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…
[caption id=”attachment_4024″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] “Get Money Out of Politics” by Flickr user Light Brigading[/caption] Some things live forever in social media. In my circles, one article that comes up all the time is the Gilens and Page study of legislative influence that is often interpreted this way: ” US No Longer an Actual Democracy “…
[caption id=”attachment_3215″ align=”alignright” width=”224″] by flickr user ChrisM70[/caption] I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the…
It is my considered opinion that the next three months will involve no serious deliberations regarding substantive public policy. Though readership and viewership for such matters will be at its highest, none of the things discussed will be discussed in a way that comports with public reason or with anything like the goal of exchanging…
This Newsnight piece paints a picture of the widespread breakdown of the Greek social compact: What was no joke were the clashes between police and the hardline protesters.[…] Time and again, on the grounds of confronting the rioters, police made incursions into large masses of peaceful protesters. […]I can tell you from repeated experience, it…
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…
Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men , recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: ” No fairytales allowed ,” and ” Have you received your gift pack? ” From the first: One of the escorts told me that, on pain of…
“300” is slated for release on March 9th. Call me a Hellenic fanboy, but I’m excited. The Battle of Thermopylae pitted 300 Spartan warriors, 400 Theban hostages, and 700 Thespian volunteers against an army of Persians reputed by Herodotus to be 5,283,220 strong.
“Quoting Madison or Tocqueville about how contemporary instituitions operate in 2006 has little more merit than reading sheep’s entrails.” There’s a quote that makes a civic republican like me sit up and take notice. While Madison and Toqueville could never have imagined today’s society, they pretty much told us what would go wrong with institutions…
I still haven’t solved the problem of governmentality, but I do have some more things to say about the Schmittian sovereign and the status of exceptional powers. If we compare the New Deal with the Patriot Act, we can see that emergencies don’t have to necessarily supply the executive with one-way options for action. It’s…