Politica
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I’ve been getting the predictable hysterical reactions to today’s column. And it’s true — I’m a Sharia Jewish atheist Marxist who hates America! Bwahahaha! But one thing actually worth reacting to is the assertion I keep getting that this is all a distraction, that even if we seized all the money of the top 0.1% it would make no difference to the fiscal outlook.
Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal - NYTimes.com
Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis
My friend John McKay, discussing the matter at his Weblog archy , wonders if the degraded state of the term has rendered it useless. After all, it has in many respects become a catchall for any kind of totalitarianism, rather than the special and certainly cause-specific phenomenon it was. Anyone using the word nowadays is most often merely participating in this degradation. Nonetheless, I think Robert O. Paxton has it right in his essay "The Five Stages of Fascism": We cannot give up in the face of these difficulties.
What's wrong with libertarianism
"The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people." -- Abraham Lincoln A pparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money!" Good libertarians and the other kind This article has been rewritten, for two reasons.
For years I've wanted to have a better grasp of fascism-- what it is and what it isn't-- and Robert O. Paxton's new book, The Anatomy of Fascism , is just the ticket. Let's start with Things You Might Not Have Known About Fascism : Liberalism, conservativism, and socialism all matured in the 19th century; at its end fascism was still undreamed of. It seemed to come out of the blue. One reason for its appearance was that traditional liberal and conservative politicians had no idea how to appeal to the masses-- especially in countries where full suffrage came late.