history

As I struggle with some newly discovered health problems, my attention tends to drift to different things. These are two.

The Missing Average and the two Australias.

This is a recent temperature anomaly map produced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, reproduced today by the ABC, with Kate Doyle’s customarily excellent comments:

A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s […]

Despite his opposition to South Africa's apartheid, Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority

James M. Buchanan's defenders argue he was not racist because of his ties with the anti-apartheid economist W.H. Hutt, but this defense fails miserably

The great student of rhetoric Kenneth Burke described the output of his era’s “debunkers” in a manner that also captures the conduct of many libertarians who have rallied to the defense of Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan over the past few years. "It would seem they are no longer seeking good arguments; rather they are seeking any arguments, if only there be enough of them to keep running through the headlines,” wrote Burke. “Are there no eagles among their utterances? Very well, let them be instead a swarm of mosquitoes.”

One swarm of mosquitos let loose by the sentries of the libertarian cause circles around the South African economist, William Harold Hutt. Buchanan’s acolytes are adamant that his support of tax-funded subsidies for segregated private schools in the midst of Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Brown v. Board of Education had nothing to do with a racist preference for the maintenance of separate schools.

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

Few persons, even legal scholars, realize that sovereign bankruptcy has a long history. Far from a pie-in-the-sky scheme conceived in the 1980s by international lawyers such as Christopher Oeschli and economists such as Jeffrey Sachs that later inspired the failed IMF Krueger proposal for a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, the concept of sovereign debt bankruptcy and discharge (write-off) has an ancient and little known history. My new INET working paper sets out this history for the first time.

The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application […]

The post The Lie of Nation Building appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

From Partygate to Trussomics, the death of the Monarch, and the humiliation of Vladimir Putin, OttoEnglish's review of the year takes us on a roller coaster of major fails and meteoric falls

in his editorial from the December print edition of Byline Times Peter Jukes says the tumultuous events of the last year may have been shocking, but not a complete surprise

Stephen Unwin explores how the famed author's views about disability were typical of a growing intellectual endorsement of the dangerous ideology of eugenics in the early 20th century