Politics
The Paranoid Style
Image by AdamThinks.com
There has been something of a debate among the American Left as to the true nature of the anti-healthcare reform movement. One position is that while there have always been crazies on the Right, the current era represents something new, in which the crazies have taken over the party, backed by unprecedented amounts [...]
Crossroads
Former Clinton White House adviser and prominent blogger, Brad DeLong says: “We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” But critics of the Geithner plan are not saying he’s being too soft on the bankers because they want to see blood. They are [...]
Understanding Gaza
In this clip ’self-hating Jew’ Jon Stewart points out the obviously one-sided and mobius-strip like quality of mainstream American news coverage of the war in Gaza. Together with help from Kiven Strohm and other friends on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve compiled a list of resources about Gaza, with the aim of providing an alternative view. [...]
John McCain
I wasn’t happy with similar sites I found on the web, so I created a wiki to get the word out about some of the more disagreeable positions taken by the McCain campaign. The idea being that all the claims on the wiki are verifiable statements about actual policy positions taken by John McCain. They [...]
The KMT in Burma
Reading Panaj Mishra’s NYRB article about Burma, “The Revolt of the Monks,” I was reminded of the KMT’s adventures in Burma, a remarkable episode in the inglorious history of Taiwan’s ruling party. After several pages discussing the brutal suppression of last year’s protest by Burma’s monks, Mishra turns to the political-economic foundation of military rule:
But [...]
Separation of Powers
Photo by 翔
If you ask most people, democracy is synonymous with elections. But, strangely enough, few people who live in electoral democracies feel that elections result in a government which truly responds to their concerns. At its best, electoral politics seems to solve the problem of succession which plagued previous forms of government. Although it [...]
Lessig
I just donated to Lessig’s congressional campaign fund. Have you?
Obama
Image by Shepard Fairey.
The biggest problem I have with the Clinton legacy is its failure to articulate a strong defense of progressive values. I think we ended up with Bush precisely because of that failure. While Gore and Kerry toyed with progressivism they were ultimately unable to embrace it, allowing the Democratic Party to drift [...]
Parallel Voting
Schee posted a link to this article on the new voting system which so affected the Taiwanese legislative elections. (See my last post on this.)
Several countries now mix proportional representation with voting for individual candidates, as Taiwan now does. However, it turns out there are two different models for how the mixing works: the one-vote [...]
Disenchanted
Almost every single American newspaper ran stories about the Taiwanese election attributing the DPP’s defeat to “broad disenchantment among Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants over the combative pro-independence campaign that has been the centerpiece of Chen’s two four-year terms as president.” I don’t know what motivated the average Taiwanese voter to support the KMT’s sweeping victory, [...]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
