Archive for the 'ideology' Category
Aaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There’s an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies’ brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the [...]
Here’s that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap – she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa’ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else.
Some points on the text.
1) Black humour. [...]
Speaking of new Soviet men, The GOP Speaks continues to be a fantastic resource on authoritarian thinking. Short version – chap writes to every county- and state-level Republican chairman in the US and asks them to fill in a questionnaire. Blogs the results as they come in. Here’s number 26.
1) So long as it’s in [...]
More fake consensus. “It’s like a three ring circus in here!”
Here’s Chris Dillow, making the excellent point that the promises of cuts are significantly less than the average errors on forecasts of the budget balance. Here’s Samuel Brittan making the excellent point that the cure for the budget deficit is economic recovery. Here’s Economic Duncan [...]
Libertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker’s, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let’s define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based [...]
Charlie Stross wants to know what the future holds in terms of ideology – what the killer memes of tomorrow are likely to be. He’s working from the position that the huge ideological systems of the 20th century were all ways of coping with, or seeking, modernity; thus you have the big two, communism and [...]
This Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist [...]
Over at CT, a link to two polls – here and here. The killer finding is that the same sort of percentage of the US population, and the same sort of people, deny that Barack Obama is a US citizen *and* that the American and African continents were once part of the same landmass.
Specifically, an [...]
Here’s Henry from Crooked Timber not getting it. Here’s Randy McDonald not getting it. Look, the fact that neo-con wankers deal in baseless smears and mindlessly repeated talking points should neither be cause for surprise, nor should you hope to convince them of anything.
I occasionally make the point that after the Left invented post-modernism, the [...]
Does anyone actually imagine that Blairites are interested in the ideas of Amartya Sen? I ask chiefly for information.
After all, they often do things that look superficially like engaging intellectually with new ideas from the Left; writing articles about Sen or Etzioni or whoever in journals like Progress or Renewal, taking part in seminars at [...]
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