The Larry Craig Show

So, I want to engage in a little bit of superficial political analysis about this whole Larry Craig affair (sorry about the superficiality - when it comes to politics, and many other things, I can’t do any better). Larry Craig, of course, was arrested and pled guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from [...]

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Luhmann Interview

Follow this link for a short video clip of an interview with Niklas Luhmann. The interview’s also on YouTube, but without English translation. Even though the interview’s from 1973, it’s fairly accessible and I think still valid as a way of gaining some perspective on Luhmann’s approach to systems theory, even in his later ‘autopoietic’ [...]

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Global Warming 2: The Melting North

There’s an interesting article by McKenzie Funk’s article in the September 2007 edition of Harper’s* which discusses the ‘Coming Battle over the Melting North.’ Funk’s article helped me to realize how dull and unimaginative my thinking was about global warming. I had assumed that everyone who *believed* in the reality of global warming - i.e., [...]

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Summer’s End and Dilemmas of Rational Choice

Well, it’s the end of another summer, my ‘to-do’ list in tatters, and I’m confronted with the usual sorts of painful choices. School starts in a week, and already work - both ’schoolwork’ and ‘work-work’ - has started to pile up. What’s the rational thing to do?

Attempt, in the last few days of vacation remaining, [...]

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Non-Human Actors: On Luhmann and Latour

I spent much of last night and early this morning reading through an interesting article by Guenther Teubner, of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Teubner’s a professor of private law and legal sociology, and he’s written extensively on topics in contract law, corporate regulation, and international law. But he’s also developed a perspective on legal evolution and [...]

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