So how do you get people to join an army and learn a highly specialised skill set, in fact, several, if your elite as a society is trying not to be part of society? Two links, both from Small Wars Journal. Plutocratic insurgency, starting with the Mont Pelerin Society – a far better framing than…
Read More In which I play a historian on the InternetAmong the fascinating prospects you poor fools are going to have to suck up is a full dress review of David Harvey’s History of Neoliberalism (shorter me: I think it’s adequate-ish), but before we get to that, a point I’d like to pull forward. In his conclusion, he spends quite a lot of time arguing…
Read More The sources of cupcake conservatismOK, here’s a photo from my summer. The car, in front of the modernist building, in the rather dilapidated car park, is an actual product of the DDR, a Wartburg, with Hungarian plates. Where are we, and why? Obviously, we’re in Archway, N19, north London but not the cupcakey sort. The car park is next…
Read More What I did on my holidays: a stability pact photoOK, so the Syrian air force drops these things – large, light alloy containers stuffed with shrapnel and low explosive, with a canister of much higher explosive in the middle, probably delivered from a helicopter or a tactical airlifter. Here’s an odd historical point. a two gallon drum with a cylinder containing about two pounds…
Read More Hello to all that – Syria, Sudan, and his LordshipOK, so you all know about Grant Shapps, spamblogger with a nasty prosperity-gospel twist (check out his dailyincome.com) and Tory Chairman. Here’s another bit of Tory Internet weirdness, completely by chance. So I wanted to look up Maria Miller, our new Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, plus a lot of stuff Tories…
Read More Tories, the party of dodgy affiliate marketing and typosquattingHere’s a post, first of a three-part series, from The Monkey Cage about inequality and power. The point Martin Gilens makes is that where a policy has broadly similar support across US income groups, its chance of being put into effect follows a well-behaved response curve with its approval rating. But a policy on which…
Read More The reactionary Internet predates ‘t other unWhy don’t I subscribe to Steve Randy Waldman’s blog? This piece is fantastic, on the competitiveness gap between southern and northern Europe, and makes up the best case I’ve yet seen for the view that prices, rather than wages, rose in Spain. The labour share of national income fell, while the prices of tradable goods…
Read More I commend these links to the House.Via someone on twatter, Parliament debates telecoms regulation, in 1895. The superficial bit: there was a great distinction between telephones and such subjects as gas and water. Gas and water were necessaries for every inhabitant of the country; telephones were not and never would be. It was no use trying to persuade themselves that the…
Read More How the Scottish Labour party got telecoms policy right in 1895“Why the Olympic Games mean we should support my politics” is already a sizeable genre, as Chris Brooke pointed out, quoting Daniel Davies in plausibly deniable mode. However, one of the very few pieces in this line that is worth reading is this one by Will Hutton, using the British Olympic team as an exemplar…
Read More The radical consensusInk Spots rips into what sounds like a truly dreadful TV belch, as well as one where the Stiftung’s opinion would be worth having. Ackerman also has a go, specifically at former SACEUR Wesley Clark’s role in it. Which reminded me. Back in 2004, in the circles of my MSc International Relations course, all sorts…
Read More Perhaps this could have been predicted