July 2010
38 posts
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W. S. Merwin To Be Named Poet Laureate →
During his tenure, Mr. Merwin said, he wants to emphasize his “great sympathy with native people and the languages and literature of native peoples,” and his “lifelong concern with the environment.”
June 2010
45 posts
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“So the NYT went from calling waterboarding torture 81.5 percent of the time to...”
– This is downright fascinating.
Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to a study that documents the way in which the American media — including the New York Times and NPR — stopped referring to waterboarding as torture … once Americans were the ones carrying out the torture.
From...
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“Can Obama really claim to be the anti-torture president?”
– This is the way that Harold Koh, former Dean of Yale’s Law School and State Department Legal Adviser, would like for people to think of him.
But, according to Tom Parker, over at the Amnesty International USA Blog, the answer is actually a loud and clear “No.”
Me? Perhaps...
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"Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule." →
I suspect that there might be a lot of debate — at least amongst political theorists — as to whether the “discovery” that Plato’s work contains a decipherable code is incredibly important or at all interesting.
After all, Leo Strauss argued that Plato wrote in code decades ago and those who bought into Strauss’ argument were thereafter persecuted like a...
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Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security... →
They take our jobs and they contribute to Social Security, helping to keep it afloat. Horrible, horrible, horrible!
As the debate over Social Security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year.
While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of...
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Competitive Coexistence in the Middle East?
Last week, Ian Lustick published a quirky little piece over at Forbes.com, in which he argues that Israel ought to engage in “competitive coexistence” with Hamas. Indeed, his subtitle is “Why competitive coexistence would work in the country’s favor.”
Unfortunately, Lustick never actually tells his readers the answer to that tricky question nor does he explore any of...
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Iranian aid flotilla cancelled, won't sail to Gaza →
Organizers say that their plans have been scrapped due to “Israeli threats.” Never fear, though: some other Iranian group is still planning to take on the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza.
Meanwhile, here’s a sensible quote that I thought I’d pass along:
“Mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by member states and groups that want to do...
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We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research →
To all of the people who have been reading and citing my work, thanks! But do those citations mean that I’m doing high-quality work?
While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs.
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As a result, instead of...
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Syria Sends Rights Activist to Jail →
Mohannad al-Hassani, 43, was arrested last year after campaigning against the charge on which he was convicted — “weakening national morale”, which he called”medieval”.
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Hassani last month received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, named after the first head of Amnesty International, for his work in defending Syrian political prisoners and the...
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Fremont, Nebraska Says "See You in Court" →
Yesterday, residents of Fremont, Nebraska — a town of about 25,000 — voted in favor of a referendum “barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.”
As the ACLU prepared an...
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Turkey vows to 'end' Kurd rebels →
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has denounced a deadly attack on a Turkish military post as “cowardly”, and vowed to fight the Kurdish fighters responsible for the raid “to the end”.
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Erdogan said Turkey was willing to “pay the price” to “annihilate” the PKK.
“We will not turn back on our commitment to democratisation...
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Transitional Justice, American Style
The story of the injustice done to Maher Arar back in 2002 and the ongoing injustice of the unwillingness of the American judicial system to come to terms with it — which you might or might not have been following — is nicely summarized on the Amnesty International USA blog:
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old engineer and Canadian citizen born in Syria. According to Arar, in 2002, while he...
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What's up? →
I’ve been told that if I don’t have anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all.
But since I’m working on a long post that won’t be done for a couple of days, I don’t really have anything at all to say.
Thus I turn to you, readers, and ask what you’d like to hear about:
Ask me questions!
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WatchLove is saying, “I told you so” at appropriate times.
I told you so, gentle readers. I told you so.
Also, here’s the Q&A that followed the above video.
Note: it’s about twice as long and it gets a little wacky.
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MetaFilter, Sex Traffickers, Heroes, and Using the...
The story is old — nearly a month, which makes it ancient by internet standards — but it came to my attention just a few days after my son was born and I didn’t really have a chance to write about what I take to be a significant example of both heroic behavior and Web 2.0 associations, two topics about which I have been thinking and writing a lot.
The basic story is fairly...
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Governor Refuses to Free Man, Despite Son’s... →
This headline from the New York Times — “Governor Refuses to Free Man, Despite Son’s Efforts” — is actually a bit confusing … or at the very least it’s burying the lead.
The actual headline should read: “Governor Refuses to Free Man, Despite His Innocence.”
Here are what I take to be the most relevant bits:
Mr. Kempfert is now certain that...
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Iranian aid ships set sail for Gaza →
Iran’s media says that the ships are loaded with food, construction material, and toys. They will not be escorted by the Revolutionary Guard, although that possibility was raised just last week by a representative of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
My sense is that we’ll find out exactly what sorts of toys are being sent by Iran soon enough, as I can’t imagine that Israel will allow...
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Abbas to Obama: I'm against lifting the Gaza naval... →
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m a pro-Palestinian activist and that I’ve long argued that the Gaza naval blockade is one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes and crimes perpetrated in recent memory. I’ve also had the opportunity to ramp up my rhetoric quite a bit in the past two weeks, after the “Free Gaza” flotilla incident.
So … what do...
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“Defense lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which has...”
– This is a bit of an odd story, as the Rwandan government has never supported the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda but very much supports the general project of prosecuting high level Hutu genocidaires.
But arresting an American lawyer at the Tribunal for denying the genocide and for...
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University of Nebraska Approved to Join Big Ten... →
“By unanimous vote, the Big Ten Presidents and Chancellors are pleased to welcome the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to the Big Ten Conference,” said COP/C Chair and Michigan State President Lou Anna K. Simon. “We believe Nebraska is an extraordinary fit, reflecting the criteria we established at the beginning of the process - high academic quality, competitiveness, cultural...
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A different take on the Texas social studies... →
My friend David Williams takes a very different position on the recent reforms to the secondary school social studies curriculum made by the Texas State Board of Education, as he focuses on the relevance of philosophers Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Aquinas to contemporary democratic government.
It’s well worth reading, especially for those with an interest in the relevance of...
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"There Was No Twitter Revolution Inside Iran." →
Over at The Monkey Cage yesterday, John Sides presented a few quotes from Golnaz Esfandiari’s piece in Foreign Policy that call into question all the excitement about last year’s so-called Twitter Revolution in Iran.
I got caught up in the excitement myself and even used Iran (albeit briefly) as an example in a co-authored paper on Twitter and democratic associations (still being...
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“Unsurprisingly, in youth-obsessed America, writers have often done their best...”
– Whenever I’m feeling a little bit smart or creative, I like to remember how much smarter and more creative other people tend to be.
This is how I felt throughout graduate school, where I spent all of my time reading and thinking about people who seemed infinitely smarter than me.
This is...
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Nebraska leaning toward Big Ten move →
The past six months have seen an amazing number of articles speculating about Big Ten expansion and Nebraska has been tossed around as one of the most obvious choices. I first wrote about this possibility back in December and I dismissed it. My old friend Marcus Sanborn then wrote a guest post in which he discussed the possibility in greater detail … and effectively dismissed Nebraska as a...
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Criticizing Israel or Anti-Semitism?
Over the past week, the vitriolic articles and blog posts about Israel have been coming out in a steady stream. I’ve read more than my fair share of them and have been thinking about the importance of writing something in response. This won’t be a blog post that defends every Israeli policy decision regarding the Palestinians or that explains why the response to the “Free...
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“The democratizing tendencies of the Internet have always been overstated. To...”
– As usual, Michael Tofias has found a snappy quote that pushes me to think critically about what I’m trying to do.
It comes from a post by Laura McKenna on the evolution of the political blogosphere, which is an interesting read … especially insofar as it unrepentantly discusses what...
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From The "Things That Aren't Going to Happen" File →
According to ESPN and the News-Herald of Northern Ohio, the Cleveland Cavaliers either have or soon will make an offer to Tom Izzo.
They’re right to do so, of course. Izzo is one of the best college basketball coaches in the country and his success over the past ten years is pretty much unparalleled. He won a national championship in 2000 and has taken Michigan State to the Final Four six...
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The Flotilla Saga Continues
Given the amount of writing I’ve been doing about the “Free Gaza” flotilla of late — and given the amount of media coverage I’ve been reading — I thought I’d pass along the following stories, one dealing with who did what to whom during the Israeli raid and the other dealing with the possibility of Iran raising the stakes with regard to the Gaza blockade.
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“Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the...”
– In the aftermath of the “Free Gaza” flotilla mess, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon has written a very interesting and thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times.
His conclusion:
Let us shed our illusions, starting with ourselves, whoever we are and however august our...
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“‘I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization … They are...”
– This quote, from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, highlights a fundamental problem faced by people who want to discuss solutions to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Unless Erdogan means by this that Hamas is a group of freedom fighters rather than terrorists — which would necessitate a...
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Judah's New Blog
Over the past few weeks, loyal Running Chicken readers likely noticed that my wife and I had a baby.
And now that Judah is almost three weeks old, we’ve decided to start up a little blog dedicated entirely to his exploits.
So if you liked the few pictures and videos that I posted here over the past couple of weeks, then you’ll definitely want to check out Judah’s blog.
This...
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Trying Our Leaders →
Michael Walzer has written a fascinating but deeply unsatisfying piece for The New Republic about whether or not to put our leaders on trial for things they do while in office. It’s well worth your time, as it raises some terrific questions about the nature of democracy and what we ought to expect from our leaders.
After an assessment of the various historical approaches to transitional...
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CSI: Omaha
On television, the CSI guys are calm, cool, and collected. They wear sunglasses, they have exciting romantic entanglements, and they catch the bad guys. Sometimes they play a little bit fast and loose with the rules, but we know it’s all in the service of doing a difficult job and we know that the bad guys committed the crime anyhow.
Meanwhile, in the real world yesterday, former Douglas...
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Why Israel Is Not Like North Korea
In the aftermath of two deadly (and fairly incomprehensible) incidents at sea — the sinking of the Cheonan and the raid of the “Free Gaza” flotilla — Dan Drezner has written a couple of blog posts in which he suggests what he calls “pretty eerie” parallels between Israel and North Korea:
True, Israel’s economy is thriving and North Korea’s is not. ...
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“Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent...”
– This quote, from Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, succinctly highlights the problem with a Supreme Court ruling, today, that effectively undermines Miranda rights for suspects.
In a 5-4 vote, the Court’s conservative majority concluded that the only way for a suspect to assert his or her...
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