Abandoned Footnotes
Stray thoughts, notes, and digressive ditties.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism III: Computational Arguments
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(Another one in the series promised here ; I’m writing a paper. This is still somewhat muddled, so read at your own risk, though comments ar...
Saturday, November 06, 2010
The Ancient War between States and Non-state Peoples, Modern Botswana Edition
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The NY Times has a really nice piece on the conflict between the San Bushmen and the Botswanan state that illustrates pretty well some of ...
Friday, November 05, 2010
Idle Queries: Exit and Voice in Economic and Political Life
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In his classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Albert Hirshmann suggested that “voice” and “exit” are the two basic responses to organizational pr...
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Equality and Domination (A footnote on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone).
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I should find this book more appealing. I mean, I am receptive to its basic thesis: that high inequality is bad for a society. I find it pl...
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Contempt and the Public Sphere (A Footnote on Don Herzog's "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders")
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Like many other people, when reading the political blogosphere I am often struck by the prevalence of expressions of contempt . It is not si...
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Ancient Ones
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R. John Parkes , a researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, studies microbes found in core samples collected by the Ocean Drilling P...
Friday, October 22, 2010
Too many gods
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The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bush...
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)
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(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought). As I mentioned in a previous post , reading S...
Friday, October 15, 2010
Footnotes on things I've been reading: James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"
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I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia , which had been hig...
Monday, October 11, 2010
Hermes, Lord of Robbers (Homeric Hymn #4)
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As a picture book . Nancy found it in the public library, and we read it to our daughter. It is a fairly complete (and very nice) translatio...
Fun with visualizations 2: Growth and Democracy
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William Easterly recently had a post on the "mystery of the benevolent autocrat" that illustrated the fact that non-democratic co...
Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II
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One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that preven...
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Fun with visualizations 1
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I've been playing around in the last few days with free visualization software, trying to think of ways to create interesting visualizat...
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