In a recent report titled Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do, the Brookings Institution in conjunction with the Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs advise NATO to drastically increase its arms commitment to Ukraine. The report has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the conflict in Ukraine and has consequently given governments advice that is both irrelevant and terrible. Here’s why.
Tag: United States
American Sniper: Was Chris Kyle Defending Our Freedom?
Seth Rogen and Michael Moore recently made snarky comments about American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s Iraq War movie loosely based on the life of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL with 160 confirmed kills. This has angered a lot of people on the right, who scold the snarksters for their lack of appreciation for the men and women who, they say, defend our freedom. The “they defend our freedom” line gets thrown around a lot when discussing military policy, but when is it really the case that soldiers defend our freedom? Is this an automatic, intrinsic feature of being a soldier, or does it depend on additional factors? Let’s think about this.
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Police Don’t Kill People. Guns Do.
I’ve been doing some more thinking about the recent cases in which American police officers shoot and kill people (e.g. Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, etc.). It has occurred to me that there are two important angles to the national debate we’re having, but I’ve only really talked about one of those angles on this blog. They are:
- The Race Angle–why do American police officers disproportionately shoot more black people than white people, even when you adjust for poverty and crime rates?
- The Civil Liberty Angle–why do American police officers shoot more people per capita than police officers in other developed countries?
In late November, I offered a view on the race angle, but what about the civil liberty angle? What is it about America that causes American police officers to behave differently from police officers from other similarly developed societies? Let’s investigate.
Why Our Schools Don’t Work
One of the difficulties with writing about education is that by the time educational reformers manage to make their voices heard, they are too old. They have forgotten what it is like to be a young person in school, and the schools have changed so much during their own lifetimes that to the extent that they do remember, their memories are no longer relevant. One of the paradoxes of life is that at 22, I still remember a lot of experiences from school that remain relevant to the contemporary debate, but because I am 22, no one really pays attention to much of what I say. But I digress. Today it has occurred to me that the reason our schools do not work is that our society has three distinct purposes for its schools, and that these purposes contradict each other in fatal ways.
How Protests Work
Eight protesters have been arrested for blocking a Washington DC highway. The protesters were objecting to racial disparities in the criminal justice system, as well as low wages. This offers us an opportunity to discuss protests as a tool for achieving political ends. How do protests work? How do protesters use protesting to accomplish political objectives?
Benjamin Studebaker 