In my last post on Renaissance Networks, I alluded to some work on basic forms of social organization so I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about them, at least as some of us are conceiving them. The concept of a “basic form of social relations”, itself goes back quite a [...]

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“I guess the larger meta question is, What is the role of the know-it-all generalist in today’s specialized world where there is really no more room for Rennaissance men?”
Depends who you ask. I think the concept of “Rennaissance men” has evolved into “Rennaissance networks”, they range from the generalists (like Matt), the interested citizens (you, [...]

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The word “theory” has an interesting effect on different people. I’ve noticed that many of my undergraduate students, upon hearing the word and learning that they are sitting in a course on “theory”, start to get the same look in their eyes as deer have caught in the headlights of a car. For [...]

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A couple of days ago, Max Forte put up an excellent post on Trinidadian music taking an in-depth look at one particular performance piece and, if you haven’t read it yet, you really should. One line in particular has been rattling around in my brain every since I read it:
Shadow and Sonia do [...]

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A friend of mine of at the SWC just posted a link through to a YouTube video of a song that used to be a favorite of mine back when I was singing in bars.

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One of the most interesting problems with any system of ethics is the twinned questions of a) what is the system grounded in and b) why should I, as an individual, care? I’m sure that most people are familiar with the old, probably apocryphal, story of a philosophy exam with one question on it [...]

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so when one dispassionately and accurately speaks of cluster bombing, depleted uranium, torture at Abu Ghraib, and laying siege to civilian population centres, the response is not that it is just “rhetoric.”
Max Forte at openanthropology (NB: there is something weird with the cascading style sheets which interferes with italic script so I have changed the [...]

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In a recent blog post, Max Forte dissected the Human Terrain System’s (HTS) Top Misconceptions page. Now, in general, I have not been very kind about most of the attacks on the HTS and Max’s post is definitely an attack. It is, however, qualitatively different, in my opinion, from the majority of other [...]

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It’s mid-July, now and, like others who teach at universities around the world, I am putting the finishing touches on courses for the Fall term. I am also getting ready for the next singing season as well; getting the music, putting the finances together for our European tour next summer and, at the same [...]

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I’ve been engaged in an interesting thread on the Small Wars Council entitled Revising FM 3-24: What needs to change? While the thread is interesting in and of itself, at least if one is interested in Counter-Insurgency (COIN) doctrine, it is also interesting for another reason - the unspoken assumptions that underly both the [...]

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