Category Archives: Politics

The Gathering Twilight, Part the First

In a review of Elena Gorokhova’s memoir of childhood in the Soviet Union, there’s a quote of her youthful realization about Communism: “The rules are simple…They lie to us, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 9 Comments

Disposed to Propose

I’ve done a fair bit of judging proposals for grants over the years, and a recent experience doing so pushed me to finally assemble some notes and thoughts I’ve been collecting. These are specific to undergraduates: graduate and faculty proposals … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

The Problem of Organizations

This is an old idea, particularly in the branch of sociological thought that descends from Weber, but it really seems to me that the political problem of the 21st Century is not a problem of markets or capitalism, not of … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 3 Comments

Double Down

Every once in a while, you see a public figure say something and think to yourself, “I am almost certain that a historian fifty or a hundred years from now is going to be using that quote to capture the … Continue reading

Posted in Good Quote, Bad Quote, Politics | 3 Comments

End User Complaint

The historian Randall Packard gave an interesting talk at Swarthmore last week about the history of malaria eradication. Like many historians, he ends up with a skeptical view of contemporary projects and plans. As he sees it, current attempts to … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 7 Comments

Pile-On

I just have to say it. President Obama? It kind of says something about the world in general (as well as the past Administration) at this moment if default statesmanship carried out within ordinary interstate institutions seems like a major … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

One Man’s Moose

There was a sort of mini-meme earlier this month circulating around left and liberal blogs, a response in a thread at digg.com satirizing conservative hostility to government by calling attention to all the high-quality services provided by government that we … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 8 Comments

The Rules of the Game

Someone asked me in email last week what I thought of James O’Keefe’s video expose of ACORN, specifically whether I thought it was unfair or distorted because O’Keefe wasn’t showing all of the videos where ACORN staff didn’t rise to … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 7 Comments

Clip-Clopping Across the Bridge

A while back, I suggested that it was time for everyone to cool it a bit on linking to the craziest, least thought-through, most over-the-top writing coming from the margins of cultural conservatism. My point was that during the previous … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 13 Comments

Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence

I don’t expect much to come of John Holbo’s careful breakdown of the non-philosophy underlying Megan McArdle’s blanket antagonism to all health care proposals, but there’s one point buried in there that’s worth pulling out for its general usefulness. Namely, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments