Robert Cover (in an essay contained in On Violence: A Reader )) suggests that the very extremity of martyrdom makes it a “proper starting place for understanding the nature of legal interpretation.” For the martyr, “if there is to be a continuing life, it will not be on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Health insurance premiums are rising under Obamacare. This was totally predictable as a result of applying the Romneycare model of health care financing to states that lacked Massachusetts’s provisions of guaranteed issue, community rating, and Massachusetts’s preexisting high premiums. . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday, I read Juan Williams in the WSJ, Race and the Gun Debate. Williams is looking at where the gun problem is in the United States. He notes, “Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2006 article, Israeli writer Eyal Weizman describes the Israeli military’s use of contemporary theory to revise military tactics. Weizman says that “the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of . . . . Continue Reading »
In Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre , Girard admits that Hegel’s analysis of the master/slave relationship, especially as mediated through Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (which emphasizes the role of . . . . Continue Reading »
Steven Smith, who teaches law at the University of San Diego, explains how rhetorical appeals to “equality” obscure rather than illuminate public debate. Citing a Harvard Law Review article by Peter Westen (“The Empty Idea of Equality”), he observes that everyone is for . . . . Continue Reading »
I like Ross Douthat, a lot. But I hate to agree with Nate Cohn’s rebuttal to Douthat’s claim that Bush’s overreach in the Iraq war is “responsible for liberalism’s current political and cultural ascendance.” Douthat implies, Cohn claims, that Americans are still . . . . Continue Reading »
The last week has been sort of depressing when it comes to intra-Republican economic politics. You had the RNC report that ignored the public’s problematic perception of the Republicans as the party of the rich while implicitly blaming social conservatives and explicitly blaming opponents of . . . . Continue Reading »
Milbank again, from the 2005 article in Religion and Literature , arguing for the importance of play not just to sanity but to political critique: “the sane adult must continue to play—to keep the world of her work in perspective, she must continue to imagine other realities. To . . . . Continue Reading »
So super-commenter Caleb Verbois and I were talking about why it is that politically suicidal tax plans like Herman Cain’s nine-nine-nine plan get any traction among Republicans. We agreed that some of it had to do with the misappropriation of Reagan nostalgia, but I didn’t find that . . . . Continue Reading »
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