Worth Keeping in Mind

...[M]ass, lower-class participants in revolution cannot turn discontent into effective political action without autonomous collective organization and resources to sustain their efforts. Moreover, the repressive state organizations of the prerevolutionary regime have to be weakened before mass revolutionary action can succeed, or even emerge. Indeed, historically, mass rebellious action has not be able, in itself, to overcome state repression.
Theda Skocpol, from Social Revolutions in the Modern World, quoted in the Duck of Minerva

Posted Without Comment, the Third

So to recap, we have “no horse in this race,” we should do nothing, we have to negotiate with whichever government emerges, and the victory of the reformers would change nothing about Iran’s nuclear program and “would not stop the country’s rivalry with the United States,” all of which “hard-core non-interventionists” have already been saying for days and days, but it is “naive” to say that an internal Iranian political dispute is really none of our business. Okay, then.
-Daniel Larison, at The American Conservative