In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I've got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
Can we feed ten billion people? Posed this way, the question presupposes that industrialized society keeps on as it does now. It keeps us searching for technological fixes to a problem caused by technology. For 150 years people have made farms more and more factory-like: improving machinery, developing high-yield hybrids, and finally GMOs. We have long assumed that by industrializing the production and processing of food we had found the secret to progress. This book examines the history of industrialized farming and fishing to raise broader questions about industrial society:
What are the costs to the environment and human health of genetic engineering?
Why are economists trapped in prescribing endless growth as a social goal?
Can democratic politics break out of the quest for jobs and prosperity?
Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos form the culture jamming duo The Yes Men. Through their actions, they try to raise awareness about problematic social issues, in their sense. In order to do this, The Yes Men impersonate people of high economical or political influence to expose lies and injustices.
543 years ago today, Florentine civil servant, diplomat, historian, philosopher and author Niccolò Machiavelli was born. Besides his seminal work 'Il Principe' (The Prince) he also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and even poetry.
The new Baffler. Back in the nineties, published out of Chicago and edited by Thomas Frank, The Baffler articulated an anti-cool sort of cool that appealed to young readers and writers on the margins of journalism and academia, subjecting the iconic brands of consumer capitalism to a quasi-Marxist critical scrutiny. During the Bush years it went out of business. Now it’s back, with a table of contents largely devoted to the economic crisis: a perfect moment for The Baffler’s kind of cultural criticism to be revived.
Erik Gartzke, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of California, San Diego. links to data. United Nations General Assembly Voting Data, The Affinity of Nations: Similarity of State Voting Positions in the UNGA, Disaggregated Military Expenditure, Nuclear Production Capabilities, Intergovernmental Organization, "The Capitalist Peace" Replication Data
David W. Moore -- Providing an independent, non-partisan critique of media polls -- to help understand what they really mean. Author of "The Opinion Makers"