anotherpanacea

Tag: Political Theory

  • Left for Dead: Equality of What, Equality for Whom?

    There’s a pretty fantastic exchange happening in the blogosphere right now, started by Freddie DeBoer here and followed-up here. The substance of DeBoer’s criticism is that there are no legitimate “far left” bloggers, only center-left “neo-liberals” and the panoply of social conservatives, partisan Republicans, and libertarians. Thus, DeBoer charges, we have a blind spot, an…

  • Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Futarchy

    In his comments on my post last week, Robin Hanson asked about the conceptual work still needed to advance the cause of prediction markets as tools for governance.

  • Cowen on Foucault

    Tyler Cowen, a loyal reader of my e-mails, responds to my question on Michel Foucault. In the process, he recommends The Archeology of Knowledge twice, and notes that Foucault …goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas.  It’s much more micro and disaggregated than…

  • Robert George and Cornell West on Blogging Heads TV

  • Wikileaks as Distributed Governance

    Hannah Arendt begins The Human Condition with an account of a world in which “speech has lost its power,” where scientific omnipotence is achieved through the manipulation of mathematical equations whose sense escapes even the mathematicians’ capacity to intuit, and the decision to unleash destructive nuclear powers has been foisted upon non-scientists who are even more…

  • Hard Choices

    Steven Maloney asked his students to stabilize the budget using the CRFB’s simulator. Some couldn’t do it without making draconian choices that were particularly painful for seniors, or undoing the President’s decisions to preserve troop levels in Afghanistan and extending the Bush-era tax cuts. Some wouldn’t do it: That students would hand in deficits of…

  • Deliberation and Evolutionary Psychology

    Hugo Mercier and Helene Landemore describe an evolutionary psychological theory of deliberative polarization in their paper, “Reasoning is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation.” From the paper: We suggest that the function of reasoning is not the betterment of beliefs and judgments through private ratiocination and this is why reasoning does not accomplish this task well. According to…

  • The Growing Field of Julian Assange Secondary Scholarship

    If you haven’t read Assange’s own self-justifications, then you can read this summary of them to get a sense of what worried me. Now, Peter Ludlow does a proper study of Assange’s political theory: this is conspiracy in the sense of the original etymology of ‘conspire’ – as in “breathe with” or “breathe together”.  The individuals are acting in…

  • Procedure and Substance in the US Budget

    Megan McArdle discusses budget negotiating strategies. She’s right. Ezra Klein outlines why liberals don’t like it. He’s also right: Obama’s got 156 million people splitting $214 billion in tax cuts and benefits. The GOP’s got 4[.8] million people splitting $133 billion in tax cuts. On a per-person level, the GOP’s tax cuts are much larger.…

  • Utopia!

    Charles Stross demands better aspirational fictions: “We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness…