You may note that when I wrote earlier today about the predictions that he’d be leaving, I hedged a bit by saying, “That’s the report, anyway.” My skepticism came not from any special prescience I have about events in Egypt, nor from any particular insight into Mubarak’s mind, but simply from my distrust in the MSM.
I happened to be in my car when Mubarak’s speech began, so I was able to listen to most of it (in translation, of course). It became apparent from the first couple of sentences that it wasn’t really a good-bye. My immediate impressions are that: elections will be held in September or before, Mubarak has every intention of playing a large behind-the-scenes role in the transition, and the army will continue to have enormous clout and is willing to be quite aggressive if it need be (if demonstrations threaten to get out of hand, for example). But if things get really hot and heavy, the army might decide to force Mubarak out and not give him the option he took today.
As far as the outcome of the long-term jockeying for position goes, your guess may be as good as mine (or as good as that of our seemingly clueless Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper). But for what it’s worth, my guess is that the army stands a good chance of holding things down long enough to allow elections in September, that those elections will be at least marginally more open and free than in the past (not the world’s highest standard), and that Mubarak/Suleiman may even appear to ease up on the emergency measures that have been in place for Mubarak’s entire 30-year rule and have so angered the people.
If the Muslim Brotherhood is allowed to campaign for office, the outcome of the elections will probably find that group holding a plurality but not a majority in Egypt’s Parliament. This will make them a force with which to be reckoned. Hey, while I’m making predictions, I’ll go so far as to say what percentage of the seats in Parliament I think the Muslim Brotherhood could capture: one-third.
Why one-third? Because I’ve noticed, in many places and many times, that’s often approximately the percentage that seems willing and eager to support more extreme positions. In a multi-party parliamentary system, a one-third win can sometimes lead to coalitions being formed and, in the end, to absolute power.
That’s the report, anyway. He’s about to give a speech some time today to announce his resignation, and according to the Fox article I just linked, the Egyptian Higher Council of the Armed Forces will take over.
Other sources, including the NY Times, report it more likely that his VP, Suleiman, will be the temporary successor until elections can occur in September of 2011.
The army has long been the most powerful group in Egypt. All the country’s leaders since independence and the 1952 removal of King Farouk have come from its ranks. Whoever does take power temporarily and officially, the military will have a huge say.
What of the Egyptian constitution? It dictates that Mubarak’s successor would ordinarily be the speaker of the house, not Suleiman the VP, and that elections must occur within 60 days.
If one is concerned about following the constitution, there is no foundation for a military takeover, which would occur “outside the constitutional framework:”
So they will have to define the format under which they are taking power.”
The source [for this story] did not know how long the military would reign nor what mechanism or timetable would be put in place to end the military’s administration of power, but said that “when (the transfer of power from Mubarak) does happen, they will presumably indicate the direction of the country.”
The source drew parallels with the Army coup of 1952, and the removal of King Faroukh, noting that it took six months before the monarchy was dissolved and the modern republic formed.
The source said this marks “a moment of grave magnitude for the national security of Egypt.”
Indeed.
It reminds me of the period when a lobster sheds its hard outer shell, and it takes some weeks for it to grow another. Till then, the highly vulnerable lobster must slink off and hide in order to protect itself. Egypt has no such luxury, and the predators it must fend off originate mostly from within. Will the end result be more liberty, or less?
[ADDENDUM: I will be busy and away from the computer until some time this evening. Till then, use this thread to talk about developments, which I assume will be coming fast and furious.]
Well, two out of three ain’t bad (hint: scroll down for photo).
Also rather dumb. What married member of Congress would, in this day and age, send shirtless pictures to an unknown woman on Craigslist and use his real name?
Here’s more about a topic we’ll probably revisit many times to come: what are Obama’s chances in 2012?
The fortuitously-named Sean Trende offers an interesting analysis based on how approval ratings affect elections. But I remain convinced that such speculation is so premature at this point as to be almost meaningless. Too many events—including surprising and unforeseen ones—can occur between now and then. And one all-important question mark is who the Republicans will nominate to run against Obama.
For obvious reasons, several people have sent me this link to a NY Times article on the overwhelming presence of liberals in the field of personality and social psychology. Conservatives? This group has barely ever heard of em, except perhaps as subjects to study.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has, however, and he addressed the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s recent convention, confronting members with the fact that their profession is almost completely dominated by liberals to a degree so profound that it is a “statistical impossibility” that it is accidental. He added:
…[S]ocial psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility ”” and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
Haidt illustrated that atmosphere by quoting letters and emails he’s received from conservative grad students in the field, who see the need to keep themselves closeted in order to have any hopes of advancing in their chosen profession.
To us it all sounds so familiar as to be glaringly obvious. But it’s easy to forget that, although some of this discrimination is conscious and purposeful, many of the rank and file who are safely cocooned in the bosom of that sort of group have no idea what’s going on. To them, if they notice the phenomenon at all, there’s a simple explanation (and one I’ve heard many times about many other fields of endeavor): that liberals are just smarter than conservatives, and also more interested in people and how they work. The possibility of systematic selection, or discrimination, or indoctrination, or self-fulfilling prophecies, is just too difficult to entertain or accept (even, or maybe especially, for social psychologists, who ought to know better) when it’s one’s own group that’s being accused.
I don’t know whether research would back me up, but my theory is that there’s at least a two-part process going on. The first part is that, as in many other professions such as that of therapy and journalism, the subject matter of certain disciplines does draw initially appeal to a disproportionate number of liberals. Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors, and/or are concerned primarily with feelings rather than hard facts or practical and technical matters.
Personality and social psychology is a research science, but of the exceedingly soft variety; you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals), and as such it would be no surprise it would appeal disproportionately to liberals. Here’s a definition of the group’s areas of interest as explained on the Society’s website:
How do people come to be who they are? How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another?…By exploring forces within the person (such as traits, attitudes, and goals) as well as forces within the situation (such as social norms and incentives), personality and social psychologists seek to unravel the mysteries of individual and social life in areas as wide-ranging as prejudice, romantic attraction, persuasion, friendship, helping, aggression, conformity, and group interaction.
There’s something ironically satisfying about such a group’s inability to understand its own prejudices and demands for conformity. That brings us to part two of the phenomenon, which is that the natural tendencies within the profession that draw more liberals to it in the first place are augmented by a purposeful selection process by which professors and researchers favor certain types of studies which get certain types of results. Therefore, when hiring and giving awards, they tend to choose people who have biases that mesh with the their own.
Each part of the process amplifies the other. The more unitary the group becomes the stronger the selection process becomes, unless there is a giant effort to reverse it. So Haidt has suggested that the group begin a affirmative action hiring policy for conservatives in order to offset it, and a few members (although not the executive committee) have even agreed that it would be a good idea to set a goal that by 2020 the Society include a whopping 10% conservatives.
Wow, talk about tokens! It’s hard to imagine that the affirmative action one out of ten would feel especially welcome around those casual discussions that tend to feature the knee-jerk dissing of conservatives and their political position. I know; I’ve been there too many times.
Haidt has a suggestion for that, too, although it’s a sly one. He gave the assembled psychologists an assignment: “to overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions.”
Watch out, social psychologists! In Haidt, you not only have a conservative on your hands, you’ve got a subversive. By suggesting you actually read some of the best of conservative thought (including a work by a figure you would have thought chimerical, a leading black conservative), Haidt is setting the stage for the possibility not just of acceptance of conservatives in your ranks, but of potential political conversions among the in-crowd.
You may think you are immune to such things (and the majority of you probably are), but some of you may end up with the surprise of your lives. Some day you, too, may wake up and find yourself outside the circle dance.
[NOTE: I became a huge fan of “Northern Exposure,” although I was a bit late since I’d missed it the first time around. I watched all the episodes in reruns on TV. Until this scene came on, I had no idea I was watching the final episode. But when Iris Dement’s plaintive voice started singing “Our Town,” I was suddenly gripped by a near-panic at the thought that the series was ending, and that it might be I who was going to have to say good-bye to people I’d grown to (I had to admit it, though it was a bit embarrassing) love.
Especially affecting for me was the segment in which Maurice, usually a comic character, stops on the stairs and gazes around with a deeply contemplative stare. And by the time Marilyn had pulled the shade down in that ante-penultimate moment, tears were streaming down my face.]
The UK’s David Cameron has followed in Angela Merkel’s footstops and condemned the policy of multiculturalism which has led to the failure of many immigrants in Britain to adopt the culture and values of their new homeland. His words were clear and concise—and, of course, controversial among many Islamic groups and the left.
Cameron said:
A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values.
A genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them.
This glaringly obvious truth hardly bears mentioning, but our Western societies have become so timid about their own heritage and strengths, and the philosophical foundations on which they rest, that even such simple truths have become occasion for heated debate and even outrage.
The entire episode got me to thinking about an educational transition that was occurring around the time I went to college. Until then, it long had been standard to require a college course in what was then called “Western Civ.” But beginning in the 60s and 70s there was a fairly successful movement to make that curriculum elective.
I went to a supposedly excellent college. There I not only managed to successfully avoid taking a Western Civ course, but there were no required history courses whatsoever. This made me happy, because at the time I was under the impression that I hated the study of history.
Fortunately, I had been educated in the New York City school system at a time when the history foundation there was quite stringent. The following courses were required in order to receive an academic diploma: one semester each of Civics and Economics, and a year each of American History and World History (the latter included a fair amount of ancient history as well). So by the time I got to college, the gaps in my education were not too glaring.
I love history now; can’t get enough of it. But it’s no puzzle to me as to why I hated it back then, and why I cheered when I discovered I wouldn’t ever have to enroll in the dread Western Civ. Almost all the courses I had taken in high school had involved dry facts disconnected by any overarching vision of history or any context in which I could figure out how most of it mattered to me any more.
I don’t think that correcting this omission would have been an insurmountable difficulty for the school system. After all, history is rife with such connections, and patterns of great significance; I see them all the time now. But for some reason (and I don’t think it was PC thought, which hadn’t taken hold much back then, especially among my teachers most of whom were quite old) that was not done in my school, or at least very rarely done. Perhaps it was considered too difficult. Perhaps the NY schools were so focused on cramming all the information into us that they thought we would need to do well in the Regents exams that the broad picture went by the wayside.
Whatever the reason, it was a monumental failing, and not just because it failed to interest me in the study of history. My guess is that it failed the majority of my fellow students as well.
And the problem has only gotten worse over time. Now those omissions have all too often been replaced by a certain political agenda, which is to downplay the achievements of Western Civ and emphasize the multicultural oneness of humankind, with special emphasis on the third world.
I’m all for studying other cultures, but not to the neglect of our own. And I’m all for respecting others, but not when we fail to respect ourselves, and to be justly proud of the gifts Western Civilization (let’s use its full name) has given the world.
I recently read Savage Beauty, a biography of American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. There are several passages in the book that describe the power of Millay’s voice and its remarkable ability to transfix and even seduce (in Millay’s case, the word was not an exaggeration) by the force of her public readings. That made me wonder whether YouTube (ah, magical YouTube!) has samples of her reciting her poetry—and sure enough, it does.
But I was surprised when I listened. Millay became famous during the early part of the 20th century, and fashions in voices seem to have changed since then. And if you don’t think there are fashions in voices, just listen for yourself:
One surprise was that it does not sound at all like the voice of a petite person, although Millay was very small and slender. There was also something vaguely British in her voice, something I’ve heard in other Americans of the time such as, for example, FDR and Eleanor, something that modern listeners hear as an affectation but that might have been more common then, especially among the upper classes and those who hobnobbed with them (Millay was well-educated at uppity Vassar, but she had a hardscrabble family past in Camden, Maine).
Here’s Eleanor Roosevelt, with that slight touch of Britain similar to Millay’s, but a higher pitch:
And finally there’s my guy Frost. A bit older than Millay, he sounds more modern to my ear, although there’s still an infinitesimal smidgen of that British quality, especially at the end when he gets to reciting a fragment of a poem. Like Millay, Frost was a New Englander (from the age of eleven, anyway). In Frost’s speech—and the quality of his humor—you can hear something close to a voice that still exists in rural New England today:
It’s not difficult to see why Frost was exceptionally popular on the lecture circuit.
As for Millay, her voice seemed merely odd when I first listened to it. But in preparing for this post I listened to the clip a few times, and after a while I found a change coming over me. On about the fifth go-round Millay’s voice seemed to take on an archaic power and I shivered listening to it, as though it were a declamation from some ancient sybil speaking to us across a divide of thousands of years.
[NOTE: This Levi’s commercial uses what is apparently the only recording of the poet Walt Whitman, reading a few lines from his poem “America.” He sounds remarkably contemporary, does he not?]
Nicholas Kristof says that the Muslim Brotherhood won’t be able to do much that’s bad in Egypt because even if they get elected, if the people don’t like what they’re doing they can just vote them out.
A brilliant notion, showing the depth of historical knowledge and the penetrating analysis that we’ve come to expect from a renowned columnist writing for the NY Times.
In other words: has Kristof never heard of what actually happened, and is happening, in Iran? Can the dissatisfied people just vote the mullahs out?
Or how about Venezuela and Chavez? Or any number of “democracies” that were hijacked by tyranny? And does he know of the “constitutional” manner in which it was usually accomplished? Has he never heard the expression “one person, one vote, one time?”
Does he understand that, unless there are numerous safeguards built into a political system, the will of the people can be overrun quite easily? Or that they can vote themselves into giving it up? Is he aware of how our own Founding Fathers studied and thought and argued and wrote until they came up with a brilliant system that is probably the best one devised so far to prevent this, but still not foolproof?
Does he—or President Obama, for that matter, who breezily assures us that the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have majority support—understand that in a parliamentary system, even 30% support can easily make a party the largest and most powerful voting bloc, and a huge force to be reckoned with?
