anotherpanacea

Tag: The Self-Defeating Victory of Violence

  • Two Theories of Wikileaks, or Just One?

    So far as  I can tell, the news coverage of the latest diplomatic infodump breaks along a line orthogonal to ordinary US partisanship. Either: 1. There’s nothing new here, although the possibility of future exposure may hamper diplomatic efforts in the near term. or 2. Secrecy is bad, here are some secrets. Neither perspective is particular…

  • Could the Iraq War have been prevented?

    In the comments to a post on Republican obstructionism, my old colleague Will Roberts proposes the following historical counterfactual: if the American left had been willing to fight harder and dirtier, they could have prevented or arrested the war in Iraq. He goes on to propose a variety of actions that might have achieved this…

  • The Tea Party Movement

    The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ‘stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently…

  • Policing Theory

    In a recent report on British policing, Denis O’Connor criticized the growing use of paramilitary policing in the UK: “British police risk losing the battle for the public’s consent if they win public order through tactics that appear to be unfair, aggressive and inconsistent,” he said. “This harms not just the reputation of the individual…

  • War, Bureaucracy, and Public Opinion

    David Brooks writes: The disadvantage [of Obama’s style of governance] is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers…

  • Prisons, Still

    I’m just reposting a couple of links from Metafilter’s Optimus Chyme: Everything You Never Wanted to Know about the American Prison-Industrial Complex Prison Nation Don’t click through if you were hoping to maintain your post-holiday glow. This is the sort of thing I hoped would be on the agenda by now. For all the attention…

  • Is Moral Progress Due to Moral Imagination or Condemnation?

    Throughout the nineties, and to some extent in the last decade, there has been a certain brand of political thinker who just can’t imagine the motivation for cruelty. So alien is the concept that these folks (Richard Rorty and Judith Butler, for instance) have developed a deflationary theory of moral philosophy that simply advises us…

  • Army of Dude

    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…

  • Vendettas

    A tale of revenge within the Shiite community in Iraq, from Jon Lee Anderson’s “Inside the Surge“: Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi…

  • Democrats are on the wrong side of Iraq consensus

    There is a consensus forming about Iraq, and increasingly I suspect that the Democratic party is on the wrong side of it. The consensus is this: though we were certainly the cause of the current instability in the country, the violence is not principally directed towards American forces. In light of that fact, David Ignatius…