News attacks

Congratulations John!

Not entirely fact-free. For example, from the linked article:

The newspaper you’re now reading is “filled with lies” aimed at furthering Murdoch’s political and commercial interests.

The Australian is a “worthless gutter press rag”. It is a “sad joke”, even if the “downward spiral” of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald means there isn’t much competition. It is “part of a political machine, using its power and wealth to crush its opponents and critics by whatever means it finds most convenient”.

Murdoch’s readers “have demonstrated, over and over, that they prefer comfortable lies to inconvenient truths”. That’s because “everyone is increasingly aware that truth and falsehood are no longer meaningful terms for those on the Right”.

Well, yes.

The Murdochtopus attacks!

“Don’t care what they say about me, long as they spell my name right.”–A. Non.

Well done Professor Quiggin. I’m really interested in the phenomenon of people misspelling your name in comments. It happened at the Australian, it happens here, it happens at LP and it even happens at deltoid. It’s not like your name is hard to spell. No one ever seems to misspell “Bertram” or “Farrell” or even “Eszter”. So why do I see so much “Quiggan” and “Quiggen”? Does it happen at your own blog too?

This reminds me that when Amartya Sen got the Nobel Prize, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial attacking him for being a Marxist – a very nasty piece. For some people, given their own ideological location, one is very quickly put in the corner of the extreme left…

And, btw, congratulations with your Distinguished Fellowship!

Congratulations! Seriously. I’d have that article framed and mounted on my office wall if it happened to me.

This seems as good a time as any to thank you & likeminded blogging souls for what you provide — a bit of sanity and insight in a world where most economics reporting is a bitter joke.

Far left! Far left! That seems to be all the WSJ’s got (ahem) left these days. Honestly, though, just how far left is sensible economics anyway? The economists I read, or try to read — my mathematical education is barely serviceable, and the last of it was almost 50 years ago — don’t seem all that far left to me. Keynes, Samuelson, Galbraith, Krugman, Baker, DeLong, and yes, Quiggin, only seem as far to the left as you need to go to treat everybody as worthy of getting by in whatever world we intend to have.

Now when I think of the Far Left, which is where you sometimes wind up when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace…I think of a credible plan of battle which is capable of enforcing politically the sensible economics of all those sensible economists that the Murdoch Empire loves to attack. Coming up with such a plan isn’t easy because, as Marx’s late followers discovered to their dismay, it can all too easily morph into the evil that it’s supposed to remedy. Still, looking at Keynes’ The Economics of the Peace in one hand, and Krugman’s current blog post on the economic consequences of the Euro in the other, I once again come ’round to the thought that good policies are not enough in a world which stacks the dice against them.

Professor Quiggin and the other posters at CT are painfully aware of this conundrum, and are doing their best, it seems to me, to grapple with it. Good on ’em, I say, and let’s all hope for the best.

As Krugman says, being attacked by the Murdoch owned press is a badge of honor.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/congratulations-to-john-quiggin/

Congratulations John.
We need more voices like you.

Not surprising, but it really doesn’t seem to me they even attempted to prove the thesis in the title about you being “far left.” All they did was quote a bunch of criticism you’ve levelled at them, and try to refute it. Even if we accept their rebuttals, how does that make you “far left”? That you’re a poor media critic seems to be the worst thing one could draw from the piece. I suppose they did mention you discussing Marx, which in wingnut logic makes you a marxist, but beyond that, it’s pretty thin.

Which is to say that as I don’t read Australian newspapers much, I’m increasingly sympathetic to your claims about the Australian given the weakness of this essay attacking you (am already sympathetic given that it is a Murdoch rag which is already 2 strikes against). At least selectively quote some of your academic work or dig up a college paper where you call for seizing the commanding heights of the economy or something.

Even the title is stupid: ‘An economist who is good in theory but on the far left in practice ‘, as though two clauses are in some way contradictory.

Actually for a hit piece it’s pretty respectful of you. It seems that all those cheap shots against Marx paid off. Or maybe the writer actually does understand and respect your theoretical work or brilliant recent book. I bet that it’s the former.

Congratulations. I like how they pump you up before they put you down.

“Fact free”? Why, then, hasn’t professor Quiggin yet seen fit to reply to the reference to his “coffee-sharpened mind”? What amounts to a direct accusation of drug dependence tells us as much about the depth of the reporter’s investigation, as the professor’s silence does to suggest that it may even be true.

Congratulations, Professor Quiggin.

On climate change, Murdoch has backed giving the planet the benefit of the doubt. The Australian supports putting a price on carbon over Tony Abbott’s direct action.

Despite the rant, I rather liked the implicit concession here that Murdoch’s papers do indeed do Murdoch’s bidding, even if the WSJ is only prepared to acknowledge this when the Dirty Digger is apparently doing something noble.

So Quiggin thinks the orthodox Marxists hidden in the comments section at CT are just like Rupert Murdoch’s minions bugging phones, lying about WMD, and scapegoating illegal immigrants. Of course no one even tried to make an empirical or logical argument for the law of value. Anwar Shaikh, Meghnad Desai, Rick Wolff and Duncan Foley are just low-level ideologues. I know that no one is listening to your policy advice, but is this all you can do try to re-gain respectability among the Really Serious People and keep the good favor of the Murdoch paper that has been featuring your opinions?

Hartal, you’re clearly knowledgable about Marx, but do you have to do this to every thread? How many more posts before you settle down and admit you went over-the-top? Maybe a half-dozen or so?

You’re really not winning any friends for your beliefs, to put it mildly. I suppose you could start a blog called The Excitable Marxist or something.

Look guys. I said Quiggin’s book is brilliant. I was just trying to make sense of why the hit job was rather restrained. I was only being cheeky when I said that maybe the reviewer wasn’t as awed by the brilliant stuff that he probably hadn’t read (I was making fun of a Murdoch employee) but was rather admiring that Quiggin can take cheap shots against Marxism with the best of them. I call the guy brilliant, he responds by comparing me to Fox News ideologues. Jeez.

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Quiggon: alien race in Douglas Adams comic sci-fi novel.

I sympathise with John. I get mis-spelled in comments on a blog post with my name at the top.