September 2011
50 posts
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Extrajudicial Executions are Executions Too
In so many of my recent posts, I’ve written about my long-standing concern about the excitement that Americans feel about our use of the death penalty. The most obvious example, of course, was the GOP debate audience cheering at the mention of the hundreds of executions presided over by Rick Perry in Texas. With the news today of the death of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, there’s another round of...
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WatchThis Bloggingheads discussion about the state of the American university is priceless. It’s hard not to feel like it’s the late 1980s and I’m listening to Allan Bloom.
My favorite segment, hands down, is the one on not pursuing one’s passions in college. But a very, very close second is the segment on why university students ought not to be having any fun at school.
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Are Libertarians Small-D Democrats?
The GOP primary debates have provided me with a whole lot of material on contemporary American politics, but I keep coming back to the Tea Party and libertarianism, in no small part because there’s a political philosophy element to be explored there. What I wonder about is whether or not libertarians even hold the same view as most of us regarding the American political system, namely that the...
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Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Time-Slice...
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, philosophical heavyweight Robert Nozick offers a alternate, libertarian vision of distributive justice to the one put forward by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (though he would balk at the term, since he argues that all such theories are actually theories of redistribution and are therefore problematic).
Nozick’s argument centers around the Entitlement Theory. He...
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Governor spares life of condemned killer →
Capital punishment’s mysterious wheel of life and death spins on, seemingly at random:
Gov. John Kasich commuted the death sentence today of Joseph Murphy of Marion, who was scheduled for execution Oct. 18.
It was the second time this year Kasich spared the life of a condemned killer.
In a statement, Kasich said the murder of Ruth Predmore was “heinous and disturbing” and Murphy deserves...
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Religion and the Death Penalty →
Christopher Hitchens has an interesting piece on the death penalty in Lapham’s Quarterly this week. In it, he attempts to answer the question that vexes so many observers of the death penalty: Why is it that America is the only advanced industrialized Western nation to continue putting its citizens to death?
Judging by the fact that several thousand people immediately clicked a button to share the...
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Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dies... →
Mrs. Maathai, one of the most famous and widely respected women on the continent, wore many hats — environmentalist, feminist, politician, anti-corruption campaigner, human rights advocate, protester and head of the Green Belt Movement she founded. She was as comfortable in the gritty streets of Nairobi’s slums or the muddy hillsides of central Kenya as she was hobnobbing with heads of state....
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Plato's Heroic Vision: The Difficult Choices of... →
My most recent publication is now available to download free of charge, thanks to the magic of the Digital Commons. If you’ve been interested in any of my writing on heroism or Plato here at the Running Chicken blog, you can now get a much more in-depth look at the academic writing I’ve been doing on the subject.
Here is the abstract:
Faced with charges of impiety and corruption of...
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Unsure What Pro-Life Means? Ask This Victim's... →
About a week ago, in the wake of the GOP debate where a (presumably) pro-life crowd cheered for Rick Perry’s execution record, I wondered about what it really meant to be pro-life in this country and I pointed to the example of the family of a murder victim in Mississippi:
They argue that the death penalty violates the core tenets of their religion and they argue that it is bound up with...
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Gary Johnson is Different →
Gary Johnson, who doesn’t seem to have any chance at all of being the GOP nominee, actually came out swinging when he spoke with reporters after last night’s debate. For Ron Paul and all the Ron Paul fanatics out there, here’s an object lesson in how it might be possible to discuss the way in which your position on hot-button issues differs from the other candidates:
He got a...
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Ron Paul and the Death Penalty →
Some of the vocal libertarians bloggers who use Tumblr as their platform — and some other libertarians who have written to me through other social networking channels — have taken issue with the criticism of Ron Paul that I raised in my post before last night’s debate. Here’s one example:
Ron Paul is against the death penalty. This is one of the few positions he has...
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So, Now It's Tomorrow ...
Last night, I reflected about how hopeful I felt at the mobilization of so many people to fight for Troy Davis’ life. With that particular fight lost, I wondered what would happen today. In other words, in the absence of such a noteworthy case, will people continue to feel passionately about the issue?
My hope is that many people who looked carefully at the death penalty for the first time...
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“The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the...”
– —Troy Davis (via Amnesty International USA).
With tomorrow’s execution looming, you can still take action in this case here.
For more information on the case, click here or here.
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Making Tyrants Do Time →
In a New York Times op-ed piece, University of Minnesota political scientist Kathryn Sikkink explains her research on the role that trials play in the transition process from authoritarian governments that systematically abuse human rights to democratic governments that do not:
Historical and statistical evidence gives us reason to question criticisms of human rights trials. My research shows...
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Who is the "Pro-Life" Crowd? →
I’ve taken a few swipes at the so-called pro-life crowd over the past couple of weeks, mostly as a result of statements by the candidates and the behavior of audience members at the two most recent GOP debates. My argument has been, I think, fairly straightforward: If you say that you hold human life to be sacred, for whatever reason, then you can’t also cheer about people’s...
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Should We All Become Ex-Moralists? →
Over at The Stone, Joel Marks writes:
I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious...
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“Certainty is cheap if one achieves it by ignoring the actual facts, and indeed,...”
– So says David Dow, in “Rick Perry and the Death Penalty: Executing Innocents” at The Daily Beast last week. I recommend reading the whole piece, if you haven’t already. For more on Perry’s execution record, some of my recent posts are here, here, here,here, here, and here....
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Ten Years Isn't Enough
Earlier today, my friend Steve Smith posted the following on his Facebook page:
Ten years isn’t enough to see clearly how the attacks have truly changed us. I guess I’d describe it as a lost decade: We’re poorer and less free, our culture is more shallow, our politics are meaner and more paranoid, and most of us are stunningly indifferent to shared sacrifice. Lawrence Wright...
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“Can U.S. companies be held liable if foreign governments use their products for...”
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Two lawsuits by three Chinese dissidents and a human rights group accusing Cisco Systems Inc. of abetting imprisonment and torture could have far-reaching impact on how U.S. technology companies conduct business in authoritarian regimes.
The lawsuits filed in May and June target a second...
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seunghomattyang asked: What kind of things should we keep in mind when we read The Republic? I ask this because it was written a long time ago and people obviously had different context and customs then.
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azspot asked: On *Plato's Republic*, which translation do you prefer? Do you read in it in the original Greek (my ultimate goal, able to muddle my way through GNT, though I have attacked Plato in small fragments… …if it were not for that "job" thing… :()?
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Justice, Injustice, and Harm
While no one’s understanding of justice can be said to be entirely original, I like to credit my sources whenever possible. When I think about justice, I am always drawn back to Plato; this week’s blog posts on the death penalty are no exception.
From Plato’s Republic (332b-335e):
“Must we give back to enemies whatever is owed to them?”
“That’s exactly...
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WatchI’ve written a great many words about the death penalty over the past week (here and here) and many people have seen fit to read them, to think about them, to share them widely across the internet, and to discuss them with me. For this I have been extremely grateful.
I think it’s safe to assume that not a single one of the people who attended the GOP debate last night read any of...
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Palmer Report Did Not Find Gaza Blockade Legal,... →
I hereby recommend an alternate title for the blog post that you can read if you click the above link: “Amnesty USA Blogger Confuses Self and Readers.”
To wit:
The media has gone crazy these past couple of days announcing that the UN-appointed panel of inquiry into the flotilla raid last summer, known as the Palmer Commission, found that the Israeli imposed blockade on Gaza is legal...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, 4.3
I meant to write about this in my previous blog post on the “Jersey Shore,” but I ran out of time. It’s important, I think, to note that the gang seems to have a job to do while in Italy, as apparently they always must, and this time it’s in a pizza parlor (rather than the standard t-shirt shop). But they don’t know how to make pizza, these supposed paragons of...
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John Yoo talk on Lincoln interrupted by protest in... →
Well, I guess I should have gone to the conference this year:
The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association was briefly interrupted this afternoon when a woman protesting the appearance of Bush administration official John Yoo loudly denounced him from the floor when he began to speak. She continued remonstrating against him for three minutes and fifty-four seconds to the...
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Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of... →
The vaunted halls of academia move slowly and cautiously. Research is produced, reviewed, and vetted to be given credibility, and there are times when this deliberate pace poses problems for professors, philosophical, pedagogical or otherwise. But the rise of social media may change that. With social media becoming increasingly pervasive on college campuses, in classrooms and in dormitories, a...
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WatchWhen I first listened to this Bloggingheads diavlog a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure whether or not to write anything about it. But given the interest generated by my post — earlier this week — about my own experience with the death penalty, I think it’s important for me to call attention to what Kevin Williamson of the National Review says here about Texas, Rick Perry, the...
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Calling all past and present Ph.D. students! Have you ever felt the urge to convey your graduate work in the form of interpretive dance? Well now’s your chance; Science Magazine’s 2011 “Dance Your Ph.D.” Contest has officially begun!
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A $500 dollar prize will be awarded to the best dances in the categories of physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. The...
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U.N. Report Finds Israeli Blockade Legal but Raid... →
A United Nations review has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal and appropriate but that the way its forces boarded a Turkish-based flotilla trying to break that blockade 15 months ago, killing nine passengers, was excessive and unreasonable.
I think we can safely assume that no one is going to like this UN report. Israel is likely to feel vindicated with regard to its blockade...
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