Princeton’s “University Channel†(link on left of main page) provides all kinds of interesting, and free, lectures, round-table discussions, and other events, featuring the top thinkers in a broad array of fields. Big names and big brains. Each item is about an hour long, and sometimes the sound isn’t that great for the Q & […]
Archive | Politics
Liberals
I don’t know whether I’m right about any of this. Let’s get that straight right off the bat. But here’s what I’ve been thinking about, and it may be too long to bother editing, so please forgive the typos and unclear language. The more I read history, the more I see that people are similar […]
Israel Thwarted Due to Its Humanity
The BBC reports that Palestinians stopped a planned air strike because protesters surrounded the house that was to be hit (link). The IDF decided not to strike, because it didn’t want to kill all the civilians (or it didn’t want the publicity headache of killing them). It’s unclear (because the article left it unclear) whether […]
North Korea as Human Rights Issue
When it turned out that Saddam Hussein wasn’t on the phone to bin Laden working out a plan to nuke the US, a lot of people shifted their argument for invading Iraq. Namely, it’s good we went in there, because Saddam was such a bad guy. This is interesting, because everyone agrees that he’s a […]
Should You Vote?
My friend Garry has often said that people who don’t know anything shouldn’t vote. Actually, I think he’d go as far as to give literacy tests, intelligence tests, and tests of political knowledge. If you don’t care enough to be aware, then you shouldn’t be voting. Kevin, over at szuping.com (link on the main page) […]
A Torture Primer
Slate (link on main page) provides a primer on torture techniques used (or allegedly used) by Americans. (link) Click the links at the top of the page to see all the pieces. The most interesting living room conversation is on the “Taxonomy of Torture†page, where they discuss the techniques and their legality. I had […]
Worst Excuse in Days
I almost titled this post, “Worst Excuse Ever,†but the fact is that we’ve heard worse, or none, for possibly illegal behavior from the White House lots of times. The discussion about torture, or torture-lite, often includes something like this: “There’s a bomb under L.A., and we know, or strongly suspect, that this guy has […]
Common Sense
It happens sometimes that I hear and then repeat some tidbit of unanalyzed nonsense. Then, after thinking about it for a while, I suddenly realize that what I’ve been repeating is indefensible. It’s either wrong, or meaningless. This happens a lot, and I’m a fool to waste energy on it. But that just happens to […]
The Poor, the Addicted, the “Unsympatheticâ€
I got into a bit of a debate on Feministe about a program than aims to pay addicts to get birth control. The whole post and articles about the program are there, so I won’t go into it here. [Except to say that while the attention is all about paying addicts to get their tubes […]
Wiretap
The University of Minnesota Law School’s alumni magazine has a downloadable PDF with an exchange among its law professors about the legality of the NSA wiretapping without a warrant. Then, there’s a discussion about the exchange on the excellent legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. One of the professors argues that it’s legal. The other two […]