I’m watching this Elizabeth Warren video today: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.
Synopsis after the jump.
There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.
One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather [...]
To some conservatives, the fact that both Clinton and Obama have connections to Saul Alinsky (of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals fame) is the dirty Communist Party affiliation of this election. In truth, Clinton’s thesis (pdf) on Alinsky provoked more comment as a secret than it has as a public document, while Obama’s [...]
Two recent articles, one by Thomas Pogge, the other by David Held, highlight the distinction between globalization theorists who have principled repugnance for the structure of international markets, and those who see globalization as a challenge to statist theories of regimes. It’s no surprise, then, that Pogge proceeds as Rawlsian concerned primarily with rights, and [...]
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s [...]
There’s a nice little article in the Washington Post about who counts as rich, which is an important question given the tax priorities that the Bush administration set with regard to the inheritance tax and other tax cuts for Americans.
A tale of revenge within the Shiite community in Iraq, from Jon Lee Anderson’s “Inside the Surge“:
Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi Army [...]
That’s right: the German government has declared that it will fund experts to ensure the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. This has been going on for some time: with funding, a position as a newsmaker, and specialized knowledge, an expert or partisan can create the primary resources wikipedia requires, and then alter the content to correspond [...]
Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial [...]
There is a consensus forming about Iraq, and increasingly I suspect that the Democratic party is on the wrong side of it. The consensus is this: though we were certainly the cause of the current instability in the country, the violence is not principally directed towards American forces. In light of that fact, David Ignatius [...]
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