Kieran Healy recently posted this chart showing incarceration rates in the US compared to other “basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies”: Earlier he posted a more inclusive chart which also listed a few “countries that are not exactly model states.” America is still way out in the inglorious lead. But what neither of these charts makes [...]
In Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World writers and intellectuals are banished to an island where they have complete freedom to say and do whatever they like – as long as there is no risk of them infecting the rest of society with their ideas. From what I’ve heard about intellectual freedom in China, it [...]
The NY Times has gotten into the whole Google Maps mashup craze with this map identifying every murder committed between 2003 and 2005. Between 2003 and 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. Men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and [...]
Having never served on a jury, my knowledge mostly comes from the movie, “12 Angry Men“. But I’ve always found the instructions given to juries fairly odd. They seem to imply a very strange idealized notions of language, thought, and discourse that have no bearing on reality. It is as if they were written by [...]
A longish title for a Keywords post, but these names are important to remember. They are the two Uighurs who remain in prison in Guantanamo four and a half years after their capture by bounty hunters in Afghanistan, over a year after they were declared not to be enemy combatants by a military tribunal, and [...]
Guest post by tf Much of France is fixated on the televised parliamentary hearings concerning the Outreau sexual abuse scandal, named for the town in the north of the country where the abuse, both actual and invented, was situated. Eighteen people were formally investigated for abuse of children, of whom only four proved to be [...]
The other day we visited Maninagar with Dakxin Bajrange. Maninagar is now little more than a street lined with tents. The people there used to have homes, homes that they had lived in since the 60s. Their children used to go to school here. That was before the city decided to develop their land, bulldozing [...]
If the Bush administration has an ideology, it is that of executive power. John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, formerly a “mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” but one who wielded tremendous influence, and who was directly responsible for shaping the Bush administration’s policy on torture, argues in a new [...]
Writer Dilip D’Souza, a long time advocate of India’s Denotified Tribes, or DNTs, has a moving post promoting our film. He draws from his book, Branded By Law: Passbook entries There is an interesting sequence of entries in a bank passbook I once saw in Purulia District, West Bengal. Shyamoli Sabar, a young woman from [...]
Post of the month: It turns out that the false information about Iraq’s supposedly training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons — information which the Administration continued to push after the Defense Intelligence Agency determined that the source of it was in no position to know — was extracted under torture. [...]