Monthly Archive: May 2011

After the jump a few of the Vernesque machines from the workshops of Les Machines de l’île Nantes:

After few wars have the victors entirely resisted the urge to be as vengeful in peacemaking as they were in war-making. There’s more often the desire to settle all accounts and ‘teach them a...

A recent Washington Monthly profile of Dan Savage draws this interesting* parallel between modern sexual norms and consumption patterns: “Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in...

“[S]urely the most obvious point to make is that if we cannot keep illegal drugs out of prison at what point do even prohibitionists recognise that the War on Drugs can’t be won?” -Alex Massie

Tyler Cowen asks: What’s the best accessible pop album that never caught on with listeners and buyers? Of course that’s a funny question. If it never caught on, what makes it so accessible? What...

Conor Friedersdorf explains well how the argument that justifying torture under even limited circumstances would morally corrupt and result in justifying torture under almost any conceivable circumstance has been proven correct in the debate...

(NOTE: The odds of a commenter making the point I’m trying to make in this post in a paragraph or less approach 100%). Tom Van Dyke, in comments, points us to this 2009 quote...

Emptywheel writes: [Some suggest] that the fact Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi provided tidbits (or, according to several reports, unconvincing denials) that led to OBL equates to us needing torture to get...

League alum Jamelle Bouie notes the not-so-surprising-upon-reflection lack of awareness of who Osama bin Laden was amongst American teenagers and reaches this depressing conclusion:

The killing of Osama bin Laden is a real crossroads about which I am currently neither optimistic nor pessimistic (ie, I think there’s an equal chance of going either direction).  Many, perhaps most, Americans...