It’s a strange thing, being a hater. It becomes increasingly hard to distinguish one’s visceral reactions to pseudo-analytical drivel from reasoned disagreement. Such is the situation in which I found myself this morning when this came down the pipe. BLUF: Friedman wishes the President best of luck in the West’s latest military intervention. Solid. Here’s the catch. [...]
Archive for the ‘Policy’ Category
The fight for Libya gains a moustache.
Posted in Policy, tagged Africa, realism, security on 30 March 2011 | 1 Comment »
Revisiting Sen’s “Development as Freedom”
Posted in Policy, tagged Collier, development, economics, justice, Sen on 9 June 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’m quite the fan of Amartya Sen’s writing, which I hope has been able to inform at least some of what I’m able to contribute — both in a personal and professional capacity. At any rate, I returned to Development as Freedom recently, and am quite pleased with the result. Thus, here is the review [...]
Dispensing with jargon
Posted in Policy, tagged collaboration, communication, context, Haiti, information sharing on 9 June 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve got a piece up for work on the nature of information sharing challenges, not dissimilar from some of the themes I’ve discussed here in the past. So, in the name of shameless self-promotion, here’s an outtake: The language of better communication has come to take on an almost dogmatic character. Particularly within official circles [...]
More thoughts on Collier
Posted in Policy, tagged Africa, Collier, economy, governance, human rights on 10 March 2010 | Leave a Comment »
My previous post contained little more than an overview of Paul Collier’s recent talk at the U.S. Africa Command, but I wanted to return to a few of the implications it seemed to contain. Whereas Collier emphasized the centrality of managing specific economic processes to the future stability/prosperity of African societies, I wonder about the [...]
Paul Collier at AFRICOM
Posted in Policy, tagged Africa, AFRICOM, Collier, economy, governance, security on 4 March 2010 | 2 Comments »
This afternoon, I had the opportunity to swing across town to the not uncontroversial U.S. Africa Command for a lecture given by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and someone who understands substantially more about African governance and economic arrangements than most of us ever will. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but considering [...]
Take your pick
Posted in Policy, tagged torture on 22 February 2010 | Leave a Comment »
John Yoo: “What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—” “Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.” “To order a village [...]
Morality, one way or the other
Posted in Policy, tagged causality, jus in bello, just war on 18 February 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The New York Times has published quite a head-scratcher of an opinion piece today. Its concern is with efforts by Western military leadership in Afghanistan to limit civilian deaths, stating that specific policies to restrict the use of air strikes are based on a well-intentioned but immoral lie. The substance of the piece is hardly [...]
Regarding an information strategy
Posted in Policy, tagged collaboration, complexity, cooperation, Haiti, ICT, organization on 20 January 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’m wary that anything I may write herein will trivialize the catastrophe that frames these considerations. That, certainly, is not my intention. As a detached observer of the scenes currently unfolding in Haiti, it is hard not to wonder how on earth the responders at hand will ever manage to return some semblance of normalcy [...]
Consolidation
Posted in Policy, tagged context, decentralization, emergence, organization on 30 November 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A tendency that I continue to find somewhat puzzling — and hopefully it’s only an error in perception, but I seriously doubt it — is the evidently sincere notion held in certain places that undirected community interactions and willing cooperation across levels of organization can somehow be bundled and consolidated into singular activities, platforms, programs, [...]
This post is not about “football”
Posted in Policy, tagged context, football, organization, philosophy, rugby on 17 November 2009 | 3 Comments »
Well, my intention with this post is to talk about something towards which I have a pretty inflexible disposition, in order to make a different point altogether. First, though, in order to brace myself for the passionate responses this might elicit, it seems appropriate to come clean about all the bias I know to be [...]
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