Ryan Cooper

They're lazily directed:

Damon Linker : "No, Condoleeza Rice is not a war criminal." They mean that leading members of the Bush administration are war criminals in the precise legal sense that they violated the imposing body of rules and regulations that have grown out of the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials and Geneva Conventions. These rules are known as "international law." There's a reason I placed the term in quote marks — because I think it's inaccurate to describe these rules and regulations as laws. They are, strictly speaking, bilateral and multilateral treaties between and among governments. Laws, by contrast, are written, enacted, and executed by governments, and they apply exclusively to those residing within territorially defined political communities (be they city-states, nations, or empires). Citizens of liberal democracies hold, moreover, that laws gain legitimacy — and become binding — only with the consent of the governed. And that standard is (tacitly) met...

Very good:

We are now nearly six years out from worst crisis of capitalism in 80 years. That crisis, and subsequent lack of recovery, is an ongoing confirmation of the Left’s critique of unrestrained capitalism: that it is prone to crisis, that most of its benefits accrue to a tiny minority, and that it undermines democracy, the rule of law, and the social cohesion on which a decent society depends. Yet the Left’s response, almost across the world, has been weak and ineffectual. Mike Konczal put it fairly well : “leftists continue to seem lost, unable to turn the middle of the plate pitch of a global financial crisis to their advantage.” I think this is due, in part, to what has become the default mode of leftist cultural operation. Leftists (by which I mean, broadly speaking, people to the left of mainstream liberals) have scored some tremendous victories by shaming prejudice: the fact that there is now gay marriage in Utah ought to be proof enough of that. But I think this style of oper...