Karl Denninger has been kicking around paleocon and paleo-libertarian circles for a long time. He used to turn up on radio programs hosted by old school paloes, but most of them have died off now. Denninger is right about a lot of things, but he has a lot of weird ideas too. You got the sense it takes a maximum effort to will himself into a zone within striking distance of normal. At any moment, the string could snap and he would spiral into lunacy.
I’ve posted a handful of locked-comment Tickers lately (yes, I still do add features once in a while to the software, and this is one of the recent additions — the ability to pre-lock a submission so it’s read-only. Fancy that.) and have had a couple of people ask via an invite-only BBM channel I set up “what’s dat.”
The software he uses is awful. The comments appear way down the page, so you would not know they exist if you did not scroll well past the post. Denninger is terribly thin skinned so the comments are heavily regulated and salted with his rantings about comments he does not like. His obsessing over it is very weird. The fact that he has an invite-only Blackberry channel is hilarious. It’s like grown men building a tree house for his friends and no girls allowed.
The rest of the post has nothing to do with the first graph so maybe his meds kicked in at that point. If you look at his bio on Wikipedia, there is a summary of his business career. Like Mark Cuban, Denninger got rich from the free money era, without ever creating much of any value. Further, his company could only exist because he got a government contract. Now he is a retired guy ranting about the excesses of government and the excesses of money creation.
Denninger would not be the first person driven mad by the realities and contradictions of his own life. Denninger knows how government awards contracts and he knows how fake money works. His insights, therefore, are useful. On the other hand, it is hard to be a critic of those things if you have befitted from them. It’s not impossible, but it requires a mental discipline and degree of self-awareness that he clearly lacks.
karl, like many smart people, is very assiduous. That can drive you mad or make you look like you have an OCD to outsiders
“I know, I know. That’s mean spirited of me, but what can I say? I’m an asshole that way.”
That’s one of the reasons I read your blog.
I’m sick of hearing from the eternally nice crowd in conservative circles. While I applaud taking the high road, we are now threatened from all sides by authoritarianism, entitlement mentality, and batshit crazy. Time for “nice” is over.