I’ve seen claims that the tulip mania that occurred in Holland in the 1630s was rational. I’ve seen the same claim for the housing bubble in the US in the early- to mid-200s. I’ve also often seen the assertion– totally revisionist and ridiculous – that “no one could have known!”

I guess you can define “rational” any way that you want, but bubbles are rational only if you believe that asset prices can rise to infinity.

Doesn’t sound all that rational to me – and notice that I did not buy a house during the bubble though I certainly could have afforded one where I lived at the time. This is because I was aware of it.  So were many others.

Just as I was aware of the stock market bubble in late ‘90s and early 2000s. A story about that at another time, perhaps.

Not a great act of genius in either case, though. Some things are just obvious.

So many people are bankrupted and impoverished by bubbles that they’d like to believe that the actions that occurred during the boom – including their own individual actions – were rational.

Perhaps on an individual level there is a marginally-applicable case for a small part of this due to inequalities of knowledge.

However, the powers-that-be like to impute rationality for their marks so they can avoid helping their victims, while at the same time claiming irrationality in their own affairs to avoid criminal prosecutions and to prevent the government from taking away their toys (that is, the ability to blow up the economy at will).

Are there any financial or asset bubbles right now? I only know the US all that well, but there is one, but it’s not that large as bubbles go.

Tech is again in a bubble, but only a relatively-small part funded by VC. When it blows up – which it will – it won’t have much effect on the economy.

So true.

What do these critics and academics even mean when they call adult literature serious? This descriptor gets thrown around but never defined. Were I to make the same reductive assessment of all adult literature that the genre’s critics make of YA fiction, then the serious novel would be about a middle-aged person struggling with career collapse and sexual frustration. I don’t want to belittle these topics, but they’re only serious to sexually frustrated middle-aged people, coincidentally being the same narrow demographic that adult literature seems to serve. And they clearly don’t read as many books as their kids.

It amazes me that supposed experts in critical theory, textual analysis and semiotics cannot for the life of them recognize the use and societal relevance of large-scale allegory and metaphor in works of sf or YA. It’s almost like they, say, are a little biased. But that couldn’t be, right?

Do read the Guardian piece, though. The conclusion is just great.

Truly free speech is equally imperiled at different times and in different ways because both the Left and the Right hate it when it assails their goals and ideologies.

On balance, I think the Right is worse — as is typical — but pretending the Left isn’t often just as eager to ban speech that displeases them doesn’t stand up to historical scrutiny.

Free speech is more often now constrained by corporate action than by the government directly, and this is something we are told we should not be concerned with.

“It has nothing to do with free speech if the First Amendment wasn’t violated!” as it is usually said.

I hear this from people on the Left more often than the Right, but it is widespread across the political spectrum.

But tell the worker fired for attempting to organize a union that their right to free speech was not violated. Or tell it to someone who gets canned for a mere blog post.

It’s a-ok, apparently, if a corporation does it according to most people.

I’m always a bit shocked at how willing people are to accept authoritarianism and neo-fascism as long as it is couched in the right language, framed by the right key words.