Democracy and Civil Disobedience: Philosophy Cafe @ Powell's Books: Aug. 1

Yesterday, I participated in the Philosophy Cafe at Powell's Books. Its a new event organized by a new friend of mine, Brian Eliot, and his colleague, John Farnum. The hope is to involve everyday folks in philosophical discussions about a wide variety of topics. My talk yesterday focused on "Democracy and Civil Disobedience". Brian and John told me we reached the highest audience numbers with this one (about 55 people total). After I gave my presentation, the audience asked some questions and then they were broken up into small discussion circles. John, Brian, and I listened in to some of the conversations. There was some great soul searching about whether or not people thought they would be willing to put their lives, jobs, reputations on the line for justice and whether non-religious people could have the same fortitude to engage in social justice work and nonviolence as figures like Gandhi, King, or Chavez, who were all deeply spiritual men. (I pointed out Barbara Deming's, work as a secular theory of nonviolence)



The talk I gave provided two views on the legitimacy of civil disobedience (which I defined, following Rawls, as "the public, conscientious, and nonviolent refusal to obey laws or commands of the government in order to bring a change in such laws or commands").

I offered two arguments from Socrates in the Crito which say that CD should not be allowed because: 1) laws and government institutions are "like parents" in that they provide the conditions for nurturance for a person to live and flourish and as such, they are owed obedience and gratitude by citizens who benefit from them; and 2) to the extent that a citizen stays in a society and abides by the laws and government power without dissent, then an implicit contract is formed in which the citizen agrees to accept the legitimacy of the laws and government. If a citizen does not like the laws, then he can leave; if he does not, he accepts them and the power they hold over him.

I then countered with Martin Luther King's point that even if a rule is legal this does not make it moral. There are just laws and unjust laws. While we have a legal and moral responsibility to obey just laws, we have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

I finished by talking about why nonviolence is the method with which we ought to think about making social change. Sometimes, when the injustices of our society are grasped in their enormity, it might seem that only violent upheaval can make the changes needed so that people will not suffer or die any longer. I offered some quotes by Cesar Chavez on how armed struggle rarely results in a situation of social justice and ended with the views of Barbara Deming. She says that nonviolence is the most ethical way to resist evil because it resists oppression "with one hand", but offers the other hand to the oppressor to reassure them that we do not seek their destruction or suffering.

John Woo Gets Punked: Should Nonviolent Protest ever be Mean?

Via this exciting new blog, Waging Nonviolence, a video from an Australian comedy group confronting Bush Administration torture apologist John Yoo in his class at Berkeley. My favorite part comes when the protester is asked to leave by administration and he says he is going to go to the human rights class down the hall.



Eric Stoner, the blog author, writes that such protests, confronting officials and ridiculing them, make him uncomfortable and can seem unproductive. Is it perhaps because they seem mean-spirited or disrespectful?

Gandhi believed that nonviolence should be done with a spirit of charity and King with a spirit of love and respect for the other who might be doing wrong.

Is ridicule an appropriate form of social criticism/protest?

The Revolution Will Not be Twittered: Some Skepticism on Twitter and Politics

Since most mainstream journalists have been neutralized in Iran, news of the protests pouring out to the world has come from social media, particularly Twitter. Twice now, previously in Moldova, and now in Iran, Twitter has become a tool for people to use in revolutionary political circumstances. It has helped to coordinate mass actions and to spread news about authoritarian repression.

But does it transform political action?

Mike Madden, in this piece in Salon.com, thinks not. Social media has been useful in documenting what is going on, getting information out, but it has not been something that radically changes how political action is taking place. Indeed, he worries at how easily social media can be blocked and then subverted by officials to spread disinformation and confuse activists.

Michael Walzer (one of my favorite political thinkers) muses here that its not clear whether the internet has changed political action very much.

In order to change things, people need to get out and be organized. Twitter and Facebook can be useful in getting people information and mobilizing mass rallies. But mobilization is not the same thing as organizing. Getting a bunch of folks to show up to a protest can be a good thing, but really, what matters more is if you can get them to stick around afterwards to do what Walzer calls "scut work"--filling envelopes, handing out fliers, cleaning up the meeting place, and generally showing their dedication to a group ideal.

If you have people who are willing to show up to protests, you have activists. But activism is usually very "flash in the pan" kind of activity--going to a rally, signing a petition, writing a letter. These things are important, no doubt. But what I take Walzer to suggest is that a social movement, in order to challenge entrenched power, needs organizers--people who are willing to do the activism, but also the less visible, and less publicized/glamorous, work of fundraising, phone banking, door to door knocking, and scut. (For an excellent discussion of the difference between organizing and activism, see this essay by Mark Rudd)

Organizing work is more long term and about building relationships with people so that they become aware of an issue and of the group of people who want to do something about that issue. This is not quite the same thing as creating a network, which social media is really good at. To say that people are in a network does not really say much about the quality of the linkage (think of all the people who might be your Facebook friends or followers on Twitter--to say they are all linked up does not fully describe the differences or similarities between them all. After all, we are all networked or linked up to Kevin Bacon by six degrees of separation, but that really doesn't tell us anything very interesting about the power relationships in those links).

There is a really great story that, I think, really captures the difference between activism and organizing (and also hints at the tedium of organizing and why it might not be so interesting to many): Some young activists went to see Cesar Chavez to find out how he made the farmworker movement so successful--building a powerful union out of literally nothing. He replied: "Well, we talked to one person, and then another person, and then another person, and then another person." No, they said, what's the secret to organizing? He answered: "You talk to one person, then another, then another, and then another."

Organizing, then, creates a group solidarity among individuals through discussion and deliberation that they might not have had before. It gives them a sense that they can accomplish actions together (Hannah Arendt says this is what power really is). Instead of being simply an aggregation of bodies at a rally, they are are group of colleagues united in a cause, trying to construct new opportunities for different kinds of political action. Organizing creates those relationships. Social media, it seems, can help the work of a movement get done faster, but it cannot replace the need to raise consciousness and a sense of agency that is the essence of political action.

(Photo: By Kamyar Adl on Flickr)

Satire and Social Justice: Racial Jokes, Racial Wisdom, and Richard Pryor as a Philosopher of Race

Warning: this post contains quotations and links that use language that might offend some readers.

From City Journal: an interesting article about Richard Pryor and how, over the long term of his career, he developed some very nuanced views about race and white racism. One of Pryor's monologues explains how he gained some insight into race dynamics in the United States after a trip to Africa:

"One thing that happened to me that was magic was that I was leaving, sitting around the hotel lobby, and a voice said, “What do you see? Look around.”

And I looked around, and I looked around, and I saw black people everywhere. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere.

And the voice said, “You see any niggers?”

I said, “No.”

It said, “You know why? ’Cause there aren’t any.”

I’d been there three weeks and hadn’t said it. And it started making me cry, man. All that crap. All the acts I’ve been doing. As an artist and comedian. Speaking and trying to say something. And I’d been saying that. That’s a devastating word. That had nothing to do with us. We are from a place where they first started people. I left regretting ever having uttered the word on a stage or off it. It was a wretched word. I felt its lameness. It was misunderstood by people. They didn’t get what I was talking about. And so I vowed never to say “nigger” again."

I've mentioned before how use of humor, and satire, in particular, to explore and challenge dominant ideas in society is a particular powerful tool. But it's a very volatile one.

Recent studies suggest that satire is a form of humor that can challenge, but also reassure and confirm, one's own biases. In one study, liberal and conservative viewers were asked to assess the political humor of Stephen Colbert. Liberals tended to think he was using humor to poke fun of right wingers; conservatives thought he was using satire to make fun of liberals.

This kind of indeterminacy of satire as a tool of social justice makes me think about Dave Chappelle. During the last season of his wildly successful show on Comedy Central, Chappelle developed a series of sketches about racial stereotypes called the Pixie series. The idea was to show the kind of burden certain stereotypes impose on different ethnic groups. But he decided to abandon the show, in part, because he wasn't sure that his humor was having the effect he wanted it to have. He wasn't sure whether he was challenging the stereotype or, instead, retrenching the stereotype in the mind of some viewers. Here is a clip from the show:

Chappelle's Show
Pixie Stereotypes - In-Flight Meal
comedycentral.com
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs Black Comedy True Hollywood Story

Should people concerned with social justice trust humor, and especially satire, as tools to raise critical awareness about issues such as racism?

Is Marriage Equality Radical Enough? Judith Butler on Same Sex Marriage, Polyamory, and the State

New Hampshire becomes the sixth state to legalize same sex marriage today. The New York Times calls it another step in "mainstream Amerca" coming to "accept" the idea of marriage equality.

Judith Butler, in this new interview in The Monthly Review, talks about the conservative trend behind the marriage equality movement. She worries about it having the effect of normalizing certain kinds of relationship configurations, namely two individuals in a special legal/romantic bond, while making other kinds of romantic bonds seem perverse or unnatural. Moreover, she also considers that the marriage equality movement reinforces the idea that recognition by the state should be something that our affective relationships require for validation. Here's an except from a really good read:



Butler :"Of course, if marriage exists, then homosexual marriage should also exist; marriage should be extended to all couples irrespective of their sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is an impediment, then marriage is discriminatory. For my part, I don't understand why it should be limited to two people, this appears arbitrary to me and might potentially be discriminatory; but I know this point of view is not very popular. However, there are forms of sexual organisation that do not imply monogamy, and types of relationship that do not imply marriage or the desire for legal recognition -- even if they do seek cultural acceptance. There are also communities made up of lovers, ex-lovers and friends who look after the children, communities that constitute complex kinship networks that do not fit the conjugal pattern.

I agree that the right to homosexual marriage runs the risk of producing a conservative effect, of making marriage an act of normalisation, and thereby presenting other very important forms of intimacy and kinship as abnormal or even pathological. But the question is: politically, what do we do with this? I would say that every campaign in favour of homosexual marriage ought also to be in favour of alternative families, the alternative systems of kinship and personal association. We need a movement that does not win rights for some people at the expense of others. And imagining this movement is not easy.

The demand for recognition by the state should go hand in hand with a critical questioning: what do we need the state for? Although there are times that we need it for some kinds of protection (immigration, property, or children), should we allow it to define our relationships? There are forms of relation that we value and that cannot be recognised by the state, where the recognition of civil society or the community is enough. We need a movement that remains critical, that formulates these questions and keeps them open."

Gays are good for it: The money, that is

According to the folks over at The Faculty Lounge, Massachusetts saw over $100 million injected into the state over the last 5 years as a result of legalizing same sex marriage:

"According to one study, "marriage equality resulted in an increase of younger, female, and more highly educated and skilled individuals in same-sex couples moving to the state." And according to another, same-sex couples’ weddings injected significant spending into the Massachusetts economy and brought out-of-state guests to the state, whose spending also added to the economic boost."

California voters may want to rethink their decisions on Prop 8 as they watch their state go down the economic sinkhole.

We Get Excited Easily: Habermas on Obama and Human Rights

Jurgen Habermas received the Spanish Brunet Prize for Human Rights recently. He was asked about the implication of Obama's election for human rights. Here is what he said:

"Obama is an American phenomenon. After eight years of Bush, Obama has been a great gift...Something that sets us apart from the Americans is that they have a great willingness to get excited with things. The history of Europe in the twentieth century has been quite complicated, with disasters and dictatorships. Perhaps it is appropriate that here in Europe we are less enthusiastic and have both feet on the ground."

After these last two weeks--in which Obama has adopted the Bush position on not releasing military abuse photos from Iraq and Afghanistan, has decided to keep the flawed military commissions system for trying detainees in Guantanamo, and has pledged to keep some detainees in permanent preventative detention--maybe we should learn to be more European.

A Modest Proposal: Anti-Fascism Day April 20

I don't know whether there is such a day on April 20 (the day Hitler was born). This is Holocaust Memorial Week, but it seems we should also have a day to rally against the attitudes and political habits that generate intolerant and arbitrary government. This great speech by Charlie Chaplin, from the film, The Great Dictator, is relevant, even over 60 years later (in fact, Chaplin's call reminds me of the ideas of Martin Luther King, jr--read his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, in which King talks about the need for a revolution of values)

CEDAW Update for International Women's Day: Will this be the Year?

Nancy Pelosi has urged passage of the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in the U.S. Senate as soon as possible. CEDAW was drafted almost thirty years ago but the U.S. has never signed on. It joins an exclusive club of about 8 nations, including notorious human rights violators, such as Sudan, Somalia, and Iran, in avoiding the treaty.

Even though the Senate is Democrat controlled and Obama favors the treaty, it looks like it will be a hard fight toward ratification. Conservatives argue that ratification means the U.S. will give up national sovereignty and be forced to recognize a right to abortion and legalized prostitution. They are unlikely to vote for ratification without provisos that exempt the U.S. from certain portions of the treaty. These exemptions anger liberals who may not want to vote for a watered down CEDAW.

Here is a list of the Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee. You can contact them with the following talking points and urge passage of CEDAW:

I urge you to support the Treaty for the Rights of Women and work toward full Senate ratification.

The Treaty for the Rights of Women addresses basic human rights of women. It can be an effective tool in reducing violence and discrimination against women and girls, ensuring girls and women receive the same access as boys and men to education and health care, and securing basic legal recourse to women and girls against violations and abuses of their human rights.

As the leading superpower, U.S. ratification would lend weight to the Treaty and provide valuable support to women seeking reforms in countries around the world. Without the United States as a party to the Treaty, repressive governments can easily discount the Treaty?s provisions.

The United States played an important role in drafting this Treaty, which 185 nations have ratified. But our country is now 1 of 8 that have yet to ratify the Treaty, alongside Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Iran, Nauru, Palau and Tonga.

(Cross Posted at the OSU Philosophy Department's Ideas Matter 2009 Blog)

Dolores Huerta Becomes a Cultural Icon (Finally!)

Glamour magazine recently did a photo layout of young actresses and singers portraying "women in history" (even though some of the women depicted are cultural icons or fictional characters and not actual persons).

But among them was America Ferrera (of Ugly Betty fame) as Dolores Huerta, co founder (with Cesar Chavez) of the United Farm Workers union.



Its about time this woman got the icon status she deserves.

I recently was excited to get a copy of the A Dolores Huerta Reader by Mario Garcia. Hopefully, this work can start to attract scholarly attention to Huerta's role as a nonviolent activist in U.S. history.

Singer's Plan to End Global Poverty

Peter Singer's new book lays out his plan for ending global poverty, in which over 3 billion human beings live on less than $2 a day (and a shocking 1 billion live on less than about $1.25 a day for all their essential needs). As this profile in The Observer explains, here is a way for the most privileged human beings to discharge their duties to the most poor:

Every person in the developed world ought to give at least 5% of their annual income to poverty relief efforts (such as Oxfam or Unicef). The rich ought to give more.

And to address the ad hominem that always follows Singer's argument: He gives about 25% of his annual income to Oxfam.

Blood Diamonds at the Oscars?

The Oscar awards are this weekend. Some groups are calling on performers not to wear diamonds that are displacing native peoples in Africa. You can check out the story and get involved here.

Muhammad Yunus Inspires Young People to Change the world

Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus talks about the importance of young people using their imagination and creativity to envision a better world and not focusing on the trappings of grades and success as the centerpoint of a meaningful life.

Amartya Sen Defends the UN Declaration of Human Rights

n the most recent edition of The New Republic, Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argues for upholding the importance of the UN Declaration of Human Rights sixty years after its signing.

Sen argues that:

1) the UNDHR makes an important contribution to ethics by establishing the priority of morality to law. Human rights do not depend on governments to establish laws to enshrine them--they apply to human beings as such regardless of their nationality.

2) the UNDHR empowers many different kinds of organizations, not just governments and law, to protect human rights, such as international non-governmental organizations (Amnesty International, etc)

3) the UNDHR goes beyond many of the great documents protecting rights (such as the American Bill of Rights or the French Rights of Man and Citizen) by making explicit mention of social, economic and cultural rights, and tying issues of wealth and poverty to political and civil liberties.

4) the UNDHR, again unlike other rights documents, is explicitly universal in scope, with the hope of including within the sphere of moral concern many different groups that have been marginalized throughout history.

You can read his powerful defense of the UNDHR here.

(Cross listed from the OSU Ideas Matter 2009 Blog)

Should Latino/a Workers Occupy a New Republic (Windows and Doors)?

A group of mostly Latino/a workers, who were laid off from a window factory in Chicago, have decided to stage an occupation of the factory rather than be turned out. You can read about this group of workers and the national attention they are bringing to the worries of ordinary working people here.

It seems that the workers feel they were not given full consideration of federal law before being laid off and are asking the owners of the factory, who claim they are broke, to give them the entire severance and vacation pay they are due. The workers claim that they will stay until Christmas, if need be.

The union to which the workers belong claims that they are simply engaging in an action that goes back to the 1930s when American workers would nonviolently occupy factories to pressure owners with their demands.


The occupation by the Republic Windows and Doors workers reminds me of the factory take overs in Argentina after the 2001 economic crisis. There, many factory owners also went bankrupt and simply left town, leaving the workers with little or no notice of a shutdown. Instead of simply accepting defeat, the workers of many of these factories went back to work and occupied facilities. They started to run the factories on their own, creating their own forms of management and production. Workers began to develop their own theories of a non-hierarchal work place, and of democratic decision making on the shop floor, that started to spread throughout the country. Soon, neighborhood assemblies were forming, in which people could talk about their reactions to economic crisis, and plan collective action that was independent from the state institutions and political parties. Some of these citizen activists called this kind of grassroots democracy horizontalism. You can read more about this movement here and also here.

The Republic workers aren't currently thinking of running the factory on their own. They simply want to get what is due to them. But wouldn't it be a great example if ordinary workers could take production matters into their own hands and demonstrate how the economy really works because of them and not because of the generosity of capital lending financial institutions which are pocketing so much of the taxpayer bailouts?

Sit or Get off the Pot: The Toilet as a Human Right

I was talking with a friend the other night and she told me she thought that a key issue for world peace in the near future would be food security and access to clean water. I said that I thought she was right, but that after reading this article, I also think that we also need to consider where all that food and water will eventually end up. Maybe we need to think of the toilet as a human right.

Many years ago, on my first trip to Europe, I remember my friend Phillip and I wandering through a train station in Florence, looking for a bathroom. We found the men's room and he went in. A few minutes later he returned with a puzzled look on his face. He said that there was no toilets or urinals in the bathroom. Just a hole in the floor. We both knew about squat toilets in Asia (there are cultural differences, even in defecating). But we were in the middle of Italy!

We were lucky to find public toilets, actually. Cities in the developed world are decreasing the number of public facilities. In the last eight years, the number of public toilets in London dropped over 40%. Why worry about the lack of toilets? One suggestion: A Japanese national disaster prevention panel found in a recent study that:

"nearly a million people would be unable to find a toilet if a magnitude 7.3-quake struck Tokyo at noon on a workday, sending 12 million people pouring out of office buildings and creating a potential hygiene and sanitation nightmare of biblical proportions."

In the developing world, access to some kind of toilet is rare. Open defecation leads to water pollution and the transmission of disease. In terms of preventing death in the developing world, nothing beats the toilet as a tool:

"Improved sanitation means more jobs, more economic growth, and less poverty. According to a recent WHO study, every dollar spent improving sanitation generates an average economic benefit of $9. The “sanitary revolution” — that is, the introduction of clean water and sewage disposal — has been the greatest medical advance of the last century and a half, according to a poll by the British Medical Journal. Though vaccinations certainly helped curb the spread of disease, they didn’t altogether stop it as much as the toilet did. A simple toilet is one of the cheapest medicines, adding decades to the human lifespan — when it’s used."

Lest you think that the idea of a toilet as a human right is a joke, consider this testimony from an Iraqi prisoner in Fallujah. It seems to make a case for the idea that being denied a toilet is a human rights violation. Abbas Abid claims he was tortured by American forces. Some of the methods included preventing him from urinating or defecating. Sometimes he was put into a room with many other men who had no access to a toilet. Instead, they were all given plastic bags that had to be stored in the cell with them and these bags were sometimes knocked over and spilled throughout the cell.

Such practices make a hole in the ground in Florence sound like heaven.

What Should Obama's Global Ethical Priorities Be?

Ethicist Peter Singer outlines some of the moral challenges on a global scale facing the new Obama administration:

1) Restoring the U.S.'s image internationally by following through on the promise to close Guantanamo prison and pulling troops out of Iraq.

2) Helping to usher in reform at the United Nations by making it more democratic--meaning that something needs to be done by reducing the power of the five permanent members of the Security Council: the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China.

3) Increasing the amount of foreign aid the United States provides to the world (currently about $25 billion/year, but still far less, as a percentage of overall GDP, than most industrialized nations)

4) Reducing carbon emissions and finding a way to become part of the discussion on enforcing the Kyoto treaty for the reduction of greenhouse gases.

What other global issues need to be addressed?

I would add a couple of considerations:

a) joining the Rome Statute and becoming part of the International Criminal Court system. The U.S. has failed to join because of worry that the Court might be used by other nations to engage in politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. leader and military personnel. We should move fast to become part of this growing system of global law with a policy of "constructive engagement" so that the U.S. regains its footing as a prime mover of global law and ethical norms. As it is now, our legal ideas are becoming less and less relevant to the world.

b) examining our commitment to trade agreements, such as NAFTA, and other bilateral agreements that we have with numerous Latin American nations and ensure that we are engaging in fair trade. NAFTA has undoubtedly affected immigration to the U.S., and that has raised issues of human rights along the border and the treatment of immigrants within the country (now that we have a vastly expanded immigration enforcement bureau under Homeland Security)

Does it Matter Who Wins? Obama, Palin, and Strategy for Social Justice

No matter which party wins today in the presidential race, it will be an historic election. One the one hand, we might have our first African American president. On the other, we might have the first woman vice president. Either way, the end result will be an individual in a position of power who would never have been allowed there by the Founding Framers of this country.

Courtney, over at Feministing, reports on the feeling in the air in the multiracial, multicultural streets of Brooklyn, NY. If Obama wins, she writes, it will provide hope for youth, and renewed faith for elders that social justice movement can work.

Undoubtedly, we are in historic moments. Some cautionary notes:

Malcolm X, speaking in 1964, on the eve of the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act, warned his audience not to be content with making reforms in the United States. He urged them to think more broadly, in terms of human rights. He said of American politics:

"Well, I am one who doesn't believe in deluding myself. I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate."

It is certainly true that an Obama administration will be different, and perhaps, more receptive to social justice concerns. But social justice will require more than just having the right people in place at the table or in the White House.

William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolishionist, refused to vote in elections because he felt it gave legitimacy to a political system that behaved immorally. I think it is problematic to think of voting as an expression of purity. There are those who will not vote for either McCain or Obama because they believe both represent compromised positions. They will vote for third party candidates, who will most certainly not win, because they cannot bring themselves to tie their fortunes to someone they consider distasteful.

There is perhaps another way to think of this. Machiavelli taught us (in the Discourses) not to think of politics as a game of virtue, or to honor our politicians because of their honorable characters. Instead, he taught that politics is an arena of struggle. If you don't participate, you risk allowing other groups into that arena who might threaten your liberty. Political action, then, ought to be strategic; how best can you defend your views? Voting should be seen as a strategic move rather than as a direct expression of your views, making sure that the political arena is open enough to allow you to manuever in it. In this sense, voting third party in U.S. elections might not be the best thing to do, since it is most certainly a wasted vote and unlikely to create any strategic space in the political arena (though it might make you feel personally good)

Garrison wrote, in 1838:

"There are those who disapprove of every form of political action, on the part of abolitionists.... We cannot yield to this reasoning. It proceeds, we think, upon a narrow view of the subject. Politics, rightly considered, is a branch of morals, and cannot be deserted innocently. …We, however, view political action chiefly as a means of agitating the subject.... To conclude this part of the subject, our true policy is not to turn party politicians, but in politics as elsewhere to stand firm by our principles, and let the politicians come to us...."

Despite whomever wins in the presidential race today, the power to make change will still depend on grassroots organizing and ordinary people who will push those in office. We will have to be strategic.

Revisiting "Torture and Democracy": Rejali wins major award

One of our most popular interviews is the one done with international torture expert, Darius Rejali. His monumental book (literally, it is over 800 pages long!), won a major award this year. The American Political Science Association gave Torture and Democracy its Best Book in Human Rights Award for 2008.

You can listen to the interview with Rejali at the new Engage site here.

The Cost of the American Dream?: Deaths along the Mexican border soar in 2007.

Via luchador@s:

The number of people who have died along the U.S./Mexico border has surpassed the number of American soliders killed in Iraq. Since 1995, 4,827 people have died trying to cross the desert wasteland. In August, 2008, the number of soldiers killed reached 4,138.

Last year, then, almost two people died each day. By the first part of 2008, 275 have died so far.