December 2009
13 posts
2 tags
Goodbye to All That
I’m not the only one, no doubt, who’s glad to be done with this awful, soul-sucking decade. For Americans, at any rate, watching our country lurch from the horror of 9/11, to the sadistic imperialism that followed, to the economic miasma we currently inhabit, has been one ordeal after another. (Let me associate myself with the sentiments in Spencer Ackerman’s Guantánamo...
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Status Quo Bias
It seems that a lot of opposition to new legislation in Washington is driven less by the particular merits of each proposal than by the fact that they are new. We saw this with the GOP raising the specter of socialized medicine with health care reform, while at the same time positioning themselves as stalwart defenders of Medicare — nothing socialized about that! In a similar vein, at this...
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Engineers: The real terrorist threat? →
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The Material Conditions for Art
Taking off this Alyssa Rosenberg post, the fetish of poverty with respect to art is based on a profound misunderstanding of why artists, generally, are poor: The market for art is fiercely competitive, which means that wages for artists will tend to be meager. If there were fewer artists, or more demand for art, then wages would rise, all else being equal. But poverty fetishists focus on the...
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Against the Filibuster
Ezra Klein makes several good points about the pernicious effect the filibuster has had on the Senate, and therefore on national politics in general. It’s perverse that a simple majority is needed for a political party to assume control of a legislature (and thus set its agenda), but a supermajority is needed to actually do anything.
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Test post
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After Copenhagen
On the recently concluded Copenhagen climate change agreement — such as it is — you can look at it three ways: 1. It’s kicking the can down the road. The agreement, with all its placeholders and blank spaces — most egregiously, the appendix meant to list individual country commitments — will only have meaning once further negotiations try to breath life into it....
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Conservatives for Industrial Policy
John Quiggin has a good commentary on Australia’s embattled Liberal Party. They have gone all out in opposition to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed cap-and-trade system — even to the point of ousting their leader, Malcolm Turnbull, for his accommodationist stance — but also seem to recognize that denialism on climate change will make them even more unpopular than they...
4 tags
Cutting Through the Climate Fog
Chris Hayes makes the case for focusing the climate change debate on — wait for it — climate change:But overall, the public opinion data on climate point to a deeper problem with the way the capping of carbon has been sold, both by Democratic lawmakers and progressive activists—that is, as a bill that seems to have nothing to do with catastrophic climate change. “Make no...