Saturday, September 22, 2007
In anticipation of reading Naomi Klein’s latest tome, ‘The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism’, I feel the need to share her collaborative short with ‘Children of Men’ director Alfonso Cuaron, ‘The Shock Doctrine’, as well as the trailer to her full-length documentary (co-directed with her husband Avi Lewis) ‘The Take’. There is [...]
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Mike asked me awhile back to write something about Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man.” I read the book a few years ago and found it a ripping read, the kind of big idea book that actually delivered the goods.
The book is based on an influential article Fukuyama wrote [...]
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Question: What is the ethical obligation of the West to the people of Darfur?
Here in California there are now ads on TV in which several actors pose as “persons on the street” and read excerpts of letters from the people of Darfur that speak of numerous horrors. At the end of the ad the [...]
Monday, September 25, 2006
Now it’s my turn to follow up on an earlier comments thread. After exposing myself to be a cold-hearted snake for not feeling substantial empathy for the Katrina victims, I went further and proposed that is impossible for us non-Katrina survivors to every really understand their plight, and thus some kind of detached compassion was the best response to the calamity. I’d like to offer both a defense of my lack of sentiment and a critique of empathy itself, basing my points on two novels by the 20th century British author Graham Greene. (I have tried my best to not give away the endings in the novels.)
The problem with empathy is that it relies on understanding, and understanding is so subjective a process that it defies our best efforts, inevitiably leaving us reliant on a jumble of personal instincts and impressions that we convert into a workable truth. If we admit that we can never truly understand each other, is it possible to experience empathy for another person? Or is it better to assume we can understand each other on some level, perhaps an intangible connection that binds us together and acts as a kind of social glue for society? Going even further, the degree to which we process the world through media like television, film, radio, and the internet offers up a new, even more ambiguous realm for relating to other people. I can’t address the all of the layers of my query, but I do think Greene’s novels provide an interesting lens through which to view the our relationships with other people.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Ethical questions posed in the comment thread of the ‘When the Levees Broke’ post have inspired me to compile my thoughts into a more cohesive form. In the following post my references to ‘The Social Contract’ pertain to the exemplar of the subject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s text, ‘The Social Contract’, as it anticipated the character [...]
In continuation of my freeloading of Berkeley podcasts I have come across a laudable series of guest lectures for IAS 180: US Foregin Policy after 9/11. The particular lecture I wish to share is given by Robert A. Pape, Professor at the University of Chicago, on the topic of Suicide Terrorism. To give [...]
So we made CNN. Everyone probably knows by now that a terrorist cell in Southern Ontario has been foiled and that 17 conspirators have been arrested in the round-up that occured friday in and around the GTA. The supposed targets of this terrorist cell were the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian [...]
Thursday, December 8, 2005
I am going to share some highlights from the book, with the hopes of coming back to this at another time to expand into a commentary post.
“A necessary evil cannot really be an evil at all, since it is a characteristic of evil that it is not necessary but gratuitous” (p. 17)
“In a war on [...]
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
And now, in an effort to better articulate why I believe the present system of capital punishment is unjust, I intend to stick to the issue. I can think of more than one argument against this sort of retribution but to make a point I want to focus specifically on how it disenfranchises the [...]
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