All Apologies
My apologies to readers and commenters here at the League for the rather peculiar happenings in this thread. I have edited the content of some of the comments there in order to protect what...
Author: Erik Kain
Like all conspiracies, there is likely less here than meets the eye
Adam Serwer searches for the slimmest of silver linings in the government’s effort to charge Julian Assange with conspiracy: I say this is merely the “least terrible” because, unlike simply charging a person with...
Limits & Liberty
I think one of the driving tensions in my own internal political ecology arises between the components of this posts title: limits and liberty. (Other tensions: progress and tradition; subsidiarity and solidarity; egalitarianism and...
Michael Moore posts bail for Julian Assange
Good for Michael Moore – a man I rarely see eye-to-eye with – for posting Julian Assange’s bail and offering to host WikiLeaks on Moore’s servers: Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London,...
DADT fails in the Senate: Open Thread
So Reid brought DADT (as part of the Defense Authorization Bill) to a vote. It failed to 57-40 (or rather, it won 57-40 but the filibuster had its way in the end). Now Lieberman...
Learning Co-Operatives and Corner Schools
In the comments, E.C. Gach imagines a charter school I’d certainly get behind: So what if in a small community, of so many square blocks, families sent their kids to a day care instead...
Making sense of the DREAM Act
Timothy Lee has a really good post up responding to Reihan Salam on the merits of the DREAM Act and, importantly, on how the DREAM Act relies on our better virtues: The pro-DREAM argument...
The War on the Poor
I had trouble reading Radley Balko’s article on the saga of Cory Maye. I picture this young man in his quiet home with his 18-month-old daughter asleep in the other room and I immediately...
Links and site errors
Let me know if you’re having any problems with the site. I’ve got some stuff I’m working on – Big Things! – and in the process we may encounter some issues. For instance, our...
Question for readers
If the publisher of a small website dedicated to the dissemination of the state-secrets of the Chinese government were operating their publishing outfit out of the United States and published a bunch of leaked...
Julian Assange: bank account closed, prepares to meet with police, face talking-point wrath of GOP hopefuls
“In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.” Ron Paul To illustrate the divide between Ron Paul and the...
The Future of Screen Technology
This is neat, but I’m so paranoid that I immediately started thinking about all the privacy implications, which sort of colors my viewing in an unfortunate way. There’s a lot of very graceful and...
On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds
I come down closer to Jamelle Bouie’s side of the Hobbit argument than Adam Serwer’s. Jamelle argues that basically Tolkien’s story is one of the British Isles, and that the mythological backdrop of Middle-Earth...
Malkin Award Nominee: Andrew Sullivan
[updated – I, II] Andrew Sullivan has an odd post up about the debt and Obama. First, he confuses the proposed federal wage freeze with some other program that will actually help combat the...
Secrecy and the state
“If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents....
Talking past one another on partisanship
Okay. So everyone is right and everyone is talking past one another. I responded to James Fallows yesterday, who was responding to Ross Douthat on his column about partisanship. Daniel Larison weighed in twice...
A Book Club in Winter
League alumnus Freddie deBoer is hosting a book club on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: First published in English translation in 1983, it is an incredibly well-realized piece of historical fiction, a...
Fallows on Douthat
Commenter Geoff Arnolds points us to this James Fallows piece. Fallows takes issue with the Douthat column I linked to earlier. Interestingly, in the entirety of the arguments laid out by Fallows, he somehow...
The will of the people and other illusions
“It’s important to remember, though, that we’ve empowered the government to do this. We’ve decided, collectively, that our fears override our common sense, and we’ve accepted every step-up in security up to this point....
In which I agree with Andy McCarthy
More often than not, Andy McCarthy and I simply don’t see eye to eye. For instance, his whole-hearted support of the War on Terror, his refusal to call torture for what it is, and...
