Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Just asking
I’m very interesting in the way questions are framed. Here’s an interesting set of questions from the Guardian’s Gary Younge, who seems similarly interested: Do you think of yourself as white or British or both? Does it worry you that you got your job just because of your race? Where are you from? No, but…
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Perpetual Peace
The Enlightenment project was, if not exactly founded upon, at least encouraged and made international, by the challenge of Saint-Pierre’s A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe. All of the eighteenth century’s philosophers took it up, and while they disagreed on the exact means, all felt that reason could lead the way. Saint-Pierre…
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International Women’s Day
So today is International Women’s Day, smack dab in the middle of Women’s History Month. Yet most people probably kicked off their month thinking about Ash Wednesday (or recovering from their first Mardi Gras without New Orleans,) celebrating Spring Break, or focusing on their studies, and I guess a lot of my friends are looking…
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Duh… Terrorism is an ‘ism’
The entry for “terrorisme” in the 1989 Encyclopaedia Universalis begins: “To terrorize does not mean to ‘terrify,’ to ‘strike with fear,’ but following [the nineteenth centurty lexicographer] Littré ‘to establish terrorism, the rule of terror.” (my translation) This usage of the word originated in the revolutionary government of France, specifically a period between September 1793…
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For the antidisestablishmentarian in each of us
So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what’s possible today that was unimaginable a century ago? 1. Communes without communal bathrooms. Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the…