This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories — Joe Forrest in Medium: No one is immune from conspiratorial thinking, but Christians have a bit more to lose from falling for conspiracy theories than the average person. And I think there a few additional reasons Christians may be susceptible to unhealthy paranoid skepticism. Maybe it’s because, from a young age, many of us were taught the “scientific establishment” was out to destroy our belief in the Bible. Or maybe so many of us were convinced by the Left Behind books that a satanic one-world government was on the horizon, it just makes sense we need to be as vigilant as possible right now. Or maybe because we’ve already been conditioned by our own belief system that there exists a hidden spiritual reality that making the leap to a hidden “shadow government” isn’t all that big of a deal. […] Conspiracy theories speak to our desire to be a part of a story bigger than ourselves. And what blows my mind is that Christians should already believe that to be true. Christians shouldn’t need to buy into conspiracy theories to feel special, or to make sense of the world, or to make their lives feel more exciting. But we’re so enraptured with conspiracy theories, I question if we believe serving the Creator God of the Universe is really enough.
• Modern monetary theory, the economy and the virus — Steven Hail in the Economic Reform Australia Blog: Recently the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia claimed – apparently seriously – that the fact the Government had been on the brink of balancing its budget, and that Australia consequently has a relatively low government debt to GDP ratio, placed him in a better posit- ion to finance what most people are wrongly calling a stimulus package. He is wrong. Countries like Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States have levels of government debt far in excess of our own. This in no sense constrains their budgetary response to the crisis. In the United States, the constraint, as ever, is Congress. The United Kingdom, despite its high government debt and its trade deficit, has been able without any problem, to ‘pay for’ a support package much larger than our own. What should be clear to everyone now is that federal or central governments like those of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Japan face no purely financial constraints at all. Never mind a ‘money tree’. They just have a money computer. They can create limitless amounts of their currencies when they need to do so. They are not dependent on the goodwill of the bond market, or of credit ratings agencies.
• The Moral and Strategic Calculus of Voting for Joe Biden to Defeat Trump — or Not — Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept: Among the wild cards of a Biden administration will be the issue of whether he has the actual mental stamina to govern, or if he is going to be frequently disoriented and infrequently seen or heard. Setting aside the protestations of people who pretend they don’t see exactly what everyone else does when Biden speaks in public, we are not actually being asked to vote for Biden as the candidate, because the Biden we see is a shell of his former self. We are being asked to vote for a spin-off of the Obama show, a cast of familiar characters and a few exciting new additions who would take charge of the executive branch, without the popular star of the original show among the visible cast. The fact that the Democrats have forced through a candidate that many people don’t believe is fully functional and will rely on the strength of “the team” assembled around him is a pretty grim statement about the state of democracy in the U.S. If Biden is the best the Democrats have to offer in the face of Trump, the system is rotten.
• The Myth of “Helicopter Money” — Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray in Project Sydndicate: What MMT actually prescribes has nothing to do with sending “cash” to people or banks. Nor is the Fed “doing MMT” when it engages in QE or lends hundreds of billions to financial institutions. MMT merely underscores the fact that the Fed faces no financial constraints on its ability to buy assets or lend; it does not prescribe any particular action in this direction – and indeed is skeptical of such policies. If there is any MMT feature to the US rescue package, it is the fact that it is not “paid for.” Proponents of MMT have always insisted that we must stop attaching such strings – increased taxes or spending cuts elsewhere (the “PAYGO offset”) – to spending bills. Abolishing such conditions may or may not increase the budget deficit. But, regardless of the budgetary outcome, the spending will always take the form of payments made by the Fed on behalf of the Treasury. No printing press or tax receipts are required.
• Bernie Sanders: The Foundations of American Society Are Failing Us — Bernie Sanders: Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation — struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction? In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today. […] Simply opposing Mr. Trump will not be enough — we will need to articulate a new direction for America. [Meanwhile, Joe Biden has come up with a nickname for Trump. Keep up the good work, Joe!]
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Why the Neoliberals Won’t Let This Crisis Go to Waste — Alex Doherty interviews Phil Mirowsky in Jacobin: Over and above various national and cultural differences, I think there’s one shared point. Neoliberals really believe that people are inherently bad cognizers — they can’t work their way out of their problems just by thinking. Of course, that sounds like a very negative doctrine: i.e., telling us that people are incapable of understanding the nature of their problems and pursuing their own democratic ends. But for the neoliberals, there’s an upbeat answer: the market. And they have changed the meaning of what a market is from earlier economic thought which tended to treat it as an allocation of scarce resources. They tend to think of it more as an epistemic problem — that the market is the greatest information processor known to mankind. This starts with Hayek but then feeds through the other main thinkers. This is important, because it means that people have to be brought to understand politically that they have to, in a sense, concede that the market knows more than they do. So, they have to adjust their hopes, their fears, to what the market tells them is necessary.
• Coronavirus and the prospect of mass involuntary euthanasia — Hamid Dabashi in Al Jazeera: As journalist Chauncey DeVega explained in a blunt piece for Salon, "Donald Trump and the Republican Party are now openly willing to sacrifice those Americans they consider to be useless eaters" in an effort to "save capitalism". What was merely presumed or suspected before is now in full disclosure. In the now nearly half a century I have lived in the US I had never witnessed such a bold, vicious, cruel demonstration of the laws of the jungle ruling this country. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one could now see in broad daylight the cruelty that was at work in the mass murder of Native Americans and the business of transatlantic slavery. In good old liberal fashion, the Washington Post and the New York Times opened forums to discuss "the morals" of the choice between sacrificing older people and getting "the economy" back on track, the "pros and cons" of the issue, as they say. Scarcely anyone in such mainstream outlets would question the very foundation of this economics of barbarism.
• Gaping at the Vapid — Wondermark by David Malki !: