Monthly Archive: August 2011

Class Warfare in London

Class Warfare in London

I have very little patience for the school of thought that says that everything boils down to class warfare. But if I absolutely must pick a class — because some folks insist on it...

Hayekian Stimulus

If you watch this Hayek vs. Keynes rap again, you’ll notice that very rarely throughout are the two men actually disagreeing with one another. They’re largely talking past one another, with Keynes speaking directly to...

Storytelling & Politics

Drew Westen’s piece on the failure of the president to tell the right stories has met with much ire across the blogosphere. I find this odd. After all, the same people who often say...

More leftist internecine warfare!

Just to supplement a bit the central argument of this great post from Shawn, I’d like to point your attention towards the following from The Monkey Cage. In the post, Eric Schickler, “a political...

Nickel and Dimed Ten Years Later

TomDispatch has published Barbara Ehrenreich’s new afterword for the tenth anniversary of her now classic work Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Here is my favorite passage, although it’s definitely worth...

Self-Referential Post

I confess: I’ve been engaged here at the League for this long only so that I can get my hands on the behind-the-scenes interface. Now that Erik has fallen for my long-laid plan, I’m...

Question on Empiricism

I know what you’re going to say: I’m getting you to do my homework for me! But I’m working on designing my Enlightenment course today and I’m trying to select a single text for the English Empiricism...

Introduction/Overture/Prologue

It appears that my long-time moniker RTod is going the way of the buggy whip, “Trumwill,” and the edginess once associated with the Simpsons as I join the League’s regular posting… um… stable? Team? ...

At My Real Job: The Decline of Men

At Cato Unbound this month, Kay Hymowitz looks at the trends and considers whether men are in decline: Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property, and, arguably, more money...

Rick Perry’s Christian America

~by Tom Van Dyke Well, the problem isn’t perhaps-GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry attending a semi-political prayer meeting. This stuff happens all the time. [His playing Pontifex Maximus for it and the potential political...

Politics is policy is policy is politics

In a response to my latest, Kevin Drum goes into greater detail as to why he finds the criticism and advice doled out by Westen (among others) unconvincing. I think he makes some good...

The Affluent (and Downgraded, Debt-Laden) Society

The late preeminent liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once complained in The Affluent Society that where Democrats once stood for an issue of great importance in emphasizing production, they lost that issue by misunderstanding...

(Civil) War and Tragedy, Cont’d

Tossed off almost like an aside, and one of those lines I had to go back and listen to multiple times while somewhere on I-65 in the northern half of Indiana, Eric Foner speculates...