Tag: politics

#REVIEW: The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, by Andrew Scott Cooper

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.

I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.

The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:

The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)

Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.

I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.

One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Teaching1 Comment

Today was more or less the exact same day as yesterday– got up, went to work for a few hours, argued with no one in particular about my classroom furniture, got home, worked on school shit for a bit more. We met some family for dinner at a place that is traditional for my wife’s side of the family, and I think I am going to push back the next time it is suggested they go there, but “Luther didn’t like his dinner” is not the most engaging of blog posts.

So instead, I’m going to go read for a while. My suggestion to you is that if you have never heard Abdul el-Sayed speak, you should do some Googling and watch a speech or two. He’s been all over my TikTok lately and I’m starting to get serious Barack Obama 2004 vibes from the guy. I’m going to try to embed an appropriate snippet, but I’m not convinced it’s going to play nice with WordPress. We’ll see:

…

It will not. So click the link:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTAtWsPxa

An open letter to Gov. Andy Beshear

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Here’s how you handle this:

Announce that Mitch McConnell’s office has until the end of the week to respond in a satisfactory fashion to your entirely reasonable letter about his health. If they do not, at noon on Monday you’ll be holding a press conference on the front steps (or equivalent thereof; the hospital probably doesn’t have a lot of steps) of George Washington University Hospital in DC, which is supposedly where he is. After that press conference, you will be entering the hospital and demanding to see Senator McConnell.

If you are provided sufficient evidence that McConnell is alive and able to perform the duties of his office, you will come out and tell everyone that. If you, the governor of Kentucky, the state that McConnell represents, are denied the chance to see him, either by hospital staff, DC police, McConnell’s staff, or literally anyone else, you will be notifying the still-gathered news media of that fact and then you will immediately either appoint a new Senator in McConnell’s place or name the date of the special election, depending on which method your office has decided you’re able to utilize this week. I feel like this part keeps changing.

They will sue you, if you do that. An awesome thing about facing a lawsuit, though, is that they would have to prove he is alive in order to sue you for unlawfully replacing him. Which happens to solve the exact same problem that you already had, so it’s all good.

It’s time to make an ass of yourself, Governor. Do it.

On executive dysfunction

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

This novelty ruler has been in the wrong room in my house for months. Every time I have looked at it, for that entire time, it has annoyed me. Today, I picked it up, carried it through a hallway, my kitchen, my laundry room and the master bathroom and placed it right there, where it belongs, and where it will be used to make sure that all of my books are lined up perfectly.

Months. It took fifteen seconds to move and has annoyed me multiple times per day for months.

But now it is in the right place.

Also, because that wasn’t much of a post, sometimes I say things on more ephemeral websites that I don’t think are completely stupid. With that in mind, I offer you the following screenshot, and invite you to comment on its wisdom or lack thereof, either here or at the original source. I’ve talked about some of these ideas before, but some of them are newer, at least in terms of being expressed by me:

I will freely admit I have not done the math, which may need to be tweaked, but I do genuinely think something like this would work for more accurate, proportional representation. Am I dumb? Call me dumb!

On the nature of reality

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.

I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.

So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.

The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.

(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)

No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if that was made up, we still have a large problem.

And then there’s the picture.

Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:

“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.

“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.

“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.

“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.

“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.

The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.

And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.

What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.

And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.

Can’t post again, reading again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, ReadingLeave a comment

Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.

I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.

Crabbersaurus Rex

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

Tornado sirens tossed us into the basement for about 45 minutes last night, and as a Midwestern dad I was contractually required to go outside the very moment the warning stopped to check it out. I was greeted with this weirdness: a little bit of evidence of rain but nothing currently falling, no wind, and near-constant lightning with very little thunder. A dad more committed to his Midwesternness would have gone out during the storm, but my wife is out of town this week and I’m trying to be good.

I woke up this morning and discovered that summer school wasn’t happening, as apparently there were more widespread power outages east of us. I have spent the day since then gradually sinking into a worse and worse mood for some reason.

Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly why; Earth has its first trillionaire, or at least its first official one (call me when Elon Musk goes on hajj and destabilizes Egypt’s entire economy along the way) and meanwhile literally everything is getting worse for everyone else all the time, with no sign that the pattern is ever going to reverse itself. Every opinion I have about Musk is unprintable, even by my standards. I tried to watch the livestream of Trump’s name being torn off of the Kennedy Center and they had to stop work because of the rain (the remnants of last night’s storm, maybe?) and didn’t get a single letter taken down. That kind of day. I can’t even rant properly, for fuck’s sake.

I need someone to face a consequence for something. Anyone. For anything.

Pfah.

Oh whatever

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

At this point I don’t even want to hear it. If this dipshit last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner counts as an “assassin,” language has lost all meaning. There’s a grainy black and white video floating around of a guy, presumably the “shooter,” although I’m not convinced he actually fired any shots, running right past security. One of the guards pulls his gun immediately and opens fire directly at several other guards. Apparently one person got shot and their vest stopped it; until satisfactorily proven otherwise I’m going to assume it was from that one specific gun-brained idiot.

I’m sorry, maybe I’ve been poisoned by decades of comic books and movies, but I feel like if someone’s going to call you an assassin you need a better plan than “run past security, on the wrong floor, ???, profit.” That’s an underpants gnome, not an assassin. I’ve seen a reference to a manifesto a couple of times, which is another word that I think is probably getting overused. Apparently dude had a Bluesky account, and he followed a lot of people who I also follow. He did not follow me, which I am faintly disappointed by.

I continue, somehow, and despite all evidence, to be shocked by the incompetence of the Secret Service and the security in general at this event. I’m a fucking overweight middle school teacher and I’m not allowed to tackle people much less shoot at them and I halt people running through hallways multiple times a week. These candyasses barely even react other than to react wrongly, and apparently not only did they let Trump fall on the way out of the goddamned dinner, they got Vance out first.

(Yes, he’s old. But you know why he shouldn’t have fallen? Because they should have been fucking carrying him. Each of those agents should have had a hand on his belt. Good luck dropping to the ground as they’re hustling you out of the room under those circumstances.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, staged, false flag, blah blah blah. These people are the biggest fucking liars on the planet and they’re also complete fucking morons and that makes it difficult to discern actual incompetence from feigned incompetence, and I have no idea why feigned incompetence would be a thing in the first place. I feel like if I was going to stage a goddamned assassination attempt on the president of the United States I could figure out a way to make it not look stupid. If these have both been staged, they did a shit job both times. This is fucking exhausting. I don’t care any more. I don’t want to hear about any future assassination attempts unless they’re fucking successful at this point. Don’t even bother reporting about them.

God, I hate it here.

(Regarding the photo: if the newspapers can print smiling, posed photos of white men after they kill their families, I can sure as shit use that one.)