The pond's worst fears were realised today. Not just the ongoing series of "planned" outages in the NBN - does the word "planned" render harmless the mess that Malware made, and in absentia is still making?
Just asking questions in the reptile way.
To move from a minor matter in the scheme of things, the genocide in Gaza continues apace, and ditto the war in Ukraine conducted by Vlad the sociopath ...
Meanwhile, never mind the CrowdStruck, more "planned" outages are planned...putting the pond in a decidedly Golding mood ...
And to cap it all off there was no Dame Groan on view this morning. No Groaning? What's the world coming to? The pond had hoped for a decent dinkum Groaning as a way of dodging US tales. What a treat bashing renewables or pesky furriners would have been ...
Instead there was endless coverage of the US scene, as if the Americans weren't already doing plenty of it ...
Really? Is that the best the reptiles can do this day? Just asking questions in the reptile way.
You have to scroll down a fair way to get the lesser member of the Kelly gang having a go at the greenies. Desperate times for desperate subscribers to the hive mind.
Perforce, the pond had to deal with what was on offer, though understandably comments and hits at the pond are way down ...
First up came nervous nelly "Ned", not because the pond wanted to, but because he was there ...
If there's one form of pundit punditing the pond particularly dislikes, it's the rhetorical "just asking the questions" style favoured by "Ned". So you get "Might further unpredictable twists lie ahead in this extraordinary saga?"
Apparently "Ned" has just realised, short of chicken entrails, tea readings or talking to psychics or spirits and channeling ectoplasm, the future isn't knowable, or particularly predictable.
Then you get waffle like "Might Trump lack the insight to campaign effectively against a younger black woman?"
"Ned" will get around to hinting at venturing an opinion, but the pond began to feel that "Ned" lacked the insight to scribble effectively about pussy-grabbing beast and woman ...
At this point the reptiles interrupted with the usual snaps, and as Media Watch established last night, the emeritus chairman was in the can for the orange man, willing to tolerate the abuse of the Bannons of the world for the cash in the paw - much unholy greed at such an advanced age - so naturally the biggest snap featured a triumphant fist-clenched orange Jesus, here reduced in size ...
After the snaps came a series of fitful, thankfully short, "Ned" outbursts ...
Just to say it again, because it can never be said enough. The pond intensely dislikes this form of rhetorical scribbling. Asking questions is the easy way out. Will the aged mango Mussolini transform himself into a sage font of wisdom? Will a billygoat cease rutting? Will the stars come out at night and will the sun rise in the morning?
The Donald, of course, comes with stacks of political baggage, but don't expect "Ned" to mention any of it ...
Not the identity politics ploy. Is every black person merely a form of identity politics to balance the ticket? Is "Ned" the only white scribbler on the lizard Oz as a way of balancing the endless number of black scribblers? Oh dear, that "just asking questions" routine is catching.
Best return to the emphatic. What a fatuous irrelevancy he is ...
And so to the final short gobbet, full of the usual "Ned" handwringing and saucy doubts and fears...
If "Ned"had wanted to have a go, he might have done an infallible Pope ...
Frankly if the pond wanted coverage of the US campaign it would turn to sources on the spot.
Shawn McCreesh wrote a delicious piece for the NY Times a few days ago, On the Trail With Trump, Vance Shows He Knows His Place: Offstage, Mostly (paywall), with the intro JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, was a mere warm-up act to Donald J. Trump at their first joint rally
The pond wouldn't usually bother, but feels short changed this day by the reptiles. If the pond must head to the US, this the sort of stuff the pond wants - summaries by punters forced to endure endless crap and then write summaries for the entertainment of readers ...
It was his first campaign rally as Donald J. Trump’s running mate, and JD Vance was up onstage, all by his lonesome, playing it humble.
“It’s still a little bit weird to see my name on those signs,” Mr. Vance, a senator from Ohio, told a packed arena of Trump supporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Saturday. “Some of you may not know me,” the senator, a best-selling memoirist whose life story was turned into a Ron Howard movie, added.
Yet, Mr. Vance’s debut made clear one indisputable fact: While his political career has been propelled by his biography — the story of his climb from poverty to Yale Law School to media stardom to populist princeling — this campaign is not about him. When Mr. Trump is near, he is the warm-up act.
In his 12-minute solo set, Mr. Vance showed he understood the arrangement. While he flicked at his rags-to-riches story, he talked most effusively about Mr. Trump and how he has the most splendid judgment of any politician ever. In a pale imitation of the master, he trash-talked the press, and the crowd booed on cue.
When it was time to bring out the headliner, Mr. Vance, who at 39 is younger than most of Mr. Trump’s children, said: “Come on out, sir!”
Being Mr. Trump’s running mate is dangerous business. The last one, Mike Pence, ended up the target of death threats and mockery, and ultimately landed in political exile. The trick to lasting affection in Mr. Trump’s orbit is unwavering deference. The former president doesn’t share the spotlight.
That was evident in the brief moments Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump shared together on Saturday. After Mr. Trump walked out onstage, they embraced in a sort of handshake-hug, separated and turned to face the crowd behind them.
Notably, they did not do that thing that running mates often do — hold hands and raise their arms up together. Instead, they stood side by side, clapping. Mr. Vance leaned in to say something into Mr. Trump’s ear — the one sliced by a would-be assassin’s bullet a week earlier — and then walked offstage, and that was that.
Still, this counted as a smooth rollout.
The last time Mr. Trump introduced a political partner, it was July 2016. He posted on Twitter that he had selected Mr. Pence, the former governor of Indiana, as his running mate, and a news conference was slapped together in the ballroom of a Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The campaign invited people right off the street, on Sixth Avenue, to fill seats. There were bemused tourists in flip-flops watching as Mr. Trump rambled about himself for half an hour and then invited Mr. Pence to speak.
Mr. Trump had picked Mr. Pence to soothe the jitters of the freaked-out Republican Party he was in the process of hijacking. But that was then. Now the party is his. On Saturday, there were 12,000 people waiting to hear him speak, many of whom had lined up hours earlier in order to get in.
Mr. Trump spoke for nearly two hours — making his 92-minute nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday seem pithy. In all those words, he mentioned his new partner only fleetingly, almost parenthetically. “I chose him because he’s for the worker,” Mr. Trump explained. “He’s for the people that work so hard and perhaps weren’t treated like they should have been.”
At another point, he invoked “the Trump-Vance administration” and then said: “By the way, I made the right pick. He’s so great. They were all good, they were all good. He’s really stepped up.”
Mr. Trump spent about as much time talking about Hulk Hogan — the aging wrestler whose shirt-ripping endorsement was a convention highlight — as he did his new running mate. (“We’re not going to mess with the Hulkster,” Mr. Trump growled at one point.)
Oh yes ... all class, all style...
Back to the entertainment ...
Many in the crowd appeared on board with Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Vance. “I know Alex Jones at Infowars supports him,” said Dale Davis, 67, a part-time security guard from Portage, Mich. “If everything he says is for real, he’s awesome.”
The fact that Mr. Vance had previously railed about Mr. Trump as a toxic influence, calling him “cultural heroin,” was for some a plus. “I think with Vance originally not being a huge Trump supporter, it’s going to inspire a lot of Americans who also are not Trump supporters,” said Kaitlyn Lella, 30, a nurse from Grand Rapids.
Others speculated about what else he might bring to the ticket. “I think he’s a good balance,” said Laura Cole, 48, who lives in Grand Rapids and works in real estate. “You have Trump and then you have someone people can relate to. I think that’s important, to have a commoner who grew up poor, when obviously Trump didn’t.”
As for the last guy who had the job? After Mr. Pence certified Mr. Trump’s defeat on Jan. 6, 2021, the mob of pro-Trump rioters that attacked the U.S. Capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” Mr. Trump’s chief of staff at that time, Mark Meadows, testified before the House committee investigating the attack that Mr. Trump had complained that his vice president was being whisked to safety, saying something to the effect of, Maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.
Reminded of this, Mr. Trump’s supporters mused about what they expected of Mr. Pence’s successor.
“Mike Pence let down a lot of people,” said Chris Cruiser, 54, an anesthesiologist from Ada, Mich. “Your job as vice president is to be supportive of the president and what he needs.”
Mr. Vance’s earliest moves suggest he gets it. While offstage at the rally, he and Mr. Trump sat for an interview together with Jesse Watters of Fox News.
In a clip released on Saturday night, Mr. Vance nods intently as Mr. Trump wonders why Secret Service agents didn’t respond fast enough when rallygoers spotted the gunman on the roof of a building.
“You had Trumpers screaming” that “there’s a man on the roof,” he said. “You would have thought somebody would have done something about it.”
Mr. Watters asked if the F.B.I. could be trusted to carry out an investigation, and Mr. Vance replied that he thought there were a lot of good “guys on the ground,” but he didn’t trust the bureau leadership.
“What the hell was going on?” he said, effectively echoing Mr. Trump. “How was that guy ever allowed to be up there in the first place?”
Ah, the old "just asking questions" routine. So that's where "Ned" got it from ...
Here, have a celebratory cartoon ...
For a bonus, the pond turned to the Lynch mob, again not because the pond cared, but because he was there ...
Oh dear, the old numbers game, which isn't much better than dots or a PowerPoint presentation, or the Prof doing it on a blackboard, but to be fair, that link did actually produce a flashback ...
It's a pity the prescient prof had to ruin it by suggesting that sleepy Joe was "irreplaceable", what with him now having been proven eminently replaceable, but never mind, back to the present and the usual visual distractions...
Then it was on with the numbers game...
Getting agitated about mass slaughter is advancing your political interests? Just asking questions.
Maybe she should have been celebrating mass slaughter so she could show her calm objectivity.
And so on, but we're back to the numbers, and at last the real condescending, smug, smarmy Lynch mob came out to play ...
There's a wealth of bigotry to unpack there, including some feed lines for the Donald when it comes to assailing black people, but the pond will just note that the prof remains a fan of genocide, so that the pond can move on to the last number in the last gobbet ...
And yet, Brian, here we are ...
So they all make gaffes. We all make gaffes. The pond's gaffe this day was paying attention to the Lynch mob and nattering "Ned" ... and so it's off to the ring with the immortal Rowe ...
It's always in the details, and the pond did appreciate that echo of moments featured above ...
The pond had hoped to end with that Kamala ad from 2019 when she made a brief run.
It's turned into a meme and got the loons at USA Today sounding terribly silly, rabbiting on about how it was from 2019 ...
The pond doesn't link to X (sounds too much like PornHub) or Instagram, and the only place the pond spotted it came from Tim Miller, getting wildly excited at The Bulwark ...
Ned: "Might Trump lack the insight to campaign effectively against a younger black woman?". It's just wonderful how many different meanings the word "black" has come to have, isn't it. So Kamala is "black", just the same as Michelle Obama.
ReplyDelete"...will the sun rise in the morning?". Psst: the sun doesn't rise at all - that's just from the days when we thought that the 'sun' was some miscellaneous 'god' named Helios riding across the sky in a glowing chariot. The correct question is: will the Earth continue rotating in the morning.
ReplyDeleteAn equally fine question GB, maintaining the JAQ protocol for the day. The pond was of course quoting the Aztecs, having just picked up a copy of Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs from the local street library. Next question: would the chairman emeritus sacrifice virgins to keep the coffers full?
DeleteHe has been (sacrificing virgins) for years, hasn't he ?
DeleteOf course, the point of sacrificing a virgin is that he hasn't had had time enough to really sin very much yet. Therefore sacrificing him just sends him straight to eternal 'heaven', doesn't it ?
Though I've always felt that spending every moment of eternity (and there is an infinite number of moments in every moment of eternity) wasn't such a great outcome yet it's what God has been, is, and will be experiencing for all of the infinite number of moments in each or the infinite number of moments in eternity.
Hallelujah.
‘Ned’ has done a free association exercise, of the kind we might have done working up an important assignment in university days. But it is the sort of thing that should not, itself, be submitted as the assignment, as our Esteemed Hostess has emphasised.
ReplyDeleteHe does write that Kamala Harris is ‘untested across a range of areas, notably the economy.’ Well, we have seen how the Mango one sets about tugging the levers of an economy, but are unlikely to see any useful comment on that.
This does give me segue into the contribution from Dame Groan last week. It fairly well set out the Reptile line on managing national economies.
The important consideration for the Dame, (and this is the style for all Reptile ‘economic’ contributors), is not what the chosen indices for national economies show. The important consideration is - if the indices are good, what was the ideology of the public administration for the several years before those good indices? If the government of those days reduced support for the less able of its citizens, so it could then reduce the tax ‘burden’ on the wealthy; if it otherwise declined to spend public funds on any infrastructure other than expensive toys for the military - then good economic indices are a direct result of that ideology. Oh, if the treasurer declared a surplus in their budget - absolute proof, and only a quibbler would wonder why any government, whose entire income comes from its citizens, should make such a virtue of not spending that money for those citizens.
On the other hand, as the Dame made clear, if the administration leading up to good indices was given to encouraging n’er do wells to find new ways for free-riding off other citizens in the guise of ‘social services’, if it actually set about building national infrastructure of kinds not directly designed to kill (furrin’) people, if it tried to maintain and improve the physical environment, and, horror, if it sought to claw back some of the wealth that can be generated for mining only by extensive, and expensive, government survey and creation of special legal entitlements - then any statistical success can only be the result of random walks, by self-styled ‘wealth creators’.
No doubt our Killer in Washington will deliver further exposition of this interpretation of macroeconomics as the contest continues. I did note that the Mango one is pretty much promising cures for cancer and dementia in his next term. Investors, look out for firms making sun-lamps that can be focussed on particular bodily orifices - their shares could take off.
But, BG, butt we've already cured cancer, so anybody suffering from some malady that resembles cancer is really suffering from a totally new disease that was introduced into the world by Biden and Harris. Wasn't it ?
DeleteAnyway, if all of a government's money comes from its citizens yet the amount of money both in the national economy and thus in national coffers increases by may $billions every year, then who out there is printing all those notes and minting all those coins ?
Because the amount of money in the economy does increase by a lot every year, doesn't it. Or is it just all those legal (and illegal) immigrants and the folding and jingling money they secrete in their baggage to set themselves up with when they arrive.
GB - I have no doubt you and I could amuse ourselves with further speculation on the points you raise, but that could bore others who come here. There is plenty of material - new diseases? Sharri (disrespect) has, as they say, written the book, and the Mango one has said he will 'look forward to reading it' - no doubt to inform the rest of his healthcare policies.
DeleteBut here in Oz, no thanks to the GST legislation of J Winston Howard, and Costello, one area that is wide open to grifters ('entrepreneurs') and manipulators to circulate funds in ways that persuade mugs that intangible items are genuine investments, to fatten their personal purses - is not troubled by GST. Much of the reams of that legislation, with contrived names, is in fact about NOT applying GST to most financial 'services'. This gives grifters an advantage in seeking other people's money, over many industrialists who try to raise funds for plant and equipment to make actual things, that we all could use.
Which is one of the ways that funds appear to grow in quantity, without contributing to national needs and wants, or generating actual goods or useful services in proportion to the funds.
Oh - and what actual metals are free of GST? 9960+ grade gold and 9950+ silver.
I happily admit I was in favour of the Greenies insisting on uncooked food not copping GST, but I never quite caught on to financial services being likewise. Unless it was some kind of 'look after the poor folks so they have some money left to die with'. But I don't think it was that, was it.
DeleteIt was explicitly to look after those who were already 'in' the financial world, particularly bank executives and directors, and minimising any opposition they might muster through mass media. Oh - the poor would get a look in when they were accumulating gold, of course.
DeleteSince the GST, the advance of the internet has produced financial turnovers running at a much faster rate than the most adept of mere human traders might be able to sustain; and wholly new kinds of 'assets' - like Bitcoin, and weird non-fungibles, like shares in 'Truth Social'.
Bullshit all the way down. Worse than lying.
ReplyDeleteTrump, oz opinionistas, us..."So they all make gaffes." Bullshit.
Rhetorical style, and" the Mango one is pretty much promising cures for cancer and dementia in his next term" seem to be beholden to...
"Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]
"The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.[3]
...
"Similar concepts
"The adage, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on", has taken various forms since as early as 1710.[21]
"In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat expressed an early notion of this law:[22]
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
"What Trump Did in Osaka Was Worse Than Lying - The Atlantic on-trumps-bullshit
1 July 2019 · By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Of course, Trump is both the liar and the bullshitter"
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit...". Yeah, and that is why the Gish Gallop works so well and why Trump engages it throughout every public occasion. The good old 'journalists' have neither the knowledge or the time to refute any of it, so they just adopt the time honoured response: do, and say, nothing.
DeleteWhich is why Trump can get away with it time and time again.
From The Atlantic: Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged (paywall?)
ReplyDelete"Now it is the Republicans who are saddled with the elderly candidate, the one who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence without veering off into anecdote."
Just change a few words, and that sentence applies to Ned and Lynch.
That link worked for the pond Joe, and it was Anne Applebaum savaging the beast, great fun ...a taster just to prove the pond got there:
Delete...Trump himself appeared, and it was as if the emperor with no clothes had taken the stage. There was nothing strong about an overweight, heavily made up yet nevertheless shiny-faced elderly man who rambled and babbled for an hour and a half, completely undermining the slick image created in the previous four days. He began by sticking to his script, solemnly referencing the failed assassination attempt against him days before. But even when telling that story, he could not master the appropriate tone and almost immediately changed the subject. “And there’s an interesting statistic,” he said: “The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason, the doctors told me that.”
Eventually, instead of sounding like an “American Bad Ass,” he digressed into pure gibberish. One example:
They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I—you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.
Another:
In Venezuela, Caracas, high crime, high crime. Caracas, Venezuela, really a dangerous place. But not anymore, because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent. In fact, if they would ever in this election, I hate to even say that, we will have our next Republican convention in Venezuela because it will be safe. Our cities, our cities will be so unsafe, we won’t be able—we will not be able to have it there.
On Thursday evening, this performance seemed deranged, sinister, and frightening. Now, following Biden’s decision to halt his own campaign, it just looks deranged. On the one hand, we have a sitting president who understood his limitations and, in an act of patriotism, selflessness, and party unity, decided to step away from power. On the other hand, we have a former president clinging to power, holding on desperately to the myth of a lost election, evoking the same predictable descriptions of carnage and disaster he served up eight years ago. Today, he is still attacking Biden, who is no longer his opponent.
In retrospect, the Republican Party’s convention looks not just staged but also hollow and false. By contrast, the Democratic Party’s convention will be substantive and maybe even spontaneous. In the hours that have passed since Biden’s announcement, a million different Kamala Harris memes, music mixes, and clips have appeared online, not orchestrated by her campaign or by any campaign, just put together by random people, some of whom like her and some of whom do not. One mash-up of her wackier speeches, her laugh, and a Charli XCX soundtrack had 3.4 million views by this morning. We don’t know yet whether Harris will be the candidate or, if she is, whether she will be a good one, but the energy has already shifted from the men trying to impose their image of their party on the country to online Gen Zers who can flip the script any way they want.
I don’t know what will happen next, and that’s the point. The heavy sense of inevitability that surrounded the RNC has lifted. The cadres of people organized by the Heritage Foundation and a dozen offshoots, all quietly preparing to dismantle the rights of American women, to replace civil servants with loyalists, to take apart pollution controls, and to transfer more money into the hands of Trump-friendly billionaires—they are no longer marching inexorably toward the halls of power. The people who spent a week trying to bend reality to fit their flawed, vengeful candidate became too confident too soon.
"...an overweight, heavily made up yet nevertheless shiny-faced elderly man who rambled and babbled for an hour and a half..." Well, an hour and a half on this occasion, much more on many other occasions when he's publicly spouted.
DeleteBut I think we should all remember that lots of people just go for that in a big way: remember Ronnie Raygun for instance ? Or even just George W Bush of recent memory. For some reason that I simply cannot fathom, "the people" go for bullshat fairytales every possible time and they're always loyal to the liars.
Have you considered stupidity?
DeleteFrom 2006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUNPMPrxvA
DeleteGreat video, Anon.
DeleteIndeed I have, Anony, since stupidity is something we all exhibit from time to time, but I think it's more than just that. I think it takes a special subconscious state of illusion that is nonetheless shared amongst a lot of people.
DeletePresident Venn Diagram It's true, she did say that.
ReplyDeleteICYMI: Colbert https://youtu.be/PnpxNB8OSDM
ReplyDeleteFor those who come here, but do not access John Quiggin, I offer recent item titled 'Getting Old, and Being Old'
ReplyDeleteJoe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.
First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.
It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.
As exemplified by Biden’s disastrous debate, growing old is like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy[1]. It happens two ways - gradually, then suddenly. The process of growing old gracefully involves extending the gradual phase as long as possible, while accepting that it’s happening.
For me, that means, in physical terms, that my running pace isn’t what it used to be, and that I need to do more exercise just to maintain a given level of fitness. And, I often need an afternoon nap if I am going to maintain the kind of program I need.
But for someone in the ideas business like me, the real concern about growing old is about what is happening mentally. The standard distinction here is between fluid intelligence (roughly, the ability to solve novel problems) and crystallised intelligence (the ability to solve problems through accumulated skills and knowledge). Fluid intelligence is said to peak in the 20s, as with young mathematical geniuses, while crystallised intelligence continues improving until the 60s.
Crystallisation has a more negative side, that of being stuck in mental frameworks acquired long ago, and no longer appropriate. This was less of a problem in traditional societies where nothing much changed over time, so that crystallised intelligence could roughly be translated as “wisdom”. Now, however, knowledge is changing all the time, and crystallised intelligence can easily become rigidity.
This has long been a hazard for academics, clinging to the ideas which they learned in their early career, and perhaps helped to form, with the result that they resist the inevitable challenges. As Max Planck put it “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …” This observation has been summarised by the aphorism “Science proceeds one funeral at a time”.
I’ve seen plenty of instances of Planck’s principle, but there’s nothing inevitable about it. You don’t need lots of fluid intelligence to observe this process, and guard against it. Indeed, one of the benefits of being old is the experience of seeing new ideas arrive, some replacing the old orthodoxy and others revealing themselves as passing fads. One experience of this kind for me was the neoclassical counter-revolution against Keynesian economics in the 1970s. Lots of people who had appeared as unquestioning Keynesians a few years before suddenly became equally unquestioning believers in balanced budgets and rational expectations. The lesson I drew was the need to strike a balance between abandoning your ideas the first time something new comes along and sticking to them unquestioningly.
That’s enough for now. When and if I come back to this topic, I’ll try to write something about some the political and economic aspects of old age.
fn1. Until I checked, I had always misattributed this to F Scott Fitzgerald, who seems more apposite
Thanks for that Chad, though nothing much of what Quiggin is saying was unknown to me, or I suspect to you and many Pondians.
DeleteI think his claim to be old at 68 is a little premature though; indeed once upon a time 68 was late enough for most who reached that age to be dead rather than old. My paternal grandfather 'passed' at the age of 72 and was considered somewhat ancient by then. And contrary to Quiggin, I think it's fine to render 68 as 'elderly', though only just beginning in that state.
However, the whole field of succession of ideas is well worth a lot of attention and investigation. Though as usual it's a mixed thing: some ideas were never worth being adopted in the first place and others (eg, dare I say it, religions) continue for millennia past their useful date.
But I have given up on expecting to see some integrated union of relativity and quantum before I too am 'passed'.
Off at a bit of a tangent Chad, I always found it a bit funny that they all become Keynesians again when a financial crisis came along. It seems that neoclassical thinking is fine when capital wants to beat up on labour or corporations want a free ride but the guvmint needs to be involved during the periodic crashes of the system. (Have you tried turning it off and back on again)
ReplyDeleteAgreed Anonymous - much of our fun comes from such about-face times. (When will mass media understand that the term 'back flip' is seldom appropriate to what they are trying to tell us?).
Delete