ELECTIONS next April are already casting long shadows in Nigeria. The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is set to hold a presidential primary next month with a victor to be announced by January 15th. A powerful challenger to Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent, has emerged. A bout of frantic politicking is certain.
Read about the Abubakar vs. Goodwill Jonathan struggle for Nigeria’s presidency.
Month: December 2010
Frost at the core: Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin are presiding over a system that can no longer change
In light of Khorodovsky’s show trial, the Economist offers a disheartening, though perhaps realistic view of contemporary Russian politics. In doing, the author offers a comparison of Medvedev and Putin and concludes that, “[w]ith Mr Putin in power, Russia may suffer deep stagnation, but a collapse of the system would be all the more dramatic. With Mr Medvedev stagnation may be shorter, but his grip on power would be weaker. This may matter little in the long run, but it makes a big difference for Russians living now—not least for Mr Khodorkovsky himself.”
Friend or Foe? A Special Report on China’s Place in the World
four-part special report from the Economist, with a compelling conclusion
Terrorism in Northern Ireland: The Curse of the Conflict Junkies
Last year [2009] Northern Ireland suffered 22 terrorist-related attacks; so far this year there have been 39. Last year 17 people in the province were charged with terrorist offences; this year, according to Matt Baggott, the chief constable of Northern Ireland’s police service (PSNI), the figure is already 74. On September 24th, acting on advice from the Security Service, MI5, Theresa May, the home secretary, raised the official perception of the threat from republican groups to a level that implies an attack on the mainland is “a strong possibility”.
Elections in Siberia Show Russia’s Drift to Single Party
Here is a short but compelling piece about how United Russia propped up a political party, “A Just Russia”, and is now taking that party down in Siberia. It is also a courageous, if not misguided, Siberian woman who sees hope in a competitive political party system.
The Riddles of "Confederate Emancipation"
In this short piece, Bruce Levine, of the University of Illinois, discusses how the Confederacy’s illogical debate over the use of Black soldiers.
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is
Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He has also directed “Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” “A Brief History of Time” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives with his wife and two French bulldogs (Boris and Ivan) in Cambridge, Mass.
Read this five-part piece that Morris contributed in the New York Times. I read it in installments as it was published and have wanted to discuss it ever since.
Unlike many of the readings that I “assign” you, I do not have a list of questions or prompts to guide you. Just read and enjoy this piece and come to our next session prepared to contribute to a discussion about it. Oh, and bring a printed copy to our next session.
Consider the Lobster
Read Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and consider the following questions before our next session:
- What are the ethical dimensions of Wallace’s piece?
- What connections, if any, are there between ethics and morality?
- Would the “knife in the head” or the slow boil method strike you as more ethical?
- “Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?”
- Interpret and apply this rich line from the text, “[s]ince pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”
If you are interested, here is an interview with Wallace recorded two years before his suicide.
What Does Technology Want?
In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.
Listen to this 20 minute discussion and consider the following questions for our next session:
- What does technology want?
- According to Kevin Kelley, what is the “technium”? What does it want? What are its tendencies?
- Where do good ideas come from? How do “eureka moments” figure into good ideas?
- What are the relationships between technology and good ideas?
- How does this connect to the philosophy of Emergence?
- How, if at all, might technologies evolve along with human/social evolution? Is there an “inevitable” correlation between these evolutionary processes? Inherent in this question is another question: how might the history of technology and the history of humankind inextricably intertwined?
- Does technology “invent” us as much as we invent technology?
- What is the adjacent possible? What might be the implications of this concept?
- How have humans created themselves? How has technology created the human experience?
- Can we understand the universe without advanced technology?
Lazar Lecture: World War II on the American Home Front
Lecture Outline:
- The Road to War
- War Socialism
- Minorities in WWII
- African-Americans
- Mexican-Americans
- Native Americans
- Women in at War and at Work
- Japanese [American] Internment
- Atomic Bombs
Vietnam War(s) Lecture
Here is my Vietnam War Lecture.
Lecture Outline:
- Imperial Roots
- On the Back of a Tiger
- The Arrogance of Power
- Opposition
- Peace with Honor
- Legacies
Even Reagan Wasn’t a Reagan Republican
Conservatives would claim that the Republican Party can only regain power by “returning to its roots” and banishing heretics. But a funny thing happened on the way to winning national elections again: the GOP has drifted so far right that it’s retroactively disqualified the only Republicans since 1960 who’ve actually managed to, you know, win national elections. Based on their public statements, policy proposals, and accomplishments while in office, none of the modern Republican presidents—not Richard Nixon, not Gerald Ford, not George H.W. Bush, not even Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush—would come close to satisfying the Republican base if they were seeking election today.
Newsweek assesses the “conservativeness” the Republican Presidents from the past decades
The Chinese PM
Here’s a little piece on the curious role of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
The future of NATO
Here is a special report on the current challenges facing NATO and the role that NATO may [not] play in the future.
TV in China
Despite government meddling and rampant piracy, commercial television is surging in the Middle Kingdom
WikiLeaks: Russian Mafia an International Concern for US Diplomats
Leaked embassy cables show US diplomats are concerned about the growing power of Russian organized crime and believe it has contacts with the highest levels of government in Moscow.
The conservative mission to destroy the Constitution in order to save it
Slate’s Dalia Lithwick offers some insights into the Tea Party’s proposal to amend the “divinely inspired” Constitution.