November 2011
75 posts
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Prison to keep execution drug →
This story is amazing, really. Sick and amazing. I’d advise someone to use it as a plot element in a novel, except that the reader would say, “Nah, that’s just not believable.” Here’s the short version:
Nebraska needs execution drugs, but said drugs are no longer manufactured in the U.S.;
Nebraska contacts broker in India, who procures drugs from shady source and...
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Occupation and Revolution
The Occupy Wall Street protest movement has succeeded in capturing a significant amount of our collective attention over the past month or two. Personally, I find its premises to be very compelling.
I’ve taught Marx for many years and it’s not at all difficult to explain his ideas about justice and economic inequality to my students or to find examples from our daily lives that...
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The Psychology of Walls and Fences →
Over at The Stone, Costica Bradatan has written up an interesting piece on why walls and fences play such an important role in our lives:
Walls are built for various reasons and they serve different purposes, but their function is always fundamentally the same: to create divisions, to prevent people and ideas from moving freely, and to legitimize differences. In the end, it does not even matter...
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Lessons from the Tweeting Classroom
Regular RC readers know that I use Twitter in my contemporary political theory course, which I teach every other year. Indeed, I’ll have a paper on the ways that Twitter can be used in a political theory course in a forthcoming edited volume on integrating emerging technology into the political science classroom.
I’ve been something of an evangelist for making use of Twitter in the...
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“In reality, Americans are disgusted with only one party: the one they don’t...”
– John Sides
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Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy... →
Adding just a dash of reason to the hysterical, conspiratorial tone that many are taking with regard to the Occupy evictions:
[T]here has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark...
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“I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of...”
– —Jürgen Habermas
“Zur Verfassung Europas” (“On Europe’s Constitution”) is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets....
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This Isn't Funny
A lot of people, especially on the Left, have the tendency to make jokes about the 2012 GOP candidates; these people look forward to each new debate in what seems to have become an merciless and unending string of debates — I think we’ve had more than ten now — in order to “live-blog” or “live-tweet” them, mostly to point out the foolish answers that are...
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“I refuse to be a part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer; and...”
– — Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon.
This is what exercising moral authority looks like:
The governor, a physician who served two previous terms, from 1995 to 2003, noted that he had allowed the two previous executions to go forward under his watch.
“They were the most agonizing and...
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The Turkey 'Pardon' as Dark Parody →
Justin Smith has a really interesting piece on the death penalty over at The Stone, in which he connects the annual presidential Thanksgiving pardoning of a turkey with the capriciousness of the death penalty in America:
Obama’s pardoning of one randomly selected bird at Thanksgiving not only carries with it an implicit validation of the slaughtering of millions of other turkeys. It also...
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I Blame Aaron Sorkin
joshsternberg replied to your link: Jonathan Chait on Liberal Disappointment
That last sentence is so true: Liberals want Jed Bartlett.
I’m surprised that Chait didn’t spend more time thinking about exactly which imaginary president liberals would prefer … because, yes, it’s clearly Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlett.
In fact, I think most liberals would probably vote for...
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Jonathan Chait on Liberal Disappointment →
Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they...
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Giving the President His Due: Cheney on Obama and... →
This interview with Dick Cheney is well worth reading; it’s a great example of the way that one can manipulate others by giving them exactly what they want and what they least expect from you. Cheney knows very well that nothing could be worse for President Obama — when it comes to voters on the Left going into the 2012 election — than the appearance that someone like Cheney...
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The Goals of Occupation
Back in late September, Glenn Greenwald suggested that it wasn’t particularly helpful or imaginative to say that the problem with the Occupy Wall Street movement was that it lacked clear goals or tactics, which is precisely what I suggested about the movement a couple of days ago, in mid-to-late November.
Here’s Greenwald:
Most importantly, very few protest movements enjoy perfect...
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Guy Fawkes, Anarchy, and the Occupation
Earlier today, I lampooned the use — by the Occupy Wall Street movement — of the Guy Fawkes mask made famous in “V for Vendetta.” Many people were quick to make the argument that the movement was using the Fawkes mask not to celebrate religious terrorism, but as a potent symbol of protest (specifically anti-government protest). Of course, the movement is also trying to...
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Occupy Wall Street: Time to Participate in... →
Will Wilkinson advises the Occupy Wall Street movement to actually think about participating in the democracy as it exists instead of agitating for something else:
There is something profoundly satisfying about believing that one’s own team alone has seen through the fog of disinformation and propaganda to the real truth about the treacherous interests that stand between our condition...
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“There’s been a lot of talk of demands. What’s yours?”
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1. I don’t have a specific demand. I want to cut the crap. If I were to have a demand of how we can change things, I want more democracy and to cut the corporate influence on politics.
2. My demand is to change the way corporations are working. I like to create change and I can’t do it by myself....
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Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will? →
In a recent piece at The Stone, Eddy Nahmias tries to untangle whether or not people have any real control over their actions and how our increasingly complex understanding of the way the human brain works does or doesn’t undercut the idea of free will.
Here’s the conclusion:
[D]oes neuroscience mean the death of free will? Well, it could if it somehow demonstrated that conscious...
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Honestly, What IS Occupy Wall Street?
I’m going to be completely honest for a minute here and hope that the people who glance at this blog (and sometimes pass it along to others) can help me to get to the bottom of something.
Here’s the thing:
What is the point of Occupy Wall Street?
Here’s what an organizer said, in an interview with Mother Jones about today’s massive Day of Action:
“Most of the...
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Happy World Philosophy Day! →
World Philosophy Day was introduced in 2002 by UNESCO to honour philosophical reflection in the entire world by opening up free and accessible spaces. Its objective is to encourage the peoples of the world to share their philosophical heritage and to open their minds to new ideas, as well as to inspire a public debate between intellectuals and civil society on the challenges confronting our...
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Who's To Blame For The GOP's Embrace Of Torture? →
Andrew Cohen suggests that President Obama is to blame:
When President Obama let all those Bush-era officials off the hook, when he didn’t push for indictments or even Congressional hearings on the topic, he famously said that he wanted to look forward, not back, on the debate over torture. Even though some civil libertarians warned that such magnanimity would backfire on the president,...
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WatchThis sure seems like a super-creepy nine minutes right here.
Maybe I’m not hearing them correctly but in this recent Bloggingheads diavlog it sure sounds like Ann Althouse and Glenn Loury worry about Herman Cain and how he’s being smeared in the media, suggest that the accusations of sexual harassment and assault are pretty thin, and wonder whether his behavior is just some behavior...
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What You Should Like
There are some elements of popular culture that people should like and some things they shouldn’t. This applies to movies, music, television shows, video games, sports, celebrities, food…and the like. It doesn’t apply to naturally occurring phenomena, like sunsets, mountains, or grandparents. Them’s the rules, folks. Nothing I can do about them.
Two easy examples, to get us started: If everyone...
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Letters from Penn State →
It seems that Penn State fans and alums have been writing to the Daily Nebraskan for the past few days about the weekend’s football game and the role in which visiting Nebraskans unwittingly found themselves. The DN editors collected and published them today. It’s worth clicking through and reading a few.
For my own part, I think it’s far too soon for anyone at Penn State to be...
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What is Moral Heroism?
In thinking about the abuse scandal at Penn State, I think we can make a pretty straightforward argument that a great many people were morally obligated to act and failed to do so. Whether or not Joe Paterno or Mike McQueary fulfilled their legal obligation by reporting what they knew to their superiors at the university, they failed to act when they might have stopped on-going crimes against...
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WatchIn this short video clip from a CNN interview, Michael Stipe and Mike Mills talk a little bit about R.E.M.’s legacy.
But, just out of curiosity, am I the only one who’s weirded out by the fact that Michael Stipe looks a whole lot like Billy Joel here?
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Herman Cain Isn't Thomas Paine →
There’s an interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday about Herman Cain and the Tea Party’s general obsession with Thomas Paine. The majority of the piece connected Cain and Paine because the former uses the words “common sense” all the time and the latter published a very famous pamphlet entited Common Sense.
Here’s the author’s conclusion:
Cain will...
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“Ninety seconds. That’s how much of the first hour of tonight’s GOP debate was...”
– Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign newsletter.
My recommendation: Ron Paul’s campaign should sponsor its own series of debates! Isn’t that the solution that best makes use of the free market? If there’s a whole bunch of competition and very little regulation, wouldn’t we...
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“Yes. I would return to that policy. I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an...”
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Herman Cain, asked about waterboarding at tonight’s GOP debate.
Michele Bachmann gave a similar answer: “if I were president I would use waterboarding” (via).
Has either one of the candidates been present for the waterboarding they’re so anxious to resume? Certainly not.
For my part, I...
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