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POPSWhy America Will Survive George W. Bush Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective. America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead. With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system. Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.
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POPSRepublicans: Crazy, Or Nuts?
Who in their right mind would argue with the observations in this article? More: "The Republican Party has become an aggregation of people who prefer to live in a world of fantasy -- and their first fantasy, the Ur-myth on which the entire conceit rests, is (classically) "we are the realists." "It degrades, into farce and Newspeak, from there. The perpetrators and defenders of the outing of a CIA agent are "patriots." Tom DeLay is a "leader" and Newt Gingrich is a "visionary." The President plays guitar while New Orleans drowns, causes a hundred thousand Americans and Iraqis to be killed or injured, and outsources torture, and it's the Democrats who, per the repellent Ramesh Ponnuru, are the "party of death." "It has gotten so that you have to muster all the compassion and understanding of which you are capable just to think of the Republicans as a party of greedy corporatists manipulating the credulous, the provincial, and the bigoted. That's the nice way of putting it.”
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POPSOnline Papers in Philosophy This is fantastic. What is the point of this site? Many philosophers provide drafts of new papers on their websites; Online Papers in Philosophy keeps track of all the sites I’m aware of, and alerts readers to newly posted papers. Here are the sites I am currently tracking. (Actually, that list might not be completely up-to-date; as new pages are submitted, I add them to the list that my software uses; I periodically update the online list to match.) Checking in regularly with OPP will keep you aware of at least most of the new papers being posted on the web. Check out which sites are being tracked here: http://philosophy.jollyutter.net/opp/?page_id=6 I just clipped a few papers, click source ... really ...
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POPSMoral Philosopher Questions Memory Manipulation Hurley says while the real threat of developing PTSD might be a good enough reason to use beta-blockers as a preventative measure, she also wants policy makers to consider the ramifications of what such a treatment may mean to a person’s moral well-being. “Beta-blockers do not cause amnesia. Rather they make memories less vivid, detailed and arousing,” explains Hurley, who specializes in bioethics. “They lessen the emotional impact when someone is recalling upsetting events.”
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POPSEthics Rebellion in Psychology The votes on a resolution — by the psychology faculties at Earlham, Guilford and Smith Colleges — are an unusually public effort by departments to criticize collectively a key decision by their national association. A number of other departments are considering similar moves. Good for Earlham, Guilford, and Smith.
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POPSChomsky: If US was a true Democracy!
On all these topics, White House policy is completely at odds with what public opinion wants. But the media rarely publish the polls that highlight this persistent public opposition. Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion. There is growing international concern about the massive US double deficit affecting trade and the budget. But both are closely linked to a third deficit, the democratic deficit that is constantly growing, not only in the US but all over the western world. The US press sometimes publishes even my work, and the US is not a totalitarian country. But anyone who fails to fulfil certain minimum requirements does not stand a chance of becoming an established commentator. One of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official li
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POPSCensorship in American Universities: Harvard But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on EU bank accounts, property, and compensation for labour expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-EU was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defence of slavery in the mid-19th. ...Harvard Crimson
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POPSW's Protest Manual: Conservative Treason. The manual demonstrates "that the White House has a policy of excluding and/or attempting to squelch dissenting viewpoints from presidential events," said ACLU lawyer Jonathan Miller. "Individuals should have the right to express their opinion to the president, even if it's not a favorable one." "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt
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