The end of the era of easy US hypocrisy

In an important article in the November-December 2013 issue of Foreign Policy magazine titled The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore lay out in great detail what I have been saying here, and that is that the main benefit of the Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning leaks is that by providing incontrovertible documentary evidence of what the US government does, it has resulted in seriously damaging the US government’s ability to lie and use hypocrisy in its favor. [Read more…]

How can these things happen?

Cleveland was rocked last year by the revelation that a man had imprisoned three women in his house for a decade, fathering a child by one of them, before they were rescued. It seemed bizarre that this could have happened in a city in a neighborhood where the houses were so close to each other, and triggered a lot of discussion and guilt about how it could be that no one noticed anything untoward. [Read more…]