April 2011
44 posts
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Today's Terrible Idea: Annex the West Bank in... →
With the clock ticking down to the anticipated unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, a senior Likud minister joined calls over the weekend to annex the West Bank in response to any unilateral Palestinian steps.
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“If they take steps, we will take steps – I think that we need to immediately annex all of the territories on that same day,” Kahlon said, and was...
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squashed asked: The other possibility is that He Is Risen/He Is Risen Indeed was, as I understand, a very early call response Christians would use to identify eachother. (Or perhaps its Latin equivalent.) That may make it into enough Easter Sunday sermons to inspire some Twitter posts.
Alternatively, if your Twitter friends are the Christmas/Easter/Mothers Day church goers, it might just be...
Alternatively, if your Twitter friends are the Christmas/Easter/Mothers Day church goers, it might just be...
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The Academic Blogger
John Sides — whom most readers will likely know from The Monkey Cage — has a great piece in this month’s PS: Political Science and Politics on academic blogging, even touching on whether or not junior faculty members ought to get into the game.
In it, he nicely captures some of the reasons that I’ve really come to enjoy blogging over the past year and a half:
The key is...
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Hamas: National unity gov't won't take part in... →
Just in case you got excited earlier today when the New York Times reported a breakthrough in reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, you might want to dial it back a little bit:
The establishment of a Palestinian national unity government does not mean that Hamas will recognize Israel or will participate in peace negotiations, senior Hamas official and a member of the Hamas delegation...
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From Time Magazine's conversation with the...
Can I pour beer in it? No, only players can do that.
Do people ever try to sneak by you to pour beer in it? They try. They don’t succeed.
Never? Never.
How much beer can it hold? The Stanley Cup can hold 14 cans of beer.
Wow, you knew that fact off the top of your head. Well, it’s seen a lot of beer.
(Time via Corbin Hiar)
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Christ Is Coming, Get Tweeting →
Could Facebook and Twitter be the salvation of man?
Rev. Franklin Graham believes the second coming of Jesus Christ could be announced through social media.
The son of the prominent Christian evangelist Billy Graham gave the prophecy to ABC’s “This Week” host Christiane Amanpour.
If you weren’t using Twitter before, perhaps this will inspire you to get started;...
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“Kin selection is wrong. That’s it. It’s wrong.”
– Edward O. Wilson, who has prominently supported the kin selection view of the origin of altruism for more than thirty years, has changed his mind.
Why this might be of interest:
The puzzle of altruism is more than just a technical curiosity for evolutionary theorists. It amounts to a high-stakes...
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Goldstone Contra Goldstone
As has been very widely discussed, earlier this month Richard Goldstone published an op-ed piece in which he wrote the following about the findings of the UN mission he led to investigate Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza two years ago:
If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.
To be more specific, Goldstone wrote that
The...
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Solomon Schechter Meets Indiana Jones →
In 1896, two Scottish sisters came to Solomon Schechter, then a Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature at Cambridge University, and showed him some moldy scraps of manuscript they had purchased in Egypt. Schechter immediately recognized them as fragments of the long-lost Hebrew original of the Apocryphal book of Ben Sira (known in the Christian tradition as Ecclesiasticus). Soon thereafter he...
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WatchIt’s really been an amazing 24 hours for a) people who want to burn Korans and b) people who have trouble understanding the First Amendment.
My sense is that the most fascinating thing here is not the bizarre decision in Dearborn, which seems not to understand the problems with prior restraint involved in barring Terry Jones from being a moron in public. Instead, it’s really the...
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N.J. Transit Worker Fired for Burning Koran Gets... →
“In America, we have the right to burn all kinds of things — letters, flags, books, Bibles and Korans,” Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey [ACLU], said Friday.
Ms. Jacobs said the case should “serve as a reminder to our leaders that they can’t punish and censor political expression based on their own emotional reactions or sense of morality.”
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Ms. Jacobs said of Mr....
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State court to review long sentences for teens →
Following on from my most recent post, about sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, is this news item from California:
The state Supreme Court has agreed to review a 16-year-old’s 110-year prison sentence for three attempted murders and decide whether juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide are constitutionally entitled to a realistic...
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Anonymous asked: "What is interesting is that a 16 year old was sentenced to LWOP."
Randomly, I was at a meeting yesterday where this came up. It turns out that there are ~25 people in Connecticut that are currently serving life or LWOP sentences who committed those crimes when they were 14-16.
Also yesterday: CT bill to ban the death penalty got a thumbs up in committee....
Randomly, I was at a meeting yesterday where this came up. It turns out that there are ~25 people in Connecticut that are currently serving life or LWOP sentences who committed those crimes when they were 14-16.
Also yesterday: CT bill to ban the death penalty got a thumbs up in committee....
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Haniyeh to UN chief: Hamas accepts Palestinian... →
Following on from my post the other day about a possible split between the political and militant wings of Hamas, there’s now this gem:
The head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip has told United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon that the group supports any steps leading to the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, according to the Palestinian news agency...
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Death Penalty Drug Search Raises Legal Questions →
As Running Chicken readers know, there’s been an amazing amount of weirdness surrounding lethal injection in the United States even since Hospira, the leading manufacturer of sodium thiopental, stopped making and selling the drug.
The New York Times now provides a handy recap of the action, complete with some interesting revelations about “secret missions” to deliver drugs...
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Price discovers thousands of unknown Whitman... →
My colleagues at the University of Nebraska are leading the way in the digital humanities and this sort of thing nicely highlights what exactly they’re doing:
As a clerk in the U.S. Attorney General’s Office in the 1860s and 1870s, Walt Whitman had a firsthand view of the legal, cultural and ideological challenges facing the nation after the Civil War. That experience, most...
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Toddler Democracy →
Over at The Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten reports on some fascinating new research for those of us who love political science, little kids, and Canada:
Finally, the [daycare] students were shown pictures of Conservative leader Stephen Harper, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton. “I had to reduce the number of candidates because clicker voting is not so...
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“It was not known that the bus targeted on the outskirts of Gaza carried...”
– According to Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, the intended target of a recent rocket attack wasn’t a bus carrying Israeli children. So, then, the intended target was just a bus carrying some other Israelis?
My sense is that this information won’t do a whole lot to improve relations...
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The iPod and the Public Sphere →
“In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the ‘mob mentality.’ Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can’t join someone in a movement if you can’t hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change.”
There’s a fascinating piece over at Slate that combines the general crankiness of post-war critical theorists and the Chicken...
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27% of communication by members of Congress is... →
It may be helpful, at a time like this — when Congress is threatening to shut down the U.S. government in a dispute over a tiny fraction of the federal budget — to think of legislators like a lost forest tribe.
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“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we...
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“The libertarian-leaning former Governor of New Mexico will announce his...”
– Gary Johnson Knows He’ll be Labeled the “Pot Candidate” - FoxNews.com
Johnson is not the most eloquent or polished speaker, but he’s a principled libertarian, and a welcome addition to an otherwise pathetic field of candidates.
I think we should probably nominate this short post to be in the...
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“[T]heory won – because nowadays everyone ‘does’ it. But theory lost...”
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This book review in the Guardian is making me excited for the Fall Semester, when I’ll be teaching my contemporary political theory course again. I haven’t taught the course since Fall 2009, when it was a huge success both in the classroom and on Twitter.
In particular, the above...
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How Much of a Consensus on Human Rights Have We...
Having set out, in three previous posts (here and here), what I take to be a compelling account of human dignity that provides the foundation for international human rights, I turned in my last post on this topic to the question of what to do when human rights violators won’t accept that account.
My argument might be boiled down to one sentence: we can insist that they accept it because the...
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The Potentially Revolutionary Political Role of... →
Over at The Atlantic, James Warren describes spending the weekend at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. Here’s a brief recap of his experience:
By the time thousands of political scientists departed Chicago on Sunday, there had been ample and at times stultifying talk of parameter stability, balancing datasets, quantifying behavioral outcomes, contextual...
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