January 2012
93 posts
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“My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without...”
– — Barack Obama, speaking specifically about the indefinite detention rules in the National Defense Authorization Act, which were changed specifically to prevent the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens or legal U.S. residents suspected of terrorism, before the law was passed by Congress. “My...
December 2011
82 posts
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A Political Theorist's Constitutional Question
Whenever I hear a Ron Paul acolyte explain that all their candidate wants to do is to return this country to the narrow boundaries imposed by the U.S. Constitution, which is daily at this point, I have to admit that I wonder why the possibility of progress — or even change, if we don’t want to use inherently biased terminology — is necessarily ruled out by Paul and his...
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Why Irish soldiers who fought Hitler hide their... →
This article provides a brief look at a fascinating bit of World War II history about which I’d previously heard nothing: Irish who deserted their own neutral army to fight against the Germans and Japanese, and who were then blacklisted when they returned to Ireland after the war.
They were formally dismissed from the Irish army, stripped of all pay and pension rights, and prevented...
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Should Bloggers Be Like Socrates?
Yesterday — as Andrew Sullivan was at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division Meeting, discussing the ways that blogging and philosophy were related — I was having a conversation with Tim Prisk via Twitter about one of the points that Sullivan made:
@sullydish: blogging is a constantly interrupted conversation, a Platonic dialogue between me and readers - a...
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The Top 5 Posts of 2011
As I did yesterday, I’m once again linking to the Top 10 Running Chicken posts of the year. These are the posts that drew the most unique eyeballs; the list doesn’t include the About page, which draw several thousand unique hits every year, or the main page, which is always the top draw since it’s the way that people access the site directly (rather than via some referring site).
Perhaps you...
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Ron Paul Downplays Newsletters : Only ‘Eight To... →
“There were many times I did not edit the entire letter and other things were put in,” he told a caller on the Jan Mickelson radio show. “I was not aware of the details until many years later. These were sentences that were put in, eight or 10 sentences. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all. It got in the letter and I thought it was terrible.”
Or, in other words:
Paul is now either...
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"Leave Me Alone For Five Minutes" →
All Ron Paul wants is to become President so that he fundamentally reorganize the way the entire country works. So, it’s not surprising that he’d like reporters to leave him alone while he eats breakfast just prior to the Iowa caucuses:
“Asked if he’s concerned that if he doesn’t win his followers will not rally behind the GOP nominee, he looks up from his plate of cantaloupe,...
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The Top 10 Posts of 2011
Today and tomorrow, by way of reflection on a pretty successful year of blogging, I’ll be linking to the Top 10 Running Chicken posts of the year. These are the posts that drew the most unique eyeballs; the list doesn’t include the About page, which draw several thousand unique hits every year, or the main page, which is always the top draw since it’s the way that people...
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1% Travel
My wife’s asleep next to me. My baby’s sleeping on my chest. And I’m posting on my blog via iPad, thanks to the free wi-fi in First Class. I tell you, dahlings, university political philosophy professors really do live the best of all possible lives. And I know this for a fact, as I’ve examined the others.
Airborne Socrates out.
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Injustice in Murder Cases →
In most American counties, some indigent criminal defendants are represented by a public defender, and others by a private court-appointed lawyer. A new RAND study focusing on Philadelphia exposes a vast difference in how clients fare depending on the kind of lawyer they are assigned.
The startling findings show that merely providing an indigent defendant a lawyer, as the Constitution requires...
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Such Discerning Taste
I hope that whichever generation David Foster Wallace is the voice of isn’t the one I’m part of.— mattyglesias (@mattyglesias) December 27, 2011
I have to admit that, when I read this tweet from Matthew Yglesias, what I thought to myself was, “I’m so smart that I don’t even like the things that smart people like.”
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BREAKING: Nebraska Democratic Senator Ben Nelson... →
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) is set to announce on Tuesday that he will retire in 2012, a Democratic source has confirmed to TPM.
Nelson was already probably the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent going into 2012, and Republicans and GOP-aligned groups were already advertising against him.
Holding this seat could be difficult for Democrats, as the state voted 57%-42% for John McCain in 2008, and...
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“What does our use and abuse of Nietzsche’s thinking say about us?”
– This fascinating question comes from an engaging book review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s new book, American Nietzsche.
I haven’t yet read the book, as it was only just published, but I’m anxious to do so. As the reviewer notes, Americans enjoy engaging Nietzsche, despite what...
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Intellectuals and Politics →
Over at The Stone recently, Gary Gutting had the following suggestion for the 2012 Presidential contest:
The best evidence of how capable candidates are of fruitfully interacting with intellectuals would be to see them doing just this. Concretely, I make the follow suggestion for the coming presidential election: Gather small but diverse panels of eminent, politically uncommitted experts on,...
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Where are the Baby Boomer Philosophers? →
There was an interesting post over at Crooked Tiimber recently that reported on a claim by Eric Schwitzgebel about the dearth of prominent philosophers amongst the Baby Boomers.
There are lots of very prominent, and ground-breaking, philosophers in my generation. (I’m defining generations in a way that my generation includes roughly people born between 1965 and 1980.) And looking at the current...
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Arrested Development & Philosophy
Not only is this a book I’m going to buy, it’s a book for which I wish I’d written a chapter!
I’ve been coming up with clever chapter titles all morning:
“What’s So Maeby About Plato?”; “Oedipus, Mother Boy, and Loose Seals/Lucilles”; “International Law, Saddam Hussein, and the Bluth Boys” …
And so on …
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A Very Ad Hominem Christmas
Yesterday, a blogger became so fed up by my posts on the subject of Ron Paul’s newsletters that he posted a libelous ad hominem attack about me on his blog. That it was libel is clear: the blogger has been following my blog for approximately two weeks, offered no citations for his charges that I was “a partisan hack,” and utterly ignored (or perhaps simply never read) all of the...
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How Did We Get Here? Or, Why Do 20 Year Old... →
Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Steve Horwitz has a long and thoughful piece that every libertarian ought to read and pass along to five friends.
After a good deal of history on Ron Paul and his unsavory associates and associations, Horwitz gets to the heart of the matter:
So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what...
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On Santa and Gift Giving
One of the more interesting things I’ve noticed today is that most people who wrote to me or left a comment about my Santa and deterrence post from this morning were less interested in the deterrence problem I highlighted and more interested in arguing against the whole concept of presents coming from Santa.
There is something to be said for anonymous gift-giving, to be sure, and something...
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The Case Against Santa →
Over at 3 Quarks Daily, Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse recently had some fun with the whole idea behind Santa Claus and his gift-giving:
The trouble with Santa’s surveillance is that it affects our motives. When we know that we are being watched by an omniscient judge looking to mete out rewards and punishments, we find ourselves with strong reasons to act for the sake of getting the reward and...
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Those Newsletters →
Jonathan Bernstein makes an interesting point about the commentary surrounding the Ron Paul racist newsletter flap:
Just don’t tell me, as Kain and Fredersdorf do, that publishing ugly newsletters is bad, but not as bad as various policies that the president or the other Republican candidates support. That’s the wrong standard; it’s the standard by which to judge an actual...
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Anarchists for Ron Paul? →
Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Gary Chartier has written a post about anarchists and Ron Paul:
As an anarchist, I believe the state is unjust, unnecessary, and dangerous. So I’d certainly like to see it reduced in size rather than expanded. And Ron Paul is actually interested in making the bloated behemoth that is the United States government smaller (though he still seems...
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The Magic of Polling →
Seth Masket patiently explains polling to Roger Simon, who actually wrote a piece for Politico that seems to inquire whether or not polls are magical:
You really don’t need to be a statistician to understand this stuff. Why can a survey of 1,100 people be accurate in telling us how the whole nation is thinking? The metaphor I always liked was a blood test. For a doctor to determine if...
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What Is College For? →
Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society. Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs. There would be no need to support, at great expense, the...
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Hanukkah, Extremism, and Religious Freedom
Just before Hanukkah began, the Jerusalem Post printed an interesting op-ed on religious extremism and religious freedom. This excerpt highlights, I think, the author’s timely and important point about the danger of recognizing one’s own religious freedom but not that of another:
WHEN WE light the Hanukka candles, we need to remember the value of religious freedom. We also need to...
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Ron Paul's Shaggy Defense →
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ entire piece on Ron Paul’s infamous racist and anti-Semitic newsletters is well worth reading; he brings together quotes from the newsletters, Paul’s one-time public defense of those quotes, and then Paul’s more recent attempts to distance himself from those quotes.
But if you don’t have the five minutes, here’s what I take to be the centrally...
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On Angry Atheists and the Religious Herd
Upon hearing the news that Christopher Hitchens passed away, I started to think about why his writing hadn’t really made an impact on me in the way it clearly has done with so many others (either in a very positive or a very negative way). I wrote it up in a short blog post on Friday afternoon.
Michael Cote, who writes the Climate Adaptation blog, sent in a quick reply about a phrase that I...
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The Memorandum
My introduction to Vaclav Havel came in my senior year of high school, when the director of our theatre program allowed me to direct a short play. It was my second experience directing — I’d somehow been allowed to direct a one-act in my sophomore year, which in retrospect seems pretty bizarre — and I benefitted immensely this time from co-directing with a good friend, David...
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Vaclav Havel, Dissident Playwright Who Led... →
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.
Havel was a hero to many all over the world, especially those living under autocratic regimes, and with good reason: He was a co-author, in January 1977, of the human rights manifesto...
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aheram asked: The question I received was in regards to him receiving donations from repugnant individuals. I mentioned Ron Paul's own take on racism and then made the argument that actions do speak louder than perceptions founded upon false premises. Paul's record all but disproves the charges of racism. To call it a "bad argument" without once addressing the main thrust of my post is...
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Ron Paul, Racism, Bad Arguments
I’ve become absolutely fascinated by the number of arguments I’ve seen recently about Ron Paul and racism. It doesn’t much matter to me if Ron Paul espouses racist ideas or has simply associated himself with people who do. But what amazes me is the lengths to which some people will go to defend Paul against any statement that doesn’t simply and straightforwardly crow about...
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Telling It Like It Is
I suppose that today is the day to officially admit that I never really “got into” the whole phenomenon that was Christopher Hitchens, even though I’m generally quite interested in the concept of the public intellectual. I’ve been reflecting a bit about this today and discussing it with friends. Whether or not I agreed with Hitchens wasn’t ever the issue, though that...
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So, Let's Recap
Against my better judgment, I tuned in for the last twenty-five minutes of last night’s GOP debate. Here’s what I learned about the candidates:
Mitt Romney made clear that he hasn’t flip-flopped on any issues; he’s simply changed his mind about them all when it became politically expedient to do so. If that’s your definition of flip-flopping, well, then, he’ll...
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Listen as retired California Superior Court Judge...
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The Socratic Method
Yesterday, an article from Time Magazine’s website alerted educators to the following:
In a study published in the December 2011 issue of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, four cognitive scientists from Argentina describe what happened when they asked contemporary high school and college students a series of questions identical to those posed by Socrates. In one of his most famous...
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"Talking Point, Sound Bite, Talking Point"
“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
When I read this, all I...
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The Theoretical Case Against Deterrence
The concept of deterrence is built upon the assumption that criminals are rational actors; if we regarded criminals as irrational, we might immediately give up on the possibility of influencing their decisions. But how rational are murderers, the particular subset of criminals that society is most interested in affecting? The answer is not so clear.
For almost the entirety of the modern death...