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War, Bureaucracy, and Public Opinion
David Brooks writes: The disadvantage [of Obama’s style of governance] is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers…
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Bridging The Will-Be/Ought Gap
So I’ve been writing the last few days on a number of only tenuously related themes: cruelty and torture, probability and prediction markets, testability, middle-range theories, and moral realism. Today I’m going to try to draw these themes together and point to a couple avenues for further discussion. Obviously, it’s important to me that our normative…
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Prisons, Still
I’m just reposting a couple of links from Metafilter’s Optimus Chyme: Everything You Never Wanted to Know about the American Prison-Industrial Complex Prison Nation Don’t click through if you were hoping to maintain your post-holiday glow. This is the sort of thing I hoped would be on the agenda by now. For all the attention…
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Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy
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…