December 2011
Keynes Was Right →
“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy...
“Libertarianism, in other words, is infallible. Wherever it fails, it does so...”
– Why Libertarianism Doesn’t Work
Israel, the Palestinians, and an Invented People →
The Greek historian Herodotus was the first person to call the land of Canaan “Palestine.” Josephus, the Jewish historian, also used the name Palestine to designate the land of Israel. However, it was the Roman emperor Hadrian who officially called the Roman province of Judea Provincia Palestina. Thus, after many years of usage, the name Palestine became the official designation for the land...
The Precious Steven Pinker →
Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I suppose. It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more “enlightened” or “rational” than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction.
That is to say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced...
“Take Mitt Romney. The narrative on Mitt is “flip-flopper.” He has a murky past,...”
– Martin Amis Goes on the GOP Campaign Trail
Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News In The 2011 Ratings →
According to Comedy Central, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart averaged 2.3 million viewers per episode in 2011. Unlike Fox News, “The Daily Show” was up in total viewers (+7%) and all key demos: adults 18-49 (+6%); men 18-34 (+2%); men 18-24 (+4%).” The Daily Show was also the top cable late night talk show in terms of total viewers, and was generally dominant. While Fox News was losing 14% in...
“When the GOP took the House they promised to focus on jobs and the American...”
– GOP: Let’s Get Tough
A similar era? →
Turning back for a moment to the present day, the Republicans in the last four years have treated Barack Obama in the same way their ancestors treated Andrew Johnson—and, I would suggest, for the same two reasons. First, they see him as attempting to maintain an old order which they detest—the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society. They prefer, of course, to argue that he...
Military Stimulus: US Selling Tens of Billions in... →
Yay, we’re arming both sides of a potential regional conflict!
“This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily...”
– Jake Olzen
The Agony of Iraq, the Country of My Birth →
The illegal Iraq war has melted the glue that bound Iraqi society together. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in charge of Iraq after the war, headed the Coalition Provisional Authority whose members were based on quotas representing the mosaic of Iraqi society. It thus deliberately employed the maxim of divide and rule. But why should the Iraqis expect otherwise? The American aim, supported...
I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping... →
Obviously, the absence of a must-see mass-market movie. When moviegoers hear about “Avatar” or “The Dark Knight,” they blast off from home base and land in a theater seat as quickly as they can.
Ticket prices are too high. People have always made that complaint, but historically the movies have been cheap compared to concerts, major league sports and restaurants. Not...
“One of the problems with liberalism in this country is that it’s headquartered...”
– Thomas Frank
The Tea Party’s “utopian market populism”
Salon: You write that after Obama took office, “market populism was the only utopian scheme available to disgruntled Americans.” There was no liberal utopian scheme that said, “Here’s how we get out of this.”
Tom Frank: There wasn’t even a Rooseveltian scheme, which was not utopian but very practical. Just to talk about Roosevelt would have been fantastic. One of the research points in the book that I thought was really interesting … was the history of the bailouts in 1932 and 1933 — when the Hoover administration did a lot of bailouts. We don’t remember that. [These bailouts] were massively unpopular for the same reason they were unpopular this time around: really blatant cronyism. We don’t remember that a big part of Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign [in 1932] was to be against these bailouts. There were maybe five newspaper articles in 2008 that mentioned this pre-history of the bailouts. It just never came up.
Salon: It was like the party’s muscle memory of the New Deal was lost. With Obama the muscle memory of the Democratic Party is the Clintonian technocracy of the 1990s.
Tom Frank: That’s exactly right. Their message was: The technocratic way is going to solve our problems. Just leave it up to the experts who are going to figure a way out. [Obama and the Democrats] seemed to think they didn’t need to dirty their hands by making a populist appeal. They did a lot of good things — the stimulus package of 2008 was good thing — but they didn’t realize you have to sell something like that. They were like, “We know what the answer is: Keynesian stimulus. So let’s just do it.” They didn’t understand that this nation only adopted Keynesian stimulus spending back in the 1930s amidst this terrible wrenching experience, the Depression, and an enormous campaign [by FDR] to tell the nation why this was necessary.
If you don’t sell it — if you just do this spending — well, people have a lot of suspicion of government handouts. Government debt bothers people for very obvious reasons. [Obama] didn’t make any effort to make the argument. It was just “listen to the experts.” I have a quote from [Obama economic advisor] Christy Roemer where she says, “Things would be better if we listened to the experts.” And she’s one of the good guys, one of the best people in the Obama administration. That’s their view.
Kahneman on Well-Being and Domains of... →
Kahneman makes three key points in this talk. The first point, which is somewhat subtle in that he only briefly alludes to it, is that happiness is a complicated construct and that there has been a shift away from this term, as it has been found not to capture the essence of what researchers are interested in. In a nutshell, what researchers have ‘found’ is that the concept of...
Report: Iranian surveillance plane films, takes... →
TEHRAN, Iran — An Iranian surveillance plane has recorded video and photographed a U.S. aircraft carrier during Iran’s ongoing navy drill near a strategic waterway in the Persian Gulf, the official IRNA news agency reported on Thursday.
“…if you’re going to argue that same-sex couples cannot get married because it is...”
– Dr. Robert R. Cargill
Trust in Neurons →
Charles Darwin had human beings on his mind from the very beginning of his theorizing about species descent. He was especially concerned to give an account of their highest trait—not their reasoning ability, but their moral capacity. From the perspective of the British empiricist tradition, even the lowly ant might display a small dollop of reason, whereas moral judgment remained an exclusively...
“Maybe 2012 will be the year that voters and political leaders finally start...”
– The Voices of Poverty
Rebs and Indians →
Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War is a chilling book, but one of the most chilling moments comes at the end, in a quotation of a letter from General Philip Sheridan to Sherman in 1873: “In taking the offensive [against Indians] I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends; and, if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the...
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power...”
– Ron Paul
9/11 and Iraq? →
alsson:
“Do you remember that time during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush made clear to the American people that if he became the next President of the United States, he would take the country to war with Iraq — a war that would kill 4,484 Americans, “wound” 22,490, give hundreds of thousands of Americans head injuries and post-traumatic stress, not to mention killing hundreds...
The Dangerous Effects of Reading →
A life optimized for consuming might look like this:
45 minutes in the car listening to podcasts (at double speed) while driving to work
30 minutes of blog reading in the morning.
Time in bathroom spent reading on your phone [Side note: how freaking scary would it have been to explain to your great-great-grandfather that people would carry around computers and look at them while in...
“The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war,...”
– Cory Doctorow
Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It’s... →
Total expenses for the richest family in the bottom half of America?
24% taxes
27% housing
34% food, health care, child care, transportation, household needs
12% energy
That’s 97% of their income. The richest family among 70,000,000 households is left with just $1,500 for a car, appliances, a TV, a cell phone, a loan repayment, an occasional night out. It comes to $30 a...
“If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it is that the very...”
– Frederik Pohl
“Right now the major political struggles are over whether or not to scrap major...”
– The Era of the Ron Paul Newsletters Isn’t Even Past
Middle-aged borrowers piling on student debt →
Both Weiss and Lin noted that this government-backed debt, unlike most other debt, cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy, so it is an albatross for those who can’t make enough money after going back to school.
“If we’re going to get anywhere addressing problems like the jobs crisis that has...”
– slacktivist
How the feds are tracking your kid →
Would it bother you to know that the federal Centers for Disease Control had been shown your daughter’s health records to see how she responded to an STD/teen-pregnancy-prevention program? How about if the federal Department of Education and Department of Labor scrutinized your son’s academic performance to see if he should be “encouraged” to leave high school early to learn a trade? Would you...
“The first great task of the first self-consciously “American” Americans was the...”
– CK MacLeod’s
Labor and the Living Wage →
Inquiries about labor’s proper wage have been central to anarchism since its birth as an explicit idea. In practical politics, those important issues are generally ignored in favor of superficial appeals to “American free enterprise.” The argument from conservative quarters is that government ought to stay out of the employment agreement.
But government is already involved in those...
“Do you remember that time during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W....”
– Is a Vote for Romney a Vote for War?
“Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad...”
– The Big Lie
The Drone as Privacy Catalyst →
Associated today with the theatre of war, the widespread domestic use of drones for surveillance seems inevitable. Existing privacy law will not stand in its way. It may be tempting to conclude on this basis that drones will further erode our individual and collective privacy. Yet the opposite may happen. Drones may help restore our mental model of a privacy violation. They could be just the...
“It was the Reconstructionists who, along with several less extreme activists...”
– Frank Schaeffer
3 tags
Percentage increase in National Debt by Presidency →
Reagan 189.0%
Bush 43 89.0%
Bush 41 51.6%
Carter 42.6%
Clinton 36.0%
Obama 34.0%
“The reaction of the American government, and its people, to drug use was —...”
– Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins
Republicans Try to Impose Selfishness on American... →
All year, Republicans have demanded an end to programs the middle class created to aid the majority, the 99 percent. The GOP wants to reverse the new banking regulations that were passed in an attempt to prevent another economic collapse caused by risky Wall Street practices. The GOP tried to to rescind the healthcare reform law that prevents insurance companies from terminating coverage when...
Mitt Romney: The Real Austerity Candidate →
Over the holidays, Willard Romney has been seeking once again to define himself, a job that is very similar to that undertaken by the people who renovate old country homes. The first thing you have to do is to tear down the accumulated improvements and renovations of the past 40 or 50 years, and get back down to the basic intent of the original architects. (Maybe changing the solarium into a...
“Just as the family is “the first and best teacher of the faith,” it is up to...”
– The Imaginative Conservative
Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for... →
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries...