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    Category: War

    • Sam Harris Should Read Bernard Williams

      By: Samir Chopra In Shame and Necessity (Sather Classical Lectures, University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2008, pp. 68-69) writing on the ancient Greeks' conceptions of responsibility and human agency via the tale of Oedipus, Bernard Williams writes:

    • Knowing The Time And Manner of Our Death

      By Samir Chopra The characters in Nevil Shute's On The Beach know that barring natural disasters, and other unforeseen circumstances, they will die in a few months time–in September 1963–of radiation sickness, brought on by the thirty-seven day thermonuclear war that has already wiped out life in the northern hemisphere. They know its painful and uncomfortable symptoms–diarrhea and vomiting–will…

    • The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to “Take Up Arms”

      As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…

    • Alloparenting, attachment and the impossible mother

      How can we combine the economic necessities of work with caring for infants? This dilemma recurs across cultures, and western culture is no exception. In a series of interviews with professors who are mothers (which I hope to put on NewApps by the end of this month), one of my respondents, who has grown children…

    • Ferguson and American Apartheid

      America has been and remains an apartheid state. That sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in Ferguson, Missouri to a group of peaceful protesters amidst tanks, deafening LRADs, a haze of tear gas and a firestorm of rubber (and real) bullets.

    • Yo, Baudrillard and Rockets

      “Yo” Is an App that doesn’t let you do much: it just lets you send or receive a “Yo” message to/from another subscriber.  Purists might insist on this being content, but it really is pretty de minimis,  which lets you ask the obvious question: why on earth would a communication technology that doesn’t really let…

    • Wilfred Owen – The Parable of the Young Man and the Old; Bright Eyes – When the President talks to God

      So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,And took the fire with him, and a knife.And as they sojourned, both of them together,Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,Behold the preparations, fire and iron,But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,And builded parapets the trenches there,And…

    • On cultural homogeneity and pre-State war

      In a recent FB status update, Justin E. H. Smith cites James Scott approvingly: As the anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly argued, it is a fool's game to attempt to learn about human nature from 'isolated' or 'primitive' tribes, since every human group about which we have any knowledge has existed in some relation…