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Category Archives: State, Sovereignty & Violence

Why Punish?

Thursday, December 8, 2011

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 [...]

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Uncolonizable

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Last night we watched “Battle: Los Angeles,” which is a fairly bad movie about an alien invasion of the world, but which focuses upon the front in Los Angeles, mostly Santa Monica. At no point is the perspective of the aliens addressed, but we spend a great deal of time on the rather boring backstories [...]

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Letter to Chief White on #OccupyOttawa

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Dear Chief White, I read in the paper today, in reference to foreclosing the Occupy Ottawa camp, that Ottawa Police Services “want[s] this to be a non-event.” To the end of the achieving that result, could I give you some advice? In order to ensure that the foreclosure is “a non-event” I suggest that your [...]

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Sausage the Riot Dog

Thursday, October 6, 2011
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Antonin Scalia, Reader of Walter Benjamin

Thursday, September 22, 2011

In re Troy Anthony Davis, No. 08-1443, Dissenting opinion by Justice Scalia, August 17, 2009: The Georgia Supreme Court rejected petitioner’s “actual-innocence” claim on the merits, denying his extraordinary motion for a new trial. Davis can obtain relief only if that determination was contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, “clearly established Federal law, as [...]

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The Canadian Collective Unconscious and the London Riots

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

I took an ill-advised journey into the depths of the Canadian collective unconscious this afternoon by reading comments to articles on the London riots. As befits the nature of newspaper comment sections, there weren’t any particularly astute or intelligent comments, be they ostensibly “liberal” or “conservative” or whatever. (I hesitate to point out the irony [...]

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In Defense of Flogging

Monday, June 27, 2011

Peter Moskos’s In Defense of Flogging presents a simple and radical argument: the penitentiary system, especially in the United States, is more or less a crime against humanity: not only does it fail to meet its stated objectives, but it is also exceptionally cruel forcing inmates to be subjected to beatings, rapes, overcrowding, no health [...]

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More Biopolitics and Bioethics

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Foucauldians–or anyone studying biopolitics or biopower in general–likely don’t spend enough time talking about bioethics. I’m not sure why this is the case. There are, of course, a few notable exceptions to this. For instance, Lorna Weir’s excellent Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject (Routledge, 2006). When Foucauldians take up ethics, [...]

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Overwhelming Misogyny

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Canada tends not to be a country people think of–at least initially–when asked about misogynic cultures. Presumably places like Saudi Arabia, Iran and, for the more adventurous, the United States comes up long before Canada. Those people might wish to reconsider their opinions: while women aren’t stoned to death for adultery here, we nonetheless–within the [...]

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“We don’t live in Canada anymore”

Sunday, July 4, 2010

No doubt most readers are more or less aware of what transpired in Toronto last weekend surrounding the G8 and G20 meetings. I haven’t read any international reporting, but if it is anything like mainstream reporting in Canada then it tends to be excessively pro-police and pro-state (if not always pro-government: the media, being a [...]

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