The case for epistocratic republicanism

In recent years, the fortunes of democracy have waned both in theory and practice. This has added impetus not only to the republican case for strengthening democratic institutions but also to new anti-democratic thought. This article examines the claim made by Jason Brennan that epistocracy, rule by the ‘knowledgeable’, is compatible with freedom from domination. It begins by briefly explaining epistocracy and republicanism. It then presents the argument for epistocratic republicanism: that democracy can be a source of domination and that freedom from domination can be secured through non-democratic political institutions. The case against epistocratic republicanism is grounded in concerns about systemic domination and the ability of epistocrats to arbitrarily set the terms of social cooperation. These two arguments are judged on the basis of which better minimises domination while respecting its value to all people. Epistocratic republicanism is found to be less reliable because of the risks of epistemic injustice that accompanies systemic domination; democracy, accompanied by other republican institutions, is better at minimising domination and respecting persons. It concludes that republicans ought to be democrats

Illegal immigration as resistance to global poverty

This article defends illegal immigration from the Global South to the Global North, while being agnostic about the right of the state to control borders. This argument is based on two premises: A) cosmopolitan accounts of global distributive justice and b) the human right to resistance. Given that global poverty is an avoidable and intransigent violation of human rights, resistance is justifiable. Illegal immigration is a form of "infrapolitical" resistance that is comparable to fugitive slaves. Like these slave, people living in extreme poverty experience a durable form of domination in which escape is possible, even though it is highly risky. If one thinks that slave did nothing wrong, then one cannot condemn the illegal immigrant

Justice in assistance: A critique of the Singer Solution

This article begins with an examination of Peter Singer's solution to global poverty as a way to develop a theory of justice in assistance. It argues that Singer's work, while compelling, does not seriously engage with the institutions necessary to relieve global poverty. In order to realise our obligations it is necessary to employ secondary agents, such as non-governmental organisations, that produce complex social relationships with the global poor. We should be concerned that the affluent and their secondary agents are complicit with unjust institutions or can be the source of injustice. What is needed is a theory of justice in assistance. This is a distinct area of justice theory because these agents are not primary agents, like states, but they often provide the basic social goods that we associate with primary agents. The article ends by putting forward a provisional conception of justice in assistance based on the republican idea of non-domination

Is There a Human Right to Resistance?

This article is premised on the idea that global poverty is the foreseeable and avoidable by-product of the international system. This position is held by many cosmopolitans, but rarely do they deal with the consequences of this claim. This paper will examine the idea of a right to resistance in the face of global poverty. It will argue that a right to resistance is a necessary component of the political conception of human rights. It will also be argued that it is latent in some major documents and declarations to the point that it can be considered an emerging practice

Letter written to Thomas Bowen from James Blunt.

Handwriting is hard to decipher, but was transcribed by Lloyd Holbrook of Goodland, Kansas.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/tj_bowen/1004/thumbnail.jp

Letter from James G. Blunt to Salmon P. Chase, August 9, 1859

In 1856, abolitionist James G. Blunt (1826-1881) moved to Kansas to get involved in the conflict over slavery. He joined a militia with John Brown and was a delegate to the Wyandotte constitutional convention that composed the Kansas state constitution in 1859. In this letter, Blunt writes to Salmon Chase about the Wyandotte convention, ratification of the Kansas constitution, and Chase’s possible presidential nomination.https://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/abolitionistletters/1001/thumbnail.jp

Reconstruction of three-dimensional porous media using generative adversarial neural networks

To evaluate the variability of multi-phase flow properties of porous media at the pore scale, it is necessary to acquire a number of representative samples of the void-solid structure. While modern x-ray computer tomography has made it possible to extract three-dimensional images of the pore space, assessment of the variability in the inherent material properties is often experimentally not feasible. We present a novel method to reconstruct the solid-void structure of porous media by applying a generative neural network that allows an implicit description of the probability distribution represented by three-dimensional image datasets. We show, by using an adversarial learning approach for neural networks, that this method of unsupervised learning is able to generate representative samples of porous media that honor their statistics. We successfully compare measures of pore morphology, such as the Euler characteristic, two-point statistics and directional single-phase permeability of synthetic realizations with the calculated properties of a bead pack, Berea sandstone, and Ketton limestone. Results show that GANs can be used to reconstruct high-resolution three-dimensional images of porous media at different scales that are representative of the morphology of the images used to train the neural network. The fully convolutional nature of the trained neural network allows the generation of large samples while maintaining computational efficiency. Compared to classical stochastic methods of image reconstruction, the implicit representation of the learned data distribution can be stored and reused to generate multiple realizations of the pore structure very rapidly.Comment: 21 pages, 20 figure

Sometimes the most powerful act of resistance is to do nothing

Resistance is a human right. This is why the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that people will be ‘compelled to have recourse, in the last resort, to rebellion’ if human rights are not respected, and why the defence of human rights framed in many United Nations resolutions supports resistance against colonialism and apartheid. It could not be otherwise. If your rights are violated, you must have a recourse. Normally this would be found in the law and the courts but, when faced with severe and intransigent injustice, resistance is that recourse. But when others are resisting, and we are sympathetic to their aims, what should we do? The answer is surprising

Continuum-scale characterization of solute transport based on pore-scale velocity distributions

We present a methodology to characterize a continuum-scale model of transport in porous media on the basis of pore-scale distributions of velocities computed in three-dimensional pore-space images. The methodology is tested against pore-scale simulations of flow and transport for a bead pack and a sandstone sample. We employ a double continuum approach to describe transport in mobile and immobile regions. Model parameters are characterized through inputs resulting from the micron-scale reconstruction of the pore space geometry and the related velocity field. We employ the outputs of pore-scale analysis to (i) quantify the proportion of mobile and immobile fluid regions, and (ii) assign the velocity distribution in an effective representation of the medium internal structure. Our results (1) show that this simple conceptual model reproduces the spatial profiles of solute concentration rendered by pore-scale simulation without resorting to model calibration, and (2) highlight the critical role of pore-scale velocities in the characterization of the model parameters