According to this news story, one of the chief complaints about the Iranian election has been “not enough ballets.” I guess their voters take culture very seriously.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
This article comes from a different angle.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/06/iran_there_will/
It will take me a long, long time to get the image of Ahmadinajad in a tutu out of my head.
the so-called reformist camp — who are not exactly humanists in the Western liberal sense — may try and animate efforts to decapitate the regime and “do away with” Ahmadinejad and even the Supreme Leader himself. … [T]here may be political killing sprees ahead. … This is not a vision he advocates — but one he fears.
I’m not a fan of killing sprees, but the prospect of a revolution in Iran does not exactly dismay me — and if it were to bring to power folks who are neither Islamist fundamentalists nor u.s. puppets, that would would not exactly dismay me either.
Yeah, agreed. Given the situation–one in which the government isn’t even pretending to be something other than a dictatorship–there are many things more frightening than a violent revolution.
That didn’t take long.
Roderick,
“u.s. puppets,”
You sound like one of dem commies who questions the wisdom of the U.S. plan to civilize the world or else.
( :
On a more serious note: I too wish for the youth of Iran to light the fire of revolution.
The reformists in Iran are still Muslim men ~ nobody else is allowed to run. The leading one was the prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war. Nonetheless, I have sympathies for anyone who takes the idea of doing away with the theocratic element of the state structure seriously. An end to the Islamist morality police probably wouldn’t produce liberaltopia overnight. It’d still be a vast improvement.