Are you sure she was being tongue-in-cheek?
Yeah, I was waiting for the snappy counter to come after the conventional wisdomish rhetorical question.
The U.K. is lucky Rick Perry doesn't live there. Apparently he is an unstoppable vote gathering machine.
Because you know this guy would have stopped those riots toot sweet.
It's sad to see Britain, a country with such potential, tearing itself apart. Someone should do something.
Can the UK simultaneously grow the economy while shrinking the size of government?
No.
Snappy enough for you?
There is something quite to the point about that comment. For the right it is axiomatic that if you shrink the government you will grow the economy, when all of economic history points to the opposite conclusion.
Lets sloganize it some more: "You cannot shrink the government and grow the economy."
Hey! Clyburn, Becerra, and Van Hollen.
"You can't grow the economy by shrinking the government."
More accurate?
Pelosi made OK choices, but Van Hollen's been a disappointment since David Lee Roth left.
The French Revolution: experimental politics.
Man, I've defended Ezra Klein in the past, but was it his boyhood dream to become an establishment tool?
14: I haven't watched the video, but it seems likely to me that Romney was saying "Corporations are people," in the sense that corporations are composed of people. Sort of the same way you might say "soylent green is people."
15: Yeah, awkward phrasing, I suppose, but it's not any different than saying "the government is people".
That explains the funny smell at the DMV.
Which would not be the interpretation Ezra is defending.
Not snappy, but Michael Lewis moves from Ireland to Germany. Funny, sad, poignant.
He laughs and then continues. "For 40 years we didn't lose a penny on anything with a triple-A rating," he says. "We stopped building the portfolio in subprime in 2006. I had the idea that there was something wrong with your market." He pauses. "I was in the belief that the best supervised of all banking systems was in New York. To me the Fed and the S.E.C. were second to none. I did not believe that there would be e-mail traffic between investment bankers saying that they were selling ... " He pauses and decides he shouldn't say "shit." "Dirt," he says instead. "This is by far my biggest professional disappointment. I was in a much too positive way U.S.-biased. I had a set of beliefs about U.S. values."The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but it has become over the past few decades something else too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt, named Aaron Kirchfeld, put it to me, "You'd talk to a New York investment banker, and they'd say, 'No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!' " When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit-default swaps all but certain to fail so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the main buyers were German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against--a bond that Paulson hoped would fail--the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, is based in Düsseldorf--which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street bond trader who was buying all this crap during the boom, he might well say, simply, "Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf."
Fucking Nazis couldn't imagine the more profound evil across the Atlantic. Wait, Hitler in Mein Kampf was essentially a want-to-be American, wanting to eradicate the Slavs like the Americans eradicated their natives. He just wasn't competent, wasn't cruel enough to make our grade.
How could the Germans forget what Americans are?
Who shoved a pocket square up bob's ass?
14, 18: I read Ezra not so much defending Romney as noting the absurdity of various laws that give corporations constitutional rights, etc. The actual tweet doens't give much explanaiton one way of the other, further demonstrating that tweets are not a good means for political discourse.
20:Moby, see the German Banks were conned by Wall Street, and in order to save their countries are putting the screws to Ireland, Greece, Portugal.
Wall Street, America, is the one who stole stealing the Greek pensions and the Irish social services and made sure the scheiss flowed downhill.
Obama's campaign money comes from Greek grandmothers.
In other British Isles related news, there will be an impromptu meetup in Dublin tomorrow, Friday 12 August at 19:00. The Ruprechts and Emir will be there. Any other Emerald Isle commenters interested in joining can email for the venue: knecht underscore ruprecht at the mail service operated by yahoo dot com.
22: I read the article earlier. It was good.
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Annals of Popular Culture:
The other day, when I went to purchase my ticket for Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), the public address system in the theater lobby was playing Laura Branigan's "Gloria". Now, I must have heard that song hundreds of times in the early 1980s, as I listened to a lot of Top 40 radio while playing LEGOs with my friend B____. And yet, it was like water off a duck's back. I don't remember ever listening to the lyrics, or having them make any sort of impression on me. By contrast, Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)", which I knew from the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985), seemed very relevant.
On reviewing "Gloria", however, I find that it is very relevant to the lives of many young women that I know (if, of course, a bit overwrought). It's funny how the same work of art can change so much in meaning throughout the course of one's life.
Also, prior to viewing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there was a trailer for The Sitter (David Gordon Green, 2011). It was apparently the heavily edited version, as I just watched the full version on the internet. And goddamn! But that is a filthy film about babysitting. I remember how racy Adventures in Babysitting (Chris Columbus, 1987) seemed at the time. Yet it pales in comparison to the newer film.
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OT: Apparently, the whole grain people have decided to take a page from Yanni when it comes to marketing.
22: Obama's campaign money comes from Greek grandmothers.
WELL, HE SEEMED LIKE SUCH A NICE YOUNG MAN. AND SO POLITE. YOU WANT SOME BAKLAVA? HERE, TAKE, EAT.
20 - The Germans are putting the screws to the Greek government not because they lost a lot of money on American mortgage-backed bonds but because they own a lot of Greek sovereign debt. I'm not sure that the failure of the Greeks to appreciate the "when you owe the bank a billion dollars..." dictum can be traced to the vampire squid and other U.S. players.
Oh my god, I just realized bob is talking about that horrible Michael Lewis article. Gosh, he's awful. When did he turn into Thomas Friedman, anyhow? The key to understanding the euro crisis is the German obsession with shit. Oh really? And the joy he takes in bullying that poor, sensible German woman he hires as his Thomas-Friedman's-cab-driver into half-heartedly agreeing with his idiot theory. What a, to coin a term, shithead.
28:but because they own a lot of Greek sovereign debt. ...read the article
It was the "funny money" out of Wall Street that was used to increase the capitalization of the German Banks that enabled them to buy the Greek Bonds. Banks buy AAA debt in order to make loans.
I watched Never Let Me Go last night and then read the IMDB user reviews ("So beautiful a love story about coming to terms with death"). It has put me into a very bad mood.
29:I liked it better when you weren't reading my comments.
And boy does that as hom miss the point. Lewis is not Friedman.
Drum didn't like it either, I suspect, like you, because it makes America look bad.
I watched Never Let Me Go last night
I just watched that last week myself.
and then read the IMDB user reviews
You masochist. What did you think of the film itself?
Every time Lewis comes up, I remember that he and Tabitha Soren are married, and then I wonder if they hang out with Kurt Loder. 'Cause man, I bet that's really, really fun.
Is Lewis the guy who wrote an article about how he got his wife to stop working?
I swear the whole time I was reading the article I kept thinking I needed to start michaellewisisanasshole.tumblr.com
32:The movie itself was better than the reviews. Very well done, good movie. I watched it carefully, and the love stories were much less important than most who viewed it seemed to see. Denial.
I had a hard time managing my internal screams of "the horrors of exploitation!" but the characters, for all their bitterness, did several times talk about the lives they were saving. It certainly was a step less subtle about exploitation versus service than Remains of the Day
Ichiguro isn't all that Japanese, but he does point at Ozu and Naruse as among his greatest influences. I got a similar feeling of horror from Late Spring. Naruse usually lets his women liberate themselves one way or another. People underestimate, I think, how deep the horror connected to mono no aware can be. It ain't just falling cherry blossoms.
I liked it a lot, but with the caveat that the horrors of exploitation can be more effectively presented without the safe distancing mechanisms of sf or fantasy.
Here ya go:service to others, exploitation, and state social control, from The Blackwell Companion to Japanese History. Preceded by a discussion of the economic conditions that prompted the state to encourage volunteerism instead of paid service workers
Forces for national solidarity and social order respond in different ways to the individual's potential for freedom. On the one hand, they can negate that potential by coercing or cajoling the individual into established roles and responsibilities; on the other, they may seek to guide the individual's ''free'' and ''spontaneous'' search for self-identity in such a way that it supports and merges with the established social system. When successful, either response can narrow the individual's range of choice and reduce his experience of difference, but it is the latter response that is consistent with ''glorification of 'volunteering as a way of life','' and mobilization of ''abstract volunteer subjects.'' By abstract, here Nakano means they are committed for personal reasons to volunteering as such rather than merely employing it as a means. Moreover, precisely because this spontaneous subject is abstract, it has a ''built-in affinity for the dominant discursive mode in the contemporary 'public' realm (and, therefore, an affinity for nationalism in the broad sense, which incorporates us as a 'we').''In other words, so long as people seek oppor-
tunities to volunteer merely in pursuit of personal goals, such as identity formation, meaning in life, self-respect, etc., while making minimal value judgments in selecting one opportunity over another, they are likely to end up in volunteer programs that ratify the status quo. This tendency toward ''abstract'' volunteering is likely to be intensified by recent publications extolling volunteerism, which dwell not on the social usefulness or significance to the state of volunteer activity but rather on its intrinsic value to the volunteer, that is, the supposedly salutary effect of the ''volunteer lifestyle.''
for chris y, who said it is impossible to create a servile society
30: Reading the article gave me a lot of fun German idioms about shit, but I still don't understand how it's Goldman Sachs' fault that Germany is deathly opposed to allowing a looser monetary policy that might allow some of the peripheral Euro economies to avoid default without destroying their safety nets.
I read the article earlier. It was good.
I just can't get past the utter incomprehension of anything about any part of German culture. Really basic things, that make me question the very most basic elements of the author's powers of observation.
40: I'm not am expert by any means, but having used German toilets, I'm fairly certain that whoever decided on that design had some kind of relationship with shit that I do not share.
25: Are we all McManus now, so that we can just drop academic-sounding but completely random movie reviews in any time we want?
Maybe I'll post about my review of the episodes of Star Trek NTG written by Ronald D. Moore.
You know who's really shit-obsessed? Koreans. Only a matter of time 'til Goldman convinces them to fail to bail out Greece.
39:Well, that is a different tho connected question to the ones about how and why the German banks bought so much scheisse (?) and made all the risky loans.
And we, the US taxpayer, have been covering the German losses to financial scams. Most of QEII went to Europe after GS and the other US investment banks got their cut. I forget how that works exactly.
40:I understand how an excessive fastidiousness can keep some people from sorting wheat from chaff.
42:I was explicitly asked at 32, asshole.
whoever decided on that design had some kind of relationship with shit that I do not share
I've never been to Germany, but certain encounters with German internet porn sure did leave the same impression.
sorting wheat from chaff
German toilets can do that? Wow.
For the third time in as many days we cross the border without being able to see it, and spend 20 minutes trying to work out if we are in East or West Germany.
You fuckhead, there is no "border." So much of the supposedly 'observed' cultural stuff in the article is a good 15 years out of date. (The Jewish/memorial/German-coming-to-terms-with-its-past parts especially.)
Also, what federal state are you in? Because that will tell you quite easily whether you're in the former east or former west.
I was disappointed (I guess?) to only see one shelf toilet while in Germany. And no coprophilia porn.
45: I was making fun of Nat, not you.
For the first half of the book Never Let Me Go, I was convinced that all the children were clones of each other, up to gender. It made for amazing images in my head, and I was immensely disappointed when the plot developed that each one looks unlike the rest.
They're pretty outdated. I think part of the reason they've gone out of favor is that they require a lot more water to sweep the poop away, and Germans are pretty devoted to water conservation.
Wow, what a horrible article. I know Lewis is widely praised, and I like Moneyball, but sometimes it's time to put down the long-form journalism toolkit and just get to the fucking point.
I mean, I guess the point is this:
In that moment of temptation, Germany became something like a mirror image of Iceland and Ireland and Greece and, for that matter, the United States. Other countries used foreign money to fuel various forms of insanity. The Germans, through their bankers, used their own money to enable foreigners to behave insanely.
Which I agree with, and I'm not particularly sympathetic to either German politicians or their banks. But do we really need 4 half-assed pages on the role of shit in German culture to get there?
52: I was there in 93 or so. All I saw were shelf toilets.
Oh, after 3-4 articles it's fairly obvious that Lewis's cultural crudity, incorrectness and offensiveness in the series is intentional, a method and probably a message.
He actually may mean to alienate the Keiran Healeys because their mediation and substantive criticism will only get in the way of readers who might actually confront and deal with the problems in a effective way.
In our current crisis, it is important to marginalize the moderates and reformers.
Obviously the "serious" people are worse than useless.
He may have learned from Kunstler and Taibibi.
I hope our leaders read Vanity Fair so that they can effectively confront our problems!
I was there in 93 or so. All I saw were shelf toilets.
Yeah, they certainly were once the norm, and you still find them in unrenovated buildings. Of which there are ever fewer, especially with the regulations phasing out coal heating.
But do we really need 4 half-assed pages on the role of shit in German culture to get there?
What I really liked was the list of shit-related German words. Each of which had a distinct English translation. So, um, they're exactly as shit-obsessed as we are?
Look, over there! It's an Eskimo precisely distinguishing between snow, slush, and freezing rain!
But do we really need 4 half-assed pages on the role of shit in German culture to get there?
Given that Americans, Lewis audience have such a strong tendency to believe that if those people "over there" aren't like us, they want to be or should be, the very strong cultural contrasts Lewis is making I think are indeed necessary.
The fact the the German investment banker made 100k euros a year at the height of the chaos may not actually get through.
I think Lewis wants his readers, Americans, to take a good look at American culture, because it is we who have destroyed the world.
It's an Eskimo precisely distinguishing between snow, slush, and freezing rain!
More discussions of global warming, I see. Well, at least you used "Eskimo" and avoided mediating your readers' experience of these problems.
57:Who does read Vanity Fair, and are they receptive to criticism of American materialism and cutthroat competitiveness?
Liars Poker for those who liked it, didn't do very much fucking good, did it?
I love Paul Krugman, who is always right, always accurate, has a heart as big as the world, and is completely fucking ineffectual.
I kind of like shelf toilets, because I am endlessly fascinated by things that come out of my body.
By now, you shouldn't be that surprised by any of it.
I'm not sure how I've managed to live over twenty-nine years without previously encountering the knowledge that shelf toilets exist. What ostensible purpose do they serve?
Oh, the stool, the stool. My dear Pepys, the persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this disease's most tedious features. When will you get it into your head that one can produce a copious, regular, and exquisitely turned evacuation every day and still be a stranger to reason?
My inlaws have them. I never knew what they were called.
My wife has waged a 30 Years War against the standard American toilet. The notion that you might sometimes have to jiggle the handle to stop it from running, and that the apparatus is not in need of replacement when this is so, is beyond her willingnss to adapt. (Which, considering the many adjustments she's made to American life in general, and life with her often difficult husband in particular, is still kind of surprising.)
To the OP: Kind of a hit-and-run comment, since I'm going to start making dinner momentarily and haven't read the thread at all, but Stanster, you left out the next line of the Rehm show commentator's remark: "The jury's still out."
The same commentator went on to say shortly thereafter that some austerity was certainly called for, but it had to be of a sort that promoted growth, or at least didn't slow it. Erm ... okay, whatever you say.
You have to admit the whole handle-jiggling thing is really inelegant.
I'm on a train idling on the tracks.
Had to walk back down the track to the station.
My wife has waged a 30 Years War against the standard American toilet.
She sounds quite determined to take the throne. Did it start when her Huguenots rebelled?
is completely fucking ineffectual.
In his place at the NYT could be someone much worse, slamming the Overton Window closed on the nuts of FDR's corpse.
After we got to the station, we walked past a skunk.
74 -- I stay away from windows when the toilet is running.
75:Yeah, ok, Krug's probably better than what we could have expected at the times. But that doesn't mean there are not economists I would think more suited to the position or the current conditions
Peter Dorman "It's the Political Economy, Stupid!" via Thoma
cDonald's parking lot). While I catch up, let me toss something out for discussion:
It's the Political Economy, Stupid!, by Peter Dorman: Sometimes living in the world of ideas makes it harder to understand the real one. If you happen to be an economist, and the time is now, that is true in spades. Take Paul Krugman, for instance. After bemoaning the terrible policy choices of the last two years, he writes, "I'm still trying to make sense of this global intellectual failure." It's as if the core problem is that political leaders didn't learn their macroeconomics well enough.But Keynes was wrong about the power of "academic scribblers". Idea-smiths provide language, narratives and tools for those in control, but the broad contours of policy depend on who the controllers happen to be. We are not living through an epoch of intellectual failure, but one in which there is no available mechanism to oust a political-economic elite whose interests have become incompatible with ours.
I was reading some paragraphs about Foucault and neo-liberalism (I think he liked it. I think) and was reminded about DeLong's thesis on Foucault and realized that I don't remember Krugman dropping names like Foucault or Postwar or E.P Thompson very often. He may not be a broad reader.
I don't know what that means or how I feel about it.
He may not be a broad reader.
He's read everything. In a casual conversation, he mentioned a very talented, but not very famous, historian, remarking not only on his well-known monograph but also on his dissertation book. Krugman isn't perfect, mind you, but he is an extraordinary polymath. And as you said above, he's always right.
The point, Waf, is not to respond, but to revel in the deluded, narcissistic idiocy of what bob says.
Or so I hear. I usually have no idea what bob says.
So wait, Volkswagen has had casual conversations with Krugman?
I know. I'm sitting here being wildly impressed.
Von Wafer is hiding under Krugman's bed RIGHT NOW.
I know because I'm hiding in Krugman's closet.
And let me tell you that the magazines in Krugman's closets are freaking erudite.
Krugman's closets have not only the regalia of an Ivy League Professor, but also the gown of a graduate student about to be graduated.
One of my fantasies is to have someone start to introduce me to Paul Krugman so I can interrupt and say, "Oh yes of course, I saw you in Get Him to the Greek.
My fantasy is to be introduced to be introduced to Bradley Whitford, so I can say "Ah yes, you are the guy from Revenge of the Nerds II."
So wait, Volkswagen has had casual conversations with Krugman?
The casual conversation was reported to me second-hand. I should have made that clearer. Now I feel very sheepish.
Von Wafer's Krugman number is ~1 +/- 1.
Von Wafer might be Krugman? Then who's been posting as Pauly Shore?
80:Still trying to police and control other's behavior, ST?
You tell them, make them obey.
49: Should've visited tulip country. Shelf toilets are still de rigeur here.
66: how else will you know you're still healthy?
74: apostropher has confused the Huguenots with the Hussites. He is now dead to me.
In other British Isles related news, there will be an impromptu meetup in Dublin
Hmm. I wouldn't phrase it quite that way when you're actually in Dublin.
apostropher has confused the Huguenots with the Hussites
"Hussite" has less than 1% of the comic value of "Huguenot".
95: When I was in the Netherlands, my host referred to it as the "inspection shelf".
So the Netherlands was commanded by Goldman to cause the Greek crisis? I'm so confused.
100: The Germans use it so they have a chance to berate those portions of their meal that were not worth being part of their body.
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Huh. From Above the Clouds
Because of this difference, kazoku peers were identified according to their rifled rank--"baron-peer,"
For a while I thought this was some kind of typo (titled?), but it is repeated over and over. I tried a google search for "rifle + ethnography" but got nothing. I rarely come across a word that stops me dead in my tracks, that I can't get sufficient meaning from the context.
|>
From the context it seems to be an OCR error for "titled" in every case - are you reading it online? Or in an actual print copy?
Certainly I've never heard of "rifled rank", neither has Google.
Google has heard of rifled rank, but it's all just the same quote from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa over and over again:
But let me ask, Has it not been a constant maxim with us, that the greater the merit on the woman's side, the nobler the victory on the man's? And as to rank, sense of honour, sense of shame, pride of family, may make rifled rank get up, and shake itself to rights: And if any thing come of it, such a one may suffer only in her pride, by being obliged to take up with a second-rate match instead of a first; and, as it may fall out, be the happier, as well as the more useful, for the misadventure; since (taken off of her public gaddings, and domesticated by her disgrace) she will have reason to think herself obliged to the man who has saved her from further reproach; while her fortune and alliance will lay an obligation upon him; and her past fall, if she have prudence and consciousness, will be his present and future security.
99: "Hussite" has less than 1% of the comic value of "Huguenot".
Huguenot be serious.
I wouldn't phrase it quite that way when you're actually in Dublin. (British Isles)
Sadly the Dublin mini-meetup has been cancelled. Rumours that this is due to KR being re-educated by grumpy Irish nationalists are hotly denied.
