This CSM piece gives an excellent background on the British-Iranian conflict that lead to the capture of British soldiers last week. The big mystery is why Iran would give the UK/US a clear casus belli like this, when we’re so clearly itching for a fight. It’s not like they couldn’t guess what sort of reaction [...]
A while back I posted some links to photos of life in Tehran. I just figured out how to make Microsoft OneNote grab my favorite picture from Flickr, so I thought I’d share it:
I love the summer greens mixed with the bright grays and blues of a metropolis. The child in the center says it [...]
Just pulled this off Metafilter. A St. John’s grad turned interrogator speaks about what he did to innocents in Iraq: Confessions of a Torturer. There goes Martha Nussbaum’s thesis that the study of the liberal arts will cultivate an ethical sensibility, right out the window. That said, Mr. Lagouranis has a lot more to tell [...]
Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army [...]
Saturday, February 3, 2007
I’m late in getting to this news, but on January 18th, President Bush amended Executive Order 12866 on Regulatory Planning and Review. The new order, EO # 13422, has some interesting and potentially troubling new provisions. Here are some links: pro, pro, pro, con, con, con.
Public Citizen identifies three problems with the new order, and [...]
Arts and Letters Daily has this piece on Alain Badiou. Badiou theorizes that there are four conditions of philosophy: science, poetry, love, and politics, and as many of his early adopters have pointed out, there’s a clear bias against theological or religious truth in his work.
Mr. Badiou also took considerable interest in a question about [...]
The controversy over John Aravosis’s “big girl” comment reminds me of this book, by Didier Eribon.
Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it’s this sort of infighting that makes [...]
I’ve spent the last semester sitting in on a seminar taught by a Vanderbilt philosopher named Robert Talisse. I’m not a student at Vanderbilt, so it was really great of him to let me sit in on his seminar. At the same time, despite the fact that one of my dissertation advisors is an analytically [...]
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a number of people about the supposed ‘plight’ of the well-educated white male. We’ve been searching for the non-existential root causes to the alienation that many left-leaning white men experience in US culture, especially the academy. The idea is that, while we are all human and troubled by [...]
Sentiments of Rationality is at it again. Dom seems to have convinced himself that conservatives are actually right about criminal justice, since they care about victims and safety more than liberals, and trust their authority figures. He goes on to suggest electric shocks in order to speed punishment and reduce incarceration time. Here’s the gist:
If [...]
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