October 2011
54 posts
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Twitter Warrior
Joshua Treviño is mad at me.
In a recent post, I made the argument that the Red State co-founder’s statements about the death penalty during a Bloggingheads diavlog were light on facts. Ostensibly, he was the voice of opposition to the death penalty in the discussion … but his opposition was tepid at best and, to my mind, misleading at worst. In particular, I charged that Treviño put...
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Spend Night in Jersey Shore Pad —for $2.5K →
If, for some reason, you want to live out your own Jersey Shore fantasy, all you need is $2,500 a night. That’s how much the Seaside Heights home where the reality show is taped rents for, according to the AP, which uses a bunch of terms in its article that are basically incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the show. (For example, renters of the home will have access to “the duck phone”...
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Is moral relativism a tenable position? Does it...
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'Jersey Shore' Conference Promises Guido And Plato →
I’m heading to the University of Chicago for a couple of days for the “Jersey Shore” Studies conference. So I thought it fitting to link to an article about precisely that:
The last time Professor Ari Kohen presented a paper at a distinguished academic gathering he offered up his take on heroism in “The Odyssey.” On Friday, he’ll be sticking with ancient Greece, but adding in...
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Push for ‘Personhood’ Amendments Is New Tack in... →
A constitutional amendment facing voters in Mississippi on Nov. 8, and similar initiatives brewing in half a dozen other states including Florida and Ohio, would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, effectively branding abortion and some forms of birth control as murder.
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Dr. Randall S. Hines , a fertility specialist in Jackson working against Proposition 26 with...
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"Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the...
If there’s one thing on which most Americans seem to agree, it’s that a celebration is in order when people are killed. Of course, it’s not just any killing that we like; it’s executions. Since May, in person, in print, and online, we have come together to publicly rejoice at the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and now Muammar Gaddafi. But we’re not only interested in the executions of...
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Watch“I’m not well informed …,” says Joshua Treviño (of the Texas Public Policy Foundation), mere seconds before announcing that “This is the system working” and “This is a win for the system in general” in the Duane Buck case. As he is saying this, Evan Smith (Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Tribune) can’t nod his head in agreement vigorously enough. This...
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squashed asked: We're both going to oppose the death penalty, regardless of the evidence of guilt. With that said, let me make the case for the prosecutor. At a trial, strategic choices are made. If you choose not to have some evidence reviewed or introduced, that could be a strategy decision. (For instance, if the DNA would have proven you guilty, you might decline to have it tested.) Can you come back...
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An Empty Tactic →
Just weeks away from execution, a Texas death row inmate is asking the courts to force prosecutors to turn over knives and clothing that were never tested for DNA, claiming that the evidence could show he didn’t kill his girlfriend and her sons nearly two decades ago.
But prosecutors say the latest request from Henry Watkins Skinner, who came within an hour of lethal injection last year before...
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Libya and the Anti-War Libertarians
I quickly read a blog post yesterday that’s based on a Huffington Post piece about the human costs of the civil war in Libya. And then I felt like I needed to respond, not because I’m a cheerleader for war or anything like that but because the blogger who wrote it is being intentionally dishonest in order to score a point for his own political position (which he describes as...
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Death penalty's unlikely opponents →
Charisse Coleman has no real compassion for the man who walked into the Thrifty Liquor Store in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1995 and put three bullets in her brother, Russell.
But she doesn’t want Bobby Lee Hampton — one of more than seven dozen killers on Louisiana’s death row — executed, either.
“My opposition to the death penalty has nothing to do with Bobby Lee...
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Tyler Cowen alerts us to the fact that Franz...
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WatchOn the banks of the Red Cedar, There’s a school that’s known to all; Its specialty is winning, And those Spartans play good ball; Spartan teams are never beaten, All through the game they fight; Fight for the only colors: Green and White.
Go right through for MSU, Watch the points keep growing, Spartan teams are bound to win, They’re fighting with a vim! Rah! Rah! Rah! See...
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“Constantly celebrating the people we kill — dancing over their corpses — is now...”
– —Glenn Greenwald
The new piece at Salon.com is powerful, lines up with a great deal of what I’ve written about Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and the American death penalty, and should be required reading.
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Rawls on Wall Street →
Seemingly in response to my blog post from this morning, about what philosophy can or should add to the Occupy Wall Street movement, though most likely just a coincidence, Steven Mazie has a blog post over at The Stone that demonstrates the many ways in which John Rawls provides the ideal philosophical background for the movement:
[T]o move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs...
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Qaddafi, Intervention and R2P →
Back in March, when there was heated debate around the blogosphere about the Libyan intervention, I quoted Jon Western’s analysis on Libya and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine to lend support to my own position (though I also took issue with what I read as his pessimism about the future of R2P). Now, with the death of Gaddafi, I’ll quote Western again, as he sums up much of my...
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WatchPeter Singer on the joys of being a philosopher.
The whole interview, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of The Expanding Circle, is well worth your time … but Singer’s thoughts on teaching, research, and moral evangelism in this short clip reflect my own in many ways, especially his characterization of the incredible good luck to have a job doing what we love.
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A Funny Thing About Tumblr
Earlier this evening, a relatively lengthy post that I wrote yesterday got snipped into just one quotation from Aristotle’s Politics that I used to ground the philosophical approach I took in my argument against a certain kind of libertarianism: “A man without a city is either a beast or a god.” I’ll be interested to see if any of the people who like and reblog that quote...
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WatchStill right 99.6% of the time.
On his program yesterday, Rush Limbaugh laughed off criticism from Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) regarding the fact that he didn’t know anything about the Lord’s Resistance Army but still blasted President Obama’s decision to send troops after them (since he presumed, given the name, that they were good Christians who were fighting Muslims in...
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On Letting You Die
About a month ago, I wrote a post about whether or not it made sense to let people die if they elected not to have health insurance. One libertarian blogger took issue with my basic assumption, namely that people want to live longer and, if they become ill and can’t afford medical care, ought to be able to seek treatment (even if doing so comes at my expense as a taxpayer). It’s a...
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“[T]he time is right for a Republican candidate to take up the cause of populism...”
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Erickson has mocked the Occupy Wall Street movement as anti-American, communist and vague and its supporters as generally filthy and unlikeable. That line got a lot of traction on the political right for weeks. Erickson even took the lead in formulating the right’s online response to the...
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Social Media Monday
It’s Social Media Monday, at least for me.
I’m quoted in a U.S. News and World Report piece on the helpful and not-so-helpful ways in which universities are using Twitter:
Though he says the handle does “a good job” keeping followers appraised of campus news and events—particularly during a lockdown at the College of Law last year when a gunman was reported nearby—Ari...
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Teaching, Facebook, and the Problem of Friendship
When I first signed up for a Facebook account, I didn’t really know what I would do with it; when former students of mine began to request my friendship, I was even more unsure of what to do. Now, for the first time since I began using Facebook in 2007, I have been forced to ask myself whether the policy I instituted at that time is a good one.
After thinking about the myriad issues raised...
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Calling on Conservatives to End the Death Penalty →
In the wake of the Troy Davis execution last month, E.J. Dionne published an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post. At bottom, he argued — as I have — that support for the death penalty isn’t nearly as deep or widespread as it seems. As opponents have known for many years, polling makes very clear that the phrasing of the question about the death penalty matters a great deal:...
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That 53% Tumblr →
Over at A Plain Blog About Politics, Jonathan Bernstein does a pretty nice job of slamming the 53% Tumblr … by noting that a sizable portion of those who are submitting their photos and stories probably aren’t paying the taxes they think they’re paying:
I’m pretty confident that a substantial portion of them…don’t actually pay income taxes, and therefore are...
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“I had to transform myself into a person who would take a life …. That...”
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“The executioner is the one that suffers,” [Jerry] Givens says on the day after Davis’s execution in Georgia. “The person that carries out the execution itself is stuck with it the rest of his life. He has to wear that burden. Who would want that on them?”
During the 17 years that Givens worked...
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World Day Against the Death Penalty →
Today is World Day Against the Death Penalty. If you’re not working to change people’s minds about this issue, what are you doing?
As Human Rights Watch astutely notes:
October 10, 2011 is the ninth annual World Day against the Death Penalty, and this year marks 35 years since the United States reinstated capital punishment in 1976. In that time, 1,271 people have been electrocuted,...
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Morality? Whatever. →
One of central questions I raise in every one of my classes deals with the problem of morality. Specifically, I want my students to struggle with the idea that there might or might not be some overarching morality out there. But, of course, most of my students already believe that there is no such thing as an overarching morality to which we can appeal and they bristle at my argument that...
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“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more...”
– Reed Hastings • In a very short post on the Netflix blog about the about-face his company did regarding Qwikster. He added: “While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.” That’s all you needed to say.
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Inmate’s Release Brings Call for New Evidence Law →
I’d be incredibly curious to hear how someone like the National Review’s Kevin Williamson — who found a way to defend Rick Perry’s record on criminal justice issues, even when the question turned to the Cameron Todd Willingham execution — would respond to this newest example of misconduct and its connection to a Perry appointee on matters of criminal justice.
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גמר חתימה טובה
Whether online or in person, it is often far too easy to say things that are hurtful or that are interpreted as such by others; while we might disagree about things, we should always strive to engage others in dialogue with respect. Whenever I fail, it is important to be reminded of the human costs of that failure.
With Yom Kippur on the immediate horizon, I wanted to take a moment to apologize...
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“Does anything happen to the counsel who have been inadequate in a capital case?...”
– Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, noting that incompetent lawyers on death penalty cases generally don’t face consequences when they screw up.
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Stop the Execution of Reggie Clemons in Missouri →
Reggie Clemons was sentenced to death in St. Louis as an accomplice to a 1991 murder. There was no physical evidence and since allegations have arisen of police coercion, prosecutorial misconduct, and a ‘stacked’ jury in the Clemons case. Despite so many lingering questions, Missouri is still planning to execute Reggie Clemons.
Urge Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to stop the execution.
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