July 2010
38 posts
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I Tweet, Therefore I Am? →
I couldn’t decide — when I read this piece in the New York Times yesterday — whether to write about it or just ignore it.
Clearly, I decided to write something … in no small part because I actually encourage my students to use Twitter (read about it here and here). I’ve made Twitter a semi-required component of two of my classes and I intend to do it again because I...
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I'm Back-Tracking As Fast As I Can →
Amend the Constitution so that some children born in the U.S. wouldn’t automatically be U.S. citizens? An unusual idea from an unusual man.
I couldn’t write it up any better than this:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he’s talked with other senators about crafting a constitutional amendment that would deny American citizenship to illegal immigrants’...
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Political Theory Everywhere →
It’s like I’ve always said, Iggy Pop and Alexis de Tocqueville are two great tastes that go great together. Well, perhaps I’ve never said that. But I should have.
From The Monkey Cage, quoting Arthur Goldhammer quoting Rolling Stone:
“I’ve said everything about myself that I care to say in life,” Pop says. “Right now, I’m reading Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville....
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Season 2
Well, dear readers, the Jersey Shore is back!
This means that, approximately once a week, I’ll be taking a short break from human rights and political punditry for a series of posts about the ways in which MTV is stretching precariously thin the fabric of our society.
If you missed the first season — or my old posts about it — last season’s complete running commentary...
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American Foreign Policy on Iran
About ten days ago, Marc Lynch wrote a blog post about the resurgence of the argument in favor of a military strike against Iran and expressed puzzlement since he views Iran as distinctly weaker today than when Obama took office. The arguments in favor of a military option haven’t changed, he noted, nor have the arguments in opposition.
His conclusion:
I suspect that the real reason for...
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Striking a Blow Against Impunity? →
My old friend Geoffrey Mock wrote an interesting post over at the Amnesty International blog yesterday. Since I’ve been writing about impunity a bit lately — mostly with regard to the workings of the International Criminal Court — I wanted to link to his post and briefly comment on it.
At its heart, the post contains a question about whether states can be bound by their...
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Reconciliation as National Project →
There’s an article in this month’s issue of Guernica, about the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation in the aftermath of genocide, that has garnered a good deal of attention.
Briefly, the author — Susie Linfield — argues that Holocaust survivor and author Jean Améry was right about the virtue of resentment in the aftermath of genocidal violence:
Against such...
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What I Meant Was... →
About 24 hours after The Sunday Times published an interview with Oliver Stone in which he said that the Jews dominate the American media and foreign policy, and that he hopes to put Hitler’s atrocities in proportion in an upcoming documentary, Stone apologized for making “a clumsy association.”
First, this:
His next task, the leviathan Secret History of America,...
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“‘To subject a sovereign head of state to a warrant of arrest is...”
– International justice efforts will never bear fruit unless and until heads of state recognize that the prevention and punishment of genocide is either a legitimate occasion to violate the principle of sovereignty or that sovereignty ceases once a head of state embarks upon genocide.
The head of the...
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“‘How do you put together a bunch of physical pieces and parts, and get...”
– The above quote comes from a really interesting article on neuroscience, materialism, and the question of consciousness.
At its heart is David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, who has some potentially unorthodox views on the issue of the mind/brain distinction (for someone...
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Peace v. Justice →
The Forum for Peacebuilding Ethics has an interesting short article (with two shorter comment pieces) on transitional justice that looks at Kenya and Sudan. The focus, in particular, is on the ethical dilemma between the twin objectives of peace and justice (which so often seem to be set in opposition).
As the authors, who are both at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre,...
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Oh, Those Conflict Minerals! →
A lot of human rights activists are excited today about the conflict minerals rider to the financial reform legislation that President Obama signed yesterday.
From Amnesty International USA’s blog, for example:
We were already ecstatic when both the House and the Senate voted in favor of a Wall Street Reform bill that included strong provisions requiring companies that use minerals from...
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More Universities Announce iPad Experiments →
“The goal is to push this tool as hard and as far as we possibly can to really see what the limitations are,” said Bill Handy, visiting associate professor at [Oklahoma State U]niversity’s School of Media and Strategic Communications.
The subtitle of this article could be: “Why isn’t my university forward-thinking enough?”
There’s a lot of potential when it comes...
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The Push of Ethnic Division v. the Pull of Local...
One of the interesting findings in a new paper on economic development and ethnic division by Rachel Glennerster, Edward Miguel, and Alexander Rothenberg is quickly summarized in a couple of quotes pulled by Chris Blattman:
…despite the leading role of ethnic appeals in national politics, ethnic divisions have been much less damaging in Sierra Leone than in many of its African neighbors, and in...
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Put Down That Internet Machine!
The Chronicle of Higher Education — almost unparalleled when it comes to catchy headlines — asked Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid? in an interview with Nicholas Carr earlier this month.
Carr’s argument in his new book is that the unchecked use of technology “is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think.” Let me begin by saying that...
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WHO and Amnesty at Loggerheads? →
Amnesty International’s latest report on North Korea describes the country’s health care system as “dire” and “in shambles.”
But the director of the World Health Organization recently described it “as the envy of the developing world.”
Who’s right about health care in North Korea?
This question — and the entire kerfuffle about health...
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Commutation
There’s a follow-up to a story I reblogged back in early May about Gaile Owens, who was convicted in 1986 of hiring someone to murder her husband and sentenced to death:
Phil Bredesen, the governor of Tennessee, today commuted her sentence to life in prison.
This is cause to celebrate for opponents of capital punishment, as it means that one fewer person will be put to death in this...
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Do I need to teach you how to teach? →
A study just published in PS: Political Science and Politics has found that, of the 122 PhD granting political science departments around the country, only 41 offer a course on how to become a good teacher … and only 28 of those are required for doctoral students.
Perhaps we ought to be shocked and deeply troubled.
But more likely we shouldn’t be.
After all, the study doesn’t...
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Do U.S. Jewish leaders take Netanyahu seriously? →
Someone over at Ha’aretz is writing great headlines lately.
That said, I think the question behind the headline’s question is missing something.
Here it is:
Either Jewish leaders in America have stopped being frightened by the specter of dividing Jerusalem, or they have stopped taking Israel’s prime minister seriously.
A little bit of background information:
Netanyahu gave a...
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“‘We like to stay where we are, but if you judge us by our past we haven’t...”
– I really didn’t think we’d be having this conversation so soon.
When long-time Detroit Pistons owner Bill Davidson passed away last year, people suspected that his wife Karen, who inherited the team and its arena, would be looking for someone to make her an offer.
And, right on cue,...
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So Much for International Justice? →
There are two ways to look at today’s suspension of ICC proceedings against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga:
This is a good day for international justice in that the Court wants to be sure that international standards for fair trials are met, regardless of the nature of the crimes allegedly committed by the defendant. Doing so will minimize blowback against the Court in the future, will...
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WatchIt would be a comedy of errors, if it wasn’t all such a waste of time, money, and lives.
Nebraska unveiled its new death chamber — as if such a thing ought to be unveiled like a work of art — but it won’t be putting it to use any time soon. While the Department of Corrections is ready to start killing Nebraskans, and has been training people to do so, there’s an...
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Kristof on Gaza
Nick Kristof files his most recent ‘Zone of Abject Misery Report’ from Gaza and, unsurprisingly, it has a good news/bad news angle, even if a lot of it is just of the “here’s an isolated observation” variety.
For example, from his shorter blog post following the column:
I’m sure some readers will dispute my suggestion that life in Gaza is better than it was a couple...
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Daily Kos: Overrated →
It turns out that Daily Kos is overrated.
I say this as someone well aware of the shortcomings of his own efforts at blogging (of which there are a great many) and who strives to improve (despite often having a thick head about these things).
Now, I should say that I don’t begrudge the Daily Kos writers their tantrum at being called out as one of the five most overrated blogs by Time...
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On eve of Obama-Netanyahu meeting, Abbas offers... →
This is very interesting:
The London-based Arabic newspaper, Al Hayat, reported this weekend that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had proposed the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with a possible land swap of 2.3 percent of the West Bank to ensure a fair solution for Israeli settlement blocs. Al Hayat reported that the Palestinians agreed to leave settlement...
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Is Political Science Becoming Irrelevant? →
Over at his Foreign Policy blog, Stephen Walt considers the question asked in a recent Perspectives on Politics article [gated] by Lawrence Mead, namely whether political science is irrelevant, at least insofar as no one outside of political science reads political science journal articles.
The problem, Walt asserts (agreeing with Mead) is ”the tendency of many scholars to ask smaller, less...
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Terrorism and Human Rights
There’s a new paper on terrorism and human rights and, while the conclusion isn’t at all surprising, it’s nice to see empirical evidence to back up a point that we generally believe to be true. In this case, it’s that “terror substantially diminishes governments’ respect for basic human rights such as absence of extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and...