Cure-alls and Remedies
(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…
Many of my own fellow-travelers police progressivism in a way I sometimes find frustrating. It is de rigeur to chastise neoliberals and technocratic moderates for their lack of radicality. My work tends towards the technocratic/participatory divide around how policies should be made, and so I often don’t have strong policy preferences unless I’ve researched a…
Barbara Ehrenriech’s book Bright-sided starts with an interesting dilemma in breast cancer treatment. On the one hand, your odds of surviving–say–stage 4 breast cancer is quite low (22%). On the other hand, there is evidence that optimism and hopefulness will increase your chances. Being optimistic won’t increase your chances above 50%, but it will help….
Shawn Gude at Jacobin discusses The Bad Kind of Unionism : “It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have…
I can think of at least six kinds of inequality: [caption id=”attachment_3117″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] Hefei, Anhui province in China (Photo by Jianan Lu.)[/caption] Inequality of income: different people receive different wages, either for different jobs or for the same job, as profits from capital investments, or as government subsidies, transfer payments, or private charity. Inequality…
I’ve been putting off finishing my series on the Bleeding Hearts / Crooked Timber debates, because Chris Bertram had suggested that there might be a reply to critics. Now he says it might be a while longer, so I’m going to finish up. In my last post , I suggested that none of the methods…
Tyler Cowen returns to the issues of employer/employee domination today , but since I never blogged his first response , I want to start working through this debate from the beginning. The Crooked Timber bloggers offered a lengthy list of workplace depredations , and then suggested that these depradations require government intervention in the form…
1. Peter Singer comments on Michael Vick . ( Previously ) My sense is that symbolic punishment of a celebrity may have lasting effects, but I worry that this is more about race than it is about animals, and Singer picks up on that. 2. Southern Poverty Law Center reports on ” The Return of…
Wendell Berry’s article in the May Harper’s is out from behind the paywall. It’s a really interesting attempt to take moderns to task for their conflation of freedom with limitlessness and infinite progress. (My Metafilter post on Wendell Berry is the most popular thing I’ve ever done there, so go check it out if you…
The Tanner Lectures are available online . Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “” Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls ” Seyla Benhabib’s ” Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms ” Stephen Breyer’s ” Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution ” Umberto Eco’s ” Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World,…
Carla Bruni went from heiress to model to singer/songwriter. Her new release shows she has the wisdom to copy her betters rather than write poor facsimiles. She sets poems by Emily Dickinson , W.B. Yeats , Dorothy Parker , Walter de la Mare , W.H. Auden , and Christina Rossetti to music. Listen . (…
What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer , the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean…
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…
“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…