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The Long View

The Long View 2008-12-07: The Components of Freedom; Mad Max in South Asia; Our Precious Bodily Fluids; Virtual Catacombs

This is a a great blog post. The linked Reason article about the “Libertarian moment of 2008” looks hilarious in retrospect. The last 14 years have if anything seen the acceleration of the trends the article mentions, but I doubt many people in Anglosphere countries feel much freer. The hyper-individualized

The Long View 2008-12-08: Remind me: why do we have economies?

The following paragraph surely counts as one of John’s good predictions: It is difficult for people in the early 21st century to understand that the only possible future of conservatism (in the sense of a political philosophy interested in conserving things) looks more than a little like the New

The Long View 2008-11-29: Mumbai and the Tranquility of Order

In retrospect, I have criticized John and a lot of other people for the things they said or the courses of action they took in the years after 9/11. However, if you get yourself back in the mindset you might have had at the time, something like the 2008

The Long View 2008-11-22: Debt and the End of the Age

John J. Reilly links here to an excellent article in The New Republic, “Debt Man Walking”. Even though the 2008 Housing Bubble has passed, we still live in the financial world that TNR article describes. If you want to understand the slightly insane sounding but remarkably stable practice known as

The Long View: Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism

This 2004 book review by John J. Reilly slipped through the cracks. It is an interesting combination of what now seems like insane warmongering about Iraq, but was in fact totally normal at the time across almost all sectors of America, and this little gem of foreign policy: One of

The Long View 2008-11-17: Another Reason to Dislike the Matrix

John J. Reilly recounts an one of the periodic corruptions that seemed to occur on his bulletin board. It may or may not have been this time, I know that once I had encouraged him to enable a CAPTCHA feature on his bulletin board that completely borked it. There is

The Long View 2008-11-09: Zero Point History

I especially like this description of MMT in Federal finance as “quantum finance”. I have heard Republicans console themselves with the thought that the new Administration will not be able to carry out any very ambitious domestic projects, because it will operate under fiscal restraints. This is pre-quantum-finance thinking. There