Harry's Place

Once in awhile the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul– again seeking the Republican nomination for president– will say something that strikes a chord even with me.
“Look at the percentages,” he said. “The percentage of people who use [illegal] drugs are about the same with blacks and whites, and yet blacks are arrested way disproportionately. They’re [...]

Cross-posted from Petra Marquardt-Bigman at The Warped Mirror
Francis Fukuyama of “End of History” fame is contemplating “The Future of History” in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. (Note that the article will be available to non-subscribers only until 12/29/2011). The central focus of his essay is the question if liberal democracy can survive the decline [...]

An organisation called ‘Right to Work’ are getting ready to ‘mobilise’. Look out for their banners at tomorrow’s demonstrations during the public sector workers’ strike. They say:
We are a national campaign and for the last couple of years we’ve been the people in the room arguing for a combination of strikes, direct action [...]

In the comments to a recent Harry’s Place post, Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths wrote:
To the best of my knowledge, no CPB stall has ever sold an anti-semitic publication, not would it knowingly do so.
When the CPB received regular unsolicited copies of North Star Compass, a “communist” journal produced by ex-members of [...]

Here’s Mehdi Hasan on Comment is Free:
If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn’t you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, “nuclear latency” (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?
Let’s be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is [...]

A very good piece by Jody Sabral, formerly of Press TV:
Whichever side you believe, left-wing liberals in the UK who, like Press TV, are quite rightly against another military intervention in the Middle East, are overlooking a significant point in this debate. The standards by which Press TV gathers information and presents it are very different [...]

Although Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination are now approximately nil, she continues to represent in many ways the id of the GOP Right.
So I have a feeling she wasn’t speaking entirely for herself at Saturday night’s candidates’ debate when she said:
“So what would I cut? I think really what I [...]

This is a cross-post from MoreMediaNonsense
Where threats to free speech are concerned anyway. Look at how the French Left has reacted to the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices. From France24 :
A demonstration in Paris on Sunday attracted hundreds of supporters, including some famous French faces, “in defence of the [...]

The Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the opposition journalist. Held in Evin Prison for weeks following his arrest early last year for protesting, he says, he learned that he was not only fighting the regime, but also companies that armed Tehran with technology to monitor dissidents like him.
Pourheydar, [...]

Is it a sign of the times that Clifford Odets’s 1935 leftwing agitprop play “Waiting for Lefty”– based on a New York City cabdrivers’ strike– has been performed by cadets at the Virginia Military Institute here in Lexington?

Probably not, but I had to go see it for myself. It wasn’t a great performance, but the [...]