February 2012
2 posts
“When you allow the debate to shift so far to the right, you lose the politicial...”
– Baratunde Thurston on Melissa Harris-Perry (via alexch)
“But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to...”
– Paul Krugman’s article “Moochers Against Welfare” from his op-ed column in the New York Times. Krugman has an openly liberal bias, but the questions he raises about why working-class Americans appear to be acting against their best interests deserve more consideration on both ends...
January 2012
12 posts
8 tags
“Europe’s richer nations, led by Germany, resist institutionalizing any...”
– “The Welsh Economy Slips, but London Cushions the Fall” by Landon Thomas, Jr. in the New York Times. The article discusses why monetary union appears to work well within Great Britain, but doesn’t work well in Europe.
4 tags
“‘Much of the politics we have today is strident and polarized and...”
– Alan Greenblatt’s story “The Public Respects Civility, But Rewards Rudeness” on the NPR website
5 tags
“Glad tide is turning on SOPA: don’t need bad legislation when should be...”
– Tweets from Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, head of the Digital Agenda for Europe
4 tags
“Iowa Republicans, after two weeks of trying to decide who won the caucuses they...”
– Ron Elving’s NPR blog on how Iowa Republicans don’t really know who came out first in their caucuses.
2 tags
“What the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan...”
– David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director quoted in the NPR story “Will The Real Ronald Reagan Please Stand Up?”
6 tags
SOPA and media industries' failure to innovate →
Just keeping in mind some of us in the media industries can’t afford to innovate as much as we’d like, this is an interesting collection of facts with some structure that helps underline what happens when the world of intellectual property changes completely in a handful of years.
You can’t blame everything on the film industry, though, and people who take without giving...
5 tags
How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece →
In her piece “How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece”, Chana Joffe-Walt describes the efforts of Diomidis Spinellis to retrieve taxes owed to the Greek government, the lack of which has forced Greece into its current debt crisis. This article shows an excellent example of how technocrats are hampered by factors outside of the domain of the problem they are addressing. You can...
4 tags
“There is an easy, conservative argument to make about taxes — and even...”
– Writer Derek Thompson in his article for The Atlantic “The GOP’s Weird Obsession With Poor People Not Paying Enough Taxes“
To his credit, Romney hasn’t been going after the poor.
3 tags
“By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history...”
–
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch on the National Defense Authorization Act, Section 1021.
5 tags
Law to stick it to US tax evaders means hardship...
Overseas Exile caught this one in his writeup of a provision that was slipped into a jobs bill at the end of last year. The New York Times writes
Legislation meant to help the United States government locate overseas assets of American tax cheats created little stir when it was quietly slipped into a jobs bill last year.
But the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, as it is known, is...
3 tags
Teenage girl spends three years in prison before...
NPR details the case of a teenage set free after a coerced confession when she was 16 years old:
Homicide detectives are often required to confront the people they question. But in the case of a teenage girl whose baby has been dead for 27 hours and who pleads and cries through much of the interview, Truong’s attorney, Ed Ryan, says this is psychological torture.
“Their...
2 tags
A merit-based pay system for teachers that has a...
During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher...
December 2011
7 posts
Cuban embargo doomed by demographic shift →
Newer economic Cuban emigrants are starting to outnumber the anti-Castro political refugees, and they are pushing for more ties to Cuba.
3 tags
“They feel that once an image goes into a shared digital space, it’s just there...”
– Stephen Frailey, head of the undergraduate photography program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan quoted in the New York Times.
"The Media's Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Campaign... →
The Atlantic: The media has deaf, dumb, and blind in covering the GOP nomination race http://t.co/aO9qrYNI
Some GOP presidential nomination candidates are saying things so far outside of the mainstream that we are left questioning where the mainstream actually is.
"Block That Metaphor!" →
Steven Pinker reviews Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff
"When Cognitive Science Enters Politics" →
A rebuttal to Steven Pinker’s review.
It’s probably important to know that in Linguistic science, there are two major schools—the old Generativist school, centred on the work of Noam Chomsky and whose intellectual home is MIT, and the newer Functionalist school, which is represented by George Lakoff.
"Lies, Damned Lies and Politifact" →
The Atlantic: Lie, damn lies, and #Politifact http://t.co/yJidOafj
People have opinions and Poltifact is staffed by people, so they end up being pundits just like everyone else.
1 tag
A Reasonable Start
Well, it’s a start even if my first post doesn’t live up to its title.
This isn’t really a blog, but a collection of links and perhaps some commentary. There is a theme, however, and the theme is reason. Everything I write or share here will exemplify in some way my idea of reasoned discourse in politics and culture.
Reason is disappearing in the world, with political and...