Comments on: Rationality

By: BarryD

BarryD — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:13:14 +0000

Or signs of a rational government having to strive harder to stop a growing problem, after having delayed dealing with it or having failed to deal with it quietly a while back.

By: Spiffy McBang

Spiffy McBang — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:33:04 +0000

Incompetence is not the same as irrationality, I agree. But if you think the margins of victory offered, the tactics used against dissenters, et al., are signs of a rational government that is acting very stupidly, I have to ask, do you really think that’s any less dangerous than one that’s legitimately off its cracker?

Of course, that’s assuming it’s one or the other. It could be both.

By: Daniel Larison

Daniel Larison — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:10:02 +0000

Incompetence is not the same thing as irrationality. If the election was stolen, that means that Mousavi was going to win and the incumbent did everything in his power to prevent that from happening. That isn’t irrational. It’s exactly what you would expect him to do. If vote rigging was essential to victory, it is even more rational as a matter of self-interested, predictable behavior and much easier to understand.

By: Spiffy McBang

Spiffy McBang — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:02:28 +0000

You: “…the more vital to retaining power stealing the election becomes to thwarting Mousavi and Rafsanjani’s bid for power, the more rational (i.e., predictably self-interested) stealing the election becomes for Ahmadinejad and his allies.”

Ezra: “A rational regime might have stolen the election.”

You’re saying the same thing he is. His premise of irrationality follows: “But they would not have stolen it like this, where there is no doubt of the theft.” You may, yourself, doubt it; but when even Nate Silver has problems with the numbers, there is at minimum a solid argument to be made that the election was illegitimate. A 20-30 point swing from polls to election results in one week is going to set off alarms everywhere. The well-documented behavior of the government in pushing the results out so quickly and reacting to the outcry does not exactly inspire confidence, either.

Everything surrounding this election screams rig-job, and if this was a fairly contested election, Iran’s government has done the worst job in recorded history of making it look that way. That’s why Ezra is calling them irrational.