The UN Security Council includes a group of permanent members (USA, Russia, China, UK, France) and a group of rotating temporary members from the world’s various regions, each of which serves a two year term. Only the permanent members possess veto power over Security Council resolutions, but being a temporary member gives a member state a vote and a platform. This is why it is so very odd that Saudi Arabia, which has just now been offered a temporary seat on the Security Council, has chosen to reject that seat as a form of protest. What do the Saudis hope to achieve by refusing to take their seat, and are they likely to be successful? Even more broadly, how is the UN perceived differently in countries that do not have permanent membership on the Security Council?
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Marx and Human Nature
Marxism is not generally my focus on this blog, but given that we’re spending a week on Marx in one of my grad school courses, I hope the reader will allow me to indulge myself in some further thoughts on Marx in addition to those I offered earlier in the week. After this, I’m moving on–there should be no more Marx for a while. I had a new thought today that I didn’t have several days ago, one that identifies a key contradiction in Marx’s work that I previously overlooked.
Deepening the Critique of Marxism
I found myself in another lecture on Marxism yesterday. Why do I say “another”? I did a cursory search of my own website and found that just shy of a year ago, I was responding to a lecture about Marxism on this blog. In that piece, my focus was primarily a criticism of the solutions Marx and the Marxists offer. Specifically, I was objecting to the Marxist belief that it is possible for people to be socially rewired so as to become more altruistic or otherwise capable of working hard without a scale of variant material incentives. Rereading that argument, I found myself agreeing, but I also found my critique had deepened, that there was somewhat more to it than I said last year. That’s what I’d like to develop today.
Why a Third Party Won’t Solve Anything
Whenever there is widespread disaffection with American politics, a recurrent idea pops up–why don’t we have a third party, one that isn’t like the two we presently have? Why is there no third party for the large majority of Americans who are to some degree hostile toward both the democrats and the republicans? This solution is not all that different from “throw the bums out”. It relies on the premise that our problem is the parties and the individuals that make them up. Today I set out to argue against this. It’s not that our parties are bad, it’s that our system is. The American political system is flush with perverse incentives that guarantee that any major party significant enough to have a chance of winning elections must inevitably become like the two we already have.
Crime Rates: Our Mass Delusion
As unusually highly attentive readers might be aware, I am now a grad student at the University of Chicago. By reputation, Chicago is often thought a comparatively dangerous, unsafe place, and this was the impression most are under upon arrival there. If, however, we actually look at crime statistics, we find that the extent to which people in this area fear crime and perceive it to be an endemic threat is unjustifiable. In this piece, I will establish that claim, and then consider how it has come to pass that the average citizen overestimates the amount of danger he is in so thoroughly and consistently.
Benjamin Studebaker 