The Mad Sociologist Blog

  • Snowden Ate My Homework

    The US Should Stop Blaming Snowden for its Own Inequities As a teacher I hear all kinds of excuses for failure. A student, with typical adolescent melodrama, bemoans how difficult my tests are and how I’m ruining his grade. You see, I’m the reason that he is failing. It’s not the fact that, instead of Read more

  • Contradictory feelings on the uprising in Egypt

    And the role of the military and preserving democracy   Figure 1: Can Egyptian democracy rely on military overlords? I have been watching the new uprising in Egypt with some fascination and trepidation. The source of my conflict is in the role of the military in protecting the nascent democracy. It is clear that the Read more

  • History is on the Side of the Whistle-Blowers

    Those who reveal secret abuses of power are the friends of society and of history   Corporal Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are quite the center of controversy. The claim made by the government and the corporate elite is that Manning and Snowden are traitors to their country and have placed our national security at Read more

  • The Man Who Makes You Equal

    The strange and unaccountable power of Justice Anthony Kennedy   Yesterday, Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote determining that, if you are a minority in an area with a history of voter discrimination against minorities, you don’t deserve the special protections accorded in the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Today, Justice Kennedy provided the Read more

  • Those Damned Whistleblowers

    An interesting video from Lee Camp at leecamp.com How do we justify imprisoning those who reveal crimes against humanity and abuses of power longer and more harshly than we do those who actually commit crimes against humanity and abuse power?   Read more

  • The Not So Secret Rise of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex

    Why we are complicit in the domestic spying scandal   The most noteworthy observation that I have about the great brouhaha over Glen Greenwald’s expose of US domestic spying in The Guardian is how absolutely shocked everybody seems. The press and the social media act as if this is some sudden revelation. We had no Read more

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