Let me inaugurate this, my blog, my very own blog, by pointing you to this excellent comment thread at Crooked Timber — which is such an ideal speech community that it actually features somebody named “Substance McGravitas” — where Mike Beggs’s review of David Graeber’s Debt is being debated as we speak.

Having come to the thread a staunch partisan of Mike’s negative take on Debt, I have to say, without revising that judgment, that some of the comments make a pretty good case for the book. See especially the exchange between Mike and the excellent JW Mason, which starts off in a sharp tone but ends with a sweet rapprochement, eliciting awwws from the studio audience.

Still and all: I’m still vulgar, and still an empiricist, so let me reproduce my favorite comment in the thread, from the legendary Dan Davies, which only seems vicious because it’s so on target: