Favored links for Monday

I’ve written before, briefly, on the issue of monks voting in Cambodia. It’s a more complicated issue that simplistic support of ‘democracy’ would indicate. Here’s a recent article quoting Ven. Yos Hut Khemacaro on the issue. The patronage shakeups in the Cambodian Buddhasangha since 2003 have been substantial, but for the most part, difficult to track beyond the individual temple level. Perhaps these realignments have something to do with Ven. Tep Vong’s reversal of opinion on the right of monks to vote?

Al Jazeera’s 101 East Program has a reasonable discussion on the question of whether Foreign Aid is helping or hurting Cambodia. Worth watching.

Cambodia is still among the LDCs – Least Developed Countries. Ugh.

Fertilizer Prices have gone up by 235% in the last year.

The “Freakonomics” blog at the NYT has a lengthy set of questions and answers from an agricultural economist. Best question? Is there any justification for farm subsidies? Best answer? “No.” [via]

Daniel Dennett’s destruction of the notion of a unified consciousness (what used to be criticized in philosophy as a Leibnizian ‘monad,’ but has survived mostly because we seem incapable of not synthesizing our experiences and attributing them to a single consciousness) is discussed in a fun, and accessible post, here at Mind Hacks.

Mahmood Mamdani, whose book on Rwanda represented a major moment in my own thought and style of analysis, has just been named as the 9th most important public intellectual by the conservative bulwark, Foreign Policy. Weird world. [via OpenAnthropology]

The MST has been threatened with banning. There’s a call for defense here.

One of my earliest heroes, Dorothy Day, founded the Catholic Worker’s movement. They celebrated 75 years of service and struggle.