July 2011
99 posts
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June 2011
108 posts
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Watch
Geithner Whips Out His Pocket Constitution: Default Is Not An Option
via Huffington Post
“I think there are some people who are pretending not to understand it, who think there’s leverage for them in threatening a default,” Geithner said. “I don’t understand it as a negotiating position. I mean really think about it, you’re going to say that— can I read you the 14th amendment?”
Geithner...
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Life As A Mosaic, Not A Monolith: What Google+...
The flipside of the rise of apps is the fall of the browser. The browser is a kludge, a way to shoehorn the web onto PCs, made necessary because the operating systems around when the web was invented were inward focused: they were all about applications, files and folders on the hard drive. But we have gone far enough toward always-on that we will have dozens of web-aware and web-dependent apps...
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No one is questioning Israel's legitimacy →
Israeli political theorist Shlomo Avineri has written an op-ed in Haaretz that’s well worth reading:
A very senior minister, who belongs to neither Likud nor Yisrael Beiteinu, voiced his concern to me some while back over the possibility that the General Assembly of the UN would decide to recognize a Palestinian state in the June 1967 borders. Such a decision, he said, would amount to...
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Read the actual copy of the treaty of Versailles →
The treaty of Versailles was signed on this day in 1919, officially ending WWI.
Not included in the text of the treaty, incidentally, are the amazing number of disasters that one might say directly resulted from it.
That said, if you’re interested in the Paris peace process, I recommend the book:
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Just 10 days after the attacks of Sept. 11,...
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Which Justices Vote Together? →
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan H. Adler gives us some insight into SCOTUS voting patterns:
It’s commonly assumed that Justices Scalia and Thomas are the two Supreme Court justices who are most likely to vote together. However much that may have been true during Justice Thomas’ first several years on the Court, it is becoming less true over time. This past term, according...
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Bachmann Backers Edit John Quincy Adams' Wikipedia... →
Defending her erroneous comments that the Founding Fathers tried to end slavery, Bachmann told ‘Good Morning America’ host George Stephanopoulos today, “If you look at one of our Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true…. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery.”
Stephanopoulos rightly points out that Adams, a...
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Koh’s Written Testimony on the WPR →
Over at the Lawfare blog, Robert Chesney goes over two important issues addressed in Harold Koh’s testimony today regarding the War Powers Resolution. The first issue deals with the question of the breadth of the term “hostilities” … but the second considers whether WPR Section 8(c) actually just makes the first issue moot.
Chesney sets it out nicely:
Here is the...
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WatchMatt Yglesias and Julian Sanchez turn their disagreement about Robert Nozick’s libertarianism into a very friendly seventy-five minute Bloggingheads diavlog.
I wrote about their disagreement regarding Nozick and then I wrote about Yglesias was wrong in condemning political philosophy as useless to contemporary political controversies, so it seems natural to grab the eight minutes of...
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WatchMatt Yglesias and Julian Sanchez turn their disagreement about Robert Nozick’s libertarianism into a very friendly seventy-five minute Bloggingheads diavlog.
I wrote about their disagreement regarding Nozick and then I wrote about Yglesias was wrong in condemning political philosophy as useless to contemporary political controversies, so it seems natural to grab the eight minutes of...
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WatchMatt Yglesias and Julian Sanchez turn their disagreement about Robert Nozick’s libertarianism into a very friendly seventy-five minute Bloggingheads diavlog.
I wrote about their disagreement regarding Nozick and then I wrote about Yglesias was wrong in condemning political philosophy as useless to contemporary political controversies, so it seems natural to grab the eight minutes of...
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WatchMatt Yglesias and Julian Sanchez turn their disagreement about Robert Nozick’s libertarianism into a very friendly seventy-five minute Bloggingheads diavlog.
I wrote about their disagreement regarding Nozick and then I wrote about Yglesias was wrong in condemning political philosophy as useless to contemporary political controversies, so it seems natural to grab the eight minutes of...
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WatchMatt Yglesias and Julian Sanchez turn their disagreement about Robert Nozick’s libertarianism into a very friendly seventy-five minute Bloggingheads diavlog.
I wrote about their disagreement regarding Nozick and then I wrote about Yglesias was wrong in condemning political philosophy as useless to contemporary political controversies, so it seems natural to grab the eight minutes of...
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“Oh put-upon ‘upper middle class’ cultivator of your own vineyard! Oh...”
– Over at the LGM blog, Paul Campos has some choice words for Victor Davis Hanson regarding his most recent missive on Obama, the state of the nation, and the tragedy that will befall us as a result of our pandering to minorities and poor people. Hanson is terrified for the wealthy American, who is...
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Silencing Speech With Propaganda →
Most would agree that heroism and freedom are fundamentally good things. But the terms “heroisch” and “freedom” have been appropriated for purposes that do not have much connection with the virtues of their original meanings. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about its costs and benefits when the invasion itself is called...
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Hamas: Israel's decision to toughen prison... →
There’s so much wrong with this headline — and with everything that happened in order for this headline to exist — that it’s going to take a fair amount of writing to deal with it all.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced that prison conditions for “Palestinian security prisoners” are going to be made tougher. In his own words, “I...
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“In my experience as a professional political pundit, the study of political...”
– After writing a series of posts devoted to detailing the arguments made by Robert Nozick, Matt Yglesias concluded what is likely his final Nozick-inspired post by suggesting that political philosophy doesn’t really do anything to help us negotiate real-world political controversies.
...
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“I’m currently in a standoff … kinda ugly, but ready for...”
– I challenge anyone to find a more bizarre use of social networking than to update one’s Facebook friends about the status of the on-going standoff with police in which one is currently engaged:
An armed [Jason] Valdez, 36, held a woman hostage at a motel in a tense 16-hour, overnight...
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The Ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham →
I wrote about this a little while ago, after Scott Lemieux did an excellent job of hammering Gov. Rick Perry on the evidence linking Cameron Todd Willingham to the crime for which he was executed. Ta-Nehisi Coates now gives us a short piece over at The Atlantic on the subject. Here are the strongest two sentences:
There really is no polite way to say this: The particular manner in which Texas...
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Much Ado About Nozick
All of a sudden, it’s become very important to decide just how much of a libertarian Robert Nozick really was. The reason, of course, is Stephen Metcalf’s piece in Slate, which didn’t have anything nice to say about libertarians and which also didn’t attain a whole lot of philosophical depth in its critique.
That said, I’m not entirely sure why it matters — to...
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Rawls Visits the Pyramids →
Bareknuckled politics is not bad news. In fact, it is all but necessary for sound constitutional design. Those documents drafted in isolation from real-world politics are often unrealistic and badly conceived. Constitutions should not be written against the will of those who are supposed to operate them. I’ve argued elsewhere that the best processes are those in which rival political forces...
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WatchIf you haven’t yet seen the Bill O’Reilly/Lupe Fiasco interview, I recommend spending the next five minutes watching it here. For those who don’t know why Fiasco was interviewed by O’Reilly, ShortFormBlog links to some background information here. There’s more here, including O’Reilly’s charge that Fiasco was “a pinhead.”
A few unexpected...
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Kerry, McCain push measure backing Libya campaign →
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been writing about John Kerry and John McCain for the concluding chapter of my book on heroism. Now they’ve teamed up to introduce a resolution supporting American involvement in the NATO-led intervention in Libya:
“I believe the president did the right thing by intervening to stop a looming humanitarian disaster,” McCain said. “I...
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Israel approves transfer of $100 million of... →
Israel has approved the building of $100 million worth of new houses and schools in the Gaza Strip, Israeli and UN officials said on Tuesday.
Guy Inbar, a military spokesman, said Israel had given the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) the green light to bring building materials for 18 new schools and 1,200 new houses into the Hamas-controlled territory.
He said the approval was...
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“Dark-hearted humanity critics always want to rave about how...”
– Chuck Klosterman on Rock VORP
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The Greatest Humblebraggers of All Time →
Harris Wittels on Totes McGotes, who is (at least for the moment) the greatest Twitter humblebragger of all time:
He is a bottomless pit of Humblebragging, and I love him for it. A lot of people talk trash to Totes on Twitter for his Humblebraggery, but I say leave him alone. I want to see him in his natural habitat, like an animal in the wild — not tampered with by man.
Never change, Totes...
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Trials Or Errors: Five Myths About “Justice” And... →
A few weeks ago, Charli Carpenter wrote a piece that examined some of the myths and fallacious logic behind the various arguments for and against international prosecution of criminals like Osama Bin Laden and Ratko Mladic:
The satisfaction over Mladic’s capture recalls claims by human rights and humanitarian law advocates who criticised the bin Laden execution as a form of faux “justice”: Bin...
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“We cannot repeat the lessons of the 1930s, when the United States of America...”
– John McCain takes aim at the field of Republican presidential hopefuls on what he calls their isolationism:
Citing what he viewed as the GOP presidential hopefuls’ positions in general on both Libya and Afghanistan, McCain said, “We are the lead nation in the world, and America...
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The Cost of California's Death Penalty
My friend Zain links to an excellent piece in the L.A. Times on yet another study that looks at the cost of California’s death penalty and concludes that the system is completely broken and economically destructive for the state:
The study’s authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining...
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Exclusion →
My sense is that my good friend Michael Tofias is getting into the spirit of blogging in earnest now (though, as with so many things about him, I might just be projecting my own hopes here). If you’re not yet reading what he’s been writing of late, I recommend it. Here’s the latest:
Tyler Cowen asks:
[A]re you prepared to admit how much the current university model is based...
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Revisiting My Early Thoughts on Fatherhood
Since it’s Father’s Day — my second one — I’ve decided to revisit a post from a little over a year ago, when my son was two weeks old. While we’ve settled into a much more normal routine now, and while much of the quirkiness described below has been replaced with the normal fun and challenges of family life, I’m pleased to be able to go back to this...
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In Search of the True Self →
Over at The Stone, Joshua Knobe provides a bit of a primer on so-called experimental philosophy, using contemporary issues like LGBT identification and putting others ahead of one’s own financial gain to get at the heart of what it means to find one’s “true self”:
More than 200 people participated in our first study. Some of these participants identified themselves as...
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On Dignity and Euthanasia →
From the Practical Ethics blog:
Sir Terry Pratchett’s documentary, “Choosing to die” and the recent deaths of Ann McPherson and Jack Kevorkian (inventor of the Mercitron) have recently raised the debate of the legalisation of euthanasia, alongside criticism of the BBC’s bias favour towards the subject.
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It is important to consider whether euthanasia is morally correct in itself. For me,...
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Why Twitter Isn't Doing What It Could Be Doing
A couple of years ago, Mike Gruszczynski and I looked at Twitter and wondered whether we might be seeing the evolution of a new type of democratic association. This was in the wake of the so-called Twitter revolutions in Moldova and Iran, while the excitement was still palpable, and everyone was talking about the best Twitter sources for news from/about Iran and debating whether Morozov was right...