One more link

This one is about rural support for Ahmadinejad.

When news spread on Saturday (June 13) morning that Ahmadinejad had won more than 60 percent of the vote cast the day before, the residents were in shock. The week before the vote had witnessed the most intense campaigning in the village’s history, and it became evident that support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s candidacy was overwhelming. Supporters of Ahmadinejad were even booed and mocked when they attempted rallies and had to endure scolding lectures from relatives at family gatherings. “No one would dare vote for that hypocrite,” insisted Mrs. Ehsani, an elected member of the village council.

The president was very unpopular in Bagh-e Iman and in most of the other villages around Shiraz, primarily because of his failure to deliver on the reforms he promised in his successful 2005 presidential campaign. He did have some supporters. Village elders confided, “10 to 15 percent of village men, mostly [those who were] Basijis [militia members] and those who worked for government organizations, along with their families.”

Yeah but CNN could never be wrong, though.

Iran Redux Or: Clarify Your Terminology, Please

Robert Fisk says that Ahmadinejad is in trouble.

I've waited a bit to get back into this mess in part because my initial reaction was too hastily posted. It's hard to offer up anything resembling solid analysis at this point and that was even more true at the time I posted. It's been described by a blogger I read quite often on livejournal that Andrew Sullivan and the Tweeters are functioning as little more than a police radio which we can all listen to and believe that we know what is happening while the information presented is - when it is credible - often hard to interpret.

But I believe Fisk to be correct to be frightened by the "absolute conviction" found on both sides of the crisis in Tehran; the supporters of Ahmadinejad and Khomeni display a reverent obedience to Iran's recent violence, while the opposition is boldly calling for rights and freedoms which they have never had under the Islamic Republic.

There's where the interesting part to all of this lies. Iran has always been a "managed" democracy with very little resembling the democratic principles found in other countries. Now, the students and the protestors are laying claim to rights and privileges which have always been presented to them as being available but were in reality illusions. The protestors are not simply demanding that the person whom they think has been rightly elected take his official position, but also are condemning the anti-democratic and authoritarian nature of the clerical system. This denunciation of their autocratic government is thus separate and ultimately non conditional to the demand that Musovai's "election" be made official through a recount process. Even if Mousavi were to be elected, the clerical system would still be solidly in place.

This is the only thing I am sure of then: that these individuals, these protestors, are being incorrectly described as "reformists" when they do not wish to reform, they wish to fundamentally change; they are espousing revolutionary ideas and should be called revolutionaries. Perhaps their ideas haven't been focused yet, no manifesto drawn up and declared, but the fact remains that the comparisons to the 1979 revolution are appropriate and telling.

We can say that at least. Oh, and we can also say that the conservative movement in our own country has yet again shown that they are completely incapable of seeing anything in nonpartisan terms. Their desire for Obama to come out in support of Mousavi's supporters is one that would be disastrously realized. It would be a gift to the hardliners, a confirmation of their belief that this unrest is an American-Zionist conspiracy to destroy Iran. As usual, Anonymous Liberal offers a salient insight into the hypocrisy of people who not too long ago wanted to bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.

Happy Birthday!

On this day in 1882, Igor Stravinsky was born. He's a foundational figure for 20th century music and I also think that there is something profoundly interesting in the dramatic stylistic shift he undertook in the 20s, going from works like Rite of Spring to the "cold blooded abstractions" of his neo-classical period. Stravinsky also made the baffling comment that music is essentially incapable of being able to express anything. An attempt to escape reality? Perhaps. Music seems to me to be the most immediately affecting of all the arts; it's akin to a language and thus should be amply able to express a wide number of things. I even think that some of Stravinsky's music which is described as emotionless is nonetheless expressive - it's not something you can escape. There's a certain cocky swagger to the opening of the Concerto in D; Dumbarton Oaks has moments of wit, humor and, like most of his work, is infused with a rhythmic vitality that I think is inherently expressive.

But oh well. Fun fact about Stravinsky: He was arrested in Boston for "tampering" with national property (there was a Massachusetts law against tampering with national property) via his interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner; he inserted a major seventh chord into it somewhere or something - I haven't actually heard it. But, here's his mug shot:

Molochnaya Voyana!!

I'm not sure who exactly coined the term Milk War but it really does make it all sound a bit silly. Not nearly as bad as Pravda, whose headline reads "Lukashenko bares his milk teeth." That hardly makes any sense. Then again, it's Prvada.

Anyway, The NYT breaks it down rather sensibly: Russia and a handful of its former satellites under the Soviet Union are due to enter into a joint military alliance. Uzbekistan has already indicated that they will have nothing to do with it unless a few provisions are changed and now that mustachioed post-bloc villain Lukashenko is saying Belarus won't join the party unless Russia allows Belarus to import milk to them. This is not a big surprise given that 95% of Belarus milk exports are to Russia. Now, I'm no captain of industry but losing that much of your market share seems like it would be a bad thing.

Why the hate for Belarusian milk? Well, it all goes back to the Georgian conflict over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, actually. Russia's pretty sore that good buddies Belarus haven't joined fellow sympathizers Nicaragua in recognizing the two breakaway regions. Since that all went down last year, Russia has withheld 1/4th of a two billion dollar loan to Belarus until Lukashenko "overhauls" the country's economic policies. They apparently have not done this.

Which brings us to today and Dmitri Anatolyevich et. al. just being really torn up and brokenhearted about the whole mess. Medvedev on Belarus not attending Russia's big "Fuck NATO" party: “Aleksandr Grigorievich Lukashenko did not call me on the telephone, and did not tell me he was intending to make a decision to not attend.”

Harsh, man.

I'm not really sure what Lukashenko thinks he can get from Europe from all of this. I mean, sure, Europe is theoretically dumb enough to embrace anyone who wants to be a part of their big melting pot, but Lukashenko is insane. Insane. He has directly said or implied (depending on who you ask) that Belarus sees Nazi Germany as a viable economic model and they had such problems with one of their newspapers, Nasha Niva (which means, amazingly: Our Grain Field) printing numerous anti-semitic articles that they had to shut the paper down. Anti-semitism is a BIG problem in the country.

Nevertheless, as the Times article points out, Belarus released some prisoners and got a call to join the EU minor league farm team or whatever and the IMF has promised to give them an additional billion dollars.

Seems like Lukashenko is realizing that Moscow and Minsk are not BFF and that Russia's support is untenably conditional. I certainly don't think Russia looks approvingly on them turning westward for help at any rate and this is likely to continue to be a problem for both countries until something is resolved. Russia really does need the smaller countries in its sphere of influence in order to revamp their abysmal military; Belarus, on the other hand, might be more amenable to Russia's demands than the EU's.

On Our Reactions to the Iranian Election

Gary Sick quite lucidly establishes that there were shenanigans in the Iranian elections.

The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his “green wave” began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” this may have been too much.

On the basis of what we know so far, here is the sequence of events starting on the afternoon of election day, Friday, June 12.

* Near closing time of the polls, mobile text messaging was turned off nationwide
* Security forces poured out into the streets in large numbers
* The Ministry of Interior (election headquarters) was surrounded by concrete barriers and armed men
* National television began broadcasting pre-recorded messages calling for everyone to unite behind the winner
* The Mousavi campaign was informed officially that they had won the election, which perhaps served to temporarily lull them into complacency
* But then the Ministry of Interior announced a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad
* Unlike previous elections, there was no breakdown of the vote by province, which would have provided a way of judging its credibility
* The voting patterns announced by the government were identical in all parts of the country, an impossibility (also see the comments of Juan Cole at the title link)
* Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene`i publicly announced his congratulations to the winner, apparently confirming that the process was complete and irrevocable, contrary to constitutional requirements
* Shortly thereafter, all mobile phones, Facebook, and other social networks were blocked, as well as major foreign news sources.

All of this had the appearance of a well orchestrated strike intended to take its opponents by surprise – the classic definition of a coup. Curiously, this was not a coup of an outside group against the ruling elite; it was a coup of the ruling elite against its own people.

I'll go into detail a bit later as to why I don't necessarily believe that this was "well-orchestrated." Perhaps "well-coordinated" is a better term; events certainly did seem to come down quickly, indicating that the entirety of the Iranian power structure was behind it, but I think there is a glaring fact which makes this whole process seem last-minute, namely its blatancy.

But, regardless of that small point of contention, Sick's post is terrific and I will come back to it later.

I'd like to take the bulk of this to examine how we in the U.S. have reacted to this whole mess. Essentially, there has been a misconception about the extent to which the U.S. and Obama (in particular) have affected the Iranian election. Sure, those in power in Iran have U.S. policy at the forefront of their agenda but there has been a perplexing sentiment expressed by conservatives that the election appearing to have been "stolen" is somehow a direct result of Obama's policies.

Drawing a causal link between Obama and the Iranian election is not tenable at all. Frank Gaffney and Richard Perle both disagree and state that it was Obama's "weakness" that caused the mullahs in Iran to act. Their line of reasoning is that Ahmadinejad, Khameni and gang are all a bunch of "thugs" who saw in Obama's "apologizing" for Bush-era policy towards the Muslim world direct confirmation that America would never truly threaten the regime and therefore they could do whatever they wanted in order to hold onto power. They point to Obama's recent speech in Cairo and his remarks last week on the Iranian election: that there was a "robust" debate taking place, that the opposition was not being outright repressed and that this progress indicated that the election of an Iranian government who would be more amenable to Washington's point of view seemed plausible and possible. Those like Perle and Gaffney, however, believe that dealing with Iran diplomatically enables and emboldens them to act in a repressive fashion - that Obama's change in tone from the Bush years was a green light for the hardliners to stage a coup and silence the opposition without fear of U.S. reprisal.

This is a typical, Americocentric and counterproductive response which is easily disproved by the fact that the Iranians successfully defied the much more hawkish Bush administration for close to seven years. One can confidently state that had Obama not tempered his language towards the Arab-Muslim world in general and Iran in particular, there would likely have been no change in Iranian "boldness" - as nebulously defined as that concept even is - and the election in Iran still would have been suspicious, with Ahmadinejad still winning. It's likely that conservatives would have then, of course, castigated Obama for not immediately calling down American might, for waffling and bowing down to the Iranians by not acting manly enough or whatever.

It's a dumb, dumb, dumb, line of reasoning that goes nowhere and one that has never been definitively proven correct.

But let's assume it's correct anyway. Let's say that, yes, Obama had the rhetorical power to influence and frighten the Iranian hardliners. His speech in Cairo was on June 4th; the Iranian election was held on June 12th. That's an entire week in which those in power in Iran had to plan their victory. That is plenty of time to realize that ceding Mousavi's victory in his home province and some of the urban centers would still allow the hardliners to boost up Ahmadinejad numbers in rural areas which were much more sympathetic to him. Take a look at this article by Foreign Policy's Karim Sadjadpour. It's a crystallization of how we in the West were thinking about this election: that it was going to be close, that the potential for illegitimacy was going to come in a lengthy Florida2000-style legal battle and not blatant electoral fraud.

The true potential for the hardliners to pull a fast one on Washington, effectively detoothing any criticism and thus giving Iran a political edge, would have been to steal the election in such a way that the rest of the world could conceivably be persuaded that it was legitimate. They could have feasibly done this with a week's time to prepare. The idea that Iran's rulers jumped into conspiratorial action the minute they realized Obama was toning down the harsh language does not hold because the fraud is so blatant.

It is much more likely to believe someone like Juan Cole, who convincingly argues that the hardliners were not driven to commit fraud until initial responses from the polls indicated that Mousavi really did have a good chance at winning. On his blog Cole recreates the "crime scene" of the Iranian election. His most convincing points for electoral fraud are: Mousavi is an Azeri, from the East Azerbaijani Province, the capital of which is Tabriz. Pre-election polling gave Mousavi a rather comfortable edge in urban centers and coupled with the fact that this was his home turf (and, as Cole points out, Azeris have a tendency to vote disproportionately for Azeri candidates) we should have seen Mousavi pull off a relatively easy victory in the city of Tabriz. However, that wasn't the case. Ahmadinejad won it with 57% of the vote. Ahmadinejad also won Tehran by well over 50%. This, too, necessitates a closer look at what happened - which, naturally, the Iranian government is unwilling to do since Khameni waived off the usual three day waiting period and officially declared Ahmadinejad the winner after only a day. This rush to declare victory is not only evidence that there was fraud, but that the fraud was done out of a sense of immediate necessity, not planning. The corollary goal of electoral fraud, remember, is to convince the opposition and the foreigners that everything was OK. There's no better way to silence opposition than the appearance of legitimacy.

And in Cole's article for Salon he explicitly describes what happened as a "last minute and clumsy fraud."

That should put an end to the notion that the Obama administration was somehow responsible for this. It is much more likely that the hardliners expected Ahmadinejad to retain enough of the vote in urban areas that, even if he lost, he could still pick up enough ground in the rural provinces to ensure - an albeit potentially slim - margin of victory. In hindsight, it's pretty clear this was a dangerous gamble on the hardliners' part. As soon as it became clear they lost, they were spurred into action. It had nothing to do with anything Obama did or did not say.

Let's go back to Gary Sick's post now. Is he right to term what happened in Iran, the mullahs and clerical authority maintaining presidential power through Ahmadinejad's re-election, a coup? Certainly, he is not entirely correct in suggesting that this was "intended" to take its opponents by surprise. Rather, I think that Mousavi's initial results surprised them so much that they were spurred into action.

He makes three very good points:

1. The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran’s Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran’s leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.

2. The Iranian opposition, which includes some very powerful individuals and institutions, has an agonizing decision to make. If they are intimidated and silenced by the show of force (as they have been in the past), they will lose all credibility in the future with even their most devoted followers. But if they choose to confront their ruthless colleagues forcefully, not only is it likely to be messy but it could risk running out of control and potentially bring down the entire existing power structure, of which they are participants and beneficiaries.

3. With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama’s plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is “likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow.” Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.

"The willingness of the regime to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud" also represents their inability to effectively silence the opposition's claims of fraud after the fact. Points 1 and 2 concisely express why I believe that this election is indicative of a "last minute" power grab. These kinds of reactionary political actions, done from an intent to maintain the political status quo, never work as they are intended and have immediate negative consequences for the regime with regards to the appearance of their power. Really successful coup attempts must carry with them an air of legitimacy. The riots in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran prove this. The hardliners in Iran wanted this to play out in the manner of a "velvet revolution" only the result would have been opposite those revolutions in Eastern Europe: those in power would remain in power while effectively disempowering the opposition.

That the Iranian government apparently threw all considerations of legitimacy out the window indicates how much of a threat the opposition represented to them. When power is threatened, the primary response is to maintain power at all costs - one couldn't care less about the appearance of dialogue or typically "free" political processes. As Sick points out the regime may very well have alienated an entire generation of "future Iranian leaders" by holding on to power in this fashion, if that is indeed what they have done. It certainly appears unlikely that Ahmadinejad really did win this election legitimately.

In light of this, one can possibly look at what happened in Iran on Friday as a temporary victory for the hardliners, but it's a victory that comes at a potentially devastating long term cost. These types of power grabs are unsustainable. Khameni and the clerics may very well have seriously undermined the future of the Islamic revolution in Iran by keeping Ahmadinejad in power.


Update: Knowing what is going on at the highest levels of your own country's government is often a difficult thing to do. Knowing what is going on at the highest levels of foreign governments is at times almost impossible. Mideast Analysis gives three potential scenarios for what happened. The first is that Ahmadinejad victory was the result of massive electoral fraud. The third is that he really did win, citing a Guardian article which does convincingly take apart some of the standard Western assumptions regarding this election.

But the second scenario is intriguing, giving this a Pynchonesque air of political paranoia:

Scenario Two: There has been a coup. Ahmadinejad and the security services have taken over. The Supreme Leader has been preserved as a figurehead, but the structures of clerical rule have effectively been gutted and are being replaced by a National Security State. Reports that facebook, twitter, text messaging and foreign TV broadcasts have been blocked, that foreign journalists are being expelled and that large concrete roadblocks (the kind that require a crane to move) have appeared in front of the Interior Ministry all feed a sense that what we are now seeing was pre-planned. Underlying this is the theory that Ahmedinejad and the people around him represent a new generation of Iranian leadership. He and his colleagues were young revolutionaries in 1979. Now in their 50s they have built careers inside the Revolutionary Guard and the other security services. They may be committed to the Islamic Republic as a concept, but they are not part of its clerical aristocracy and are now moving to push the clerics into an essentially ceremonial role. This theory in particular seems to be gaining credibility rapidly among professional Iran-watchers outside of the country.

While I admit to not even being close to an expert on Iran, I am fairly confident in assuming that this type of scenario is incredibly rare. In any event, things could come to light which prove or disprove it, but it is a fascinating thing to consider.

Russia round-up

Most have probably already read about the satellites that crashed over Siberia, but aside from that there has been a flurry of important news coming out of Russia.

• The world-wide economic shit-fest has forced the Kremlin into making sane decisions, the result of which is the ruble jumping 2.5% against the dollar and the euro. It's still lost one-fifth of its value since November, though.



• Secretary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov will be meeting in Geneva in what will hopefully be the first step towards "resetting" the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Although, I think this will ultimate be a long process - it's hard to change outlooks regarding a country that was your main enemy for seventy odd years - this is certainly a good sign.



• Furthermore, we're easing off the whole missile shield nonsense. This is no doubt influenced by Kyrgyzstan's cutting off U.S. use of its Manas airbase. We're going to need Russia's help getting troops into Afghanistan and besides, the missile shield is a stupid idea anyway, likely to further alienate Russia more than deter Iran.



• A Reese Witherspoon lookalike and pro-Kremlin blogger, Maria Sergeyeva is making waves in Russian political circles after a recent speech in which she expressed undue faith in Putin and Medvedev to ensure hers and other's financial stability. The Moscow Times article also gives a general overview of the political climate among Russia's youth - which is the polar opposite of what you find on American campuses, oddly enough.



• LUKOIL is salivating over two Iraqi oil fields, hoping that Russia's forgiving the almost thirteen billion Iraqi debt to the country will allow them to competitively bid. LUKOIL will be allying with the American company Conoco to hopefully get some of that foreign investment back into Russian energy markets, which took a severe hit last year.



• The New York Times reported this week that Russia had a banner year for arms sales in 2008, increasing exports by ten percent. They are second to, you guessed it, the United States. Medvedev bemoaned the fact that most countries will likely be strapped for cash this year and thus won't be able to buy Kalishnikovs.



• Finally, the AP reports that 7 people (4 police officers, 3 insurgents) have been killed in the Ingushetian city of Nazran. In October the governor of Ingushetia, a wonderfully psychotic asshole by the name of Murat Zyazikov, resigned and residents cheered in the streets. Medvedev appointed Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in the hopes that he would bring order to the troubled region, but this has yet to happen.

And thus ends my playing around with bullet points for the day.

Case sets huge precedent for how websites link

Wendy Davis has a piece up at Slate about a lawsuit which could have a profound effect on how most websites operate. The case refers to a dispute between BlockShopper, a real estate news site and a law firm, Jones Day. BlockShopper ran a few stories about two Jones Day lawyers who made house purchases and linked back to Jones Day for the bios on the respective lawyers. Jones Day, in turn, sued BlockShopper for trademark infringement, flimsily arguing that by linking to their website BlockShopper may be confusing readers into thinking there is a correlation between the two sites.

This is pretty much a bullshit, frivolous lawsuit and a number of law groups spoke out about it. But as Davis outlines in the article, the judge in the case ruled in favor of the law firm, BlockShopper decided to settle and the result is rather obnoxious to anyone who writes on the web:

The idea that readers of a real estate news site would somehow be confused by links to Jones Day, on the other hand, shouldn't have passed the straight-face test. One legal blogger proposed that the attorneys who brought the suit take ethics classes. Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a "new entry in the contest for 'grossest abuse of trademark law to suppress speech the plaintiff doesn't like.' " The digital rights groups Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Citizen Media Law Project, and Public Knowledge tried to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking for the case to be dismissed.

No go. In November, federal district court Judge John Darrah rejected the amicus brief and denied BlockShopper's motion to dismiss the case before trial. Two months earlier, he had issued an injunction requiring BlockShopper to remove the Jones Day articles while the case was pending.

Faced with the prospect of big legal bills and an unfriendly judge, BlockShopper co-founder Brian Timpone decided to settle. On Tuesday, the real estate site said it agreed to change how it links to Jones Day. BlockShopper will no longer use the names of Jones Days attorneys as anchor text. Instead, it will use the full and cumbersome URL. In other words, Timpone said, instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.)

Obviously, this does little to stop BlockShopper from writing unflattering articles about Jones Day employees, but the law firm has won a big victory which would make it very expensive to run a website. If a website has to alter their "linking protocol" it would not only change the style of the writing, making it look more clumsy and haphazard, but it would also be, as Davis points out, more labor intensive. That basically means more costs to the websites.

In Wisconsin there's a similar suit brought forth by Jennifer Reisinger, a political critic, who is suing city officials - including the mayor - in Sheboygan for violating her first amendment rights by forcing her to take down links to a police department. Hopefully the result of this case will be different.

*Edit* Just to let you know, I fucked up the links in this article at first. MAYBE THE INTERNETS ARE TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING

Incredible

A Republican state representative in Missouri, Bryan Stevenson, referred to the Civil War as The War of Northern Aggression. I am not making this up. The full quote was, "What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the War of Northern Aggression."

He was referring to the pro-choice Freedom of Choice Act.

Stevenson later apologized for his comment at the behest of an African American representative.

(Via Show Me Progress, which has video of the incident.)

Edit: Oddly enough, there's a professor at NYU law named Bryan Stevenson who is the founder and executive director of the civil rights group Equal Justice Initiative.

I think dementia is a subjective experience which hinders interpretative ability

Stanley Fish has always been an insane hypocrite, but he's not even bothering to make a coherent argument anymore.

The thesis for his latest blog entry is that professors are omnipotent and are mentally molesting your children at your expense. Except he elucidates said thesis in such a way that only Andy Rooney and possibly Thomas Friedman could understand how he arrived at it.

He takes the case of an anarchist physics professor at the University of Ottawa who has obviously gone batshit and isn't teaching science anymore but rather teaching political activism and yelling at his students to fight the power. Apparently there are some letters between the professor and the dean in which the latter asks the former to stop being insubordinate and do his job and the former tells the latter that being insubordinate is his job and I'm pretty sure at this point the former is winking into the camera and knowingly stroking his beard while the latter is shaking his fists and screaming at the ceiling fan in a vain attempt at making it fall on both of their heads.

But nothing gets by Fish! The man who destroyed Duke University proceeds to contradict this Canadian professor's claim by citing an Arizona court case which ruled that a teaching method could be grounds for dismissal. Brilliant, but he's forgotten that Arizona is not in Canada, you know, where the Canadian professor teaches. At a Canadian university. Oops!

But that's just a minor error, really. Fish's point is that these types of radical professors have jobs for life, can never be fired, and can therefore do whatever they want. Except this guy WAS fired. He received exactly the kind of punishment which Fish bemoans is lacking in North American schools.

So therefore I'm not really sure what his objection really is. Because he says that this case, a case, I repeat, in which a tenured professor with specific professorial duties was dismissed from his position for not abiding by those duties, confirms his belief that professors are exempt from the standard outside the ivory tower which holds people accountable for the responsibilities of their professional positions. What the hell? I know I've underlined that twice in this entry but that's because I'm still trying to process. I don't believe he's actually really saying this shit. Maybe he didn't have anything better to write about? Maybe he just really likes that special feeling you get when you complain? The man is inscrutable.

A whole lot of words about Mahler

Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra's recording of Mahler's Sixth is incredible. Aside from the fact that they put the Andante second, it's flawless and even that can be easily fixed by just putting it third in iTunes or whatever. The percussion in the opening movement is syncopated in such a way that it truly does feel like a march and the pace never slackens. At just under twenty two minutes, it's neither rushed nor boring.

The scherzo doesn't really have a Viennese quality to it and I suppose that Mahler purists will find it's atypical of other conductor's interpretations. But whatever. It works. Gergiev's best quality as a conductor is his ability to underscore contrasts - which is why I don't understand why they put the Andante second, but I'll get to that in a moment. This knack for shifting tempos and emphasis is what makes him so good an interpreter of Prokofiev's music and what gives his Shostakovich's Ninth an acerbic wit that is rare in a work usually dismissed as "one big scherzo." As usual, the LSO's string section sounds great in the middle section and everything is balanced perfectly. I love this scherzo because it's so hysterical in the climaxes, with horns screeching, thunderous blasts from the timpani, etc. But it's also quite humorous and playful at times, most notably in the twinkling glockenspiels and the halting pseudo-waltz and minuet. Mahler seemed to have a lot of fun with the dances of his native country, transforming traditional drinking dances into satanic whirlwinds and aside from the middle movements of the Ninth nowhere is this more evident than in this part of what is otherwise definitely not a lighthearted symphony.

I was expecting not to like the Andante, but the only qualm I have is that they kind of rush through the cowbells. I know, I know, but I really love the goddamn cowbells, who else has cowbells in a tragic symphony? Valery Abisalovich leads the orchestra through it at about fourteen minutes, which is three or four shorter than most recordings I've heard. The only one that was around this tempo was Boulez and I didn't like it at all because it seemed like he was embarrassed and tried to avoid it sounding too sorrowful or emotional. Gergiev, however, takes the opening at just the right slow pace underscoring its wistfulness, hinting at what's to come. The sighing violins are often criticized as being too kitschy, too cliche, but I think when played right the opening gives a cohesion to the emotion found in the rest of the movement. This music never really strikes me as depressing or pathetic in the way that, say, Tchaikovsky's Sixth does; this is more like a longing for some past peace, a memory which distance transforms into an idyllic calm. The real pathos is that these memories are distorted and whatever hero Mahler had in mind when he wrote the symphony knows this basic human fault of comparing rough times to some non-existent golden era. The quick tempo of the climaxes aids in this, making the first utterance of that lilting melody in the first half seem flippant and dismissive. When it returns, much more powerful, towards the end there is all the more impact, the whole thing effortlessly and powerfully flowing towards the end of my favorite piece of music by Mahler.

This movement is the heart of the symphony and when put third it gives a brief respite between the bite of the scherzo and the unrelenting finale. Also the emotional, uncontrolled end of the movement is a perfect contrast with the grotesque clashing in the beginning of the last movement. The reason given by people who put the Scherzo third is some misguided sense of historical correctness, namely that Mahler himself played the movement third. But he was unsure and when it was first being performed it was not definitive how Mahler wanted it to be played. He toyed with the work for two years. The other reason is that the opening of the scherzo sounds similar to the first movement. This is undoubtedly true, but there are some slight differences and again, I think it still stands as a kind of contrast, however paradoxically that might sound. The first movement is a march, the scherzo is a dance and both seem to share the same origin. This becomes more clear when heard back to back. Also, when played third the transition to the finale just sounds odd.

All in all, however, I think I'll always prefer Karajan and the Berliners for this Andante, probably because I heard that recording first. Then again, I'm a dilettante, not an actual critic so take the blathering above as an exercise in descriptive solipsism.

The best part is in the finale, by far. Everything that makes this movement what influenced Alban Berg to call it "the only Sixth, Beethoven's included" is here: the offstage celesta sounds perfectly eerie, the hammer blows aren't overwrought and they make it seem like the symphony is running into a brick wall, the fucking unhinged, ceaseless attack in the sustenuto is as exciting as any piece of Romantic music you could listen to and the final full orchestral clash perfectly closes the whole thing. This is just great playing, masterfully controlled by Gergiev. He hasn't been this dead on since his Rite of Spring, and that's saying a lot.

So buy this disc, or download it - whatever. It's the perfect introduction into what is one of the greatest symphonies written in the 20th Century.

Some notes about Biden's speech

Biden's speech was overall very promising, and except for some minor quibbles regarding Russia, I was pretty happy with it.

But going forward with the missile defense system is a mistake and Obama said he thought it was a fatuous deterrent. In his speech, however, Biden indicated that we'll go on as planned with the shield, adding the caveat "only if the technology proves cost-effective." Well, it probably won't prove cost-effective so who knows what that means. And who knows what the recent decision in Krygyzstan to ban the use of their base at Manas will mean. And that's pretty much my sentiment about his remarks about the future of U.S. and European relations with Moscow. It's not possible to get anything definitive out of it. Of course we can assume that the Obama administration will be more open to dialogue than its predecessor, but on the whole there was nothing substantive enough in Biden's speech to really forecast what is going to happen in the next few years. Certainly, Moscow's response is a good indication. According to the NYT summary of the speech, Konstantin Kosachev, a representative in the Duma, said that he was pleased with Biden's remarks about inclusion.

Relatedly, there was one phrase of the speech which bothered me. It really doesn't have anything to do with Biden because it's such a heavily ingrained part of our general rhetoric. It was this: "We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence."

The uncompromising and somewhat damning aspect to that statement is counterproductive in a way. Russia reasserting control over former Soviet republics is not a good thing, certainly, but in a way it's inevitable. And what this type of moralizing does is just make us seem like hypocrites. I don't know how many times I've read in the Russian press comments about the hypocrisy of the United States, who asserted massive amounts of influence in our back yard, and the Europeans, who, you know, had a few colonies and what have you. I get that the intent is to somehow try to convince the Russians that this kind of extroverted projection of control is ultimately not worth it, either in terms of security or economy.

And what the hell, right? Russian leaders should certainly learned something from their experiences in Afghanistan. But as we've seen with our own foreign policies decisions, we don't learn either. What we need to do is re-frame our criticism toward the Kremlin in such a way that highlights our own mistakes and problems with the idea of a "sphere of influence" and emphasizing the overlap of experience between us. This is the only way to effectively critique their foreign policy without wounding Russian pride. The opposing position to this, of course, is that any admission of culpability will provoke a Russian response along the lines of them thinking we're weak. But that concern is trumped by the possibility of really transforming our relationship by assertively underlining what we have in common.

There's a hell of a lot we don't have in common, naturally. They're not a democracy and they do not have a solid legal foundation. We need to stop pretending that they do and try to work with them in spite of this. But, we need a different approach if we are to avoid a regressive path back to a 20th century relationship with Russia.

I don't know why I was ever optimistic about this

They reached an agreement on the stimulus legislation. It's...uh, not all that great. The new bill cuts $40 billion in aid to bankrupt states and $20 billion to broken schools, all in favor of $30 billion in fucking tax rebates for people who buy homes or cars.

Why should we use this money for sorely needed investments that will pay off in the long run, when instead we can do more regressive shit that has proven to be stupid and doesn't work. Why should we learn from the past eight years? Why should the ideas of the people who got us into this mess be given any kind of credence. You guys failed. You guys collapsed entire industries and eroded the middle class. It's time for something different.

Maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel, as some folks seem to think, with the upcoming conference committee. Maybe they can work on some of these numbers and convince themselves that they have the political capital to bail out states and dying schools.

As it stands now, this is not a good deal.

Funtime in Munich

Brilliant, controversial international security expert slash cartoonish, supervillainy war criminal* Henry Kissinger is going to be given some kind of shiny thing honoring his contributions to world peace at the Munich Security Conference.

Aside from all that, the conference will also feature what will hopefully be an entertaining but not embarrassing speech by Vice President Joe Biden.


(*seriously, when Christopher Hitchens takes you down a peg without revealing his own batshit insanity, then there are problems)

Joshua Keating has hurt my feelings

Moscow Times runs an article which exposes the vast contrast between Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin which is mainly that the President likes horrible bands from the 70s like Deep Purple and Pink Floyd while the Prime Minister likes lovable Nordic bands, namely ABBA; the least insane poster over at the Foreign Policy blog, Joshua Keating, posits that this makes Medvedev more of a "badass" than Putin.

What he doesn't know is that Medvedev probably likes ABBA too. Everyone in Russia likes ABBA. This is because Russians have excellent taste when it comes to the Arts. In the winter of 2007 there were roughly A BILLION posters advertising the "smash hit musical" Mamma Mia! and people would whistle such golden tunes as "Knowing Me Knowing You" and "Dancing Queen" on the streets. Students at the Technical Institutes would take study breaks, put down their maps, stop worrying about how best to punish the Caucuses and recreate dance numbers. If ABBA were to reunite and play a free concert in Norilsk, Muscovites would ride on the backs of wolves to the frozen Siberian tundra to hear the group's glorious, inspired pop sensibilities.

If the doom and gloom from our own economy isn't enough for you

Kyrgyzstan is going to shut down the American military base at Manas. Our military officials say this won't affect operations in Afghanistan, but I think that's downplaying the situation a bit since, as the article mentions, militants recently blew up a key bridge along a supply route in Pakistan. Not being able to use the Kyrgyz base will make things a bit tougher. Tensions have been high since an incident in 2006 when a Kyrgyz man was shot by a U.S. soldier, but although many resent the presence of American soldiers, blaming them for everything from wounding national pride to destroying their grazing land - one farmer said the Americans were bad for the Kyrgyz nature - I doubt that's the leading factor. Kyrgyzstan will be getting about $2 billion dollars in credit from Moscow.

I'm not really sure what the thinking on this is. Moscow wants the U.S. out of its backyard, sure, but it's putting Kyrgyzstan in a bit of bind here. The Kyrgyz can't afford to lose us as an ally and while the economic aid from Russia will temporarily lift some of the economic pressure every country in Central Asia is feeling, if the Russian economy goes further down the drain what are they going to do?

And speaking of Russia's woes, the rouble hit an all time low this week, Bulgaria is demanding a new gas deal after being cutoff a few months ago, Fitch has downgraded Russia's debt rating to the second lowest investment grade -this is the first time its been hit since the fun times of 1998 - and the government is also bailing out their banks, injecting about $33 billion in exchange for 25-30% stakes in the various companies. The financial sector was one of the few areas the Kremlin didn't gobble up significant portions of over the best decade, probably because Russia was booming. It's going to be an interesting couple of months.

And finally, in what is surely a blow to national pride, Andrei Arshavin has left St. Petersburg and will transfer to Arsenal. He could have at least gone to Chelsea, but hey given the recent speculation of a bidding war involving every Britons favorite enemy, The Russian Billionaire, the Gunners could be experiencing a Slavic invasion soon.

Drunk or just suffered a stroke?

A disturbing but somewhat hilarious article in the Moscow Times about a Russian Aeroflot pilot who was incomprehensible and could barely stand on his feet before a flight. Passengers on the flight - which was going from Moscow to New York - demanded that he be taken out of the cockpit but were told to stop causing trouble. The pilot was eventually removed, but only after Ksenia Sobchak started getting concerned and complained. Ksenia is the daughter of former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and she is the Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton. After the pilot was taken from the cockpit he was seen to have had bloodshot eyes and denied being drunk, stating he had suffered a stroke.

There are so many good quotes from this:

"His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."

...

while pilots are forced to undergo a battery of medical tests before each flight, a test determining blood alcohol level is not among them.

...

"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," said Katya Kushner, who, along with her husband, was one of the first to react when the pilot made his announcement. "At first, he was looking at us like we were crazy. Then, when we wouldn't back down, he said, 'I'll sit here quietly in a corner. We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise.'"

...

an Aeroflot representative sought to assure them that "it's not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk."

"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."

Keep in mind that in September an Aeroflot plane crashed, killing 88 people. The pilot was found to have had alcohol in his system.

So...bombs kind of suck

On last night's Bill Moyers' Journal, the two guests for the first half of his program were Marilyn Young, a history professor at NYU with an upcoming book titled Bombing Civilians: a Twentieth Century History, and Pierre Sprey, ex-Pentagon official and former underling to Robert "strict adherence to rationality is itself a form of insanity" McNamara. Sprey is a controversial figure in military circles after his "defection" in the late 70s when he dared to suggest that the defense budgets were maybe a bit too high and that we were spending our money on ineffective weapons anyway.

They start off the discussion by stating how disappointed they were with the January 22nd air strikes in Pakistan, advocating that the new administration should reconsider the effectiveness of an intensified military strategy in the region. No doubt plenty on the left were outraged: Democracy Now! and - a little less hysterically - Lionel Beehner of Huffington Post represented many people's fears that this could be the first indication of a lack of real change on Obama's part. Pakistanis, too, rushed to point out the counter productivity of such attacks.

They have a point. I think it's worthwhile to watch the whole clip, but the two most salient critiques against both the troop increase and an increased arial assault are that we are operating under a backwards assumption and that bombing campaigns, the implicit purposes of which are to avoid politically damaging heavy casualties on the bombers' side and also to dissuade others from fighting by seeing how devastating such resistance can be, don't work.

The backward assumption, what Sprey calls the Petraeus Doctrine, is that we have to deal with the security issue before we begin work on the political issue. That is, in fact, the most prevalent objection to the alternative of seeking a political solution to the problems in both Afghanistan and Pakistan: how, dissenters ask, can it be possible to forge a stable political system in the midst of a war? Well, I can think of one time when it worked out. Sure, it might not be a completely accurate parallel, but I think it's an indication that such a thing is possible

I think Sprey and Young's second point, that bombing campaigns don't work, is much more devastating. Young reminds us that neither the English government nor the German government buckled much under intense bombing. They go on to state that there really is little we can do about collateral damage. The US might not be deliberately targeting civilians, but civilians die nonetheless - just not in as great a number as in WWII. The result is that we are creating recruits for terrorist organizations.

Moyers goes on to ask his panel if they can think of any time when a bombing campaign was effective in ending a conflict. Neither can come up with an answer: it was ineffective in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, the first and second Iraq Wars, etc...

Well, it actually was effective in the Pacific Front of World War II. They seem to have forgotten the two atomic bombs. They forced the Japanese to surrender and saved the lives of "millions" who could have been lost in a land invasion.

So, it's clear then: if we are to assume that the only successful deterrent in the history of bombing was Hiroshima and Nagasaki then we have to nuke Afghanistan, and, probably, parts of Pakistan too if we don't want a politically unfeasible number of American soldiers killed.

This is obviously insane and nobody who does not belong on the villain side of a Batman comic would suggest it unless in the direst apocalypse-as-retaliation nightmare scenario.

And yet the alternative to heavy bombing - increased troop levels - doesn't seem that much better. Obama is increasing the number of troops, but by a ridiculously minimal amount. He would be hard pressed to find the political will necessary to send the hundreds of thousands of troops into the region to stabilize it. Even then, that didn't work for the 100,000 or so Soviet troops and the 350,000 Afghanistan troops who were fighting the Mujahideen.

Let me go on a brief tangent here to say how utterly fucking ridiculous our inability to learn from history is. Vietnam didn't work so well for us. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan it didn't work for them either. The break up of the USSR shortly after that war ended led people to call it the Russians' Vietnam. Now we are back in Afghanistan, fighting the very same rebels whom an insane drunkard congressman bravely exploited the loopholes in our defense spending laws to arm. Not only did we not learn the lessons from our own past we didn't learn them from our former enemy in the same goddamn country.

It's depressing, immensely and utterly depressing, that in the one area where we needed change the most, Obama seems to be pursuing the same failed strategies that have plagued both parties for decades. Vietnam ruined LBJ's chance to more stringently fight for social change in the US. We are in the midst of a serious economic crisis and it would be disastrous if Afghanistan consumed the Obama administration in the ways in which Young and, particular, Sprey fear. I'm optimistic that we can change course, if solely because Obama has the refreshing tendency to surround himself with people who aren't carbon copies of his ideological bent and actually listening to them. We'll see.

(Related: see Robert Farley's takes on abolishing the Air Force.)

Hell Yeah

I'm really glad that one of the first things to pass through Congress under Obama's watch was overturning Ledbetter.

I know some people thought that the wording of the original law needed to be fixed to make it clear that each successive paycheck starts the discriminatory acts clock over,but I don't think that justified the Court's horrendous conclusion that Civil Rights must be extremely and unduly difficult to enforce. It's awesome that this got taken care of so quickly and I'm happy that Ledbetter's name will no longer be associated with an idiotic judicial ruling but rather with a much needed legislative step towards enforcing Equal Pay.

Catching the midday news on Echo Moscow

A correspondent just said that she was "excited and hopeful about the normalization of the intellectual pursuit of statecraft and foreign policy now that the American president speaks better English than the average citizen of Irkutsk."

Russian translated into English is like seriously one of my favorite things in the world.

Dear Chris Matthews

GOOD GOD STOP COMPARING THE BUSHES TO THE ROMANOVS.

Nothing, I repeat, nothing about that comparison makes any sense whatsoever.

Rachel Maddow is the only bright spot about MSNBC's political coverage. I have been half-listening to the inauguration hullabaloo and so far Chris Matthews has made the above idiotic statement three times, posed a barely comprehensible question to Doris Kearns Goodwin which I think had something to do with Lincoln and contained more "uhs" and "ahs" than words which one would find in the OED, told a rambling story about a cobbler and the Chief Justice both being in the same room and how that's somehow indicative of the anti-monarchical quality of American political life, and Keith Olbermann has called Obama a raisin.

This is going to be a long, long day.

I agree with Dmitri Trenin

Great op-ed by Dmitri Trenin in the Moscow Times. In it, he argues that the friendship between Putin and Bush "simulated not stimulated" a real strategic partnership. Trenin urges Obama to not neglect Russia in his administration's foreign policy agenda and offers a suggestion on how to handle Ukraine and other former bloc nation's who aspire towards membership in the European community.

The Euro-Atlantic security architecture is your next priority. In April, you will come to Europe to celebrate NATO's 60th anniversary. As such events go, there is always a temptation to praise the past successes. You need to move beyond that and recognize that Euro-Atlantic security will remain an unfinished business until Russia and its neighbors, including Ukraine and Georgia, are fully integrated within it. The idea that expanding NATO membership while excluding Russia is obviously not working. Seizing upon President Dmitry Medvedev's initiative of a European security treaty offers a chance to start discussing the hard issue so far avoided.

This is anything but a philosophical discussion. Anyone who has an interest in keeping Ukraine intact should support its tortuous but realistic efforts toward accession to the European Union, not on a crash course for NATO. But more important, you will be challenged to come up with a formula for a meaningful Euro-Atlantic alliance that includes Russia. The Kremlin muses about a Helsinki II. Give them an Obama I.

I think the overall point is that seeing someone's soul and a deep, personal friendship tend to get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle inherent in governing.

What the hell, Thailand?

Also, a second what the hell to Pantene.

Putin is expanding his repertoire

Vladimir Vladimirovich, perhaps a little insecure at the thought of being pigeon-holed, perhaps simply grown tired of hearing those around him sing the praises of his masculinity after his habit of throwing down his rifle and ripping off his shirt after he has rescued a child from the maw of a bear only to charge headfirst toward a giant tiger threatening one of his aides, has now decided to take up the art of watercoloring. And all for charity! Take that Sarkozy!

I say good for him. It might boost his ratings with that cross section of the public (read: everyone) who is now beginning to experience the harsher side of relying entirely on global oil speculators to drive your economy.

Two notes: one, for those who don't read Russian those numbers in the second link represent the amount of votes Putin has received in a nationwide poll of who are the "disgrace of Russia"; two, the blame which Putin and Medvedev are placing on the US and, in general, international forces conspiring against the purity of Russian economic leaders in tearing down the facade of their nation's wealth will, inevitably, lead to someone (not just Zhirinovsky) blaming all of this on the Jews.

And....we're back

Well, it's the new year and with today being Russian Orthodox Christmas I thought I'd resurrect this blog. In an effort to force myself to write more I'll be limiting the subject matter to things going on in Russia and various ramblings about classical music.

I've really not been paying attention to the Gas War, aside from finding out that in total 12 countries are without a reliable source of gas this January thanks to the impasse between Ukraine and Russia. I do know that the global economic crisis is hitting the Russian economy harder than most countries in the west. The rouble is being rapidly devalued and their stock market has lost about 70% of its value. Other than that, though, I haven't much to offer as I've been mostly occupying myself with trying to find gainful employment in this new year. The campaign I was working on lost - badly - and thus I was not able to continue my career in politics. Probably a good thing considering how inept I was at it and how much I really didn't enjoy the work.

Anyway, what I have been doing is listening to a lot of new music. I've discovered a truly amazing Russian composer. His name is Alexander Tcherepnin. He wrote in the beginning of the 20th century and his compositions were strikingly original. For example, his first symphony (1927) is the first symphonic work to contain a movement scored entirely for unpitched percussion. He invented his own scale, which bares his name, consisting of nine notes. The main body of his works are six piano concertos and four symphonies. I've only one of his recordings (which you can get off iTunes for ten bucks less than in stores) that contains his first piano concerto, a one movement work with an unforgettable quasi-minimalist opening with a distinctive flair of folk melodies from the Caucuses and also his third piano concerto. The third piano concerto is a bit harder to get into than the first, but it reminds me in a lot of ways of how Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony ties together its material: at first it can seem disjointed, but upon a few repeats the different movements are themselves broken down into discrete sections. The effect is the sonic equivalent of a kaleidoscope and is remarkably enjoyable. In addition to the concertos, there are two "fillers", crowd pleasers which also serve as orchestra show off pieces.

I've heard snippets of his other works and what I love most is the synthesis of so many different musical styles: from the Caucuses, China, Japan, Arabic folk songs, and a number of other places I'm probably missing. It never sounds cheap* and the way that he utilizes his influences combined with his own individualistic contributions makes for some truly weird but never uninteresting sounds.

Anyway, his music is really worth exploring if you're a fan of 20th century music. He's criminally underplayed and yet some of his pieces have the potential to be really big attractions to contemporary audiences. I'd love it, for example, if they took Prokofiev's Third piano concerto off of any one of the numerous "Visions of Russia" lineups orchestras put out each seasons and replaced it with Tcherepnin's First concerto (incidentally, you can hear the awesome opening to this concerto when you preview the work in iTunes store)

I get the feeling my descriptions of this sucked, which is why I need to write more. Hopefully some of you are still checking this periodically.

*It's the complete opposite of the type of imperialistic folk-looting that you get in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. I hate that shit. (not the ballet itself, of course - it's what got me into both classical music and Russia, so...)