Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 
A tragic story about Target, a hero dog that was killed in error by a worker in an animal shelter, caught my attention. The story brought to mind my uneasiness with state sponsored killings of all sorts. Additionally, I was intrigued by the way words shape narratives, in this case “euthanize” and “kill.”
Target was a war hero. She was a stray dog who survived gun shots and explosions in Afghanistan. She and two other strays, befriended by U. S. soldiers, deterred a suicide bomber wearing explosives. They barked at and bit the attacker, and in the process spared the lives of large numbers of soldiers. One of the dogs was killed. Target and Rufus, the other dog that survived with the assistance of aid workers, were taken to the U. S. to live with soldiers who had helped care for them in Afghanistan.
Target became famous after appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show. Unfortunately, last week, Target escaped from her backyard. She didn’t have on identification tags nor did she have an identification microchip implanted in her. Someone found the dog and called animal control. While Target’s family continued to search for her, she entered the institutional dog shelter system. Through a series of missteps, the owners didn’t get to the shelter in time.
“Euthanize” and “kill” have been used to shape alternative Target narratives. “Euthanize” and its related terms, “put down,” and “put to sleep ”(or “PTS”) are more comforting, “kill” or “execute” more disturbing. In Target’s case, the later terms are more descriptive of the case. Target wasn’t suffering. She wasn’t in physical distress. She wasn’t aggressive. She didn’t have any severe behavioral problems, and she wasn’t a threat to other people or animals.
Euthanize: Policy Implications
The deconstructed word euthanasia is “good,” “gentle” or “easy” death derived from the Greek. It typically refers to the painless killing of a suffering person or animal which either has an incurable, painful disease, or is in a permanent coma. While Euthanasia is generally considered to be illegal as it applies to humans, it is considered to be humane as it applies . . .
Read more: Euthanize or Kill: What is the Difference?
Monday, November 22nd, 2010 
President Obama’s goal of “doubling exports over the next ten years” seems like a win-win in that it will boost employment and reduce the troubling U.S. trade deficit. At first glance, his position makes sense politically and economically. But there is a problem. Because of the globalization of production that U.S. companies have championed over the past 20 years, exports from sectors other than agriculture require a much higher level of imports than ever before. As a result, the job creation from expanding exports is much lower than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
In economic terms, the President’s goal of doubling exports makes sense. Foreign demand is expected to be the fastest growing component of U.S. demand in the coming years. And other, domestic, sources of economic growth are less promising than they have been in the past.
We can’t consume our way out of our problems. Consumption demand is going through a long-term adjustment from the build up of consumer debt over the past ten years. Private investment also is not a likely singular basis for recovery. It stopped being the most dynamic source of U.S. economic growth years ago. With fear of a double-dip recession, lots of built-up excess capacity and still inexplicably tight credit, private investment spending is unlikely to be a driver of US economic growth. Government spending has been politically excluded by the bi-elections. Federal spending has grown rapidly over the period of economic crisis, but calls for deficit reduction mean that the kinds of increases we have seen in government spending over the last few years may not be politically feasible in the future.
That leaves the export sector. With the dramatic growth rates of the emerging markets — most prominently Brazil, India and China, — the potential for growth in U.S. exports is considerable.
A rapid doubling of exports also makes sense politically, since it relies on the spending power of foreigners not the U.S. government, and in this sense is a “free lunch.” Moreover, if export growth is blocked by tariffs or exchange rate manipulation, the source of the failure lies outside U.S. . . .
Read more: Will Increased Exports Lift the Economy?
Sunday, November 21st, 2010 
Martin Plot is a former student, and good friend and colleague. I have learned a great deal from him about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, specifically concerning the temptations and dangers of kitsch. He joins DC with this post offering his critical view of the question of truth in American politics. -Jeff
Many commentators on the Democratic side (including Jeff) are mesmerized by the fact that most in the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party at large, seem completely delusional, asserting facts that are not so and assuming ideological positions that distort reality almost as a matter of sport. The problem is not, however, one of simple dichotomies between reason and un-reason, and of truth and fiction, the problem resides in the dynamic that is slowly transforming our political regime.
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty explained this in the epilogue to his Adventures of the Dialectic. At two different moments in that text he uses two phrases in an almost indistinguishable way. At one point, he says, in condemning the Soviet dictatorship, that a different regime is needed, one that makes room for opposition and freedom. Later on, almost as if he were saying the same thing—and he was, in the context of his philosophy—he calls for a regime that welcomes opposition and truth. For Merleau-Ponty, truth is opening, or what he calls hyper-reflection and hyper-dialectics, which means opening to both other perspectives and the unfolding of time. Put straightforwardly: hyper-reflection means that even “reason”—or what he calls “the point of view of reflection”—needs to understand that it has its own blind spots. Therefore, it needs to be opened to contestation. Hyper-dialectics, on the other hand, means that whatever is the case today, may not be the case tomorrow. Therefore, present circumstances should never be expected to remain unchallenged.
In this context, the problem with Republican illusions, and lies that are mostly self-delusions, is not simply that they are wrong and untrue. The problem is that they find no opposition, that Democrats are afraid of confronting them . . .
Read more: Opposition and Truth
Friday, November 19th, 2010
My posts, “.com v .org” and the follow up “Is the business of American Business?” have stimulated an interesting and important conversation. The complexities have been revealed, providing a basis for serious discussion which should inform decision making and political action.
Elle recognizes that applying the bottom line to the point that basic humanities majors are eliminated is a problem. She realizes that there is a cultural value, the value of the university, that has an independent significance beyond the logic of the market, and, I would add, beyond the significance the university has for the state. The modern university, with a definitive liberal arts tradition, shouldn’t be subjected directly to the logic of the bottom line.
Elle and I are in agreement with the great 20th century conservative philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, who, in his The Voice of Liberal Learning points out, “Education in its most general significance may be recognized as a specific transaction which may go on between generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they are to inhabit.” He goes on to explain that a liberal education involves “the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves.”
But Elle and I disagree about the application of this conservative reasoning to the appointment of Cathy Black as Chancellor of the New York City public schools. While I have serious doubts, Elle thinks that Black’s excellence in the arts of administration should be decisive. As a student of Oakeshott in this regard, I am not persuaded. Scott’s particular concerns about Black, revealing an acquiescence to questionable business practices, are disturbing and have implications. The competing ethos and imperatives of business and politics, on the one hand, and education, on the other, undermine the case for the Black appointment. I think this is an instance where the saying “there is a time and a place for everything” suggests that certain people should find their appropriate place.
. . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Thoughts on Recent Replies
Thursday, November 18th, 2010 
While January 2009 marked the inauguration of a new President of the United States, it was also a virtual coronation of John Maynard Keynes as the king of modern economics.
For decades, the economics profession attacked Keynesianism, first for lacking a theory of inflation and then for an insufficient appreciation of individual rationality in decisions by investors and employers. Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent, and other radical conservatives ruled the roost, arguing that markets work best when fully deregulated, that labor market protections reduce employment, and that economic growth is driven by a series of exogenous shocks. Milton Friedman’s influence was felt more than that of Keynes.
But for the past two years Keynesianism has served as the scientific foundation for the ideas of today’s most celebrated economists, both conservative and liberal. From Martin Feldstein to Joseph Stiglitz, from Glen Hubbard to Paul Krugman, all major economists have supported Keynesian demand management in the form of large fiscal stimulus to reverse our economic decline. Even today, it is only the far right of the economics profession that has backed away from this view in preference to the politically popular notion that deficits should be eliminated in the short run. The embrace of Keynes is a welcome development. He brought deep insight about the nature of capitalism and especially the need for adequate demand (as opposed simply to downwardly flexible wages) to generate fully employment.
The Keynesian concern is the short-run stabilization of employment and income. The current situation poses a longer-term set of challenges, rooted in the structural changes that have plagued the economy both during and prior to the crisis in 2008: stagnant wages and a huge buildup of household debt, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and a persistent trade deficit, a bloated and destabilizing role for finance, a reduced rate of private sector innovation, and heightened economic insecurity. A progressive response to these problems is likely to be more informed by another great social thinker of the 20th century, Karl Polanyi, than by Keynesianism.
![]( "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi, Amereon </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Making Sense of the Economic Mess
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 
I worry about the penetration of the market and its logic into all spheres of social life. I see this almost everywhere I turn. It’s the future of America that Republicans wish for, but it is my nightmare.
In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has chosen Cathie Black to be Chancellor of the largest public school system in the United States. She is not an educator, never went to public schools, has never worked on school issues and didn’t send her children to public schools. But the mayor still confidently declared her to be the most qualified person, as The New York Times reported, calling Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.” Hers are market, not educational, qualifications for a management position in the NYC public school district.
In my and the country’s second city, Chicago, where I studied for my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in the meanwhile, smaller issues are at stake, a local battle of symbols. The Chicago Transit Authority is selling naming rights “for rail lines and stations, bus routes, retail concessions, and special events. Even the venerable (sic) CTA logo will be on the auction block,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
And where I studied as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany, because of a budget crisis, five humanities programs, including French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater, have been suspended, apparently because these programs don’t contribute to the university’s and the individual’s bottom line. (link) Such majors don’t attract many students, and those who are so attracted upon graduation have trouble finding work. But how can there be a university without the humanities? (link) This hits close to home for me. Albany is the place where I decided to make the unusual move that has defined my career, starting my research by studying the sociology of theater.
How can it be that the business of the New York City school system and of my alma . . .
Read more: Is the Business of America Business?
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 ![KSpring[1]](../../wp-content/uploads/2010/11/KSpring1-150x112.jpg)
In two previous posts, DC has considered the military in terms of its means and ends. First, I asked about pragmatic pacificsm, and in response, US Army veteran, Michael Corey, discussed the use of war as a political tool. Today’s contributor, Kimberly Spring, is a PhD candidate at the New School. -Jeff
 In my research, I work with military veterans who served in Iraq. For them, this Veterans Day was not a day for parades, but for political action and protests. It may be that many service members find themselves questioning the strategies and tactics of Pentagon privately, but these veterans represent the minority of active duty and former service members who publicly criticize the military.
Protesting in this way has caused them difficulties. Speaking against the military is taboo. Breaking the “code of silence” to talk about abuse and brutality among their fellow service members is a betrayal.
Thinking about the polarizing discourse around the military, I wonder how discussions about means and ends in war can ever achieve any depth. Our portrayal of those who serve in the military remains split between, on the one hand, blanket condemnation of the savagery of men who glorify killing and domination, and, on the other, unqualified, unabashed reverence for the honor and sacrifice of those who serve.
The veterans who I work with struggle between these two extremes. In the US, national discourse has taken an uncomfortable swing toward the latter depiction – any criticism of service members is impolitic, for the left and the right.
But the idealization of soldiers denies the much more ambiguous experience of the men and women who serve.
We should not confuse the economic and personal need that leads many men and women to enlist with the idealism of sacrifice. We should not forget that service members are flawed, just like the rest of us.
That sometimes they act bravely, and other times they act out of fear; sometimes with compassion and other times with cruelty; that they, like anyone, operate in an arena of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Somehow we never fail to be astounded by the My Lais and the . . .
Read more: Means without Ends?
Monday, November 15th, 2010 
 I had to make a decision about this blog early on.
Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial? I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.
For many people, this decision would be straightforward. For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go. For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear. But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.
Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing. They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.
While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire. I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives. The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and . . .
Read more: “.Org” or “.Com”?
Sunday, November 14th, 2010 
 Last week, DC contributor Robin Wagner-Pacifici commented on how Facebook and other social networking sites have changed the language of social interaction. (link)
I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience. Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.
When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members. As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.
That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.
I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook. Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.
Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your . . .
Read more: On Facebook: Real, Everyday Life
Friday, November 12th, 2010 
 I’ve been brooding about on-line network sites, most particularly Facebook, attempting to get a handle on the nature of relations, commitments, and forces that operate in such virtual worlds.
And this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece titled, “The Crossroads Nation,” that illuminated something about the networked-world phenomenon that I hadn’t clearly seen before. The column’s ostensible topic is the capacity of America to be the most globally networked nation for the 21st century and thus Brooks advocates an economy built on continued digital integration.
Bland and unassailable as a premise (satisfying both more left-leaning infrastructure-building advocates and more right-leaning champions of individualistic success stories)the interesting thing about Brooks’ column is a subtle shift that occurs in the way it narrates human relationships.
“The Crossroads Nation” column is itself constructed by way of interesting shifts in the terminology it uses to label human groupings. Brooks imagines a young person finding her voice and her metier by migrating from a small town to a metropolis and connecting with other creative individuals and groups in the process. Describing this trajectory Brooks begins with traditional words like “country,””place,” “circle,” “group of people,” and switches decisively mid-column to “networks” and “hubs.”
He concludes with a paeon to America’s network capacity: “The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.”
Brooks does not reflect on the significance of this shift, or of the consequences of abandoning these traditional ideas about social and political collectivities. But reading the column made me realize that my diffidence toward on-line social networks has something to do with this transformation in our understanding of groups. I realized that I do not see myself as part of networks, that such a self-identification is actually anathema. Rather, I think about my life as one that is embedded in a world of families, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions and social classes.
This stubbornly off-line relational imaginary may have a generational foundation – born in the mid twentieth century I am . . .
Read more: Facebook has Changed the Language of Friendship
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Making Sense of the Economic Mess
