I’ve recently watched the season premiers of two shows I like to watch–South Park and Saturday Night Live. Both shows were returning after a long hiatus, but rather than lampoon the intervention against ISIS, the crisis in Libya, the conflict in Ukraine, or global indifference to climate change, both shows chose to lead off with the recent scandals in the NFL, with South Park making fun of the Washington Redskins name controversy, while SNL mocked the league’s indifference to the domestic violence committed by players Ray Rice (punched his fiancee in an elevator) and Adrian Peterson (beat his kid with a switch), among others. My Facebook feed is dominated by this stuff. This is really unfortunate, because it is yet another case of the American voting public being distracted from the serious issues by soap opera outrage politics.
Tag: United States
Hey, Whatever Happened to Libya?
As the United States once again intervenes militarily in a Middle Eastern civil war (this time in Syria and Iraq), I am reminded of the 2011 western intervention into the Libyan Civil War. Remember three years ago when the western states decided to help Libyan rebels overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s government? We almost never hear anything about what’s going on in Libya these days. What happened there? 2011 was about a year before I started up this blog, but I remember being vitriolically opposed to the intervention there. How did it turn out? Let’s investigate.
Why ISIS is Beheading Americans and What We Can Do About It
Two American journalists have now been beheaded by the Islamic State–James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Vice President Joe Biden has already declared that he wants to follow ISIS to “the gates of hell.” But why is ISIS doing this, and what should the United States do about it?
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The Threat of Ebola is Massively Overstated
In recent months, Americans have taken a hysterically fearful attitude toward Ebola, an extremely unpleasant viral disease that kills most of the people it infects in a remarkably gruesome way (vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, sometimes with internal and/or external bleeding). Multiple US congressmen have expressed fears that Latin American immigrants will carry Ebola into the United States from Mexico. Nevertheless, Ebola poses virtually no threat to people living in the western hemisphere, and even the threat it poses to Africans is overstated.
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How the United States Invented a New Kind of Corruption
It’s easily forgotten that the US constitution was written to address the defects of a very specific kind of government–the 18th century European absolute monarchy. The trouble is that when we design our states to solve one very specific kind of problem, we often over-correct and create precisely the opposite sort of problem. Our minds are too aware of our recent experience. We get myopic, we fail to see how our solutions to yesterday’s problems contain within them the beginnings of tomorrow’s problems. This piece aims to detail how America’s answer to absolutism has contained within itself the foundation for many of our current political woes.
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Benjamin Studebaker 