad condition. The 24 remaining women have started a hunger strike to protest their illegal confinement.
Continue reading “International women’s day in Iran”

As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
Continue reading “Linksforum”

So Nouri al-Maliki pardoned Saddam Hussein to promote national healing and move on, Gerald Ford is making one last appearance at the Apollo theater, and James Brown will shortly be buried at Arlington cemetery, his long reign of terror having come to an end at last. No, that’s not right. I’ll try again.

While I puzzle it out, go read Josh Marshall pre-emptively cutting through the bullshit that will pile up around the gallows this weekend:

Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. … This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur—phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. … for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting. … This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right. What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?

An experiment is underway over at Acephalous to test the velocity at which a meme spreads across the blogal landscape. As Scott Eric Kaufman explains the hypothesis being tested:

Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are — to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett’s rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium — “skyhooked” into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

I’m not sure where CT fits in this particular schema, though probably we are of the middling sort. Anyway, please check out the rest of SEK’s entry. Here’s that link again.

And if you have a blog—be its traffic high or low—please consider joining the experiment with just the short of (otherwise content-free) entry you are now reading.

Remember, it’s all for Science, albeit of the MLA variety.

I’ve just noticed that we haven’t had a specific post on the Litvinenko poisoning, despite the fact that it’s an interesting subject. I don’t really have anything to say on this, except that I would point out that this is a good refutation of those self-consciously “level-headed” types who like to believe that “most suspicious things are a case of cock-up rather than conspiracy”, that “you can’t put together any big plan without someone talking about it” or that there is something intrinsically weird or tin-foil-hattish about assuming that political ends of one sort or another are often advanced by illegal means. The most interesting thing about this case to me is that whoever is responsible for killing Litvinenko (and I suppose that the truly “rational” point of view of the non-conspiracy-theorist might be that the polonium got into his sushi by a series of coincidences), they will almost certainly get away with it. All of the main suspects are simply too geopolitically important in one way or another to ever be charged with or punished for anything as simple as murder. Informed opinions solicited, the other sort welcomed, try not to libel anyone please.

The term “wingnut” gets thrown about rather loosely at times. But the life and work of former Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) embodied all the richness and flavor that expression ought properly to convey. She died yesterday while bravely defying the nanny-state’s intrusive expectation that its charges wear seat belts.

Some highlights of her career are covered over at The Phil Nugent Experience:

Other Republicans had played footsie with the Turner Diaries crowd, but Chenoweth boldly remained attached to them even after the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that inspired her to the optimistic explanation, “Maybe now more people will listen!” Chenoweth married her admiration and concern for the militia groups with her other big obsession, the unspeakable horrors of eco-fascism. Having denounced environmentalism as a deranging form of religion that was at odds with the separation of church and state, she claimed that the government was using its secret black helicopters to terrorize hunters and protect endangered species…. She also, naturally, called for the impeachment of that awful Bill Clinton, but publically declared her support for her kind of world leader, Slobodan Milosovic.

Chenoweth was not simply another opportunist signing onto the “Contract with America” in 1994. “She was,” as Nugent puts it, “a 100% true believer, too radical to ever really accomplish anything and so sincere that you always knew just where you stood with her.”

I’m skeptical about whether bin Laden is actually dead. TPM guest poster DK says something that strikes me as funny, though: “I will say that typhoid is not exactly my idea of a deserved death for the man.” I don’t know. I hate Osama plenty, and I think dying of typhoid would be absolutely horrible, and much worse than getting shot or blown up. Fatal bacterial infections are world-renowned awful ways to die, so if typhoid has carried him off, I think my lust for vengeance will be perfectly slaked. That said, I’m skeptical. But then, I am partly skeptical because I think he died some time ago; I find it impossible to believe that he would be able to resist taunting everyone with pictures of himself holding a recent paper after some terrorist attack. I just don’t know.

“The Path to 9/11 is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to ‘transform Hollywood’ in line with its messianic vision.”

Plenty more where that came from, here.

A group of prominent American historians is calling on ABC not to broadcast The Path to 9/11. (For a quick reminder of how propaganda-rific it is, see Mark Grimsley’s recent item at Cliopatria. It quotes an endorsement by Michael Medved and provides some pertinent links.)

The list of signatories starts with Arthur Schlesinger—who, whatever else you may think of him, is pretty much the guy to have out in front on this sort of complaint, for rhetorical appeal to the center (rhetorical construct thought “the center” may be).

Continue reading “Fraud Alert”

Feel like getting really angry? Go read this Pandagon post and the zuzu post at Feministe it refers to. And the comments. From Amanda:

Zuzu at Feministe, in trying to write a normal blog post on how this case is being blown up to bolster racist fears, ran into this problem when some of their regular commenters started to bleat about how Moore has only herself to blame for what they considered the outrageous behavior of being young and leaving the house to have fun. Always these people say they mean well, of course, but in this case, the commenter slipped up and showed the true purpose of her bleating:

I don’t know about the whole race thing you’re getting at, but I agree that the coverage seems to be trying to force her into the victim role. It’s tragic what happened, but Jennifer made a number of really stupid decisions that are not terribly sympathetic (to me, at least). Driving into manhattan to get tanked (while underage no less), then not calling parents or authorities for help when she and her friend got stranded was profoundly bad judgment.

You read that right. People are “trying to force…into the victim role” a person who was raped, murdered, and then dismembered and left in a dumpster. I know that there is strong psychological pressure to find some reason why someone else was raped, a reason you could avoid. If I just do this and don’t do this and… Why? Because it’s just really scary to think that you might become a victim for no reason at all. People feel that if they can just do some magical thinking they will stay in the not-victim chalk circle and everything will be OK. The problem is not that women sometimes get drunk or go dancing or get into cars with strangers because someone threatening is following them down a dark city street. The problem is the rapists and murderers. Keep your eyes on the ball, people. Now let’s have the comments thread degenerate into a pointless discussion of what women should be doing to avoid getting raped, because god knows I’ve never heard any of that before. C’mon, Steve, advocate concealed carry! [NB: I am not actually particularly opposed to concealed carry laws (or Steve!), but I don’t think they would put a dent in the US rape rate, because most people are raped by someone they know and no one is likely to tote their pistol around from room to room in their own goddamn house while they talk with a friend. Which nonsensical behavior is also not relevant to concealed carry. And I don’t want to hear about it at all.]

You know, it’s very rare that I find myself agreeing with some Instapundit post about terrorism. Vanishingly rarely. And I find the tedious “media bias” paranoia on the right to be…tedious—wait did I say that? Still, the NYT account of the recent Canadian government action (in which they claim to have arrested the members of a terrorist group previously under monitoring when they accepted delivery of some 3 tons of ammonium nitrate) is sort of strange. I obviously don’t suggest that the headline should read “Muslims, trying to kill you, or trying to kill you and your children?”. That said, it actually is a little weird to have the info run as follows: 1) 17 Canadians arrested for plotting to blow things up; 2) the men were mainly of South Asian descent and varying ages as follows; 3) none were known to be affiliated with al Qaida (why would we even think they were? Oh.); 4) RCMP assistant comissioner notes: “They represent the broad strata of our society. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed” (right, now this is crazy, but do they have anything in common at all, like adhering to some fringe-group religious extremism? Anything?); 5) something something something; 6) something something something; 7) other stuff, also, stuff about border security, possibly zinging those who obsess about our southern border at the expense of real security; 8) “Islamic extremists.” Wait, what? Islamic extremists? Surely not!

It merely invites suspicion to dance around an obviously relevant point. I do not think that the risk of anti-Muslim pogroms among readers of the NYT rises appreciably as the issue is mentioned in earlier paragraphs of the article. If Nazis plot to blow stuff up, just go on and say they’re apparently Nazis in paragraph one. I promise not to go look up some random blonde guy and pistol-whip him. Unless he’s this one ex of my sister’s, who’s a racist skin, and…what? OT, sorry. If radical Islamists plot to blow things up, then just go on and say so.

UPDATE: James Wimberley’s point about the “Nazi’s” noted. Namely that they’re Nazis.

FURTHER UPDATE: I thought you all knew enough about me to know that I think Roger Simon is a crazy person—with a hat! It’s my birthday and everything, y’all; be charitible.

AP:

NEW YORK - In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

The study looked at complication rates within 30 days of heart bypass surgery and compared three groups of about 600 each: “those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.”

Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

A kind of reverse placebo, I guess.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him….

Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”

No, it’s designed to study the natural. Like, for example, whether prayer can help recovery from bypass surgery.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the abstract in the American Heart Journal. The full text is behind a pay wall.