Month: March 2006
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Terror alerts and polling data
JuliusBlog reminds us about the way the Bush administration abuses terror alerts.
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Dems want freedom to speak
Ed Kilgore writes: I think both sides in the usual intraparty debates are guilty of excessive “the enemy is listening” fears, and that we need to create a free-speech zone with some simple rules of civility (e.g., I won’t call you crazy, and you won’t call me spineless, just because we disagree). The question of…
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Spectacular Politics and Rancière’s Radical Egalitarianism
The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has…
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Quashing nasty rumours
There’s a rumour going around, perpetuated by bumper stickers and politicians, that “God is pro-life.” It’s an interesting claim, and since everyone seems to want God (i.e. the heavy guns) on their side, I thought I’d examine it. Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from…
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South Dakota
A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality, has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans’ test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the famous…
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Actually, *politics* is the experimental wing of political philosophy….
“Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.” —Notes from a talk by Clay Shirky(?) Shirky compares a Buffy fansite to Slashdot and suggests that moderated listservs…