A Decision is Made

Dissolving the Social Contract

Research questions: what are the conditions under which various social contracts can be dissolved? Can Hobbes' contract be dissolved by the people if security cannot be guaranteed by the government?

Another thought - how to understand movements towards a seemingly Hobbesian social contract in the past decade? Is the plaintive defense of Bush administration actions "They kept us safe"/"They were trying to keep us safe" a move towards viewing a state through a more Hobbesian lens?

1993? Not a chance...

Obstructionism is undoubtedly the Republican party's MO right now. Cantor is openly modeling himself after Newt Gingrich (I'd skip divorcing a woman going through chemo) and Michael Steele thinks it's just peachy that the House Republicans stood lock-step against the stimulus. They're not going to be able to block it, but come 2010 they'll be the ideologically pure opposition that had "no part" of the ongoing mess, and voters will flock to them, just as voters flocked to Republicans in 1993 despite George H.W. Bush's recession.

Right.

Just as Clinton supporters forgot about one key detail during the 2008 Democratic primary when claiming that "Clinton is magic! Her husband wins red states!", so too have the Republicans forgotten what legitimized their obstruction in 1993. Ross Perot. The Texas billionaire (seriously - that's the way he was referred to during the campaign!) won over 20% in numerous Western states that Clinton won by plurality, not majority. Clinton won the election with only 43% of the vote! Republicans were able to (honestly) say that a majority of Americans voted against the president, and thus he didn't have a mandate.

And now they keeping digging, hoping they'll hit oil before voters kick the dirt at the top of the hole back down in, burying them and their sorry fanaticism.

In like Flynn

Got into Chicago, so can scrap all the plan b stuff for next year. Still waiting on a number of places, but Chicago would be a hard place to turn down...

Publishing time

Starting to work in earnest on an article on sanctions, their ethics (through a Just War Theory lens) and strategy. Delineating the goals of sanctions as follows: compellance, containment, internal regime change.
If I finish this article and clean up my thesis, I could be submitting two articles for publication by the end of the summer...maybe keep them under my belt a little longer, that way I can publish them as a grad student and have them more recently on my record when I'm in the hiring process? Alternately, if I don't get in anywhere this go-around, one or possibly two published articles (or at least under consideration) would be a huge boost for re-applying next year...

A Resolution

I've noticed that the amount of knowledge gained by surfing the net is not actually all that great - it keeps you up to date if you are reading the news, but the sort of analysis one gets from bloggers and columnists doesn't actually expand one's knowledge usually - just helps you to form an opinion.

So a resolution - I spend way too much time reading stuff online. I have to start reading more books and journal articles. This doesn't mean that I will no longer be a news and info junkie, but hopefully my harvesting of knowledge will be more fruitful this way...

Why Senators should not Twitter

There's always the cliche of old people trying to be "hip" by using new technology - the Google, or something else on this grand old series of tubes. But I was truly horrified when I discovered that at least one Senator, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Twitters. A recent update on the stimulus compromise.


First of all, her background is hilarious - the too-small-picture that's wallpapered behind her posts reminds me of when I was first experimenting with desktop backgrounds on Windows 3.1. But, much more importantly, is that Twitters have maximum character limits. 140 characters. How can one possibly say anything worthwhile about serious government business - be it legislation, hearings or even investigations - in 140 characters? It's impossible. Twittering in this scenario is simply abbreviated talking points - as if talking points were too well-explained in the first point.

Senatorial Twitterrers (or Twits?) are doing America a great disservice by communicating in this way.

Grad school update

Apps are all in. There seems to be a small problem with the letters of rec to McGill and Notre Dame, but that should be cleared up relatively soon. So, a summary of where I've applied:

Harvard
Yale
Princeton
UofChicago
Northwestern
UCLA
Berkeley
Duke
Notre Dame
McGill


And if I don't get in to any of those places, I'll need to reconsider if I really want to be a political theorist. If I still want to, I'll have to come up with a better reason to be accepted. These would be the schools that I'd apply to in such a situation (not back-up schools per se, but schools with different focus than the ones I'm applying to now):

Johns Hopkins
UVA
Minnesota
Wisconsin-Madison
Toronto
Brown
Washington University
UT Austin (?)

The Moral Imperative to Resist?

"Abdel Minaim Hasan, 37, knelt, weeping, next to the body of his eldest daughter, Lina, 11, who was wrapped in a Hamas flag. “From now on I am Hamas!” he cried. “I choose resistance!” But then he cursed Arab nations for ignoring the plight of the Gazans. “The Arabs are doing nothing to protect us!” he shouted." From New York Times article Grief and Rage at Gaza School.

There is much popular thinking that punishing civilian populations can lead them to rise up and overthrow their governments. That was (some of) the logic behind the Iraq sanctions during the Clinton years, the Cuban sanctions, and then the sanctions against Gaza. Now, it constitutes some (though by no means most) of the logic behind the airstrikes against Gaza - civilians will inevitably be killed by such attacks, but the Israelis want Gazans to know that Hamas is the party truly responsible for those deaths.

Aside from the arrogance of such an attitude (if your leaders were more to our liking you wouldn't be suffering), is their a moral imperative to resist, perhaps with force, such an action? Abdel vowed that he was now with Hamas. Fatah is negotiating with Israel, trying (fruitlessly so far) to gain sigficant progress in a peace process and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. But this man's daughter has been killed - arguably murdered, as she was in school - by an Israeli strike. Why negotiate with those responsible? If they can kill with impunity, is resistance - rather than accomodation - the moral imperative?

Conversely, would the same imperative exist for those in Sderot?