Politics

How We Got Here

In other election-related news, check out the dubious decision on the part of supposedly left-leaning German magazine Die Tageszeitung editors to run a picture of the White House with the headline “Onkel Baracks Hütte” (“Uncle Barack’s Cabin”). Wessen dumme Entscheidung war das?

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Mama, trains, trucks, prison, gettin’ drunk… and Obama

There’s a very famous country song, made popular by David Allan Coe, called “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” (NOTE: That link is to a YouTube rendering of the song, which might be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.) As Coe explains in the song, it was actually written by Steve…

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From ressentiment to rights?

It has occurred to me that I need to say a lot more about what I mean by “weak” in the formulation “weak humanism,” about which I posted a short while ago (here) and which has sparked a very interesting and productive discussion. My clarifications herein are in part attempts to sharpen my own sense…

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Tightening the Democratic Belt

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, it’s time to officially move to the next stage in the Party’s game plan to take back the White House. Among other things, this means that we will (finally!) get a break from all of the intra-family fighting and the supporters of both…

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Celebrity Colonialism

In a recent article for the Mail and Guardian, Brendan O’Neill suggests that adoptions of African children by the likes of Madonna and Brangelina may show us that “having a black baby is the new black.” O’Neill calls this phenomenon the “White Madonna’s Burden” (in not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The…

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Habeus Corpus

[Argh! I was having blog problems on the UNITE day, so this post is late (and severely truncated). I think I have things figured out now, though, so more on human rights later…] Bloggers Unite for Human Rights day is a joint venture of Amnesty International and BlogCatalog.com intended “to help elevate human rights by…

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We’ve Come A Long Way, Baby?

Consider this a friendly (though not completely unrelated) break from the Clinton/feminism discussion of late on this blog.

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Strategic Misreading

I used to say that one of the things I both loved and hated about philosopher Richard Rorty’s work was that he was a master of what I call “strategic misreading.” If you’ve ever read Rorty’s famous foray into the “Continental” (European) philosophical tradition, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, you may have some sense of what I…

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Why Hillary Should NOT Drop Out (yet)

I suppose it was inevitable that, when the results came back from North Carolina and Indiana, people would begin calling for Clinton to drop out of the race. I don’t think she should. I’m not going to appeal to the most obvious reason, which is that many of the superdelegates still remain uncommitted. (In the…

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Super Tuesday

“Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.” –Barack Obama

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