Cure-alls and Remedies
For a little more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, Phil Agre produced the Red Rock Eater News Service , a collection links and commentaries (“notes and recommendations,” he called it) that he distributed via e-mail. Agre is a professor of information studies at UCLA, and my intellectual identity was partially formed while reading…
Civil society starts here , with György Konrád ‘s book of essays on the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution , Antipolitics : “Antipolitics is the political activity of those who don’t want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power. Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against…
“It is said that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the…
“…if they do get down to asking the forty-something asking-and-telling homos , something very, very calamitous will have to have happened.” – David Rakoff
It’s probably obvious to most people, but the complete works of Shakespeare are available online . I just discovered this, and am currently reading The Tempest . Some of my favorite Shakespeare lines appear in that play: PROSPERO Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied…
Arthur C. Brooks is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. His recent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, develops a number of data sets to show that conservatives give a larger percentage of their income than liberals. There’s a review here , but it doesn’t answer some of the…
…the traditional policy process was viewed not only as unproductive but “perilous.” Information, that is, could slow decision-making; indeed, when it had to do with a bold and risky venture like the Iraq war, information and discussion — an airing, say, of the precise obstacles facing a “democratic transition” conducted with a handful of troops…
Which brings us to the second possible interpretation of Obama’s equivocations. He really is not a political warrior by temperament. He is not even, as the word is commonly understood, a liberal. He is in many respects a civic republican—a believer in civic virtue, and in the possibility of good outcomes negotiated in good faith….
“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts. Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here , where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people….
Stun guns and tasers are less-than-lethal tools for controlling violent suspects. They serve to demobilize the target and cause serious, but not excruciating, pain. When a police officer uses a stun gun or taser on a suspect, they can usually count on that suspect going and staying limp. Because of this, it’s an extremely stupid…