Obama, class politics and the debt ceiling crisis
The tortuous negotiations over the US sovereign debt ceiling probably feature in our minds as a threat to our economic well being. Or for American politics junkies, the maneouvring could be uppermost. It’s worth putting the negotiations in a different perspective.
Libya: Realism, ideology and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’
I referred in my last Libya article for The Drum (the final part of the trilogy, on democratisation, will be published next week) to the issue of Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine enabling the UN to take action when states [...]
Libya roundtable
Discussion on Libya on various threads has tended to stray off the topic, so it’s appropriate that we have a general roundtable for discussion of continuing developments in Libya, and argument about issues other than those raised on substantive posts.
Libya, the Left and a No Fly Zone IV
The previous thread is also getting a tad long, so here’s a new one. You can access all related LP threads here. If anyone needs a discussion starter, there’s an interesting take from Gilbert Achcar at Znet: The left should [...]
Libya, the left and the no fly zone debate
I know Guy Rundle’s work isn’t all that popular with a lot of commenters here; but this is his latest dispatch on the Libyan mess: With Muammar Gaddafi’s forces now beginning to slowly beat back and possibly overwhelm the rebel [...]
What I really wrote to The Australian
I don’t like to be too critical of editors of letters pages in newspapers, as they receive many times more letters than they can publish, and it’s not always easy to edit a letter for length whilst remaining faithful to [...]
Egypt, events and ideology II
Writing in The Guardian, Gary Younge makes an excellent point about responses to the Egyptian revolution among Western leaders: “Egypt proved that our leaders see freedom as a question of strategy, not principle”. I think Younge is right to circle [...]
Dive! Dive! Dive!
It seems that the Very Serious People are determined to make one of my predictions for 2020 come true before 2011 is out, and bring on a full-blown public panic a mature and reasoned discussion about the strategic implications of [...]
Egypt, events and ideology
Like tigtog, I’m not inclined to offer too much substantive commentary on the revolutionary events in Egypt (and across several other countries) as I don’t think that the value of analysis by Australians who aren’t intimately familiar with Egyptian society [...]
The next decade: The (not so) strange death of Western liberal universalism
In thinking about Rob’s post on the decade ahead, it occurred to me that one of the current forces at work in the world most denied and, indeed, repressed is the death of Western liberal universalism. In his fantastic little [...]
Wikileaks: Five theses on the politics of Cablegate
1. Human rights talk tends to crowd out politics: it becomes an appeal to the liberal principles of the dominant order, and a supplication that the liberal state and the mechanisms of justice act as they purport to promise. Hence, [...]
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