krebscycle

  • Low wages, social insecurity

    Conservatives are now hardly bothering to disguise their political objective – destroying the middle class. Here’s Politico explaining the consensus of official Washington on Medicare. The thing to notice is that they don’t care about cutting costs –  the benefits are what they want to cut. They will also tell…

  • Cheery holiday thoughts

    For Schopenhauer, suffering is an ineliminable feature of this worst of all possible worlds. Here the nastiness of experience makes it such that, for each of us, it would have been better not to have been born. Indeed for Schopenhauer, our world can be described quite accurately as hell, and…

  • Keynes versus usury

    If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. For a little reflection will show what…

  • Basketball metaphor updated

    Suppose liberal/progressive pundits called a basketball game: Chalmers takes the ball upcourt – that’s incredibly stupid, he’s not a scorer He passes to Wade –  Basketball 101: You can’t score if you don’t put the ball in the hoop, all this passing bullshit is pure cowardice. Wade in traffic, passes…

  • Color and class blind “progressives”

    Color and class blind “progressives”

    The professional “left” in the USA, the left of entertainers, professors, lobbyists, and “progressive media” is now mostly a suburb of Libertarianism – a suburb that has preserved only certain habits of speech and some historical myths from the old left.  By way of illustration consider Corey Robin’s  3500 word…

  • Negotiation 101 Revisited: a primer

    Here’s what happens when you make a bunch of concessions before negotiations begin: your compromised stance becomes the *baseline*. — David Roberts (@drgrist) November 8, 2012 //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Why is it that progressive pundits are so eager to make pronouncements about things they know nothing about? Political negotiations are not like…

  • Lessons Learned Obama term one: Part one

    The  biggest success of the anti-Obama “progressives” over the last four years has been to displace any actual Democratic critique of the Obama administration. What passes for “left” or “progressive” critique ranges from dyspeptic Libertarianism to bitter whining of old white men (and some old black men) who don’t find…

  • LBJ explains the secret of American politics

  • Connor Freidersdorf’s Unsound Moral Calculus

    What I am saying is that Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. I hate when that happens – a politician goes beyond the Moral Comfort Zone of a Morally Serious Thinker like Mr. Friedersdorf.…

  • Matt Stoller’s progressivism in Victorian England

    ‘It can’t never be haltered,’ interrupted old Linden. ‘I don’t see no sense in all this ‘ere talk. There’s always been rich and poor in the world, and there always will be.’ ‘Wot I always say is there ‘ere,’ remarked Philpot, whose principal characteristic–apart from thirst–was a desire to see…