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Top Stories Tuesday 14 Jan

Groupthink Central on the limits of US power:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been continually amazed that the crackpot leader of a Stalinist hellhole
has been able to make the president of the Most Powerful Country on Earth look like a bumbling fool
(insert snarky comment here). However, Kim Jong Il is only the latest in a series of thoroughly bad
dudes who have been successful at playing the U.S. government for dupes. What’s the secret to their
success? Well, being a megalomanical, repressive sunufubitch certainly helps. However, I think the
reason why Castro, Gadaffi, and Saddam have fended off successive administrations for so long is
that they recognize the limitations of American military power. Both Castro and Gadaffi have surely
realized that no American administration would risk launching a full-scale ground war to remove them
from power. Thus, they have been able to thumb their nose at the U.S. for decades with only minimal
repercussions (assuming you conveniently overlook the poverty and despair of the toiling masses, of
course). Likewise, Kim perceives that, for all his bellicose blustering, W isn’t about to make a march
on Pyongyang any time soon. As a result, he has continually called W’s bluff over the past few months,
which has only exacerbated the administration’s “strategic ridiculousness,” as Josh Marshall likes to
say.

Hullabaloo has
Bush nailed:

Throughout the campaign, as George W. Bush assured us that George W. Bush was “a leader because he
could lead,” (while others were quietly winking about the “grown-ups” keeping the frat boy out of
trouble) I kept wondering,” What will George W. Bush do when his grown-ups disagree?” How does a man
like this make such a decision? How will someone with so little experience with responsibility —
someone who doesn’t have even have an interest in understanding the complexities of making life and
death decisions — how does someone like this weigh competing interests, particularly since he doesn’t
appear to have developed even a Reaganesque set of basic principles to which he can always refer for
simple guidance?

D-square
Digest on “blackboard economics” which should also give us bloggers pause for thought:

But the real error was just a pure and simple case of economists’ arrogance, the belief that as a
clear-thinking outsider with a training in constrained optimisation, I would be able to design a much
better way of going about things than the people actually doing the job. This is the sort of
“blackboard economics” that Ronald Coase always railed against, which is why he’s a bit of a hero of
mine and it’s genuinely saddening to me that he blotted his copybook so badly over the lighthouse
business.

The Watch
on the power of ridicule and the fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist”:

Yet it becomes ‘crazy talk’ to imply that the wealthy and powerful have desires that conflict
with the majority of citizens. Crazy to imply that someone with the power to hire and fire
thousands, issue press bulletins that will be paid attention to, and get personal audiences
with politicians might wield undue influence. And you must be especially crazy if you imply that
oodles of cash might influence the behavior of public figures.

If you suggest that someone with this kind of influence and like-minded and situated acquaintances
might quietly push motives that the public would disagree with, you may be referred for psychiatric
care.

Mr Happy explains why he doesn’t believe in rights as the basis for political philosophy:

All this amounts to saying that politics — the business of living together — cannot be axiomatised. Don’t get me wrong, I think systems of rights are fine things. They set out the values we consider to be particularly important, and provide a framework for arguing about when and how rights should be exercised or violated. But rights are not pre-existent, they are not self-evident, they do not arise as a necessary consequence of humanity. They are things we decide to create, and we can modify them if we choose.