Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell is wondering why Obama’s lead over McCain is bigger in polls where more left-wing Presidential candidates are included – A puzzle about the polls. Comment #1 by a certain Cryptic Ned is proposing an interesting theory: versioning also works in elections. (more…)
Without words. Via Stefan Niggemeier, who got it from Andrew Sullivan, who apparently got it from Aidan Nak.
If you haven’t already, watch Jon Stewart embarrass Tony Blair in a 10 minute interview.
Dani Rodrik with an Asian update of Robert Putnam’s theory about Italian democrary – what states are for, and why a monopoly of power is a good idea when it comes to governance structures.
“When the state does not enforce property rights… the Mafia–or, as happens in this case, the Taliban–will.”
Via netzpolitik.org, I find a commentary by Rop Conggris about the new fundamental right to “privacy and integrity of information processing systems” which was defined last Wednesday by the German Constitutional Court – Today, we’re all Germans.
“It would of course have been even nicer if the Germans had actually managed to elect a government that didn’t attempt to trample their most basic rights to begin with. But then constitutions are there as a safety-net for precisely this eventuality. They are written because the framers realized that when it comes to governments, shit (such as in the form of oppressive laws) sometimes happens.
So the people of Germany seem to be successfully defending themselves against their government. What’s wrong with the rest of the world? There have been plenty efforts in many other countries to defend the notion of privacy, but the Germans have simply been provided with better and sharper tools for defending themselves. Their sharpest tool by far is this federal constitutional court. Without it, I fear Germany would have long been in the same sorry state as my own country. I hope all Germans realize that the judges and support staff that make up this court are the one single thing that stands between today’s Germany and a police state.”
By the way, the wonderful policitaltheory.daily “weblog” is now really published in blog format (and has a new home). I liked the old one (google cached version, might expire at some point, link hat tip orgtheory.net) better, but at least there’s a RSS feed now. The previous lack thereof and the consequential lack of the site in my feed reader was the most important reason I did not read politicaltheorydaily as often as I should have.
Die Zeit online beginnt den Weltfrauentag mit einer überaus sexistischen Einführung…
Bei ZEIT online wollen wir Zeichen setzen. Deshalb sollen am 8. März unsere Titel und alle Bilder auf der Homepage weiblich sein. Wir wollen uns bemühen, keinen Krieg, keinen Hass in die Überschriften zu lassen. Wir setzen auf die weiblichen Substantive: auf die Liebe, die Leidenschaft und die Vernunft. Es wird sicherlich auch Überschriften geben, die von Missgunst, Krisen und Niedertracht handeln. Denn – nun ja – auch das sind weibliche Wörter.
Krieg und Hass sind also männlich, Mißgunst, Krisen und Niedertracht weiblich. Nun ja. Ich freue mich schon auf die feminisierten Schlagzeilen über Bomben im Irak und einen DAX-Tagesverlauf in weiblichen Kurven…
I don’t know how many black sheep there are in the US army in Iraq today. But I suppose there are a lot who never imagined their fur would even feature a single black patch, because, probably, given normal circumstances, they’d likely have remained white all their lives.
Stress, anxiety, guys stewing in their own testosterone for extended periods of time. That’s one of the, sometimes intended, but always terrible consequences of war: it hardly ever creates heroes and almost always creates thugs.
It’s not the war per se, but the violence it inevitably brings wit it – think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, remember Liran Ron Furer’s “Checkpoint Syndrome” for just two chilling accounts of the effects violence on “white sheep”. And if some sheep are already black in disguise, war certainly attracts them, as it, at least partly, legalizes behaviour that is considered criminal in peacetime.
But there are limits, and the above argument can only serve as a reminder to those in power, that it’s not just Patriot Games they play, never as an excuse for the murder of an Iraqi family and the gang-rape of their 14year old daughter - BBC NEWS | Americas | US soldier admits murdering girl.
A couple of years ago, someone left some sick spam comments about amateur pornography featuring raped Iraqi women (almostadiary.de: “The most disgusting porn spam ever“). In light of this story I can’t help but wonder if the offer wasn’t just the result of someone’s unfortunate experiments in role playing with a video camera.
Es war einmal eine Zeit, da war es “cool”, “links” zu sein, zumindest, wie Bertrand Russel uns lehrt, solange man jung noch war. Damals hatte “links” auch noch eine geringe inhaltliche Komponente, die über die a priori-Annahme hinausging, das alle wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich Schwachen allen wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich Starken moralisch überlegen sind.
Auch wenn schon die Absurdität einer solchen Annahme für jedes politische Engagement, das ja zumeist mit der relativen Veränderung wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Rangordnungen einhergeht, die empirische Bestätigung durch jahrzehntelange sozialistische Feldversuche eigentlich nicht benötigte.
Insofern hat es sicher auch sein Gutes, daß “links sein” für Gregor Gysi, einem der Fraktionsvorsitzenden der “LINKEN” im deutschen Bundestag, bedeutet, “gegen Armut zu sein”, wie er kürzlich in einer Talkrunde zum Thema “Mindestlohn” erwähnte. Wow. Das ist tiefgründig.
Angesichts der Inhaltsleere solcher Aussagen möglicher Vordenker sollte es nicht überraschen, daß sich Linkssein für Jugendliche heute vor allem in einer “Ich bin dagegen! Worum gehts?”-Haltung erschöpft, manchmal verbunden mit Aktionen, die ein diffuses Unwohlsein mit einem ebenso diffusen moralischen Bewußtsein verknüpfen. Zumeist argumentationslos und faktenleer.
Ein Beispiel ist die Aktion “I don’t like G8″, über die ich über ein Banner auf einem anderen Blog gestolpert bin – eine Revolution dürfte dabei allerdings nicht herauskommen.
We lose. America certainly no longer is the Land Of The Free. It may be telling that the German term “Rechtsstaat” doesn’t really have a useful translation in English, but, alas, at least in the US, there may no longer be the need for one. President Bush now ordered the special tribunals, or military commissions, to be created in which so-called “enemy combattants” will be tried. Most of the defendants are currently inmates in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Last year, the US supreme court had stopped their creation based primarily on institutional concerns – after some political haggling, a bill was passed, and the tribunals will now be established.
Even Bush’s last friend among the German newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seems appalled about the seemingly totalitarian legal practices applied by these “courts”. As the newspaper reports (in German), defendants may be punished with the death penalty based on indirect witness accounts and forced testimonies.
Let’s hope Ben Franklin did not hear about it.