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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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Is Moral Progress Due to Moral Imagination or Condemnation?
Throughout the nineties, and to some extent in the last decade, there has been a certain brand of political thinker who just can’t imagine the motivation for cruelty. So alien is the concept that these folks (Richard Rorty and Judith Butler, for instance) have developed a deflationary theory of moral philosophy that simply advises us…
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Army of Dude
This blog was posted over at metafilter and got deleted for being too political, but I like it: Do you know what the light at the end of the tunnel is for us? Food. Yeah, food. When we’re on patrols and house clearing missions, what’s keeping us going is not the promise of freedom and…
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Vendettas
A tale of revenge within the Shiite community in Iraq, from Jon Lee Anderson’s “Inside the Surge“: Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi…
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Democrats are on the wrong side of Iraq consensus
There is a consensus forming about Iraq, and increasingly I suspect that the Democratic party is on the wrong side of it. The consensus is this: though we were certainly the cause of the current instability in the country, the violence is not principally directed towards American forces. In light of that fact, David Ignatius…