Troll Bait

If you have something to say to David the Wake, but it doesn’t pertain to a particular topic that I have written about in a particular post, perhaps because you’re feeling kind of trollish or chatty, then just leave it in the comments to this post.

Political Evolution

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics – The Daily Beast

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal.

Yeah, I thought I was semi-retired from this blog, but occasionally something reminds me of the self-righteous stupidity of my friend The Cisco Kid, or Jimmy Cranknfurter, or whatever he’s calling himself now. I don’t have any problem with his positions, because it is obvious why he has to take them, since he is just following the instincts selected for during his political/psychological evolution. But blatantly false statements of fact, such as the “conservative” nonsense surrounding Obamacare, should be corrected. I sincerely believe it is in one’s best interest to use accurate statements of fact, even when lying, propagandizing, or otherwise acting out on one’s political instincts.

Party Animals

Ron Paul Rising – NYTimes.com

Paul, for all his crankishness, is the kind of conservative that Tea Partiers want to believe themselves to be: Deeply principled, impressively consistent, a foe of big government in nearly all its forms (the Department of Defense very much included), a man of ideas rather than of party.

Gingrich, on the other hand, is the kind of conservative that liberals believe most Tea Partiers to be – not a genuine “don’t tread on me” libertarian, but a partisan Republican whose unstinting support for George W. Bush’s deficit spending morphed into hand-wringing horror of “socialism” once a Democrat captured the Oval Office.

Politics: “They do it because they’re dumb”

Oh my! There is someone else who thinks that people who obsess over politics are stupid.

Why The 99% Should Protest Against YCombinator

Here’s Paul Graham’s second comment:

I don’t think there are two separate crowds. I think HN’s initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.

Politics happens to a big source of shallow controversies. But I don’t think most people who upvote comments saying “**** Monsanto” do it because they have a deep interest in politics, any more than most people who rail against “Obamacare” do it because they have a deep interest in politics. They do it because they’re dumb. It’s the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.

Science Does Not Find Truth

Jonah Lehrer points out that the increasing number of retractions in scientific research is not necessarily due to fraud; it’s probably just an inherent flaw in the philosophy of scientific materialism as a mechanism for finding truth.

To measure the impact of rebuttals, the researchers tracked the citation history of seven high profile papers on fishery science originally published in Nature and Science. All of these papers were later subject to multiple falsifications, so that most objective observers would conclude that the proposed theories had been soundly refuted. How did these refutations impact the subsequent citation history? . . .

For those convinced that science is self-correcting, and progresses in a forward direction over time, we offer only discouragement. We had anticipated that as time passed, citations of the original articles would become more negative, and these articles would be less cited than other articles published in the same journal and year. In fact, support for the original articles remained undiminished over time and perhaps even increased, and we found no evidence of a decline in citations for any of the original articles following publication of the rebuttals. [Ecosphere]

Science is a human process and reality is damn complicated – we are bound to make mistakes. There’s also no reason to believe that scientists are somehow less likely to commit fraud than other ambitious professionals. The more relevant question is what happens after the error. Can science correct itself? Does a picture of reality gradually emerge from the scatterplot of mismeasurement? This returns us to the institutions of science, for they are what distinguish the scientific process from every other pursuit of the truth. As Richard Rorty once observed:

On this view, there is no reason to praise scientists for being more ‘objective’ or ‘logical’ or ‘methodical’ or ‘devoted to truth’ than other people. But there is plenty of reason to praise the institutions that they have developed and within which they work, and to use these as models for the rest of culture. For these institutions give concreteness and detail to the idea of unforced agreement.

I like the fact that Lehrer defines science, by elimination, as a social institution. By contrast, the worst definition of science describes it as an esoteric body of knowledge and then goes on to ascribe godlike attributes to the institutions that create it.

Who Here Is Not a Person?

Why Romney’s Gaffe Might Not Matter – Garance Franke-Ruta – Politics – The Atlantic

As to the critical question of how the gaffe is playing in Iowa, driving back from Ames to Des Moines after the debate Thursday night I listened to a local right-wing talk-radio station that replayed most of the shouty exchange Romney had had with the hecklers, whom the radio host repeatedly pointed out belonged to a liberal Iowa advocacy group. The commentator basically presented Romney as a hero for his handling of them and blamed “the liberal media” for accepting the protestors at face value. The quote in question about corporations as people didn’t even come up.

This is one of those issues that really plants me in the liberal camp, I guess. I absolutely cannot get on board with a defense of the claim that a corporation should have the same legal rights as a person.

It’s not just absurd; it’s obscene. It requires making a “person” an abstract legal entity that does not necessarily have an existential status as a sentient life-form. From there it is possible to jigger all kinds of interesting exceptions to the definition of a “person.” It is a totally corrupted and deviant way of looking at the world.

The Mollycoddled Mob

Never mind the looters, what about the ‘fascists’? | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

And so it has been this week, which kicked off with reckless rioting by multi-ethnic yoof in inner-city patches, yet which ended, bizarrely but at the same time predictably, with an orgy of elite handwringing about those non-rioting white working classes who haunt London’s suburbs. That some of ‘these people’ dared to patrol their streets, to set up miniature citizen armies to see off the chancers and tricksters of the looting lobby, has been treated as the No.1 threat now facing Britain. They are a ‘white mob’, we are told, who could precipitate a ‘race war’. According to the deputy mayor of London, Kit Malthouse, their community-protection antics are ‘deeply undesirable’. Come on Kit, you can say it: you think these people are ‘undesirables’.

This riotous week has confirmed that the great and the good of Great Britain don’t have much in the way of a shared morality anymore. At the start of the week, the political class, cops and Fourth Estate all proffered various explanations for the youthful violence, often pointing the finger of blame at each other in a moral stand-off not dissimilar to the final scene in Reservoir Dogs. Yet by Friday they were tentatively re-linking arms around the one thing they agree on: that there is nothing scarier – nothing – than the sight of 100+ white blokes on the streets, shouting things in those gruff voices they have. You may have looked at the groups of men in Enfield and Eltham and seen working people keen to protect their homes and shops, but the upper echelons of society, through their snob-goggles, saw the emergence of an English version of the Third Reich – they saw ‘race hate’ and ‘fascists patrolling the streets’.

“Police work” is primarily a political activity.

The riots have confirmed, once more, the gaping chasm between Britain’s elites and its white working-class natives. In the eyes of our betters and rulers, these whites are the true aliens.

Who is the constituency? The one that is being patronized, not the one being demonized.

Where some happy-clappy Christians live their lives through the question ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, Britain’s great and good seem to organise their morality and security around the question ‘What Will The White Working Classes Do?’, treating this blob of people as a pogrom-in-the-making who could be provoked into fascistic fury any minute now.

Ironically enough, in the US we hear the same warnings from both the Frantic Left and the Galtista Right. They both want to play up the threat of Angry White Men With Guns Who Hate The Librul Gubmint. But whereas the Democrats want to antagonize these scary folks, the Republicans want to bribe them. “Go John Galt . . . Go get your pork-barrel defense contracts and farm subsidies! Go get your Hummer tax credits! Go get your megachurch tax writeoffs! Go get your Medicare benefits! That’ll show them libruls!”

The phony protests of the “Tea Party” and the manipulative rhetoric of Fox News are ridiculously insincere and worthless when considered in the light of what “conservative” politicians actually accomplish. To be clear, I have no problem with stolid Midwestern conservatism. I would rather live in that culture than in a putrid, decadent, liberal East Coast or West Coast community. Interestingly, this “British neo-marxist” has the same view:

So this peculiar week has ended with the peculiar situation where some in the liberal elite are expressing sympathy for the rioting youth, while simultaneously spitting bile at ‘white mobs’. Why? In essence, the cultural elite feels a closer affinity with the moral-lite rioters because, largely through the welfare state, it has some influence on those people’s lives and outlooks. In areas where welfarism is entrenched, the elites have some leeway to influence morality, to push parenting in a certain direction, to import their own decadent, relativistic values and spread them among the poor. It has no such purchase, or certainly less purchase, in more productive, self-sufficient working-class areas, where people are less reliant on the state and more reliant on each other, and where they have their own traditions and values thank you very much (which, yes, sometimes includes ‘chanting England’). The elites’ failure to colonise fully these white working-class areas makes them view such areas as strange, unknowable, full of people with rough hands and a weird penchant for post-work pints of beer. Indeed, the thing that most unites the lumpenproletariat and the decadent bourgeoisie is a fundamental disdain for the ‘labouring nation’, for people who work for a living and who try their best to govern their own lives. How dare they live outside of the moral universe created by the chattering classes? What is wrong with them? They must be fascists.

London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.

The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they seem to care for their own communities. You don’t have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal.

This, in fact, is identical to my view of the “Tea Party”:

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community.

Story Telling

Climate-change alarmism: you couldn’t make it up | Tim Black | spiked

For what climate change offers our cultural betters, what it provides that politics in its contemporary form no longer can, is an overarching framework for understanding our present, past and future. Much as a religious or social and political narrative might have underlain a figurative or realist work of literature, so environmentalism neatly provides contemporary authors with a similar source of meaning. And here’s the thing. The reason it appeals, the reason famous authors have willingly drawn from it to compose their dystopian short stories, is that climate change is itself a narrative. It was always already fictional.

That may seem counterintuitive, given environmental campaigners’ obsession with ‘the facts’. But to the extent that climate change provides a way of giving our world a direction and ascribing moral value to certain behaviour in the light of a postulated apocalyptic ending, it is first and foremost a grand narrative.

Yet, for some reason many people disparage the study of rhetoric as irrelevant.

The Great Evil

If investors leave, the 1930s could return – Page 3 – CNN

Strong bull markets usually end badly for a large number of investors. Volatile markets dissuade them from investing in anything but safe investments. If they believe that there is nowhere left to invest, the consequences will be of 1930s proportions. Stock markets hate uncertainty, goes the time-worn phrase. That is because investors abhor the destruction of their wealth, especially if it is seen as being caused by bad politics.

This article pinpoints one reason for my disgust with economics in general, as well as US politics when it is treated as a subset of economics. The disgust is not directed at practitioners of economics or even its practices as such, but rather at economics as rationale for ethics or as justification for private superstitions about politics.

The overriding concern of this article’s author is the great evil of uncertainty. Evil is here characterized by the diffusion of capital into the hands of smaller investors and ordinary individuals, who tend to waste money on food and shelter; whereas they should be donating it to help rich people.

The most telling phrase is the complaint about “the volatility that has wiped out several trillions of investor wealth.” The author thinks that is a bad thing, but here is another view:

The concentration of wealth is now in so few hands and is so extreme in degree, that the combined liquid financial power of all of those not in this small group is inconsequential to determining the direction of the economy.   As a result, we now have the equivalent of centralized planning in global marketplaces.  A few thousand extremely wealthy people making decisions on the allocation of our collective wealth.  The result was inevitable:  gross misallocation across all facets of the private economy.  [Central Planning and The Fall of the US Empire]

The pinkos at Citigroup, as reported by the pinkos at the Wall Street Journal, call this a Plutonomy.

1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”

2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.

There is no difference between someone shilling for increasing “investor wealth” and someone shilling for increasing “government control”. Both are concerned with the evil effects of allowing individuals to make decisions for themselves. The decrease in “investor wealth”, like the decrease in “government control” or “consumer confidence”, is a function of society’s lack of trust in its idols. In fact, the “US consumer” as driver of the economy is a myth:

In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. [Can the Middle Class Be Saved?]

In a roundabout way, that actually supports the contention in the first linked article: the only thing that matters is what the wealthiest people do, since they are the de facto cream of civilized society–”If they were to decide to stop supporting all the working-class leeches, everything would fall apart, just as Ayn Rand predicted.”

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain.

Nevertheless, most politicians seem to believe that the most important function of politics is to protect the super-rich from losing their money.

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

But favoring the rich risks alienating those who think they are entitled to become rich.
The worst political mistake is to make someone believe they deserve some kind of guaranteed income or status, and then take it away.

A Theory of Everything (Sort of) – NYTimes.com

We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.

The US myth of the middle class propagated from the 1940s onward has been that every citizen deserves to have a chance to get an above average education, a lifetime career, a pension, a nice-looking husband or wife, a stable marriage, two or three children, two or three cars, a house, several televisions, air conditioning, annual vacations, low-cost health care, low taxes, good roads, good public schools, clean air, clean water, no nuclear fallout, no toxic waste, a low crime rate, a few guns, a credit card, a good return on stock investments, truthful politicians, and low-fat ice cream with sprinkles, whipped cream, and a cherry.

But, in fact, not everyone even gets a chance at all those things, and it is irresponsible to base government policy on the promise that eventually everyone will get a chance at all those things.

Jimmy Smack

I believe this article concerns the secret identity of one of my occasional interlocutors, Jimmy “Smack-Talker” Crank:

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/the_legend_of_jimmy_smack/