Cure-alls and Remedies
Apparently context is scarce. Here’s some: “Democratic party politics is urban machine politics, scaled up” from Noah Smith A variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as “The Groups” — can basically persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, well out of the public eye. Democrats’ focus…
(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. I focus here on chapter one; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, and Joseph Trullinger will be discussing chapter two in the next few days.) In a certain sense, much of Karatani’s book is a…
Laws are like sausages: you can’t enjoy them if you know how they’re made. This is doubly true for budgets and stimulus bills. That said, during the campaign American Public Media put out this nifty little Flash game that puts you in charge of the Federal budget, and in the spirit of self-governance (and wasting…
In the small corner of political philosophy I inhabit, Sheldon S. Wolin is a big name. His mammoth Politics and Vision is a breathtakingly systematic genealogy of political life, a Rosetta stone of political theory. His perpetual commitment to thinkers like Tocqueville and Montesquieu has kept interest in those figures alive during a period when…