Against this background, adopting a baby might have seemed like a small issue. But in fact, all the opposition parties agreed on one thing: they would quickly stop all adoption to the United States, and indeed, in 1995, a law was passed to suspend adoptions from Paraguay until there had been a complete overhaul of adoption procedures.

via The ‘Enabling Violation’ of International Adoption – NYTimes.com.

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

via Occupy Wall Streets Political Disobedience – NYTimes.com.

…

But we do know this: for the foreseeable future, contact with ETI would have to result from their coming here, which would in all likelihood mean that they far surpassed us technologically.  They would be able to enslave us, hunt us as prey, torture us as objects of scientific experiments, or even exterminate us and leave no trace of our civilization.  They would, in other words, be able to treat us as we treat animals — or as our technologically more advanced societies have often treated less advanced ones.

This suggests an argument against SETI that is the reverse of Pascal’s famous wager argument for believing in God.  Pascal’s idea was that even a small probability of bringing about an enormous good (without risking unacceptable evil) was good reason for acting.  This is a reasonable principle: even a small prospect of enormous good can swamp the prospect of more probable but much lesser goods. Pascal’s argument runs into trouble not because of this principle but because of worries about, for example, which God we ought to believe in.  (There is also, as William James pointed out, the disconcerting possibility that God might be particularly ill-disposed to people who believe in him through the calculating reasoning of the wager argument).

via Will the Aliens Be Nice? Don’t Bet On It – NYTimes.com.

…

Moreover, the University of Freiburg in Germany, where Sebald studied German literature, was the very university whose rector in 1933 was none other than Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who became (in)famous for supporting the Nazi regime during its first years in power. Significantly, Sebald’s time as a student at Freiburg coincided with the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which publicly exposed the atrocities committed in the Nazi extermination camps.

via Times Higher Education – Out of the shadows.

via Philosophy As an Art of Dying – NYTimes.com.

The object of Wikileaks is to dismantle the conspiracies that, according to its founder, rule the world. But what is a conspiracy and are you part of one? According to Assange, it’s possible to be a member of conspiracy without even knowing that you are. This week, we look at Julian Assange’s political philosophy and his view of the world as a network of conspiracies.

via Philosophers Zone – 26 February 2011 – The Julian Assange Conspiracy – Networks, power and activism.

The globalization which has submerged the earth for the past thirty years, is not limited to finance and the economy. It also carries across the borders the virus of freedom which occasionally gains the upper hand (as in the velvet revolutions) and sometimes comes up against the brutality of the profane politico-military apparatus as in 1989 on Tienanmen Square, or its celestial equivalent in Iran 2009.

via Andre Glucksmann: Revolution without guarantee (18/02/2011) – signandsight.

In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to “think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it”. By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to an end. The sort of history that ordinary people might make was to fade away within a “new world order”, a world in which a narrow set of elites would control all the main levers of power.

via Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking | Peter Hallward | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

The Society of the Muslim Brothers, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned in Egypt for many years. Nevertheless, after the recent upheavals, the Brotherhood was among the opposition groups invited to talk with Vice President Omar Suleiman. So today on The Philosopher’s Zone we’re exploring the life and times of the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s great theorist. Qutb spent many years in jail during the ’50s and’60s, but before his execution by the Egyptian government, he was the Brotherhood’s leading intellectual. And he really disliked the American suburban obsession with lawns.

via Philosophers Zone – 12 February 2011 – Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb.

Slavoj Zizek, For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

Eric Schliesser, Egypt and China

And of course Graham Harman’s blog

PS: Please send me links you see…