A Web Log

The Wrath of Corleone   Author: Noah Millman Site: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Summary: An overwrought analysis of the Godfather trilogy.   The Keynesian Revolution Author: Jonathan Kirshner Site: Boston Review Summary: Book review of new biography of Keynes: "The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes" by Zachary D. Carter Quotes: The Great War shattered the illusion that civilization was secure—and much of Keynes’s efforts in the three decades that followed were designed to save society from dystopias looming in the wings, particularly in the varied forms of authoritarian collectivism. Carter’s Keynes is “the last of the enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design.” To approach Keynes’s economics innocent of such an understanding is to miss much, if not everything.  Essentially, mainstream postwar Keynesianism was a tamed and housebroken interpretation of selected part...

 Clearing the Backlog - May 9, 2021 India's COVID Shambles: It Took Us Seventy Years, Not Seven, To Get Here Author: Shashank Kela Site: The Wire (India) Summary: critical article of Indian state structures.  Nothing particularly new though. Quote: In 1979, apropos the Moro affair, the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia remarked that for the Italian Communist Party, the state appeared to be “a kind of mythical and metaphysical entity, superior to anything like the rendering of services. For me, the state is nothing but a well-coordinated ensemble of services. And when these services are deficient or altogether absent, it’s necessary either to fix them or to create new ones. Otherwise all you are defending is corruption and inefficiency under the pretext of defending the state.” In India, unfortunately, the state is defined almost exclusively in metaphysical or in Hobbesian terms. For some nationalists, it’s the living embodiment of India’s glorious past (and manifest destin...

This site is designed to be a log of articles and sites that I come across on the web - a "web log" if you will.  It is merely meant to be a reference that can be easily accessed.  Nothing more.