Some people on here and Twitter were sure they’d succeed. But they seem to have vanished off the radar in the past couple of days. Few news stories, no updates on /r/worldnews. What happened?
In reality, as I pointed out, they were almost certain to fail. To get a color revolution going, you need a mass movement, some degree of elite defection, and preferably both.
Iran had neither, as perusing the main stories even at the height of the protests several days ago showed:
- University students refusing to trample the US and Israeli flags;
- Sportswoman defection;
- Some protests from actors;
- Anchorwoman resigning and apologizing for “lying for 13 years.”
So, that’s basically just students and some professionals in the big cities, i.e. what are usually the most disaffected groups towards “sovereignist” regimes.
To slide in a Russia analogy, many of Russia’s state institutions, including those viewed as “propaganda bullhorns,” are staffed by crypto-liberals. (Liberals are more intelligent than “vatniks”, so any state needs them to staff its organs to some extent, so that they function at some level of competence). I can’t imagine it’s much different in Iran. There’d be differences, too. No risks to “defecting” for a Russian state journalist. While that Iranian anchorwoman might face consequences (though I don’t know Iran well enough to be sure). So it’s probably a more meaningful act.
And I’d guess velayat-e faqih is even less appealing to the high IQ than Putinism, which would make those protesting classes even angrier. (Actually, if I was Iranian, I’d guess I’d be against it, since the Islamosovok theocracy is actively hostile to Iranian nationalism as opposed to Putinism’s merely ambivalent relationship towards it).
Still, these are irrelevant details, in the big picture. The polls show that the Islamic Republic enjoys a groundswell of popular story, while the only major semi-independent force are the even more radical IRGC. You’re not going to get anything that’s to the liking of the neocon/regime change crowd out of that stew.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
The gas subsidy protests in November drew hundreds of thousands.
The Suleimani funeral drew millions.
The plane protests drew thousands.
According to actual Iranians I saw on twitter, a lot of people didn’t even know there were protests about the plane. The Basij seemed really enthusiastic about busting heads, so that scared a lot of people off even if they did know about them.
The danger to the regime by these particular protests were blown out of proportion. The blob thinks every protest in Iran is the end of the regime.
Alt lite reporting on it really pissed me off. That is first time a lot of their personalities lied by omission. Discclaimer obviously people are not perfect and lie. This was extra.
Is Confucian China the only historical example of of a socially and culturally conservative midwit elite? How can a modern state like Iran or Russia replicate this political system.
Maybe the Right’s human capital problem is unsolvable because having an IQ higher than 110 automatically makes you hostile to conservative ideas, like a biological programming, just like you are biologically programmed to eat and breathe, or am I wrong here?
It has gotten to the point where popularity on Twitter and Reddit indicates that a ‘happening’ is actually of no particular importance.
Perhaps because the events that get attention on such platforms are often those which are forced by globohomo media, rather than manifesting naturally. e.g. impeachment and Russiagate in the American context.
YES, you are unequivocally wrong on this!
Does she look like Sharipova? Or did she come flying the latest MiG or J-20? If not, send her back. We do not need women athletes.
Green Protests of 2009 and fuel protests were hundreds of times bigger and failed to do anything. It’s bizarre how some student protests marginally larger than berkeley’s in California were covered with such scrutiny and amplified in the western media. A few hundred liberals refused to step over the Israeli flag — so what? Such people exist all over the world and are rightfully mocked everywhere except the west.
The Iranian govt’s dislike towards pre-islamic nationalism is certainly more hostile than it ought to be, but it is not entirely unwarranted as liberal types and zionists have attempted to coopt Cyrus the Great as some big hero for human rights and a philosemite in the pre-enlightenment era. Reading the Cyrus Cylinder myself only gave me the idea that he wanted to win over conquered people by running his empire with a bit less of an iron fist than the earlier babylonians. We know less about cyrus than I would like, but he was probably less a liberal and more a pragmatist. That weird Israeli coin that shows Cyrus and Trump side by side is particularly bizarre as Cyrus did not conquer other states for Israel, but for Iran.
Perhaps there was more of a dislike towards pre-islamic iranian civilization by the IR back 40 years ago, but like the USSR and China after their revolutions the IR has toned themselves down over the years and become more of a pragmatic authoritarian type government.
There’s certainly a positive correlation between IQ and openness and between openness and being liberal. However, those correlations do not equate to being biologically programmed to be a left wing vanguardist. Moreover, these correlations do not deserve to be compared to biological imperatives like breathing.
Most liberals in the US seem totally disingenuous anyway, and they probably only signal liberal values because liberalism is socially fashionable.
Most people are pretty apathetic politically and have fairly elastic political views.
Once liberal values get ossified there will be a generation of young, reactionary and smart radicals with these traits. It’s kind of what happened in the early 20th century. It wasn’t true conservatism so it went bad.
I know a right wing, brilliant, adventurous Gen X person whose parents were boomer hippies ( guy has spent part of his childhood at Eselon)
This largely seems true.
As for Nationalism, I think the IR thinks it is nationalist. Khomeini certainly thought he was saving Iran.
“Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1400 years. You, who want freedom, freedom for everything, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom.” – Ruhollah Khomeini
Well Zoroastrianism was hostile to male homosexuality and was anything but globohomo friendly.
A leadership cadre not in thrall to the status provided by Western academia.
Failing that, some kind of radical political change in the US that gives conservatives a mandatory quota throughout academia.
https://i.ibb.co/nbSWVk3/iqope.png
From the IQdb dataset, in general there is no correlation. But if you stare hard enough at the data you can see an inverted V statistically significant relationship, for low IQ≤90 increasing IQ increases Openness and the reverse for IQ>90.
It is generally asserted that the higher IQ educated tended to be liberal. So the liberals tended to be less openness and hostile to any ideas different from their own. So Znzn’s assertion that “having an IQ higher than 110 automatically makes you hostile to conservative ideas” might be correct. Similarly very low IQ also makes you hostile to liberal ideas.
No such thing. A “conservative” is just a liberal that takes it slow. (Which automatically explains why they’re necessarily low IQ.)
No thanks, I’m not an NPC.
It’s unsolvable if you think right-wing means “conservative” but that’s just the box where the right has been forced into in the US. The European nationalist right-wing had plenty of jobs to offer to intellectuals to argue over linguistics (evidence of some related tribe having once lived in an area = territorial claim), racial theories and so on. The American regime vigorously suppresses every field of research that would have non-leftist political consequences like evolutionary biology, group differences, gender differences etc and that has the effect of limiting the right-wing to non-intellectual approaches.
GBR an outlier.
Private schooling, better yet boarding schools, really does keep the elite reactionary.
It is actually important to note that Khomenei basically saw himself and his role as a classical Platonic/Aristotelian philosopher king. And that basically informed his actions and whatever choices he made.
Often forgotten is the abrupt turn of adherence by America’s youth in the 1980’s to conservative thought spearheaded by groups like the Young Republicans that coincided with the popularity of Ronald Reagan. Although much less prominent today, it signaled a paradigm shift in political alignment that still has influence to this day. I think, however, that these adherents to traditional conservative values have not been able to successfully pass on these values to their college age offspring that are coming of age today. As the liberal ideas of the 60’s & 70’s seem to be gaining in prominence today among a large portion of today’s youth, it appears to me that a left wing resurgence is bound to reemerge even more than what we have today.
that reminded me of the band Army Of Lovers, or it’s brains Alexander Bard … he is a gay I suppose, but he converted to Zoroastrianism … although he now seems to endorse the “open source” religious movement Syntheism …
Didn’t know how popular Army of Lovers was or is in Russia …”to date, Army of Lovers have been the only foreign act in Russia to achieve diamond status besides Kylie Minogue’s 2001 album Fever. ” America was too conservative to embrace Army of Lovers …
Bard is published futurist cyberphilosopher nowadays… interesting figure ….
Songs: Crucified, Israelism (banned in MTV) , Say Goodbye to Babylon,Carry My Urn to Ukraine, Heterosexuality, Also Sprach Alexander (LOL!)
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videos are clever, colorful and extravagant, tunes catchy Euro Dancce often with Eastern European flavor
apologies for the post above, it went off tangent.
Seems that the American conservatives get their ideas of the “imminent” — or should we say “eminent” following Donald — revolution in Iran from the Twitter users like Hashmet Alavi … but does that guy even exist, or or is he an inauthentic fake profile created by MEK …
the US Conservatives also follow the Imam of Peace … but he might exist …
Heshmat Alavi appears not to exist. Alavi’s persona is a propaganda operation run by the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is known by the initials MEK, two sources told The Intercept.
“Heshmat Alavi is a persona run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK,” said Hassan Heyrani, a high-ranking defector from the MEK who said he had direct knowledge of the operation. “They write whatever they are directed by their commanders and use this name to place articles in the press. This is not and has never been a real person.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/heshmat-alavi-fake-iran-mek/
Bolton and Giuliani are supporters of the “Islamo-Marxist” terrorist group MEK, but just recently Pompeo said that the administration does not work with MEK, then again, Pompeo is usually very frugal with the truth. So the opposite might be the case.
It isn’t true, unless the government denies it.
Had they been boomers, it’d be more easy to understand.
https://memestatic.fjcdn.com/pictures/Behind+the+enemy+powers+der+ewige+boomer_0d6988_6818597.jpg
The US Right has virtually nil representation in academia.
This is thanks to:
-Selection bias, conservative leaning people find the academy unfulfilling and of low income potential
-Discrimination, which is furiously denied by the left
-glorification of the private sector
-An unwillingness to demand Affirmative Action for conservatives, out of fear for undermining efforts to eliminate A/A
So the typical con intellectual aims to end up at a think tank, which is more glamorous than the academy.
Conservatives in the US put lots of weight into “bootstraps” approaches, to the extent they won’t even demand that “conservative” should be a protected class along side LGBTQQIAA.
There’s always been a sort of working class/small business conservative attitude that looks on with envy at the benefits that the public sector workforce receives (this never applies to the military, rarely to the police).
Among these people, there’s almost an article of faith that unions are the cause of deindustrialization, and that anyone should just “bootstraps” and “find a better job”. Needless to say, the conservative elite have eagerly amplified this sentiment far beyond where it came from.
So in 2009-10, there was a surge in anti-union sentiment related to the auto bailouts, which the Tea Party easily exploited to win the 2010 elections. But such sentiment disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived, and in 2020 pro-union sentiment is higher than ever before. Still, Millennials suck at actually organizing unions.
So instead of encouraging right-leaning students to become primary and secondary teachers, or become university professors; Con Inc stood by and let the left monpolize these culturally powerful institutions.
The left wing resurgence in youth today is mostly thanks to demographic subversion, and also due to record high student debt, particularly with young women. The Right hasn’t done much to stauch the flow, doubling down on boorishness.
I do predict a swing to the right among these women, as their debts are either paid off or wiped out by forgiveness. But its hard to say if it will be to neoliberalism or conservatism. I call it the “Neo-Victorian Feminism”. A lot of women who expected marriage will hit 40 one day and find nothing of the sort. They are going to take their anger out on both the men that refused to marry them, and to the feminists that lied about “having it all”.
All those in Iran who refuse to walk over the jewish flag should be shot, they are supporting a regime that has very openly declared their intentions to destroy Iran.
A lot of both men and women are going to turn 40 and realize that they still have $86,790 left in unpaid school loans with no end in sight in ever paying it all off. These are the ones that will look towards the left and not the right for help in having their debts forgiven. Can you really blame them?
Who is “the blob”? The Western mainstream media? Someone else–and, if so, whom?
I find it quite surprising how patriotic Americans tend to be and what a strong sense of cultural identity they have considering it is a totally deracinated society, yet they are more patriotic and frankly jingoistic than most native Europeans are.
I wouldn’t go as far to say the US is a cohesive society on a day to day basis, but they definitely have a strongly defined sense of what “Americanness” is and they do pull together when they feel threatened or challenged by a foreign country.
… and now a penpal of Justin Murphy!
O/T
Haven’t thought about a favorite Rumi poem for some time
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Jellaludin Rumi,
—
In Iran, “They honor their poets higher than their warriors.”
https://i.postimg.cc/G2QXMmLk/Rumi-monument.png
At the monument to Rumi & other poets, Iranians gather at lunch hour, drink tea and read poetry to each other.
nb. The monument to Rumi is in Turkey
The Mevlâna Museum, located in Konya, Turkey, is the mausoleum of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian Sufi mystic also known as Mevlâna or Rumi. It was also the dervish lodge (tekke) of the Mevlevi order, better known as the whirling dervishes.
—
more pertinent to AE’s column:
Neda is being recycled:
2009 Neda:
https://i.postimg.cc/2j4VqLHc/neda.png
2020 Neda: “Neda’s Blood Stained the Ground Where Iranians Protest Today”
[see all the blood spurting and staining Iranian ground as bystanders do chest compressions?]
https://i.postimg.cc/BbDZHkcP/Neda-without-blood.png
We have a different working definition of ‘statistically significant‘, you and I.
I know you would prefer that I give it to you straight – like pear cider that’s made with 100% pears.
To begin with, I have a strong aversion to using a completely bogus, as-bad-as-BriggsMyers metric as a dependent variable.
We all have bad days, so sometimes stupid variables can make it onto the RHS… but never ever the LHS.
The “Big Five” is a taxonomy that has appeal to innumerate charlatans – psychosophasters, HR-retards and so forth.
As with horoscopy and haruspicy, its practitioners become adept at making up stories to cover up the epistemic wasteland they perpetuate. At the end of the day though, it’s just some halfwit mumbling nonsense – whether it’s in an office, in a shop that sells crystals and dream-catchers, or in a robe with his hands up to the elbow in sheep guts.
May as well try to use IQ to explain the national average Ascendant sign, or the national average length of bits of wool that are found in the street.
(That last one’s in there for comedy effect: it’s a contrast to the fake things in that it’s a real thing, albeit hard – and pointless – to measure. Think of it as an example of Verfremdungseffekt – which you probably know by its other name – Brechtian alienation).
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However let’s say that for some reason, someone felt like estimating piecewise-linear relationships between a poorly-measured thing (IQ) and a largely-imaginary thing (psychosophaster checklist-based, non-replicable horseshit), using a dataset that is too small.
“Some reason”? I know – it’s unappealing to just dismiss motivations with some airy flourish. Maybe they have a fetish. Perhaps someone holding their family hostage and threatening to do them harm unless they conduct a glaringly-obviously-flawed statistical analysis. It’s impossible to really say, but it’s best not to assume that sentient beings just do shit at random.
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Well in that case…
In order for that person to get a non-failing grade in 2nd year undergraduate Econometrics in 1991, they would have to show a Chow test for parameter stability.
An estimation method that obtained the breakpoint as an output rather than imposing it wouldn’t go astray either (but wouldn’t get extra credit).
What would have gotten extra credit, is noticing the obvious outliers in sub-sample 2 (the “> 90” subset) and making it clear that in such a situation using something like Thiel-Sen (basically the median slope for all lines constructed from pairs of points) would be better than basic linear regression. Theil-Sen is robust in the presence of outliers; OLS isn’t.
About those outliers though: anyone not wedded to a linear relationship would notice the gigantic fucking cluster at “pretend psych metric” = 50. Metrics with the explanatory power of a coin toss are like that – that “μ = 0.5” characteristic.
Looking at the relationships between the p-values, R-squareds and sample sizes, it is very likely that the null of ‘no regime change‘ will be satisfied for Chow.
I can’t be arsed back-solving for the respective RSSes and calculating Chow formally (there’s enough information to do so) and I spent 17 seconds trying to find the data (I searched ‘IQdb’ and got an image-search site, then gave up).
Between the outliers, the breakpoint selection issue, and the small sample size, I’m confident.
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I know, I know… “Typical [E|I]NTJ: low Flayvin, high Gloyvin, and practically zero Hoyven-MAYvin. If only I still had my re-floyvinator… “
Well, you can hardly blame them, surely: it was obviously driven by their commitment to scientific approaches to problem-solving.
Consider what they knew from their literature…
They knew that Ahriman buttfucked himself in some weird attempt to destroy the world by the least-likely-to-succeed method imaginable.
They knew that when Ahriman did that, his arsehole (I assume) released of a bunch of demons (or goblins maybe… perhaps just ‘minions’ would have worked in the past, but now that conjures up mental pictures of mostly innocuous little chiclet-shaped yellow critters).
When facts like that are in evidence – written down for anybody to read – it’s pretty clear that the Man of Science is obliged to take action.
If sticking things up your own poo-chute causes masses of demons to spurt out your arsehole (I assume), then doing same to someone else’s poo-chute/s must have a similar effect – that’s just basic science.
I am certain that 97% of Zoroastrian scholars took the same view – and as we know to this very day, numerical plurality is what decides scientific debates.
So you can’t just declare the resulting society-wide norms ‘irrational’ and be done with it. The science was settled.
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The alternative hypothesis – that it was just nonsense made up by charlatans – is too horrible to contemplate.
If that was the case, someone would have to find a scientific reason why religious texts always say words like “This is totally true“. Checkmate, doubters!
Otherwise we all just have to throw up our arms in despair and declare that Zoroastrianism is nonsense, and Ahura Mazda sounds like a good name for a variety of Japanese car.
The theologically astute will immediately notice that such a conclusion makes no sense whatsoever, on multiple grounds:
① it says right in the book that it’s all true (it’s in there somewhere); and
② Mazda started using ‘letter-number’ names (CX-5, RX-7 etc) ages ago.
The natural conclusion, then, is that anybody who suggests it is obviously a daeva – which Wikipedia defines as “a particular sort of supernatural entity with disagreeable characteristics“. Probably a predilection for bums, too (although I suppose that is a disagreeable characteristic, but it ought to be given more prominence).
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A Cynic (especially a cynical one) would just say that they had loads of time on their hands: they had developed a scam whereby they no longer had to work.
The downside to the grift was that they had to make up new stories, or add embellishments to the old stuff – otherwise people would drift off and stop paying attention, thus putting the livelihood of the clerisy at risk. That’s what a cynic would say.
So (the cynics would continue) the clerisy had to produce new material every now and then, which generally involved telling the laity who to hate.
Since poofs aren’t very good at defence, and are better at interior design than they are at asymmetric tactics, they were among the first targets.
That’s what they’d say – the Cynics, I mean.
Fucking Cynics. They obviously can’t read: it says right in there (somewhere) that it’s all true, like 100% true and real and not even made up, not a bit. In fucking writing. What more do they want?
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It turns out that a whole lot of primitive fucktards took a dim view of bummers, back thousands of years ago.
Not just Zorro and the Astrians: The Deuteronomists and the Levites also had a bit of a death-dealing hard-on for bummers; but they also had a death dealing hard-on for people who picked up sticks on the wrong day, which doesn’t seem at all the same.
Frankly, I have no view on bumming – but I have strong views on being bummed. If someone came up to me and said “I like bums, and you have a nice bum. can I bum you?”
I would say “No, but thanks for asking. I reckon it would hurt more than doing a big hard poo, and I deliberately eat lots of fibre so that my poo is not as hard as an erect penis. Not that ‘erect penis’ is actually a benchmark that I use explicitly, but thinking about it now my ideal poo consistency is about the same as porridge when you let it cool down to room temperature, which is a lot less rigid than an erect penis.”
He would respond (if he was honest): “Are you a scientist, then?”
And I would say “No – I did well at Physics and Chemistry in high school. Why do you ask?”
And he would say “No reason. Well, I’m off to find someone else to bum.”
And that would be that: no offense given or taken, and no appeal to a congeries of primitive drivel written down by ignorant fuckwits who didn’t understand basic Public Choice Theory.
HAIL KEK.
Someone woke up from the wrong side of bed this morning.
I never said that that was a causal relationship, just correlation. In fact the initial chart I tried was as you said. However I inherently dislike an unstable structure in the shape of “>” and so I swapped them. Also the inverted V shape is shown in a neutral up/down position rather than the biased pointing to the righ > shape and having an x value which gives 2 y values is confusing. Your preference for unstable right pointed structure shows you have an unstable alt-right mind.
Though Big5 normally does not have good reception but if they have consistent measure and they can be useful in explaining some phenomina, like why there are bipolar arguments. If there is no relationship then what the left-right arguments are about? It is is linear then only one side is taking pot shot while the other will just ignore them. Heated arguments only happen with V or U shape relationships.
In fact you can do that. IQ influences the national GDP. More prosperous country can afford better quality wool. The price of wool is dependent on the diameter and length of the fibre and something called the “position of break middle (pobm)” which can be estimated from the national average length of bits of wool that are found in the street. The determination for the price of wool, http://www.makingmorefromsheep.com.au/market-focussed-wool-production/procedure_2.1.htm
“Growing ultrafine Merino fleece wool
Growing superfine Merino fleece wool
The most uptodate IQ data is from David Becker
https://viewoniq.org/?author=2
And the bonus is that it also contains the national averages of Big5 data
chow.test(y1,x1,y2,x2,x=NULL)
F value d.f.1 d.f.2 P value
5.512774467 2.000000000 51.000000000 0.006799685
Satisfied??
I don’t know about the USA, but bookshops in Europe tend to have a slight “left” bias in terms of what types of books you see on display. My guess – and it is no more than that – is that it is because right-wing people are less likely to read books.
Around that time photos stared emerging about Iran and about Russia documenting atrocities or protests in those countries on Fox/CNN .
One was from Cyprus which media claimed to be from Russia
One was from some winter activities which was told by media as proof of on going ant government t activity in Iran ( in summer )
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Now Buzzfeed has this article on the viral videos promoted by truth telling facebook who wouldn’t allow truth on Israel
“A viral video titled “Truth From an Iranian,” which has amassed more than 10 million views across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, was created by a registered lobbyist who previously worked for a militia group fighting in a bitter civil war in Libya.
At no point during the five-minute video, in which she praised the US drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani” its not told taught , Saghar Erica Kasraie had worked fir Chruistian evangelical organization and for CIA protege Hafter and in turn she has been featured by
Christian Broadcasting Network, The Ingraham Angle, and Fox News as expert .
source- https://www.buzzfeednews.com/aricle/ryanhatesthis/the-iranian-woman-in-the-iraniansdetestsole
What I remember from another article is that this lady has not lived in Iran as an adult .