The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Essay

Weaponized Interdependence – with Abraham Newman

In May 2018, the US Administration announced that it was pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, reimposing sanctions. Most notably, many penalties do not apply to US firms, but to foreign firms that may have no presence in the US; the sanctions are consequential in large part because ofUS importance to the global financial network.This unilateral action by the US ...
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Essay

In praise of negativity

Andrew Gelman has a post on the benefits of negative criticism, where he talks about the careful methodological demolitions he has done of others’ research that he has found to be slipshod. if you want to go against the grain you have to work harder to convince people. My point is that this is the ...
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