anotherpanacea

Tag: US

  • When Money Itself Comes to Represent Nothing: Baudrillard or Austrian Economist?

    (This post is especially for my friends who are reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions right now.) Post-structuralist trickster or stuffy monetarist? You guess: If modernity is characterized by loss of the sense of the real, this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century. Everything threatens to become unreal once…

  • Unofficial Gag Rules on Immigration Reform

    In the wake of Arizona’s attempt to localize immigration enforcement, I think it’s time for Congress and the Obama administration to return to immigration reform. If anything can justify American exceptionalism, it’s the waves of immigration that have repeatedly demonstrated that we can offer a better life to foreigners without losing our own identity. As we…

  • Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Fear of Statisticians

    Often when I am trying to explain problems in the modern political landscape or my own approach to political philosophy, I will return to Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy as more efficient than private office. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about “efficiency” in bureaucracy, but Weber’s argument rested on the contrast between private and…

  • 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…

  • Treasury Sums Up

    Out of the mouths of babes: Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, indicated that the US would accept some criticism. “We have in many ways humiliated ourselves as a nation with some of the problems that have taken place here.”

  • The Presidential Election

    This site isn’t really for partisan cheerleading. I’m a US citizen with policy and party preferences, but I feel that those preferences are somehow irrelevant, especially since my work in political philosophy is mostly oriented towards expanding the definition of  the word ‘politics’ to include more than just voting and partisanship as sports team rivalry.…

  • Boumediene v. Bush

    Doing a little dance today over the decision in Boumediene and Al Odah v. US. It turns out that Congress didn’t accidentally suspend habeas corpus while authorizing the use of military force. Yay! More here, and the decision can be read here. Also, here’s a line that I really, really enjoyed: “Abstaining from questions involving…

  • Inequality and Democracy

    Back in January, President Bush gave a speech acknowledging that income inequality has been rising for the last 25 years. He attributed the cause to inequalities in education: The fact is that income inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years. The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards…

  • For A Few Dollars More…

    The New York Times has a report on the proposed law regulating oil contracts. There’s no mention of production-sharing agreements there, but there is something a little fishy about the law, which centralizes the approval procedure for contracts for the oil under regional control. Here’s the relevant text from the NYT: [The law allows] regions…

  • See it. Film it. Change it. Blog about it.

    Project Witness provides training and video cameras for local groups to use in their human rights advocacy campaigns. They have recently begun releasing these videos online. Check out US films like Outlawed, Rights on the Line, or The Day After Diallo, or focus your attention on the international scene: Between Two Fires dwells on Northern…