Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Diplomatic Pressure and Human Rights: The Case of Assad in Syria

It is perhaps telling that the world was more or less content, as of 2011, to rely on diplomatic pressure in the idyllic hope that it is sufficient to remove a tyrant from power, even if a tyrant were unleasing the weapons of war, including chemical weapons, on his own people I have Bashar Assad of Syria.

LA Times (2011)

The full essay is at "Diplomatic Pressure and Human Rights."

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The London Riots of 2011: Protesting Police Power

Over three nights of rioting in London after the police shooting of a 29-year-old father of four, over 450 people had been arrested and 44 police officers injured. The rioting began on August 6, 2011 when a peaceful march in protest of the police use of lethal force turned violent. According to the Huffington Post, “Hooded and masked youths threw bottles and petrol bombs at police and buildings and vehicles, setting a building, a bus and cars alight.” The source of the violence seems clear, at least with respect to its beginning. Rather than being fueled by greed at that point, anger at a possible abuse of power by the local police seems to have been the motive. To be sure, rioting spread to include the looting of stores by kids and opportunistic adult thieves, but to claim that greed itself was the driving force instigating the riots is to miss the purpose of the initial march and give the London police a pass.

The full essay is at "The London Riots of 2011."


Monday, August 8, 2011

What Is a Member-State?

It is easy to get locked into a certain way of viewing something, even if the perspective, it turns out, has more to do with one’s epoch than the thing itself, including how it came about and was designed. I contend that one of the main category mistakes is that wherein one Union is treated as equivalent to a state in another Union. It is astounding when citizens of the former acquiesce in the likening of “apples and oranges” at their own expense—in this case, citizens of the United States unwittingly treating their Union as though it were simply France with a very big backyard rather than a Union commensurate with the European Union (in which France is a state). The affable “going along” is caused in part by a willful indifference that relegates any study of the origins and history of the United States. I submit that a proper comparison between the U.S. and E.U. takes both after their respective first fifty years—hence most Americans are ill-equipped to refute the asseverations of European friends that the U.S. itself is somehow equivalent to a state in their own Union.



The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.