I just finished reading a recent article of the Yale Political Science Professor, Ian Shapiro, “On Non-Domination,” in which he contrasts his view of “power-based resourcism” and non-domination as the bedrock of justice to egalitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice. 

Here is a link to a memo providing a detailed, article by article comparison between the law promulgated by the June 30 government and that proposed by the Morsi government.

The “revolutionary” government — headed by the interim President, Adly Mansur, previously president of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, otherwise known as a bastion for liberal and democratic values — has passed a new law titled “Organization of the Right to Public Meetings, Marches and Peaceful Demonstrations.” Here is a link to the official version as published in the Egyptian Gazette.

I came across this 100-page report today documenting the names of many of the dead from the Rab’a Massacre and the circumstances of their death.  I cannot comment on the details, but I think it is crucial that Egyptians face the grim details of what happened on August 14.  By any objective measure, the Egyptian police and military committed “serious violations of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions,” i.e., they committed war crimes. 

The New Yorker has a brief piece on the views of Mohammed Abu al-Ghar, whom it describes as a lynchpin of Egypt’s liberals and emblematic of their support for the military.  In it, he admits that he and other decision-makers contemplated the possibility of a substantial number of deaths from the very moment the decision was made to move against the protesters.  But what kind of justification is given for this?  He absurdly claims that Morsi was much worse than Nixon, and Americans refused to let Nixon complete his term.

Over the past ten days, I read the highly informative work of the late Samer Soliman, “Autumn of Dictatorship.”  The book provides a detailed analysis of the political economy of the Mubarak regime and its various crises as it attempted to deal with the systematic decline of rents available to the Egyptian state. During that time, I tweeted various crucial points from the book. I thought it would be useful to put them all together in one blog post.