August 2011
57 posts
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WatchI wrote a whole lot about intervening in Libya back in March (here, here, here, and here), much of it which centered around the responsibility to protect doctrine.
Now that the intervention might be called a success, what do the good folks at Bloggingheads have to say? Hear Dan Drezner and Heather Hurlburt on the question of whether we should regard the intervention in Libya as a victory for R2P...
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Bill Simmons' Suggestion for Twitter →
In his most recent mailbag column at Grantland, Bill Simmons puts forward an interesting idea that might substantially change the way I use Twitter:
Adding a checklist to your follower list so you could follow however many people you want, but “check” the ones you want to actually show up in your feed. This would prevent wounded feelings (if you’re not following a friend...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 4.2
In the second installment of the great “Jersey Shore” Season of the Italian Vacation, Deena goes grocery shopping and finds herself in a great deal of trouble: “Like, nothing is in English.”
This is, in a very clear and concise way, likely to be the premise of the entire season. Our intrepid gang of adventure-seekers find themselves decidedly outside the zone of blissful...
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Report: Sprint to get iPhone in October →
A published report says Sprint Nextel, the country’s third-largest cellphone company, will get to start selling the iPhone in mid-October.
The Wall Street Journal says the wireless company will get to sell both the new iPhone 5 and the current model, the iPhone 4. The newspaper cites unnamed people familiar with the matter.
As a Sprint customer for more than ten years — one who hated...
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Ron Paul’s Strange Freedom →
Amidst all the complaints that Ron Paul isn’t getting enough attention from the media — or, at least, the attention he deserves — Matthew Yglesias decided to give Paul’s ideas some careful attention. Here’s what I assume is the opening salvo:
After looking at his positions and statements, the most remarkable thing is that if it weren’t for his loud fanbase of...
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Google+ Hangouts and Sadism? →
It’s now possible not to make eye contact with up to ten people at once, thanks to Google’s new social networking platform. Google’s stated purpose is to make “sharing on the web more like sharing in real life,” which is true only if “in real life” is understood to mean “on the rest of the internet.” Instead of occurring in our inbox, group videochats—called Hangouts—open in separate windows,...
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Watch
While there are many details in the life of Michael Schur, the co-creator and show runner of the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” that convey his obsession with the David Foster Wallace novel “Infinite Jest,” perhaps the most salient is that his wife once forbade him from discussing that 1,079-page-long work of fiction at social gatherings.
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His literary mania has been put to...
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Anonymous asked: I'm a soon to be freshman in college and I was wondering what kind of math do political science majors have to take? And also do you have any tips/ advice because I want to double major in international relations also.
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“Believing or disbelieving in moral absolutes is a philosophical position, not a...”
– Stanley Fish made this argument, earlier this month, in an NYT editorial entitled “Does Philosophy Matter?”
At bottom, his argument is that philosophy matters to philosophers … and to pretty much no one else in the world.
Now it’s my job, I suspect, to disagree with...
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Anonymous asked: Thanks for your recent article on academia. I'm entering grad school next week and really needed that shot of exhilarating enthusiasm.
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How The Wire Explains Lebanese Politics →
Mitch Prothero has a pretty terrific piece over at Foreign Policy, using lessons learned from “The Wire” to explain some of what’s going on in Lebanese politics. If you haven’t seen “The Wire” and you plan to do so at some point, please note that there are substantial spoilers awaiting you if you click through.
The hard-nosed world of David Simon’s...
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Rick Perry By The Numbers →
Amnesty International does not comment or take sides on elections. But everyone knows that Rick Perry, Texas Governor for over a decade, is now running for President. And everyone knows that during his tenure as Texas Governor, he has presided over a lot of executions. The total now sits at 234 (40% of all US executions carried out since Perry became Governor in December 2000).
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BY...
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Air Force Discharging Sergeant Who Doubts Obama →
Staff Sgt. Daryn Moran became a hero of the so-called birther movement by sharing his views on websites of groups that believe Obama is not eligible to serve as president.
… and he’s from Nebraska.
Nothing like a little home-grown wing-nuttery.
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 4.1
I have to admit: I gave up on Season Three of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” But the new season offered the possibility of analyzing international relations through the lens of America’s best and brightest exports. So … here we go again.
The majority of the season premiere revolves around the gang’s trip from Jersey to Italy.
There’s a race between the guys and...
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The Loathsome Life of a College Professor →
From my good friend Michael Tofias:
John Hudson says, being a college professor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And that I am probably a depressed, childless, narcissistic jerk? Sounds about right (via Michael Zimmer).
Madness, I say.
But let me expand on this just a bit, especially since the new semester begins next week and I’ll be teaching my graduate seminar in political theory. I...
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Rick Perry, Limited Government, and the Death...
“If it helps, think of the death penalty as a ‘government program.’ It’s one thing to support this government program. It’s something else to refuse to believe your favorite government program could ever do wrong. And it’s downright pathological to be so confident in your favorite government program’s infallibility that you actively undermine an investigation into said government program’s...
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Why philosophers should care about computational... →
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen mentions David Hume and so I pass it along to you:
In a new paper, Scott Aaronson reports:
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that...
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Dr Angie Hobbs … Senior Fellow in the Public...
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Post-Conflict Potter →
Over at Foreign Policy, Tom Malinowski, Sarah Holewinski, and Tammy Schultz take a good long look at the post-Voldemort world of Harry Potter. The whole thing is pretty fantastic; here’s just a part of their section on transitional justice:
Thousands of Death Eaters fought with or provided material support to Voldemort, including prominent members of key magical institutions. It will be...
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In Decrying Obama's Centrism, Drew Westen Ignores... →
I believe the existence of deep racist currents in America explain much of Obama’s caution—and his success. This is the source of his political centrism and what Westen describes as his “risk-aversion.” We are at a demographic tipping-point in our inevitable evolution into a multi-racial, multicultural, multi-lingual society. If Obama survives eight years in office, he will preside over much of...
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Confirmation of abstract submission for the...
A number of thoughtful RC readers were kind enough to send me the call for papers for a conference on MTV’s “Jersey Shore” that’s being organized at the University of Chicago. Rest assured, I submitted my abstract (based in no small part on my ongoing “Justice and the Jersey Shore” blog series) and just received this confirmation message:
This email is to...
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“[A]s an academic’s blog expands readership to a larger and larger audience, the...”
– Chris Blattman, reporting on some of David McKenzie and Berk Ozler’s findings regarding the impact of blogs on academic paper downloads.
A blog post on Chris Blattman or Aid Watch is thus equivalent to an extra 7-9 months of abstract views, and 4-6 months of downloads.
The impacts of...
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Google Isn't Playing Nice
I recently discovered that there’s a blog out there that’s just taking my posts and reproducing them without any attribution; I found four of my posts there this week. When they repost, they send out a whole bunch of tweets from multiple accounts that either link to their Blogger site or to a spam site that’s run on Tumblr (to which I won’t link, given the explicit content...
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The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality... →
A new paper by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro looks closely at utilitarians and provides an assessment of their personalities. It isn’t particularly flattering.
Here’s the abstract:
Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas...
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What People Don't Get About My Job: The... →
The bulk of what a philosopher does is think. I think about politics, art, society, culture, science, music, language, technology, teaching, ethics, literature, history, religion, and philosophy. And yes, I think about the meaning of life. But because I am a philosopher, I can’t unquestioningly rely on the criteria from other fields as justification for either those fields themselves or...
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“It was an inartful statement and one Jon regrets making.”
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Bruning made the comment while criticizing endangered species regulations, which he said had hindered a roads project near the central Nebraska town of Sargent. Bruning said biologists placed buckets with rat carcasses along the roadside to capture burying beetles, an endangered species, so they...
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Teens Coerced to Confess to Murder →
Recent DNA testing has proven the innocence of 10 men from Cook County, Illinois who were forced to confess as children to crimes they didn’t commit. Some of them have been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Despite the overwhelming genetic evidence, which has linked the crime to the real killers, State officials have refused to recognize their innocence.
More information here.
Take...
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California Abolition Bill Moving →
Earlier this summer, California State Senator Lori Hancock introduced a death penalty repeal bill (SB-490), after a study found that her state spends the exorbitant amount of $184 million dollars annually to keep capital punishment on the books.
The bill has already passed its first committee hurdle, and will have another hearing next week.
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Senator Hancock applauded the bill’s...
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Kitsch and Memorials, Side-by-Side →
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, a date the city is commemorating in extremes. Creative entrepreneurs and senior government officials are addressing the Wall and its consequences in very different ways, with kitsch and serious remembrances often featured side-by-side.
On Aug. 13, the president, the chancellor and other top politicians will attend a...
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Will the Protests in Israel Bring Down Netanyahu?
Netanyahu thus faces a difficult path ahead. He can surrender to the protest movement and sacrifice many of the policies that he has enacted. Or he can attempt to co-opt the Israeli center with a renewed attempt to negotiate with the Palestinians. He may also try to ride out the protests and hope that all will pass. Yet the continued momentum of the protests indicates that Israelis may take...
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"Jersey Shore" Studies
Many thoughtful Running Chicken readers passed along information about the upcoming “Jersey Shore” Studies Conference at the University of Chicago, encouraging me to submit an abstract. Rest assured, I submitted prior to the August 1 deadline. Here’s the idea behind my paper, based in no small part on my ongoing “Justice and the Jersey Shore” blog series:
Platonic Justice and...
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The status of scientists →
When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.
But if you asked about POLITICAL scientists ….
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Teaching with Twitter
In 2009, right when I began blogging here at Running Chicken, I also embarked on a teaching experiment: in my contemporary political theory course, I made use of Twitter to get students more invested in the material, to stimulate conversation outside the classroom, to make myself more accessible to students, and to demonstrate that the ideas we discussed would also generate interest amongst people...
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Script Doctor →
Over at the Monkey Cage blog, John Sides puts together a particularly thoughtful response to Drew Westen’s lengthy indictment of Obama in the NYT’s Sunday Review. Here’s Sides’ conclusion:
It is not that Westen—like many others—exaggerates the power of the president, although he does. It is not that Westen downplays the role that Republicans and Democrats in Congress have...
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Texas Schedules One Execution, Tries To Forget... →
Over at the Amnesty International USA blog, Brian Evans notes a(nother) disturbing trend in the Texas criminal justice system:
Hank Skinner, who resides on death row in Texas, won a case at the U.S. Supreme Court recently. He got the right to sue, in federal court, for access to DNA evidence he says would exonerate him. Officials in Gray County, Texas, are in possession of the evidence in...