Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: TK News
by Matt Taibbi

“How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks? When the English forced the Wampanoags off their land and made many convert to Christianity? When Lincoln told Horace Greeley, ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it?’ How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game? We don’t ask Russians how they can sit around the yelochka every New Year and open presents knowing that Ivan the Terrible used to roast prisoners in giant frying pans, or how they can smoke Belomorkanal cigarettes knowing the real White Sea canal is filled with the bones of slave laborers. I think even most MSNBC anchors would agree, that would be stupid. But we do this to ourselves all the time now, and every year it gets worse.” (11/25/21)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-is-awesome

Source: Libertarian Policy Institute
by Nicholas Sarwark

“One of the first things you learn in computer science is the concept of cruft, the remnants of old projects, failed design attempts, temporary fixes, and emergency debugging done ages ago. It all had a reason, a need, an absolute requirement to be written at some point in the past and it has no reason to continue to exist. Cruft is a special type of entropy in human endeavors, the memory of the myriad ephemeral things that were once important to us. The cruft accumulates over time on everything, like moss and bromeliads on everything along the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Speaking of the Gulf Coast of Alabama, it’s where I am spending this Thanksgiving, living in a camper trailer for weeks at a time, missing my family and helping the Libertarian Party of Alabama gain ballot access. … The whole concept of ballot access restriction through physical signatures is a type of political cruft.” (11/25/21)

https://libertarianpolicy.org/policy-analysis/cruft-and-being-thankful-for-it/

Source: Antiwar.com
by Jonathan Cook

“An ‘honest mistake’ is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians — and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier. And yet, a supposedly ‘independent’ Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorized a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. … The ‘honest mistake’ is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands — and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way — it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.” (11/26/21)

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2021/11/25/honest-mistakes-how-us-and-israel-justify-targeting-and-killing-civilians/

Source: EconLog
by Pierre Lemieux

“In and of itself, social mobility is far from ambiguously good. … Relative social mobility up is necessarily accompanied by social mobility down. Few people would consciously argue that social mobility in this sense is unambiguously good, especially if the arguer is among the downward-mobile. Whether relative social mobility is good or bad must depend on its causes and consequences. If people switch relative places but the absolute incomes of all move up in the process, social mobility can be said to be absolute: everybody gains.” (11/25/21)

https://www.econlib.org/whats-wrong-with-social-mobility/