<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRTfex2VQ7g>
CG flagged this several weeks ago, specifically the "agnotology" theme. I didn't have time to watch it at the time, but it came up again through another line of research and inquiry and I found myself watching it today, slightly mesmerized.
There's an important underlying issue in play about "the nature of money." (NB: If only for the sake of time [!], I won't entertain criticisms of that phrase that don't demonstrate familiarity with the ancient Greek experience invoked in the naming of "physis.") With huge respect and a due sense of contrition and dread, I have to say that I find Doug's piece on "how to misunderstand money" (a.k.a., Web of Nonsense; <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Web_of_nonsense.html>) - which I've read at least a half dozen times over the past few years - inadequate. Anti-semitism is both abominable - as is any form of bigotry - and commonly misunderstood (both Jews and their most frequent contemporary political adversaries being, after all, semites), but its invocation in this piece seems cheap: a bit too close to an ad hominem diversion from the substance and cause of Brown's dis-ease. The treatment of "internationalism" also seems deeply under-developed. Doug wrote:
"[I]sn’t internationalism a good thing? Shouldn’t people and ideas and art should be free to move around without being blocked by borders or suspicious provincial minds?"
But surely this is inadequate. Surely, when we engage critiques of "internationalism" we are obliged - at a minimum, as a starting point - to ensure we embrace the most defensible definition of that term that can reasonably be attributed to our opponents. Brown's point can hardly be reduced to the exchange of "ideas and art": she's talking about the internationalization of the monopoly control (and highly secretive monopoly control, at that) of the issuance of currency. I suspect she'd happily embrace every imaginable arts exchange, every salon, every (*gasp*) "inter-racial liaison." But she is troubled - if I understand her correctly - by the expansion of the conceptual, legislative and regulatory infrastructure that makes credit bubbles both possible and almost inevitably recurrent. And surely that's a valid concern. No?
Re-reading, I realize I've hardly begun to do justice to Betancourt. Perhaps a subsequent post....
Oh, one bonus ball from the schadenfreude file: Scott Walker is a peasant.