June 2011
108 posts
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Assault Rifle Stolen From Unlocked Vehicle →
Here is the news report to go along with the above headline … in its entirety:
Here’s one more reason to remember to keep your vehicle doors locked overnight. Lincoln Police Officer Katie Flood says someone stole an AR-15 assault rifle from a man’s blue Ford explorer.
Flood says the owner of the vehicle left the doors unlocked. She says it happened between 2:30 and 5:15 a.m....
May 2011
79 posts
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Are There Natural Human Rights? →
Over at The Stone, Michael Boylan has a lengthy survey of some of the arguments for and against the idea of universal human rights. After setting out some of the better-known positions put forward by philosophers across the centuries, Boylan returns to the contemporary international turmoil with which he began in an attempt to bring home the importance of answering the question of whether or not...
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Atlanta Thrashers sold to True North, moving to... →
Here’s an alternate headline for you:
Not Peachy Keen: Atlanta Loses its Second Hockey Team to a Canadian City Due to Complete Lack of Interest.
Here are some relevant details:
True North Sports and Entertainment has completed its deal to purchase the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers, clearing the way to move them to Winnipeg.
True North announced the deal at a news conference Tuesday at...
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Victim Relatives Opposing Execution Feel Ignored →
One of the issues that comes up time and time again with regard to the death penalty is the way in which its use creates “good” and “bad” victims, namely those who support and those who refuse to support the state’s decision to seek death or to preserve its capital statute.
There are a great many examples from all over the U.S.; here’s a relatively clear,...
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Gaza flotilla to proceed, despite opening of Rafah... →
The activists said 15 ships, including the Mavi Marmara, would be in the new flotilla, carrying 1,500 people from around 100 countries, humanitarian aid and construction materials.
Egypt eased travel restrictions for Gaza residents on Saturday, eroding the blockade.
But a spokesman for the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla II” vowed to keep challenging it.
I’m anxious for someone to...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 3.7
I know, I know: The third season of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” wrapped up what seems like months ago and I haven’t written anything about it since discussing a mid-season episode at the end of March. So I thought I owed readers an explanation, especially since I also made a case for my inclusion in an academic conference organized on the subject of MTV’s “Jersey...
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What Should We Do With John Walker Lindh? →
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Frank Lindh asks, ““If Bin Laden is dead … why can’t John come home?” He rightly notes that
In post-9/11 America, John became a symbol of “the other.” He was called the American Taliban. A traitor. Detainee No. 1 in the war on terrorism.
President George W. Bush called John a “Qaeda fighter.” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said,...
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The New Public Intellectuals →
My good friend Michael Tofias thinks that all of the people who might be in the running for Running Chicken “guru of the left” are too old. In a series of blog posts and email messages, he made plain his opinion that the internet is where all the really good public intellectuals hang out. For example:
John Sides and The Monkey Cage Named “Blog of the Year” by The Week:
Sides and...
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Do War Crimes Arrests Matter?
In a blog post earlier today, Stephen Saideman scoffed at the impact of the Mladic arrest:
Sixteen years? Political scientists tend to assume that folks focus on the short term, not the long term. I am pretty sure 16 years is the long term, and Keynes was right about what happens in the long run.
The funny thing is I am pretty sure that if we dig up enough NYT editorials, we might find one or...
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A Research Agenda for Bleeding Heart Libertarians →
The excellent political theorist John Tomasi has joined the Bleeding Heart Libertarians as a guest blogger and his first post suggests that he will try to set out what I’ve been hoping to learn from this blog all along:
To be a bleeding heart libertarian means to be willing to take up a new research agenda. That agenda, it seems to me, has two parts. The first involves our developing a...
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Mladic, OBL and International Justice →
Charli Carpenter raises an interesting point in her most recent LGM blog post, one that I brought up earlier today in a brief exchange with the Short Form Blog curators; she writes:
What I find fascinating about the international reaction to his arrest is the importance of this man being brought to trial. At no point I am aware of during his years of hiding was it argued that he should instead...
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Rwandan genocide mastermind captured in DRC →
It’s not a good day to be a fugitive from international justice … which means it’s a very good day for people all over the world who care about human rights.
A mastermind of the Rwandan genocide has been captured 17 years later in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, a United Nations court has announced.
Bernard Munyagishari, a former Hutu militia leader, is...
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Nasrallah Bashes Obama and Netanyahu, but Applauds... →
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Wednesday that recent speeches by US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered a knockoutblow to the Arab peace initiative. He urged the Arab League to withdraw its initiative for Middle East peace. “What have Obama and Netanyahu left for the Palestinian people, Palestinian Authority and Palestinians factions?” Nasrallah asked...
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Top Serbian War Crimes Suspect Caught →
Serbian President Boris Tadic announced at a news conference in Belgrade on Thursday that Ratko Mladic, the fugitive accused of masterminding the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, had been captured but refused to give details.
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Mr. Mladic was blamed for the worst ethnically motivated mass murder on the Continent since World War II that resulted in the massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men...
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Democrats join Republicans in questioning Obama’s... →
In a tweet this morning linking to this article, Glenn Greenwald wrote, ”Only a conspiratorial hatemonger would suggest that the Israel Lobby has immense influence in Congress.”
It’s sometimes difficult to read sarcasm into a tweet, but not in this case. Greenwald intends for us to understand that anyone should be able to recognize the influence on American politics of the...
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The facts and fictions of Netanyahu's address to... →
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes claims about the West Bank, Arab citizens of Israel and the Jewish people’s historic biblical connection to Israel - are these hollow statements or political truths?
This is the subheading for a nice little piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that evaluates some of the factual and fictional claims made by Netanyahu in yesterday’s speech...
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The Stone Returns!
The Stone — a forum for philosophers to discuss contemporary and age-old issues — has returned to the New York Times Opinionator section after a hiatus of several months and Simon Critchley announces its return thusly:
For some of us who are lucky enough to get paid to think, philosophy is a profession, a way of paying the bills by teaching students.
But philosophy is more than a...
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Obama, Israel/Palestine, and the 1967 Borders
It seems that no one is particularly happy with Obama’s proposal for a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But this should not be a surprise to anyone. If someone were to present a peace plan that made everyone happy — even moderately so — then one of the most vexing problems of the past half-century would be solved … unless you believe that a great...
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The International Criminal Court Bares Its Teeth →
The ICC’s big weakness, apart from its astronomical cost and drawn-out procedures, is its dependence on others to help arrest suspects. But even this may be changing.
As this quote suggests, we probably shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves with regard to the potency or efficacy of the International Criminal Court. But this piece from The Economist does a pretty nice job of balancing some of...
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Further Thoughts on Tumblr's Politics Tag →
It seems that a post I wrote ten days ago — complaining about the lack of original content and the overwhelming libertarian direction of Tumblr’s Politics tag — was picked up yesterday by some of the editors of Tumblr’s Politics tag.
Now that it’s been tagged, due I think to the fact that at least one libertarian editor reblogged and commented on it (and I’ve...
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Justice for Victims?
My friend David Kaczynski, the Executive Director of New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, wrote the following in a very compelling blog post just the other day:
On Thursday evening, while dining with my wife Linda at Appleby’s, I glanced up and saw the scrolling news blurb on CNN: “Unabomber items to be auctioned on the internet.”
As most of you know, the Unabomber is my...
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Michael Oren Against Certain International... →
Say what you will about Michael Oren’s obvious pro-Israel bias — he’s their ambassador, after all — but this is an interesting take-down of some prominent members of the realist school of international relations theory. I’m awaiting a response from Stephen Walt, who also blogs for Foreign Policy and who recently wrote a fairly self-congratulatory piece about how well...
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What different college degrees are worth →
Ezra Klein tells us the following:
If you’re going to college to get a job after college, you’re better off in a major that lends itself to an obvious job after college. Engineering, say, or teaching. A humanities or communications degree turns out to be a much tougher sell. That doesn’t account, of course, for the joy and pleasure of learning about the humanities or communication, but if my...
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“This is not some unknowable thing. This is not curing cancer. We know how to do...”
– Danalynn Recer, executive director of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, quoted in Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Mitigator” from The New Yorker [gated], on the use of mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of capital trials.
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The Declaration of Independents →
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen reviews the new book on libertarianism from Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. It seems like it might be a mixed review, until you reach the conclusion:
This is the up-to-date statement of libertarianism. Not warmed-over right-wing politics, but real, true-blooded libertarianism in the sense of loving liberty and wanting to find a new path toward human...
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IDF expected to seek death penalty for killers of... →
The army will apparently seek the death penalty for the murderers of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar in March. This would be the first time it has sought a sentence of death since the mid-1990s.
Such a request would most likely be purely symbolic, since the only case in which a death penalty was ever actually carried out in Israel was that of Nazi war...
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More on History, Partition, and Israel/Palestine
In response to my most recent post about Israel, the Palestinians, and the UN Partition Plan of 1947, cerebralthoughts said: “But that doesn’t really address the crux of his argument. His argument is that there has always been a non-violent Palestinian resistance; there were indeed Palestinian political groups who even supported the UN partition plan…”
So, let me clarify and expand a...
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War Crimes Reporting After Goldstone →
Charli Carpenter has some thoughts on how we might replace ad hoc committees to investigate war crimes — like the one that was headed by Richard Goldstone — with a more permanent independent monitoring body:
[T]he key weakness of the Geneva Conventions is that the rules that currently exist are inadequately monitored and more seldom enforced. Without an independent monitoring...
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The Problem With Purity →
In 1914, the Tamil activist and editor P.S. Aiyar took to the pages of his South African newspaper to appraise Mohandas Gandhi. “Mr. Gandhi may have been a good man prior to his assuming the role of a saint,” Aiyar wrote, “but since he has attained this new state by himself without being ordained by a holy preceptor, he seems to be indifferent though not callous to human sufferings and human...
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Of Politics, Grading, and the Politics of Grading →
When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.
Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the...
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Socrates Goes Back on Trial →
Socrates, the famed Greek philosopher, made a rare public appearance on May 12, in the Ceremonial Courtroom of Manhattan’s Federal Courthouse.
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The court was in session on a brisk spring evening to reargue the case against Socrates, sentenced to death in 399 B.C. after a jury of 500 of his peers convicted him of failing to honor the city’s gods and abetting in the...
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thepoliticalnotebook asked: You have a book; this is very cool. I'm definitely reading it.
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Ex-Rwanda Army Chief Sentenced for Genocide →
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found that Augustine Bizimungu had complete control over the men he commanded, who were involved in the massacres that started on the night of April 6.
Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the former head of the paramiltary police, was also convicted of genocide crimes but the court ordered his release as he had already spent 11 years behind bars since...
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WatchMy baby boy is a year old today and so I’m taking a break from politics, philosophy, and human rights to spend the day reflecting on the amazing year I’ve had with him and my wonderful wife. I’m a very lucky man and days like today present the perfect opportunity to pause and reflect on just how lucky.
I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual bill of fare. In the meantime,...
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Libertarian Radicalism and Health Care "Slavery" →
Matt Zwolinski, over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, takes a good look at Rand Paul’s exciting claim that universal health care necessarily involves enslaving the poor doctors of our nation.
His analysis of the problem with Paul’s statement is cogent and goes a long way toward explaining both what libertarians believe and why they ought not to let their beliefs run amok...