A while back I wrote a series of posts about the 1998-9 Kosovo conflict. If you’re interested, here they are: Prelude to War, The Serbian Ascendancy, Things Fall Apart, And So To War. This post continues that story up to the unsuccessful Rambouillet peace conference of February-March 1999. So by early 1999, the Serbian province […]
World Politics
Political philosophers are criticised for their idealism, but when it comes to immigration they try to be ‘realistic’. Their aspiration to ‘realism’ often leads to nationalism (which I have analysed elsewhere as an implicit but heavy bias), but I still don’t understand why they aspire to realism on this issue. Philosophers have neither voters to […]
“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official. I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most […]
At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, […]
Over the last few years, the Australian and UK Labor/Labour[1] parties, have followed strikingly parallel paths. A better-than expected result with a relatively progressive platform (Oz 2016, UK 2017) A demoralizing defeat in 2019, followed by the election of a new more conservative leader (Albanese, Starmer) Wholesale abandonment of the program Failure of the rightwing […]
Amid the current horror and propaganda, the pogroms, kidnapping and bombings, and the (at best reckless) violence against civilian populations it is important not to lose sight of what a justish solution might be in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me that this is actually a rather simple matter at least as soon as we […]
A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s […]