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Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 03:22
I’m developing a set of Mastermind lectures on economics, and the marketing has included video “shorts” from my interview with Lex Fridman. This one, on why socialist economies didn’t innovate as fast as capitalist ones drew a lot of ire on Twitter. The text of that short is: Innovations: Socialist versus Capitalism [Under capitalism] You … Continue reading "Why did socialism fail at product innovation and economic growth?"
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:42

As well as ripping a hole in the economy with her disastrous mini budget, her passionate rants about cheese and pork markets and, of course, being outlasted as prime minister by a head of lettuce, one of Liz Truss’s lesser-known legacies is the damage she caused to the Environment Agency (EA) in her time as […]

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:29

Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube channel, Smile2Jannah, to discuss the power of the Israel Lobby, Jordan Peterson and the World Cup among other topics.

The post World Cup Racism, The Israel Lobby, and Jordan Peterson, with Smile 2 Jannah and David Miller appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00
Net neutrality to sunset if Retained EU Law Bill is passed Retained Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill will wipe out net neutrality from UK law on 31 December this year. Anyone who cares about the Internet – and indeed who cares about freedom of expression and access to information online – should be […]
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00

This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting:

Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 01:00
And he is the rest of us Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement. There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.” The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding. Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic): According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
The postwar welfare state, with its implicit recognition of human need, produced public domains and clinical spaces in which the state was cast as maternal surrogate to a population of child citizens. If Nazism had demonstrated the triumph of the superego’s capacity to punish, with ‘Hitler daddy’ as the authoritarian father, only a maternal approach could avert future catastrophe.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
If political advantage were the only consideration, you would expect the government to quickly settle disputes where the strikers have public support. A poll at the end of last year suggested that 66 per cent of people support striking nurses, with only 28 per cent opposed. That the government hasn’t come to an agreement with the Royal College of Nursing suggests either that they are poor tacticians, or that they are unwilling to countenance tax rises, no matter the cost to public services.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between his appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and his early death in 1902, he became the face of a quintessentially modern – because newly global – form of religiosity.
Created
Thu, 19/01/2023 - 00:00
Samuel Adams was an ascetic, indifferent to worldly baubles, decent comforts, respectable clothing. His republican vision for Massachusetts was forbiddingly austere, not an open marketplace free of intrusive British taxation, but what he termed, uninvitingly, a ‘Christian Sparta’. Religion was not then a private matter of belief unrelated to political attitudes.