Skip to content

Category Archives: State, Sovereignty & Violence

Hungry, Hungry Hippos versus Battleship

In what will most likely either be the single greatest movie of all time or the absolute worst movie of all time (of course, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive!), “Battleship”–based upon the children’s (I think!) board game–is set to be released this summer. The plot seems to be rather thin: aliens invade Earth and [...]

Why Punish?

The final reading of the semester for my first year students is an extract from Peter Moskos’s In Defence of Flogging. I’ve previously discussed the book here, but the basic argument is–more or less–prisons are ineffective at best and gross human rights violations at worse, thus they should not be used in the case of [...]