D. Black

I'd like some more commentary on my general point, that non-right wing nutcase economists have been too soft on the right wing nutcase economists.

My observation from when I was in that world was that... most (majority, not supermajority) economists were probably DeLongish Democrats. More than people would think, anyway. But there was a bias against left-leaning (mostly center left-leaning) economists ever piping up in public, even if that was the prevailing sentiment. It was really kind of weird.

It's not "really kind of weird" it marks the modes of basic human relations and behavior: replace economics with Zionism. But arrogance makes it worse. Repeats.

Atrios in 2002:

David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom.

The organization is fictional, David Duke is not.

Yglesias, in 2002

After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.

Both, recently

DB: "I think a major consequence of the lack of reading non-fiction other than textbooks is that when in late high school or college teachers want research paper type things, the students have a lot of trouble largely because they've never read any."

linking to Yglesias:
"Like a lot of people I know, I read a lot and what I read is mostly nonfiction. But as Dana Goldstein points out in a great piece lots of Americans read very poorly and schools teach reading almost exclusively through fiction"

Tedra Osell yesterday at CT: Reading Coates Reading Eliot

He’s no callow undergrad and he writes better than anyone I can think of, which means reading him is not merely the familiar pleasure of observing students’ first encounter with a familiar novel. His frame of reference is totally intellectual but not “academic” in the conventional sense: rigorous but really fresh.

Her language makes me cringe.
Osell includes 8 links from Coates. I'll post two:
Into the Canon: Middlemarch
'All the Light I Can Command'

The powerful tell stories and call them truths. Hitchens in his piece on Isaiah Berlin linked below quotes Czeslaw Milosz: "Irony is the glory of slaves."