Subscribe to RSS
Subscribe by Email
Sometimes when advocates want to change society, they conclude that they need to “get in people’s faces” about the issue, call in the TV cameras, march in the streets and thereby force a national conversation to occur. At other times, advocates quietly accrue small victories out of limelight until the facts on the ground have [...]
Archive for the ‘Political Science’ Category
January 25th, 2013
Category: Political Science
Steve Teles on kludgeocracy is as mind-blowing an essay as Harry Frankfurt on bullsh*t. http://www.samefacts.com/?p=38736
November 19th, 2012
Category: Political Science, Psychology
Long-time reader Ed Whitney wrote me an email that was too intriguing to keep as a private communication. Ed graciously agreed to turn his thoughts into a guest blog post. What follows was written by him: Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal and the Noise, begins with a sobering parallel between the age of the [...]
November 15th, 2012
Category: Drug Policy, Political Science
Our friends at Washington Monthly have provided a vivid example of a piquant feature of drug legalization debates. As a group, the editors and writers at Washington Monthly have been broadly supportive of the proposition that we should regulate marijuana like alcohol. Yet the current issue carries Tim Heffernan’s expose on the monopolistic, addiction-generating, profit-grubbing [...]
November 6th, 2012
Category: Political Science, Vote Casting and Counting
Speculations on who answers “none of your beeswax” when asked “how are you voting?”—and why.
October 29th, 2012
Matt Stoller thinks this would be a good time to vote for a third-party candidate. His case, approximately, comes in two parts. The first is a sheet of charges against Obama for bad things he did and good things he didn’t do in his first term (some of which are a little naïve about what [...]
September 24th, 2012
A survey that’s being glossed as showing that voters are thinking subjunctively in fact shows that they’re voting sociotropically (voting based on what they see as the country’s economic condition, not their own).
September 20th, 2012
A fine image of the dilemma of authority in China.
July 25th, 2012
My past keeps recycling, and everything old is new again. Last year I was asked to write papers about NIMBY issues affecting nuclear waste recycling and high speed rail development, something I last worked on three decades ago. Now the Massachusetts “bottle bill” is in the news again, with a proposal to extend it to [...]
April 30th, 2012
Category: Political Science
Third parties are vessels for ideas, values and policy proposals that are being rejected by a nation’s reigning party duopoly. Most of us think of third party supporters as people who are drawn to a platform that substantively represents their political views, which otherwise get no oxygen. Yet the collapse of the Liberal Democrats in [...]