There is no British netroots, and God forbid there ever will be. Why? Well, the original thing is/was an effort to mobilise the grassroots support of the US Democratic Party, to shove in the underpinning of a mass party that it doesn’t really have. This was intended to a) supply activists and donations, and b)…
Read More I never wanted the love that you showed meWhat is it with sodding “electrosensitivity”? Why has it suddenly achieved escape-from-reality velocity this spring? What is it with columnists like the Obscurer‘s Jasper Gerard, who this week chose to announce that, if you include the long-term sick, the total number of unemployed people in Britain is over 3 million. Wasn’t it like that under…
Read More We’re so pretty…we’re vacant!After this post, my quest to grasp heterodox economics moved on to this Crooked Timber thread, in which Dsquared argues that the biggest problem with orthodox economics is that it doesn’t really account for profits. And profits are a pretty big thing to miss, especially as the entire notion of economics relies on the idea…
Read More When profit is a problemYou probably don’t know that the government wants to implement wholesale filtering of URL requests from the end of next month, do you? Not that the national press, TV, or anything else has reported on it, nor has there been any serious parliamentary debate. Nuh. But the Home Office is pressurising British ISPs to install…
Read More It’s for your own good (again)Tom Griffin links a stack of briefings prepared by the Reconstruction Operations Centre in Iraq, the coordination point for private security firms run by Aegis Defence Services. The first thing that strikes me is that they are impressively more sane, factual, and useful that anything I’ve seen emanating from the US Army. Not that this…
Read More IncomingSo the cult of the amateur is killing our culture, right? What if I was to tell you that bloggers had accused someone of abducting Madeleine McCann purely on the basis that he spoke foreign and had associated with Bogus Asylum Seekers? You’d be shocked. Well, the national press did it. Robert Murat, the only…
Read More Your Professional National PressContrary to what John Robb says, the supposed plot (no explosives, information from a sooper source, mystery men) to attack a jet fuel pipeline into New York (JFK) airport does not bear out his theories as anything distinct from good old-fashioned counterinsurgency. Robbo is right that the pipeline was a good target, but I suspect…
Read More Limits of RobbismI would like to understand the current controversy going on over at many more-read blogs than this one regarding “orthodox” and “heterodox” economics. At least, I’d like to understand it better. I’m sympathetic to a general critique of what we’re apparently obliged to describe as “orthodox” economics – unrealistic standard assumptions, unrealistic views of rationality,…
Read More Heterecon BlegIn any given period of history, the proportion of irony to available cases tends towards 1. The last people in the world who seriously consider that there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are working for the United Nations, and it’s Russia that wants to keep them on the job, and the US…
Read More The maximum irony generation principleRemember this post on Maglev, managerialists, and creationist technology? Heavily-blogged Myers links to equally heavily-blogged article on the market for Kalashnikov rifles. Apparently, everything he reads only makes sense in the light of evolution. Funny that – think process. This is also why the Chinese textile industry wants to reopen an old mill in Wigan,…
Read More Kalashnikovs, trousers, squid, pies..