Skip to main content

Tavakoli on the "Unveiled Threat"

Janet Tavakoli has a new book out entitled Unveiled Threat: A Personal Experience of Fundamentalist Islam and the Roots of Terrorism.


Yes, I know. There are hordes of people these days wielding pens (or keyboards) these days to give their view of the world's discontents and the violently discontented. One can't keep up with them, nor should that be an aspiration.


But I know Tavakoli. We aren't close friends but we are work acquaintances -- I have been happy to quote her as a source or to call her for guidance on ongoing stories. None of these ongoing stories has had a lot to do with terrorism. So this drew me up short.


You see, Tavakoli is an expert on  "structured finance." her firm, unsurprisingly called "Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc." offers as her webpage says "independent risk consulting and expert witnesses services ... for derivatives, credit derivatives, synthetic collateralized debt obligations, total return swaps, special purpose entities" and forex derivatives, all of which come under the broad "structured finance" heading.


So: why is she writing about "the roots of terrorism"?

She traces her own interest to her presence in Iran during the period of the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs. She has followed Middle Eastern developments consistently since her harrowing experiences in that time.

Her book seems to credit the regime of the late Shah with some real achievements and a promising façade, but notes that there was always rot beneath. The revolutionaries of course benefitted from that rot. With some sympathy she quotes William Simon, Nixon administration Secretary of the Treasury, who  called the Shah "irresponsible and reckless" and frankly "a nut."
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more