Trash is a big deal in Egypt. As much as I’d like only to say beautiful things about the country and the wonderful people who live there, some of the most enduring images of my two month stay are waves of trash fondling my mouth at the public beach, rivers…

Note: I wrote this in Arapahoe County Detention Center, where I didn’t have adequate access to research materials. I will be clearing up some things in a postscript at the end. I think the American justice system is confused. Like most institutions, it was not engineered in one fell swoop…

Reducing crime is the language of defunding — What do we need the police for anyway? All societies need some way to regulate behavior and force people to follow through with commitments. If we abandon contracts whenever it benefits us, cooperation becomes impossible. If there aren’t any norms to guide us on how we ought to act towards…

In the interest of elaborating what I think is an interesting and somewhat different perspective on electoral politics, I’m going to assume that within the United States political divide, Democrats tend to be Proceduralists while Republicans tend to be Nationalists. …

The crusader state is not sustainable — I’ve already written about my conflicting views over whether China might be a better dominating power or “global hegemon” for the world than the United States. The United States has been exceptionally brutal in its foreign policy, and there’s good reason to believe that China wouldn’t be nearly as violent…