The paradoxes of ‘rational’ death

He has written widely on issues of moral theory, medical ethics, and moral theology. He is author of Medical Ethicsand co-editor of Set No Limits.He is currently completing a book titled The Distant Edge of Lifewhich examines Roman Catholic teaching on rational suicide.     

More on health care paradoxes

Federal and state government efforts to improve the nation's health focus particular attention on the necessity of increasing the numbers of physicians. Yet, evidence from several studies suggest weak linkages between health and the number of physicians. The present study surveys civilian health and the number of physicians during the period of national mobilization in the U.S. in the 1940's. This period, where low physician/population ratios prevailed for several years, is unique in recent history and provides a useful reference for current health policy. Reduced numbers of physicians are shown to have had a measurable negative impact on civilian health over the period.The author would like to express gratitude to the Brookings Institution for support and to a referee for helpful suggestions.     

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

ABSTRACT

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid's study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.     

A critical reappraisal of some voting power paradoxes

Power indices are meant to assess the power that a voting rule confers a priori to each of the decision makers who use it. In order to test and compare them, some authors have proposed ‘natural’ postulates that a measure of a priori voting power ‘should’ satisfy, the violations of which are called ‘voting power paradoxes.’ In this paper two general measures of success and decisiveness based on the voting rule and voters' behavior and some of these postulates/paradoxes test each other. As a result serious doubts are cast on the discriminating power of most voting power postulates.     

Empirical evidence of paradoxes of voting in Dutch elections

In this paper we analyze four national elections held in 1982, 1986, 1989 and 1994 in the Netherlands on the occurrence of the Condorcet paradox. In addition, we investigate these elections on the occurrence of three so-called majority-plurality paradoxes. The first paradox states that a party having a majority over another party may receive less seats. The second states that a Condorcet winner may not receive the largest number of seats and even may not receive a seat at all. The third says that the majority relation may be the reverse of the ranking of parties in terms of numbers of seats.     

The green party in German politics

Among the parties emerging from the ‘new social movements’ in Western Europe, the German Green Party represents the most successful of the ‘new type’ parties so far. This article surveys the salient features of the party, its programme, strategy and organisational structure, showing the problems the party faces in all three respects. Attention is also paid to the nature of electoral support given to the Greens as well as to the impact the party is having on the established parties and the political system.     

Public choice, technology and industrialization in Tanzania: Some paradoxes resolved

No less than in agriculture, industrialization in Africa is difficult to explain on purely economic grounds. This paper applies public choice theory to some of the most paradoxical aspects of technology and industrialization in one African country, Tanzania. Our analysis turns on two assumptions about bureaucratic behavior in that country: The first is that bureaucrats have preferences defined over projects rather than technologies and the second is that, in their capacity as managers of state-owned enterprises, these agents of the state have sought to initiate as many new projects as possible, mainly on the basis of foreign aid. These propositions are shown to be consistent with evidence regarding the growth of the public sector in Tanzania during the 1970s and 1980s.     

Gagging orders: asylum seekers and paradoxes of freedom and protest in liberal society

The detention of non-status migrants is now commonplace in developed countries. Detention has been justified on such grounds as security, the welfare of non-status migrant populations, and as a way to speed up processing asylum claims. Drawing from the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko's sustained interest in themes of migration and belonging, this article examines the relationships between technologies of government in detention and accommodation facilities, and the possibilities and constraints of protest that these settings and practices give rise to. The analysis highlights paradoxes of freedom as well as opportunities for protest that imbue these spaces. Using Foucault's discussion of technologies of government, we draw on empirical research to highlight how orientation booklets, classes, and legal self-representation manuals are technologies that compel asylum seekers to become ideal detainees in hopes of being understood as ‘liberal subjects’ worthy of inclusion in a small number of evermore tightly policed Western European states. We conclude with the suggestion that asylum seekers' paradoxical encounters with technologies of liberal government deliver a challenge to the accepted framework of citizenship within liberal societies.     

The 2019 Swiss federal elections: the rise of the green tide

Abstract

The Greens made spectacular gains in the 2019 Swiss federal elections. In a campaign that was dominated by the climate change issue, the party outperformed the Christian Democrats to become the fourth largest party in the lower house. This status enabled the Greens to legitimately request a seat in government (the Federal Council). However, their attempt to unseat a member of the Liberals failed due to the resistance of the right-wing parties. It thus turned out that the Green wave was not strong enough to change the composition of the federal government.     

The scent of a green carnation: A review of the queer year

The “Blitz spirit” is a popular story about the British public during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Previous work has revised this wartime story as a propagandistic construction of national identity and popular memory. Therefore, this paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) then examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings in London. I examine how this myth was constructed and the ideological role it played after the attacks. Similar to previous revisions of the Blitz myth from 1940, I argue that social and political complexities after July 7th were often suppressed by messages that sought to evoke a sense of “Britishness” defined by a previous generation. Whilst the July 7th bombings were not a case of traditional warfare or attacks carried out by a foreign force, I argue that wartime analogies often supported military responses in the war on terror and evoked a foreign threat.     

Red green prospects in Ireland

“Ireland is the “Emerald Isle” in popular imagination. There is certainly some truth in this, since of all European countries the Republic of Ireland is the least ecologically ravaged. Ireland has been spared many of the ecological problems that afflict other Western capitalist countries due principally to its relatively underindustrialized nature. It is therefore a rather special case in the general development of red!green political dialogue of the type that typifies the realignment of European oppositional politics along an emerging continuum stretching from red/green/new social movements to conservative/christian democratic/neo‐fascist parties. The decks have now been cleared for the construction of a viable Irish eco‐social politics.”