"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by liberal japonicus Being in a country with a working national health care system, I've thought of the Obamacare battles as the typical overwrought commentary. However, via Atul Gawande, I see that this view is all too sanguine. Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds … Read more
by liberal japonicus
It is probably a measure of not only tragedy fatigue, but also the distance that Africa stands in my mind that the terror attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi didn't really loom very large. Most of my reading of world news is about Asia and my recent post about Kyrgyz has me trying to figure out all the names and places of Central Asia as well as dealing with the more mundane aspects of classes starting.
by liberal japonicus When I saw this, I was sure it was in Onion article Microsoft chairman Bill Gates acknowledged that the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” means of logging into your Windows PC was a mistake, although done with the best of intentions. Ted Cruz juxtaposing Dr. Seuss and the Bataan Death March, a bridge named after a … Read more
by dr ngo
Everyone who’s ever been in the military has stories to tell, and I am no exception. Mine are scarcely the best around – for one thing, they occurred about 10,000 miles from the nearest combat – but they are my own, and in this telling of them, at least, they are true, to the best of my recollection. Besides, for me most of you are a new audience, though not exactly a captive one, since you can easily skip over this. (If any of you want more stories, just buy me a drink. Any drink. Any time.)
by Doctor Science
Reality in the sense of “Reality TV”, i.e. “not reality”. A performance.
Right now I see people from Karl Rove to Paul Krugman saying that the GOP’s determination to “defund Obamacare or bust” is quixotic, self-defeating, or just plain crazy.[1]
I don’t think it is. I think that, for the Tea Party end of the GOP, the attack on Obamacare makes good business sense. It’s just a question of what business they’re actually in — and I don’t think that business is politics in the sense of law-making. Their business is performance.
by liberal japonicus
This post is part travelogue and part musing on world politics, though I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins. In possibly the most famous Sherlock Holmes story, the key clue is the dog that didn't bark and while it may be strange to find a non-barking dog in Kyrgyz, it's one of the things I take away.
by liberal japonicus I'm back and in the process of writing a post about my travels, but this guest post on LGM by Robert Widdell caught my eye as I was catching up. It discusses the 50th anniversary of the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and specifically, it was this passage: In this context, … Read more
by Doctor Science Last week, Corey Robin wrote about Jews Without Israel: In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. .. I remember the rabbi first taking up the topic in earnest in 2011 (or was it 2010?), almost apologetically, saying that we … Read more
by Ugh Not sure LJ is putting one up for Friday given his current location (although he's closer than Voyager 1) so for y'all's enjoyment, here you go. That Syria thing sure took a turn. I think it essentially reflects that Obama, at bottom, really didn't want to bomb them, although he was clearly going … Read more
by Doctor Science
In my last post I mentioned some things I was disappointed by in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, but that’s not by any means my opinion of the book as a whole. Indeed, I found it fascinating, mind-opening and for the most part convincing in its core thesis: that money did not arise out of barter, as the story is usually told, but out of debt. Graeber argues that debt as a social obligation is much older and more universal than money, and he demonstrates it with wide-ranging knowledge of history and anthropology.
One of the many insights I got from the book was into the nature of the Jewish High Holy Days, the “Days of Awe”. Not because Graeber discusses them specifically, but because of this passage, describing Early Modern England (based on the work of Craig Muldrew):
In a typical village … everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would hold a general public “reckoning”, canceling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods. [Debt, p.327]
Graeber notes that “the circular cancellation of debts in this way seems to have been quite a common practice in much of history” [p.400-01], though he gives no other details.
When I read Graeber’s description of a yearly circular debt cancellation, I immediately recognized the Days of Repentance.
by Ugh The New York Times: Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish … Read more
by Doctor Science
I was surprised by the romantic historical ignorance about work in Yves Smith’s post on The Rise of Bullshit Jobs. It’s annoying, because I agree with Smith (and David Graeber, whom he starts out quoting) that
most people work longer hours than they should and consume too much, and many would benefit from increased free time to spend with family or relaxing.
But then he goes and quotes Yasha Levine, talking about
The Invention of Capitalism by economic historian Michael Perelmen:
Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?…
A romantic vision of the pre-industrial “rural communal lifestyle” is also my biggest criticism of Graeber’s Debt, though he romanticizes the forager (hunter-gatherer) communal lifestyle instead.
