by Erik Kain on December 27, 2011
Opponents of online censorship have introduced a bipartisan alternative to legislation that threatens to break the internet. The OPEN Act is far from perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. Eric Goldman has a really smart, detailed breakdown of the OPEN Act – an alternative to the purely noxious SOPA/PIPA legislation currently crawling [...]
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by Erik Kain on October 21, 2011
A number of commenters pushed back against me when I argued that taxing the rich, without fixing other injustices within our political system, would not be enough. Darren G warned that I was arguing “a straw man.” The recent poll published in the WSJ showed that 30% of the OWS protesters were motivated by ” [...]
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by Erik Kain on September 26, 2011
It’s funny how history repeats itself. Conor Williams has an excerpt from Michael Kozin’s The Populist Persuasion up at his blog describing the 1896 elections. The echoes of our own time are glaring: During the presidential campaign, the major parties fought, more pointedly than ever before, to control the symbols and definitions of patriotism. The [...]
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by Erik Kain on September 20, 2011
Last night I mentioned that the “populism” of recent Obama speeches and policy proposals is pretty weak tea compared to the populism of earlier leftist and agrarian movements at the turn of the 20th century. Matt Yglesias points to the actual class warfare that sits at the foundation of the platform of the Communist Party [...]
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