Politics
Bonus Army
I’ve been thinking a lot about Obama. According to Ezra Klein: his answer to arguments against consensus rhetoric [see my earlier post] is that his rhetoric is behind that success, it brings in more voters and thus intensifies popular pressure for his agenda More specifically, his approach is that of Occupying the moral high ground [...]
Human Rights Day
This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by [...]
Understatement
It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article: When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his [...]
Big Table
For those who haven’t been following, Obama’s been doing his best to alienate the progressive left. That’s resulted in him butting heads with two of my favorite people: John Edwards and Paul Krugman. And while it may result in more corporate fundraising for Obama, he’s come out looking much worse for the wear. Obama has [...]
Green
Red A recently had a post which seems to imply that Taiwan’s own hosing bubble is about to burst, with housing prices way above their actual value. I haven’t shopped for a place here on the East Coast, but I know that things are a lot cheaper and that there is rampant housing speculation. Looking [...]
陸克文
I would like to congratulate Australia on finally ridding itself of John Howard. In 2002 I wrote about ““Howard’s openly racist policies” and more recently we’ve had some excellent discussion on Savage Minds about his use of the “Little Children are Sacred” report to undo decades of progress on Aborigine autonomy. I’d really begun to [...]
Ivory Tower vs. Real World
[Cross-posted at Savage Minds] In our discussions about anthropologists in the military the term “ivory tower” has come up again and again, as has its antipode, “the real world.” These terms work rhetorically to oppose academic elitism and detachment against the difficult moral choices one must make in everyday life. A couple of things really [...]
Free Burma
{Burma, activism}
Model Minority
This NY Times story made me wonder: Do Indian-Americans really want to have a small vocal minority whose views diverge strongly from their own represent them? But then I realized, its the other way around – its this small vocal minority who want to speak for all Indians. Too bad the NY Times can’t tell [...]
Media Transparency
If you don’t know Cursor or the Center for Media Transparency, you should. Cursor is the premier alternative news aggregation site. Since the start of the Iraq war they have been playing an important role aggregating the best of the blogsphere, making it easy for the rest of us to know what’s out there. Similarly, [...]
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