by Henry Farrell on September 15, 2010
Available from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416588698?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416588698 “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781416588696 .
This is a transformative book. It’s the best book on American politics that I’ve read since _Before the Storm._ Not all of it is original (the authors seek to synthesize others’ work as well as present their own, but provide due credit where credit is due). Not all of its arguments are fully supported (the authors provide a strong circumstantial case to support their argument, but don’t have smoking gun evidence on many of the relevant causal relations). But it should transform the ways in which we think about and debate the political economy of the US.
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by John Q on September 15, 2010
For your postmodern entertainment, a few stories about the social construction of reality on the political right
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by John Q on September 15, 2010
Felix Salmon has a great piece responding to a WSJ puff piece on the American trademark troll company that has stolen the name “Ugg boot” then used “intellectual property” laws to impose the absurd claim that the only genuine Uggs are those made in China.
The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished, or at least scaled back to the more modest claims of the 19th century. The attempts of the US government to defend IP monopoly rights in their most extreme form are one of the many reasons American “soft power” is such a perishable commodity.