My semi-regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring). This week: 7 links.
If a mathematical problem goes against your political beliefs, you might not be able to solve it – yes politics can even muck up our maths.
Why does drug liberalisation never get properly on the political agenda?
The CIA PR strategy for the drone war.
What make the US so prone to interventionist wars?
With Britain’s Labour opposition leader being constantly undermined – what people don’t understand about the position.
How the NZ economy did so badly – in the context of the Australian Liberals promoting our neo-liberalness as a virtue.
And the war continues – photo from the US in Afghanistan:
That math article simultaneously boggles my mind – it’s math! Surely you just do the math! – but also makes a huge amount of sense. It really helps explain why whenever I mention fat acceptance topics on my blog or Twitter I get screamed down by people who insist that “the science is clear” on the ~obesity epidemic~, even when I think it’s pretty clear the science is not.
(Of course, I’m less arguing from the math and more the source of the math, but you know what I mean.)
Yet another nail in the coffin of the Milton Friedman’s retarded idea that people are perfectly rational beings acting in well reasoned self-interest.
greed, the golden leprosy.
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/09/08/gluckman-to-government-empirical-evidence-not-idealogical-blindness/
The British Labour looks like it is going through a painful repudiation of Blairism, complicated by the need to build a new socialist narrative that doesn’t come with a Soviet or Maoist accent.
Still, at least the left in the UK is painfully dragging itself out of it’s possums in the headlights torpor in the face of neo-liberal triumphalism and the denialism of the crimes of the USSR of the old left. It will be very interesting to see what the left comes up with, and how it goes about replacing neo-liberalism and Blairism.