September 2010
47 posts
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Will North Carolina Halt Executions? →
It’s very good to see North Carolinians taking a good long look at their criminal justice system; when I lived there — from 1999 to 2004 — the problems were no less real but they didn’t seem to be on the radar of a great many people, especially those in charge of signing death warrants.
As Brian Evans notes, on Amnesty International USA’s blog:
Following the...
August 2010
35 posts
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“‘I hope to find a courageous partner as Begin found in Sadat.’”
– Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called to mind the historic Camp David meetings between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in a speech to Likud Party supporters today.
With direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians set to begin in Washington, it will be fascinating to see if Netanyahu...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.5: Justice and...
For the second week in a row, MTV’s “Jersey Shore” has been devoted to the Platonic quest for justice with regard to friendship. J-WOWW and Snooki felt that they owed it to Sammi to inform her of Ronnie’s behavior with other women; to that end, they typed up a note filled with Ronnie’s indiscretions and left it for her to find.
In this week’s episode, Sammi...
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The Rule of 200 →
A number of the academics I follow on Twitter have spent the past week telling their followers about their writing. But they’ve been doing it in a way that’s quite different from the way I typically talk about my writing. Whereas I might mention the broad topic of a paper or book chapter, these people are talking about the number of words they’re producing every day.
It’s...
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UN Mapping Report Leaked: Genocide Against Hutu? →
Jason Stearns — over at Congo Siasa — has written a very thoughtful run-down of the leaked UN report on human rights abuses committed by various groups in Zaire/DRC between 1993 and 2003. With regard to the role played by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, he says:
The striking conclusion is that the crimes committed by the RPA/AFDL against Hutu refugees and Congolese Hutu could constitute...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.4: Justice and...
Last week’s episode of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” centered around the bizarre relationship that Sammi and Ronnie have constructed over the past season and a half. As such, I considered skipping it entirely. Or, it seems, I put it off for a week.
And what happened in the intervening week?
Well, I realized that there’s a compelling philosophical question — at least as...
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Oh, Ayn Rand, You Silly Goose
At least once every semester, some student will want to know why there’s no Ayn Rand in any of the political theory courses I teach.
Well, I tell them, it’s because her books are marginal works of fiction filled with intellectually bankrupt pseudo-theory about what you might want to do if your goal is to create a society that would fall apart almost instantaneously.
From now on,...
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“‘The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has...”
– Yowza.
This quote — as well as the one below — are from a lengthy but amazingly interesting [and fairly terrifying] piece in The New Yorker. Very much worth reading; it’s like a modern day ghost story, if the ghosts were real and were combating the federal government, science, and...
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What if Tyler Cowen decided to take over the... →
Chris Blattman asks an interesting question in a recent blog post but, to my mind, not necessarily the most interesting question.
Here’s Blattman (or maybe Amanda from Wronging Rights; the wording makes it slightly ambiguous):
“It’s amazing; his readers do whatever he says. If Andrew Sullivan links to me, I get a few hundred people. If Tyler tells people to read my blog, they come by the...
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A Mess at Harvard →
People interested in evolutionary psychology have been wondering for quite some time what went on in Marc Hauser’s lab since there was clearly some sort of problem that has resulted in an investigation and a leave of absence for Hauser.
This article from The Chronicle provides some insight and things don’t look good.
Basically, it seems to be a sordid tale of monkeys, graduate students, and...
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Russian Scholar Warns Of 'Secret' U.S. Climate... →
As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries. In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.3
In the most recent episode of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” the gang officially starts work at the gelato shop. If you don’t feel terribly for Enzo, the owner of the shop, then you have no feelings at all.
We’re also treated to a guy’s night out, which involves Pauly D putting on a pair of bright red shoes, shaving Vinny’s neck, and proclaiming it an “MVP...
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Heroics, Please
The new semester starts in just a week and I’ll begin my ancient political theory class by asking students to write down a few sentences about their heroes and about why those particular people seem heroic to them.
The course centers around the concept of living a good life and, at bottom, we need to decide what would make one life more choice-worthy than another. One way to get at this...
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Should We Eliminate Tenure? →
Having just made it to the top of the mountain — I’m a tenured associate professor as of this week — I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have tenure and what it would mean not to have it.
First of all, it’s important not to sugarcoat one important point: there is nothing quite like the feeling of having achieved tenure at a research university. The...
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Hamas, 10 other groups reject all forms of... →
With the possibility of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the horizon, some things never change … like crazy statements issued by radical groups that oppose peace.
For example:
The U.S. and the “Zionists,” the statement said, were “aiming to wipe out the national rights of the Palestinians and to cover up the practices of the occupation,...
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What does Web 2.0 mean for the study of... →
Dan Drezner and Charli Carpenter have just published a paper on the future of international relations scholarship; in brief, it says:
The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the...
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Hillary Clinton to Iran: Stop Using Death Penalty... →
As someone who views every execution as a violation of human rights, I like the message here — don’t get me wrong — but has Secretary Clinton ever been to Texas? And where was she when her husband was responsible for signing death warrants in Arkansas?
In all seriousness, Clinton has expressed concern that “Iranians face execution for ‘exercising their right to free...
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Blagojevich Jurors Say They May Be Stuck →
Really?!
The jurors — where did they even find twelve people who didn’t already think Rod Blagojevich is the international symbol of corruption?! — have been at this for eleven days, have now sent three notes to the judge, and aren’t sure whether they can “reach a unanimous verdict on ‘any given count.’”
It’s Blagojevich and it’s a...
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Why I Love Mad Men
Don: Trust me, I work in advertising.
Stephanie: You're kidding; it's pollution.
Don: So stop buying things.
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More on Conflict Minerals →
Over at her excellent Texas in Africa blog, Laura Seay responds to the Enough Project’s response to critics of its focus on getting American legislators to pass conflict mineral legislation as the most effective way to end the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Her conclusion goes a little something like this:
[B]y overstating the extent to which American consumers are actually...
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The Rwandan Election
With presidential elections set for Monday — only the second since the 1994 genocide — there’s a fair amount of attention being paid to Rwanda, at least online.
There is no doubt that Paul Kagame, who won something like 95% of the vote in 2003, will win this election. Much like that last election, he is effectively the only candidate for whom people can cast their ballot, given...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 2.2
This week’s episode of “Jersey Shore” — the second of the season — was almost entirely devoted to nonsensical drama between Ronnie and Sammi, who were dating throughout the first season, are still in love (?), and can’t stand to be around one another.
I’m completely disinterested in that story line — apart from the fact that Ronnie makes a terrific...
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An App For Determining Which Loved One Will Be the... →
Finally, the App Store has something we can all use as we prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse.
Fair warning: I will turn out to be a very handsome zombie.
HT: Stephen Saideman.
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If You Didn't Write It, It's Plagiarism
With the academic year fast approaching, it’s nice to be able to reference the New York Times when discussing the bane of my existence. But, of course, the article presents a much more complicated picture of plagiarism than I think is warranted.
After providing several examples of blatant plagiarism, the author suggests the following:
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of...
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“For me, it’s been a real thinking process,” O’Neal told The...”
– Talk about burying the lead. Over at ESPN, the article is all about where Shaq is going to take his talents next season. But, as indicated by the quote above, there’s a much more pressing issue.
If I had written the article, it’s a story that’s got Shaq, in his unending quest to...
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On Having Stuff
On the basis of one innocent tweet — namely that I was anxious to receive my pre-orderd copy of the new Arcade Fire album — I’ve been having a discussion with several people on Twitter about surrounding myself with things that other people, I’ve discovered, find to be a waste of space or outright wasteful.
Apparently, I’m one of the few people I know who likes to own...
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