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The Potent Polity

Really, is this the best of all worlds yet?

Unapologetically no, it is not. Consequentially, faithful policy analysis cannot be merely descriptive of the status quo. It must envisage, dream, if necessary, a richer and fairer configuration of our social, economic and political worlds. Taking as starting point real existing people, in our frail and noble human condition, it must design a better way for us to prosper together, that is both feasible and visionary. It must establish that normative counterfactual, against which our ever-lacking reality is judged, and explained.

Let us reclaim that enlightened emancipation: that really, how we live together is of our own, collective choosing.

To inform and to invigorate that collective choice, to insist that it is possible, and to engage more people in its making - that is the project of the potent polity.

It is to this project, to which here, Maximilian Held, a public policy student from Berlin subscribes. 

 

 

Since the two GBU-38 500lb bombs struck the fuel tankers in Kunduz province, Afghanistan and engulfed by-standing civilians in a giant fireball on September 4, 2009, what have we really learned?

I fear that amid all the self-righteous blameshifting and  frantic second-guessing of the attack, which was launched from an American fighter jet, but ordered by the German Oberst Klein, we haven't learned nearly enough.

We haven't learned nearly enough about this mayhem of a failed state and the chaos...

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On May 1st, 2003 when then President George W. Bush, declared the end of major combat operations and the mission Iraqi Freedom to be "accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, much of the failure and dying in Iraq still lay ahead.

Mission Accomplished Banner on USS Abraham Lincoln
Mission Accomplished Banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln

The invasion, starting on March 19, 2003, had been a remarkable military success, on schedule and with comparatively few casualties (139 US troops and approximately 7,500 civilians before May 1,...

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How to react to global warming? How do wean ourselves off that harmful oil - and still prosper?

Renewables / via Flickr, originally uploaded by Chad Johnson
Renewables / via Flickr, originally uploaded by Chad Johnson

maintained that we'd better be safe with Sinn's fears of a Green Paradox than sorry without him, notwithstanding the uncertainties of his argument.

Economist Hans-Werner Sinn is no easy read for a green German: he pretty much pulls german and European green policy into pieces. Much of his critique is plausible, if unsettling: without...

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"But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting."
Micah
(5:2), King James Version

Marienkirche Leeste, Germany / Christmas 2007

Last Christmas, Pastor Brusermann at a local church near my hometown (Weyhe's Felicianius Church) told the congregation that Christmas also meant that "this world could be made good, again". The...

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The Big Ask is on: These days, the leaders of the world convene in Copenhagen for the 15th time to address that "greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen": Climate Change.

Will they ward off that Tragedy of the Commons of our time? We don't know.

They are playing games in Copenhagen. Not of the entertaining kind, but of the intricately interdependent kind.

The Green Paradox is one of those intricacies: are we reckoning without our fossil-fuel supplying hosts? What are their stakes?

Let's...

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