Remembering Steve Jobs Photo credit: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576 He died 10 years ago today. The following day Dave Winer wrote a lovely piece about him. I wish Jobs had been a blogger, had written about his design process, so I could quote something. But he was the opposite of a blogger. Jobs was a mass communicator. No one in my generation has mastered the art as Jobs did. Today, with the outpouring of feeling on the net, are people mourning the man, or the phenomena he could unleash, just by saying “One more thing.” #
On the “new right” article: I don’t have to look the author up to know this is written by an American. This is not a new development, the right has always been heavily interventionist in Europe, with the exception of Thatcher in Britain in the 80s, the Swiss, the Irish, and the Dutch centre right parties, although the latter can hardly be called right wing. Boris Johnson has taken a leaf out of the Front National dirigiste playbook at the recent Tory party conference: immigration restrictions, massive tax increases, pharaonic investments, and a doubling down on a Beveridge healthcare model. The American lens is influenced by their Fusionism to the point of assuming conservativism and free markets go hand in hand, but this is an exception rather than the rule. After all Hayek dedicated his Road to Serfdom to “Socialists of all parties”, and that was in 1944!
The death of liberalism has been pronounced regularly since the 19th century, yet it has survived far far worse than the current climate. As the popular quote goes, it has been “greatly exaggerated”.
On the “new right” article: I don’t have to look the author up to know this is written by an American. This is not a new development, the right has always been heavily interventionist in Europe, with the exception of Thatcher in Britain in the 80s, the Swiss, the Irish, and the Dutch centre right parties, although the latter can hardly be called right wing. Boris Johnson has taken a leaf out of the Front National dirigiste playbook at the recent Tory party conference: immigration restrictions, massive tax increases, pharaonic investments, and a doubling down on a Beveridge healthcare model. The American lens is influenced by their Fusionism to the point of assuming conservativism and free markets go hand in hand, but this is an exception rather than the rule. After all Hayek dedicated his Road to Serfdom to “Socialists of all parties”, and that was in 1944!
The death of liberalism has been pronounced regularly since the 19th century, yet it has survived far far worse than the current climate. As the popular quote goes, it has been “greatly exaggerated”.