Kevin Hilke
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been roundly accused of judicial bias in matters of race. Comparative analyses of “judicial bias,” even ones that give somewhat reliable comparative measures of various jurists’ work, operate by postulating a spectral fixed point of neutrality against which the scrutinized is measured. But where is this point? What constitutes it? What allows us to say that the contingent result of Sotomayor’s intellectual collaborations with dozens of individuals, absent Sotomayor’s views as such, constitutes a universal norm? Why should we presume that the average of the biases of multiple others represents a default lack of bias?
Lindsey Miller
David Brooks says the global gag rule made no tangible difference in the way the United States conducted itself its international development efforts. He needs to read up.
Kevin Hilke
U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech “to the Muslim world” from Cairo University earlier this week has provoked a variety of predictable reactions from the right, most of which impugn Obama for admitting points of view other than that of U.S. interest when thinking through global affairs. By this rationale, Obama’s admission that the Islamic societies of the past were crucial to generating and preserving the ideas that underpin what we call “the west” becomes nothing more than a sheepish “apology” to “terrorists.” Criticism from the left has been almost as uniformly boring and predictable. An intriguing and problematic exception comes from Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official whose readings of events are often simultaneously refreshing and myopic.
