Category: Uncategorized
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Food Riots
Foreign Affairs has a post on the “psychology of food riots.” The argument is that it isn’t the high prices that are dangerous but the sense of injustice felt by the poor towards hoarders and profiteers that leads to riots. They note that most of the time people suffer in silence as their ability to…
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Disconnect
Disconnect as verb and noun. The Egyptian regime has attempted to isolate its people both from each other and the rest of the world during the current crisis. Most recently Al-Jazeera has been banned from reporting and its broadcasts are being blocked. Mubarak et al seem to believe that pulling the plug might aid matters.…
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Egyptian Protests
The world is certainly a fascinating place. January 25th is, apparently, Police Day in Egypt. This reminds me of the wonderful habit of naming short segments of Chicago streets after locally relevant ethnic heroes and of the oft-cherished Casimir Pulaski day. That is, you give benefits to those whose support you require. The Democratic machine…
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Grain Riots
Merriman (thanks again Open Yale and iTunes U — such a shame that there isn’t a recording of Spence‘s Modern Chinese History course) draws a distinction between “grain riots” and “riots over high food prices,” with the former dying out in France in the mid-1850s and the latter being a more modern phenomenon. Grain riots…
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Been Nuanced
iTunes U is quite amazing. I’ve been filling an intellectual lacuna by listening to John Merriman’s European Civilization 1648-1945 course. Complimenting a piece by his mentor Charles Tilly, he says it “has not been nuanced in the past 25 years.” Maybe not the best type of praise to hear when one is trying to power…
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Tunis and Beijing, Cities and Transitions
As of the 15th of January, it is clear that there has been a political transition in Tunisia. The long time president, Ben Ali, came to power in a bloodless, even “constitutional coup” (if such things can be; the prior president was declared unfit for office due to senility, according to some sources, and replaced…
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China, Economics, and Morality
Paul Krugman has been very difficult for a China scholar to appreciate fully in the past few months as he has relentlessly criticized the Beijing regime for its currency and trade policies that he describes as mercantilist, with no little justification. The solution to the difficulties seems to me to simply be to devalue the…
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Anniversary
Tomorrow is the official anniversary of my “confer date.” I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University on the 24th. Now, to be sure, I’m not clear where that date came from. My signed dissertation was turned in at least a week and perhaps 2 before that day. Regardless, noting the anniversary marks an opportunity to…
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Regimes
The number of autocratic regimes of the past from 1950 (or so) to 2005 (or so) is in dispute. There are 700 heads of state in years in which these nation-states are coded as autocratic. But of course, a change of leadership does not necessarily imply a change of regime. When power passes between members…
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Reform
It is the nature of time to continue moving forward. Writers create texts, shape them over time, but then declare them finished, at which point they–unlike reality–cease evolving. This scares writers of non-fiction, especially those in the putatively predictive social sciences, as it leads to the possibility that we will be demonstrated to have been…
Jeremy Wallace 