If you have access to a source of quality Dutch-processed cocoa powder, I recommend Alton Brown’s recipe for homemade cocoa mix. I tried it last year with a so-so brand of cocoa powder, and was less than thrilled. But this year we found a new variety at Whole Foods, and it’s some good stuff.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the area of democratic theory lately, which will provide fodder for a slew of more academic posts shortly. The area I’m focusing on is called deliberative democratic theory, which is basically concerned with getting citizens involved in the political process by getting them to justify their favored policies to one another. So Amazon has been spitting a bunch of titles at me lately, and this one caught my eye: Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government by Ethan J. Lieb. Here’s the description:
Leib concentrates on designing an institutional scheme for embedding deliberation in the practice of American democratic government. At the heart of his scheme is a process for the adjudication of issues of public policy by assemblies of randomly selected citizens convened to debate and vote on the issues, resulting in the enactment of laws subject both to judicial review and to possible veto by the executive and legislative branches. The “popular” branch would fulfill a purpose similar to the ballot initiative and referendum but avoid the shortcomings associated with those forms of direct democracy. Leib takes special pains to show how this new branch would be integrated with the already existing governmental and political institutions of our society, including administrative agencies and political parties, and would thus complement rather than supplant them.
I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not sure how it would work. I’ve expressed my doubts about government by proposition before, so I’m open to new ideas that execute the core idea more effectively. I’m definitely going to have to try to get a hold of this book.
Every once in a while I read a book I desperately wish I had written. The Philosopher at the End of the Universe by Mark Rowlands is one of those books. I’ll write a fuller review in the near future, but I wanted to give it a mention now. Rowlands is a philosophy prof in the UK and a big fan of science fiction stories. He argues that the high concepts of a lot of blockbuster movies are actually explorations of thorny philosophyical issues like personal identity and the reliability of knowledge. Since Star Wars is probably one of the things that got me thinking about ways of understanding the universe as a kid, I’m not one to argue. In fact, I just showed an episode of Babylon 5 to one of my classes to kick start a conversation about identity and the mind. And of course everyone has heard about the connection between philosophy and The Matrix.
What I like about Rowlands’ approach is that while he’s not dismissive of the movies, he also knows that a good exploration of the issues they raise requires more depth than you can get in a two-hour movie. So he expands the conversation to include key texts and arguments from a number of philosophers. He has a sense of humor, but he uses it in the service of a serious discussion. It’s a really nice piece of work.