Commenter Archive

But...Reihan and John Schwenkler are talking around the 800 pound gorilla in the room......nat'l healthcare is very bad juju for the GOP.
Small gov't meant local welfare providers like churches took care of the electorate. Big gov't welfare means increasing secularization, and addiction to liberal welfare.
The problem for Reihan, is that his audience wants nat'l healthcare, and doesn't have the IQ substrate to absorb why that is a bad idea.
It is the same old problem.
There are good reasons for conservatism....just none that the left side of the bellcurve is capable of understanding.

Chris_kun, a major huge difference is that is Islamic scholarship and Islamic jurisprudence are valued far more in Islamic societies than Christian scholarship is in ours. Christian jurisprudence doesn't exist in our society.
In American culture a college degree in secular law or medicine or science is the greatest good....in Shi'a Islam....the lawyers are the clergy.
So Montazeri's statement packs a whallop. That part of the Assembly of Experts (Rafsanjani and his allies) and part of the Guardian Council dissent against Khameini and Nejad is simply huge.
The more Nejad and Khameini crack down on the dissidents, the more they lose legitimacy. The cost to stay in power I think is too large.
The regime would have to pull a Tianaman to accomplish that.
2500 dead and 20,000 wounded?
That would mean the end of the regime.
I see signs that the army would not support that.

full circle
Is Islamist like Christianist?

Pakistan was the first Islamic state.

And I changed your honorific.
kun would mean young man in your context, more of a peer to my chan.
;)

Chris_kun
How do you see the islamic judiciary changing?
Even Iraq has sharia writteninto its constitution.

Oh I forgot VDH.
Also a charter member of the axis of idiots.

Sayeed Ayatollah Monzeri is saying that election fraud is not only illegal, but a sin.

can’t but eventually lead to the mass secularization of Iranian society and politics

Not true.
No more than in our society. Nejad's fundamentalists are analogous to American religious conservatives, except for the Israel thing.....they are in favor of virtue, social mores and taboos imposed as law, conservation of tradition, etc.
But Islamic jurisprudence is rooted in sharia law, and the Islamic judiciary is not very analogous to western lawyers and western judges.

And you wonder why I get so mad.
John....Iran is a THEOCRACY.
Sad day for the xianists, we live in a pluralist republic with a separation between the church and the state.

4- I ask the police and army personals not to “sell their religion”, and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before god. Recognize the protesting youth as your children. Today censor and cutting telecommunication lines can not hide the truth.

Actually Chris, that is one of the 5 pillars, or the 8 practices in case of Shi'ia Islam...salihat, or just deeds.
Most Americans seem to have bought into the cartoonish construct of Islam ginned up by Bush the Comick Rustick and the axis of [islamophobic] idiots--Steyn, Daniel "crack" Pipes, Malkin, Roobart Spbunsar, Spengler, etc....in their apparent drive to cheerlead the lowerhalf of the bellcurve (socons) onwards to the Clash of Civilizations.
This is not an uprising against Islam......the greens are more devout than Nejad's fundies. The legality of the election is in question, and that will be decided by Islamic jurisprudence, and not by western secular law.
Sayeed Ayatollah Montazeri is pointing this out.
Islam is all about justice.
One of the 99 names of God is "the Just".

When the sky is torn
When the stars are scattered
When the seas are poured fourth
When the tombs are burst open
Then a soul will know what it has given and what it has held back

My empathy has been exhausted by stupidity and partisanship.

Even the greatest love empathy in the world can wear out, Scarlett.

I prefer, ekshually, to argue with people on the same side of the bellcurve of IQ with me as it is pointless to attempt to persuade someone without the basic intellectual substrate.
Man cannot acquire what he cannot use.

I like, You twodigit tools myself.
;)

Jaybird, conservatives don't believe I should control my own sexual destiny........what is the difference?
;)
And now, I understand the right's naivete purrfectly.
You twodigit tools believed in the Bush Doctrine, aka the Epic Fail of the Manifest Destiny of Judeoxian Democracy in MENA.

Freddie.....I think the right doesn't understand the students they are expressing extreme solidarity with ARE ACTUAL DEVOUT MUSLIMS! Haha, some of them go to maddrassa even, and the uni students are uniformly shi'ia.
This is going to make all their heads explode when they realize it.
Sweet!

Mr. Obama has the opportunity to lend the protestors the considerable weight of U.S. moral support, just as he has the opportunity to show the regime there are consequences for stealing elections. One such consequence would be for the President to remove his opposition to various bills in Congress, sponsored by Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman and others, that sanction companies that sell gasoline to Iran. An estimated 40% of Iran's domestic gasoline consumption comes from foreign sources.

This is stupid. Could Lieberman be anymore moronic?
Sanctions hurt the population and empower Nejad's anti-US meme-war.
BULLSHYTT
Obama opened a door for dar al-Islam.....it is our duty to observe and not to look away and let the Iranians reform their own country.
It is our duty NOT TO MEDDLE this time.

Freddie.....what about this?

Ajax was only a small part of our much broader meddling with reinstalling the Shah against the will of the Iranian people.
I just thought Freddie should mention it by name, because of the infamy.

And.....half the country is under thirty.
Patience.

Lol Freddie, you forgot Operation Ajax where American CIA operatives colluded in the assassination of a freely elected Iranian president.
I think Obama is actually, bright enough to stay the fuck out.
Bob Cheeks.....I am a practicing Sufi.
In'shallah you will never have to kiss my ass.
The students that fuel the Green Revolution are unanimously devout-- green is the color of al-Islam.

But that doesn't seem to part of conservatism at all.
Conservatism seems to be totally about growing government of uteruses and penises.
Call meh skeptical.

Srsly...what does conservatism provide that we actually need anymore?
No one can even tell me what conservatism is.
Small government for the markets and big government for uteruses and fallopian tubes and penises?
That is sure what it looks like from here.

Every generation says that.

And sometimes it is true. Like the Whigs.

There's a thought...perhaps the buffers of law and society and science and technology and government have simply made coservatism obsolete?
What if what we are seeing is the natural decline of an outdated philosophy?

Gratz on the Sully link, my habbibi.
Sully gets it.
This is the same dumb failcake that Coulter served up when the last prolife terrorist was being sentenced for murder.
Conor and Douthat and McArdle can tart up Coulters failcake all they want with faux-lucid verbage and terrorist apologia but it is still a whore's argument and they are still intellectual whores for spreading it again.