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mixawy late

Couple shot, killed in carjack attempt at Miami Gardens gas station - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...-dead-after-miami-gardens.html

Couple shot killed in carjack attempt at Miami Gardens gas station

shared by mixawy late on 26 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • mixawy late on 26 Jul 11
     
    stop at a gas station in Miami Gardens early Monday left a young couple dead when a group of carjackers tried to steal their souped-up car. The men were apparently after 23-year-old Julian Soler's prized 1997 white Mustang Cobra, police said. Miami Gardens police said Soler's girlfriend, Kennia Duran, 24, saw the men shoot her boyfriend before pulling her out of the car and fatally wounding her, too. Detectives called the double murder "cold-blooded." "There was no need to kill them," police spokesperson Rafael Suarez said. No arrests have been made.
thinkahol *

Sen. Benjamin Cardin's impressive feat - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Sen. Benjamin Cardin's impressive feat - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 31 May 11
     
    But what makes Cardin's conduct special is that he wasn't merely condemning exactly that which he does; that would just be garden-variety nationalistic hypocrisy.  It's that he went a step further by specifically denouncing those who hypocritically defend values they simultaneously subvert: it's a double, meta form of hypocrisy that is really difficult to construct.  That's what makes it impressive.
thinkahol *

The Blog : How Rich is Too Rich? : Sam Harris - 0 views

www.samharris.org/...how-rich-is-too-rich

The Blog : How Rich is Too Rich? Sam Harris

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11
     
    I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll
Arabica Robusta

West 86th - The Administration of Things: A Genealogy - 0 views

www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/...-administration-of-things.html

political theory

shared by Arabica Robusta on 03 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • “If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility
  • The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”
  • Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • All history, Comte argued, is a history of class struggle. Not the struggle between master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian—that was still a couple decades away—but the struggle between two classes of phenomena: “critical” phenomena that contributed to moral and political decay and “organic” phenomena that promoted individual and social regeneration.
  • The objective was to protect against arbitrariness in all of its manifestation. Earlier political thinkers had tended to associate arbitrariness mainly with absolutist governments, but for Comte any form of government was susceptible so long as it rested on “metaphysical” rather than “positive” principles.
  • Engels believed that the obsession with detail that had characterized utopian socialism—its compulsion to work out every last aspect of future social organization—is precisely what made it so utopian.
  • When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary.
  • “I think it was Trotsky who used a very plain but very telling metaphor,” the historian Isaac Deutscher told graduate students in a seminar on bureaucracy at the London School of Economics in 1960. “The policeman can use his baton either for regulating traffic or for dispersing a demonstration of strikers or unemployed. In this one sentence is summed up the classical distinction between administration of things and administration of men.”
  • Our hasty genealogy of the “administration of things” must conclude with its latest, and quite possibly last, iteration: Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” or Dingpolitik. Initially proposed in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991), then extended in a massive exhibition and accompanying catalog, Making Things Public (2005), Latour’s program has attracted a growing number of partisans in the world of political theory
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