Slog - Comments on On Hypopsia

Comment by Simac

Simac — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:49:50 -0800

Actually, Ancient Greek had no such word: this is a learned neo-Greek coinage from the 1970s, sometimes also encountered as "hypopsy."

Comment by charles mudede

charles mudede — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:54:56 -0800

@1) From On the Shores of Politics ... "Suspicion, in Thucydides' Greek, is called hypopsia: looking underneath. What characterizes democracy for Thucydides is the rejection of this looking underneath."

Comment by SeMe

SeMe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:55:08 -0800

we have a looooooooong way to go before we experience half of third world poverty.

Comment by manbaby

manbaby — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:05:19 -0800

I read the first line of this post and suddenly became narcoleptic.

Comment by Dan

Dan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:12:22 -0800

What was it Charlie Gibson said to Palin recently? "I'm sorry. I got buried under a blizzard of words there."

If your point were valid, I doubt you'd need to use false anthropomorphisms and irrelevant tangents to make it. As is, I'm not actually sure what your point is.

Comment by Chris B

Chris B — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:14:18 -0800

Wall Street usually _is_ happy or sad or indifferent. We (that is to say the masses in the public who don't know the actual workings of it) only pay attention to it when it is Ecstatic or Morose and that's usually because the media is throwing the information up every three seconds: "OMG! BEST DAY EVER!!!" "WTF! WE'RE SCREWED!!!!" In a very real way, all these numbers and these pictures, for all that they represent, are as meaningless to daily life as the Top Ten Box Office numbers.

That's why I'm watching all this with a grain of salt, because while I don't dispute Golob's posts and don't know enough to imagine that everything is going to be just fine, I feel inured to the hype of the news. Worst day EVER? Really? Hunh. Get back to me on that.

Comment by Bellevue Ave

Bellevue Ave — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:19:35 -0800

look at it this way;

SKF was up more than 10% 2 days ago, down 10% yesterday, and up again more than 10% today. Smooth that over a 3 day moving average and it doesn't look that manic.

Comment by um

um — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:30:00 -0800

I like getting all my financial tips from "people" who lurk on blog comment threads all day

Comment by Bellevue Ave

Bellevue Ave — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:39:27 -0800

Im actually a bot from bloomberg.

Comment by east coaster

east coaster — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:19:55 -0800

This post is an excellent example of bad writing. Its meandering path of thoughts and failure to make a clear point reveal that it was poorly thought out and its excessive use of big words makes the author look like he is trying to look smarter than he is. It requires a complete and honest revision.

Comment by charles mudede

charles mudede — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:33:51 -0800

big words?

Comment by Dan

Dan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:29:43 -0800

@11:

Oh, come on, Charles. The signal to noise ratio in your posts is absurdly low. Much as I dislike what you write, I'm not saying this to be mean; this is simply why I dislike it.

You can play at ignorance--perhaps it is we, the audience, who are too dimwitted to appreciate you?--but isn't the point of writing to communicate with your audience?

What's the quotation attributed to Pascal (and Cato and many others)? "I apologize for the length of this letter; had I had more time, I would have made it shorter."

Comment by Jeff Stevens

Jeff Stevens — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:13:54 -0800

I wonder if either of the Coen Brothers read "The World of Wrestling" before making "Barton Fink".

BTW @10, ever spent time on the West Coast? Try it sometime. Maybe you'll understand Seattle writers better.

Or maybe not...

Comment by Lorenzo

Lorenzo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:18:36 -0800

I was with you until the end. "...a mass movement of the universal equivalent to an even smaller percentage of the global population."
So the government is taking over a lot of these banks and companies that are going bankrupt, right? And so this amounts to a "socialization of losses".
But what's the upshot?

Comment by M

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:15:06 -0800

Charles, you're exactly right. The massive consolidation of wealth that will result from the failure of so many big players in the financial sector is the ultimate consequence of a series of deregulations that have been pushed through in the last decade. According to reports on Bloomberg, this isn�t the first time that the loopholes of the new regulatory environment were coveted by a lucky few as the market corrected to reflect looser restrictions. Last night the new revelation seemed to be that without people noticing, the short sell regulations had been softened.

Anyway, essentially a few very smart people are working the system and they are making ridiculous amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. I don't think this was an accident.