Category: Uncategorized
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If I could do one thing other than write my dissertation…
…it would be to run deliberative polls, or to assist in running them, or just to participate in one. Some questions for Professor Fishkin: how much does this cost? Do you generally run polls on public or private money? My idea is to get a bunch of rich philanthropists into a deliberative poll about deliberative…
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On the title “Liberal”
I can never decide whether to call myself a ‘liberal.’ A lot of the time, you’re only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it’s okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you’re writing about yourself, you’ve got the power to present yourself in…
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Skin to Skin: Between Logos and Flesh
Sometimes when I read too much I get very quote heavy; rather than letting my own voice through in my writing, I can’t think of a better way to say it than the way I just read it. So when Merleau-Ponty explains the problem with Husserl’s project in two pages in the midst of The…
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Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or not
From the NYRoB: “A critical mistake was made,” observed the American security analyst Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. “By creating US security zones around US headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a fortress that tends to separate US…
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States as persistent political entities
What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer, the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean what…
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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…