My Salon column this morning on Joe Biden and the Jews has generated a lot of conversation, at Salon, on Crooked Timber, and on my Facebook page and others. I want to address here four objections to the column that have been made. 1. A few commenters have claimed that I completely misinterpreted Biden’s comment. Biden wasn’t saying, they claim, that American Jews have no guarantee of their safety save Israel but that Israeli Jews have no such guarantee. What’s more, I alone have come up with this far-fetched reading, ignoring for my own reasons—a desire for “clickbait,” one commenter said—the more obvious interpretation of Biden’s remarks. There’s a few problems with this claim. First, and most obviously, Biden’s remarks were first reported by […]
Alexander Cockburn, one of the finest radical journalists—no, journalists—of his generation, has died. Because of the similarities between him and Christopher Hitchens—both Anglos (he of Ireland, Hitchens of England) in America; both friends, for a time; both left (though, in Hitchens’s case, for a time); and both dying relatively young from cancer—people, inevitably, will want to make comparisons. Here, very quickly, are three (and why I think Cockburn was ultimately the superior writer). First, Cockburn was a much better observer of people and of politics: in part because he didn’t impose himself on the page the way Hitchens did, he could see particular details (especially of class and of place) that eluded Hitchens. At his best, he got out of […]
Since my last roundup on the response to Chris Bertram’s, Alex Gourevitch’s, and my piece on workplace tyranny, there’s been a lot of action. But before I get to that, there are a couple of dispatches from the front that are just doozies. Down in Australia, a company issues guidelines for how its employees ought to keep their work stations clean: Cold soup can be freely enjoyed in communal hubs on each floor, but hot soup is only permitted on the “top deck”, an area devoted to eating and socialising on level 45 with sweeping views of the city and beyond. While gum, throat lozenges and lollies can be consumed at desks, the privilege does not extend to “chocolate, fruit, […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Alex Gourevitch, Alex Tbarrok, Brad DeLong, Chris Bertram, Daniel MacDonald, Frank Pasquale, Henry Farrell, Jacob Levy, Jason Brennan, Judith Shklar, Julian Sanchez, Matt Zwolinski, Mike Konczal, Peter Dorman, Roderick Long, Tyler Cowen
It’s no secret that Friedrich von Hayek was a warm supporter of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody regime. As I wrote in The Nation a few years back: Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned. In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Greg Grandin, Naomi Klein, Brad DeLong, John Quiggin (twice), and Michael Lind also have written about the Hayek-Pinochet connection. By […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Alan Ebenstein, Andrew Farrant, Brad DeLong, Crooked Timber, Edmund Burke, Edward McPhail, El Mercurio, Greg Grandin, Gunnar Myrdal, Hayek, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Quiggin, Michael Lind, Pinochet, Salazar, Sebastian Berger
So many responses to our Crooked Timber piece I can barely keep up (see my last post for an initial round-up). And now the responses are generating their only little mini-wars. These Bleeding Hearts Let’s start with the Bleeding Hearts themselves. Kevin Vallier has a lengthy reply, in which he concludes that the Bleeding Hearts “can have it all.” (I initially wanted to title our post “The Bleeding Hearts Can’t Have It All.” So at least we’re all the same kitschy page.) Jason Brennan has some interesting statistics on Denmark and France that I know we’ll want to come back to. Proving once again that he’s the menschiest of the menschen, Matt Zwolinski wonders “why are employers so mean?” Though […]
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Categories
Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Aaron Swartz, Arnold King, Belle Waring, Brad DeLong, Henry Farrell, Jason Brennan, Jessica Flanigan, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Vallier, Matt Yglesias, Matt Zwolinski, Noah Smith, Tyler Cowen, Will Wilkinson
On Thursday, September 29, The Reactionary Mind was officially launched. Because of Rosh Hashanah—Shanah Tovah to all of you!—I haven’t been able to keep up with the whirlwind of commentary and activity around the book. With time, I hope to have lengthier, more substantive responses to the thought-provoking reactions I’ve read. But in the meantime, I just wanted to give you all a quick roundup and a reminder. First, the reminder: I’m doing a public conversation with Chris Hayes over at the CUNY Graduate Center on Thursday, October 6, at 7 pm. Details here. Come early; seating may be tight. Onto the reactions. Interviews Salon interviewed me about the book and contemporary conservatism more generally. Salt Lake City’s NPR […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Andrew Sullivan, Brad DeLong, Caleb Crain, Charles Petersen, Chris Hayes, Digby, Doug Henwood, Elias Isquith, James Kwak, Mike Konczal
Those of you following this discussion between me, Matt Yglesias, and Mike Konczal, need to check out this post from Doug Henwood. It not only cuts through a lot of the fat, but it also takes us in a completely different, unexpected, and difficult direction, raising fascinating questions about the petit bourgeois origins and dimensions of the politics of inflation. Doug is my rabbi in all things economic (though, sadly, we part ways on matters musical). Check it out, comment there, here, everywhere. To my astonishment, this debate, or a spin-off of this debate, seems to have been kicked upstairs. Way upstairs. As in Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong upstairs. Update (July 18, 12:30 pm) And now the boys—and, seriously, […]