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Social psychologists have documented an intriguing phenomenon dubbed “outgroup homogeneity”. It is the tendency to assume that groups to which you do not belong are less diverse than they are (in contrast, we overestimate diversity within groups of which we are a part). I have described before how this cognitive error produced complete misunderstandings of [...]
Archive for the ‘Iran’ Category
December 2nd, 2011
November 1st, 2011
The great scholar-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted correctly that ethnicity was too powerful a centrifugal force for even the Soviet Union to contain. Similar perspicacity is nowhere in evidence in all the recent predictions about the emergence of an Iran-Iraq Kingdom of Greater Shi’a. The U.S. media bears part of the blame for consistently getting [...]
May 16th, 2011
Category: Iran
Ahmadi-nejad doesn’t like the clerics, and they, apparently, feel the same way about him.
July 4th, 2009
Category: Iran
The key association of Islamic scholars in Qom calls the election result bogus.
July 3rd, 2009
The Iranian regime embraces “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
July 1st, 2009
Category: Iran
A senior Iranian cleric says that the antics of Khomene’i and Ahmadi-nejad are driving young Iranians away from prayer services. Inshallah!
June 26th, 2009
Category: Iran
A reader with a very Yiddishe name and a very goyische kopf rebukes me for being enthusiastic about the prospect of Moussavi forcing Ahmadi-nejad from power. “One anti-semite replacing another,” he huffs. Well, yes. I also recall rooting for Lech Wałęsa against Gen. Jaruzelski: or rather, for the Solidarność movement and its allies against the [...]
June 25th, 2009
Category: Iran
“The cement that bonds the rule of tyrants is the blood of citizens.” [Ricordi, B20] That was written five hundred years ago. Some things don’t change.
June 24th, 2009
Category: Iran
From a colleague’s student: compelling eyewitness account of life and terror in Tehran.
