I think the problem with bifurcations is that each time it happens, power is monopolized even further. Also, the density of awful people in the government increases.

The problem with your partitioning senario is that in past 25 years, this game of partitioning has gone on, and each time the worse group has won. I don't see how this time it is going to be different.

As Yahya pointed out, there was, almost, nothing postive in all of the bifurcations, in the past 25 years of Iran's history;
always the support of state among people dropped, and state felt less responsible about people's desires.
However, it is correct to say there will be another bifurcation, may be sooner than we expect, and another part of political elits will be forced out of chamber of power, as always with undemocrtic means.
But I don't see anything postive about it!

I just want to put the first two comments in a somewhat more precise (to my liking) form: the bifurcations that Hamed points out have only been in the number of people who take hold of the (political) power. They would have actually been happy occurances if they had been bifurcations of "the power" itself. So, the graph presented in the article is not a representation of what has happened historically in the Islamic Republic. The intensity--as a code for the power--of one (and only one) of the branches has always been almost equal to the original branch, making up a visible path of power transfer in the hands of those who alienated the rest through undemocratic means. Thus, the right side of the graph is just another face of dictatorship, not democracy.

I think I can summarize your already brief posting to this sentence:

The process is one of divide-and-conquer. The Islamists have been dividing each other for 25 years, and they will eventually be conquered by the need to implement some sort of reform.

Well, I commend your optimism and patience! Also, I think Mehdi's got a point. You said:

"If the competition doesn't help to any reforms, at least it will weaken both players and make some space available for others to play."

Well, maybe; but, I think you are overlooking one important fact that when political wrangling gets to a point where abiding by "the rules of the game" would not take any of the sides anywhere, one or both of them will try to change the rules by resorting to more extreme measures.

This is exactly what happened in last week's election. The regime as a whole had come to a point where it could not play the game by attracting people's interest to either side. Therefore, one side decided to gain superiority through undemocratic means in a supposedly democratic process, i.e. elections. Now, this time the Guardian Council's powers were enough to knock the other side out of the race by disqualifications. I hate to think about a few years from now, when this "change in rules" necessitates one or all sides to resort to more violent measures. Next time, the Revolutionary Guards Corpse might assume the role the Guardian Council did this time.

Maybe this makes the losers to think about forming "professional political parties" which are independent of the state.

Wishful thinking? I hope not.

If there is ever going to be a chance for forming "real political party" its memebrs wouldn't be anyone other than these losers. Who else has enough money and a little bit of inside relations?

Wishful thinking? I hope not.

May I now?

In this entry I see an instance of the process of Hope ---> Belief. Even from the depths of utter despair (which is far from the case here) humans make in their imagination a window of hope. If not in their wakefulness, it comes to them in their dreams. They believe in it, and sometimes this very belief gives them strength to make it happen. This is how all elf-fulfilling prophecies work for us. So nothing wrong with hoping after being defeated. It's only human.

Another point. I don't see anything wrong with using a graph for a political article, but I object to reading too much into it. To my dismay, I have seen quite smart Iranian students who have been trained in "hard science" inclined to think up simple-minded models for complex social issues. (Someone here even compared making a democracy with making ice out of water once.)

What I find unsettling is some of them simply BY VIRTUE OF BEING MATH-SMART OR PHYSICS-SMART think they are eligible to make up theories that would explain (in their opinion) the social phenomena. This is perhaps nothing but a result of our effed up educational system in Iran that, indirectly as it may be, makes them believe such things. "After all, aren't sociologists (and social thinkers in general) those students who couldn't get admitted to "better" majors in KONKOOR?", we would think.

If you read Sa'eb Tabrizi's poetry, or almost any classcial Iranian poet's work, odes of Hafez or Sa'di or Rumi you see a great amount of analogies that they have observed and pointed out to from our human world and the world of the animals and even the inanimate. I remember one line from Sa'eb (because I have a very feeble memory):

EZHAR E DARD NAZD E SETAMGAR ZE ABLAHI ST
ASHK E KABAAB MUJEB E TOGHYAN E ATASH AST

A famous analogy is of course that of nightingale and rose, or that of a moth (or butterfly) and the candle light. Thousands of lines of poetry has been written in this line. My point being, some of the analogies that you point out to, like this bifurcation thing from Chaos Theory (and of course one can think the left side of the graph is harmony and unity and the right hand side is chaos [in its non-technical sense] and disarray) is more of a "poetic" nature than conducive to any scientific study of a social phenomenon.

Sometimes to understand complex social issues, some kind of simple model, image or anology is useful. Can anyone come up with a better image of Iranian state today?

Don't know about an image, but the Iranian dictatorship sounds like a supremacist ideology/fantasy unsupported by the more tolerant (and thus more timid?) population. PLO, Nazism, Communists etc are also supremacist ideologies/fantasies.

In every analogy, if I remember from high school years, there is a VAJH-E SHABAH, that I don't know the word for in English. There is also another element. In the line I quoted from Sa'eb, he compares the relationship between a cruel oppresoor with his subject of oppression with the relationship between a sizzling piece of kabob put on MANGHAL (the thing you use for B-B-Q, and I don't recall its English name) with the fire cooking it from under. He means to say, as in the latter case the juices extracted out of kabob help the flames of fire go up, same is true about the relationship of the oppressed to the oppressor. It is a poetic analogy. It's a nice observation, but devoid of any scientific value.

Now, for those of us who are familiar with some hard science, it is natural (and poetic), to make some such observations. However, one should note that the fact that those analogies are made with some material taken from, say, High Mathematics, does *not* make it more "scientific". I don't think it is the case here, but if one is "smart" enough, then one can easily use such ill-founded analogies to write psuedo-scientific books that will be best-sellers, as others have already done.

I have add this to the end of the post:
“Exactly like khatami's first election when, another bifurcation was going to happen. The splinting of technocrat from conservatives. However it was not a complete one, it gave the opportunity to reformists to enter the game with the idea of reforms.”
Yahya, It was some times good, wasn't it?

Signor, what are you worry about?
I think any one (including a simple minded and not very smart hard scientist like me ;-) has the right to make any theory and ill-founded analogy and write any pseudo-scientific post, book or article s/he wish. If the theory is true, then no point to be worry about and if the theory is wrong, it won't be accepted by the readers.

Hamed,

I do not dispute your *right* of writing whatever you feel like writing here; well, at least not as long as it's not "offensive"--a term that is not really easy to define. Likewise, I am entitled to commenting on your writings and warning about the possible misreadings of your message.

You who seem to be a student of physics, must have learned about Wronskian in a Differential Equations course! Wronski was a mathematician, but he also wrote thick nonsensical books, using mathematical formulas to prove strange things. That kind of thing is what I am worried about.

From old times people have shown a fascination with numbers. 7 is a holy number in many faiths, because, presumably, there are 7 heavens. There is a vast area of "knowledge" called numerology, and the mystique of numbers (and in general, of mathematics) has been able to attract a lot of people, who would assign strange properties to numbers. Once I saw somebody arguing for the existence of God, because: zero x infinity = 1 !

I just don't want thses kind of things to happen to your bifurcatory observations. That's all.

It's true that Mr. Iran stepped on dog-poop but I think it's ultimately good for him because he will wash his shoe and will have a cleaner shoe soon.

formulas for math

It is funny to put comment with the name of author.