October 2010
45 posts
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.12
There were two main themes on the penultimate episode of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” They might connect nicely with Marxism — and, then again, they might not.
The first is that almost all of the cast members have shorter emotional fuses than is humanely possible. The first example is the most obvious: Sammi flies into a full-blown rage because Ronnie says that she looks Asian...
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Journey to Ithaca
There’s an interesting article by Jeffrey Tayler about travel, philosophy, and life in general over at World Hum. Taking its main idea from Homer’s Odyssey, the piece is about finding one’s own Ithaca to set at the center of one’s life as a destination. Using the Odyssey as a touchstone but relying mainly on “Ithaki,” a poem by Constantine Cavafy, Tayler...
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Rwandan Hero Accused of Funding Terror
Those who’ve been watching Rwandan politics at all over the past decade will almost certainly have seen this one coming. Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroic actions were made famous by the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” has been a persona non grata in Rwanda for some time. Now, Martin Ngoga, Rwanda’s general prosecutor, says that Rusesabagina sent money to the Democratic Forces for...
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Holocaust Denial and Academic Freedom
As a newly-tenured associate professor, I’m frankly amazed to have come across this statement from Lincoln University — America’s first historically black university — regarding one of their associate professors, Kaukab Siddique.
The long and short of the matter is this: Professor Siddique recently made comments calling for the dismantling of Israel and, previously, he...
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Arizona: Execution Drugs Came From Great Britain →
The on-going saga of the out-of-stock lethal injection drugs continues (I’ve written about them previously here and here).
Yesterday, after a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, the people of Arizona used drugs of mysterious provenance to successfully kill Jeffrey Landrigan to avenge the 1989 murder of Chester Dean Dyer:
In a 5-4 ruling late Tuesday, the US high court said a lower court wrongfully...
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WatchThanks at least in part to the Monkey Cage blog, this little piece of comedic gold is feverishly making its way around the interwebs … at least via political scientists on Twitter.
So … I watched it, I chuckled about it, and then — since this version is really about American politics, rather than political science more generally — I wondered what a version that focused on...
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WatchThis is a really excellent — and little discussed — instance of heroism that makes great use of religious faith to explain why people did something rather than nothing.
This short clip provides some fascinating details about how and why Albanian Muslims saved the lives of 2,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
HT: Matt Langdon.
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The History of Human Rights
There is an interesting — and, I think, controversial — account of the history of the contemporary human rights regime that was published by Samuel Moyn in The Nation at the very end of the summer. Its argument is an adaptation from his new book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which I’m hoping to read very soon.
I say that the piece is controversial because I have a...
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Free Speech
It seems like a lot of people in the news are losing their jobs lately for saying things that someone else — the public, an employer, etc. — deems unacceptable. There has, of course, also been an outcry about the firings, namely that they amount to little more than a witch hunt and that they should be considered a dramatic example of the curtailing of free speech.
At what point did we...
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Is Pure Altruism Possible? →
For someone with my specific philosophical interests in heroism, human rights, religion, and morality, The Stone has been really terrific of late. If you’re interested in any of these topics, you should probably just add it to your list of RSS feeds.
Today, it’s a long and quite interesting post about altruism from Judith Lichtenberg that begins with the same example, of Wesley...
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O'Donnell Questions Church-State Separation →
This New York Times headline, which I’ve used as the title of this blog post, seems to me to be confused.
From the exchange, it isn’t at all clear that Christine O’Donnell is “questioning” the separation of church and state that the establishment clause is generally regarded as enshrining. Instead, it seems that she’s simply unaware of what the First Amendment...
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Restorative Justice, Forgiveness, and Victims of...
Over the past few days, I’ve been having an interesting discussion via email with my friend Lisa Rea about the role of forgiveness in restorative justice. These mechanisms, as David Cayley (1998, p. 10) defines them, “seek noncustodial settlements; they allow both the offender and the victim much more initiative; they are oriented more to peacemaking than punishment; and they try to mobilize...
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WatchThe newest Bloggingheads discussion is now available: it features Robert Wright and Frans de Waal in a conversation about primate ethics. The full video is about 50 minutes long, but each section can likely be watched as a shorter stand-alone piece.
Accompanying it nicely is an article by de Waal just published over at The Stone, the New York Times blog devoted to contemporary philosophy. At its...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.11
I’ve waited a bit longer than usual to deal with the “Jersey Shore.” I’ll admit it.
As an avid listener to Bill Simmons’ podcast, I knew that a fall from grace was imminent for “The Situation.” I wasn’t sure how far he would fall, but it seemed that I would need to retract some of my earlier statements.
Thus, after a serious GTL session this...
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Are States Breaking the Law to Get Execution... →
The on-going issue with sodium thiopental, the lethal injection drug that’s in very short supply, just keeps getting weirder.
The last time I wrote about the drug, it was because California’s supply was set to expire and the state couldn’t get the go-ahead from the courts to use their last batch to kill Albert Brown. The time before that, it was because Hospira, the drug’s...
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Nietzsche Family Circus
The Nietzsche Family Circus is a pretty clever idea and I could probably spend a fair amount of my day looking at the bizarre pairings of Nietzsche quotes and Family Circus cartoons.
My only wish is that the pairings weren’t randomly generated. There’s serious comedy gold left on the table here, though I recognize that it would be a major investment in time to pair them according to...
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Solve for Achilles
If you’re like me, you don’t like math because you’re not very good at it.
But, since I write and teach about classical archetypes of heroic behavior in the Western canon, sometimes people send me things that have to do with Achilles.
Like this math problem:
If you solve this, I will buy you a cookie.
How will I know if you solved it correctly? I will ask people who like...
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Further Thoughts on Dressing Like a Nazi
I’ve had a number of interesting conversations since I wrote about Rich Iott, the Republican candidate from Ohio who was a Waffen SS World War II reenactor. Some of it took the from of a back-and-forth with Daniel Joseph, another Tumblr blogger, who wrote about the virtues of role playing as a good guys as well as bad guys (both in real life and in video games). Some of it has come from...
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“He is a military history enthusiast”
– What’s wrong with people?
Honestly. I want to know.
This time, our focus turns to Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District and a member of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Guns” program [his name has since been...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.10
The most recent episode of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” raised a fairly timeless question: should Shakespeare properly be classified as a political theorist?
Just as I teach Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in the first course in the political theory sequence here at Nebraska, I have also long argued that a great many of Shakespeare’s plays ought to be discussed for their important...
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“A spokesman for Sen. Jim DeMint tells CNN the South Carolina Republican was...”
– Oh, well, that makes more sense then.
By “Dear school boards, I, an elected official, believe you shouldn’t be allowed to hire the following people,” I meant “Dear school boards, you should decide for yourselves.”
It must have been Opposite Day.
More here.
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The Anti-Semitic Hits Just Keep On Coming →
If you’re like me and you didn’t care for Rick Sanchez’s public musings about Jewish control of the media, my sense is that you probably also won’t like Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Holocaust joke … or the fact that he’s told it before … or the fact that he thinks Mussolini was a pretty good guy:
[T]he Italian leader can be heard...
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J.K. Rowling hints to Oprah there could be more... →
In “nothing’s over if there’s any more money to be made” news:
“I could definitely write an eighth, ninth, tenth,” the celebrated author, 45, told Oprah Winfrey during an interview scheduled to air Friday. “I’m not going to say I won’t. I don’t think I will … I feel I am done, but you never know.”
Despite the fact that...
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Rick Sanchez and Anti-Semitism
Yesterday, I posted a twenty-minute clip of Rick Sanchez’s diatribe against Jon Stewart, which included his thoughts on the power or control that Jews exert on the media. I came to the story a little late and, shortly thereafter, CNN announced that Sanchez was “no longer with the company.”
Online, the most common reaction to this news was a sort of tongue-in-cheek statement...
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WatchIt’s worth listening to this for a few minutes.
The remark from Sanchez — quoted below — that gets as close as one could possibly get to simply saying, “The Jews control the media” comes around the 11:00 mark.
Don’t worry, though: he immediately follows up by letting us know that his best friends were Jewish, since he grew up in Miami.
At no point, of course,...
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