All posts by John Casey

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Antichrist

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One would hope in vain that the reelection of Barack Obama would put to rest the foolishness of many of his opponents.  Here is a megachurch pastor from Texas:

"I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he's not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes," said Jeffress.

"President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist."

One question: Can we do anything to stop the Antichrist at this point?  Should we try to stop him coming?

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The confidence man

Nate Silver, nerdy statistician at 538.com, correctly predicated the outcome of the recent election (with the exception, by the way, of one Senate race in North Dakota).  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, "numbers" guys by their own descriptions, did not.  An article at CBS.com (my first time there too!) had this to say:

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks – not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan – bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time – poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats – and that would translate into votes for Romney. 

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed – they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks.

What is interesting about this account is that the Romney campaign found a way to convince itself of the power of confidence, motivation, and enthusiasm over simple numbers.  But that is why we have numbers, because those things are meaningless. 

Here was Romney's approach to the economy (from, by the way, the same tape where he made the "47 percent" comment):

If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see — without actually doing anything — we'll actually get a boost in the economy.

I'm glad he did not win, for his losing has been so instructive.

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Schadenfreude

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The election is finally over, save the crying.  Speaking of which, please join me for a little bit of schadenfreude at the expense of Charles Krauthammer, Fox News contributor and columnist.  A little context, the other night, as the internet went all abuzz with an imminent Obama victory, many turned to Fox News to watch the slow motion realization that their alternative reality was just that, alternative.  I happened to catch an embittered Charles Krauthammer utter the following:

If he manages to win the popular vote, it will be very small, if there’s any. And even in the electoral, I think it will be a very small majority. Particularly if Virginia and Florida will go to Romney. So this is not a mandate in the number, or in the way that he campaigned. He did not campaign on any ideas. Anything large. Anything important. He didn’t address entitlements of tackle anything like that. 

Via Salon (via DailyKos), here's Krauthammer in 2004:

I think it was a huge issue that the president was weak in his first term. He had less of the power and strength and capital, as he speaks of, than he does today. And now that he’s been elected with a large majority, or a significant majority, and with a mandate, I think part of that mandate is to get the right judges, by his likes.

What where the election results in 2004 versus 2012?  Following directly from above. 

Bush won with 286 electoral votes to John Kerry’s 252, and with a 2.4 percent margin in the popular vote. Obama currently has 303 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, and he’s likely to add to that the 29 votes from Florida, which hasn’t been called yet, for a grand total of 332. It’s to early to tell on the popular vote, but it will be between 2 and 3 percent.

I don't know what "mandate" means, by the way.  But if Bush had a mandate in 2000 (as some said–I'll find the quotes later), and a real mandate in 2004, then Obama has a mandate now. 
 
Like I say, I'm glad the election is over, but I'm enjoying the crying. 
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There’s a 73.6 percent chance of a sea battle tomorrow

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I've said it a bunch here, but I'll say it again.  The textbook examples of fallacies have nothing on the actual fallacious arguments people make.  At this link is an add put out in favor of the Republican Party.  See if you can count the fallacies. 

And here is someone (I'm not going to link directly to him) taking on political odds maker Nate Silver:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Apparently, Nate Silver has his own way of “skewing” the polls. He appears to look at the polls available and decide which ones to put more “weighting” on in compiling his own average, as opposed to the Real Clear Politics average, and then uses the average he calculates to determine that percentages a candidate has of winning that state. He labels some polling firms as favoring Republicans, even if they over sample Democrats in their surveys, apparently because he doesn’t agree with their results. In the end the polls are gerrymandering into averages that seem to suit his agenda to make the liberal Democrats candidates apparently strong than they are.

That's weird; if you think Nate Silver's methodology sucks, then you don't really need to comment on his stature, his voice, or whether or not he has testicles.  If you think that is bad, and I hope you do, then you'll appreciate the more serious commentary of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (via Charles Pierce):

Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it's the same thing," Scarborough said. "Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes."

Scarborough makes too much money to confuse the principle of bivalence (i.e., every proposition is either true or false) with probability (e.g., you have a 1 percent chance of winning!).  Sadly, odds are that his salary depends on his not understanding that. 

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What it takes to be a pundit

Outsourcing this week's blogging to Gawker.  Speaking of the value of political punditry, Hamilton Nolan writes:

But whereas the sports world, for example, boasts a class of professional commentators that have a legitimate claim to their positions—Jon Gruden can offer more genuine insight into football than your drunk friend in the Packers jersey—the same cannot be said for politics. The political commentator class is, for the most part, little more than a bunch of regular people like you and me who were lucky enough to land jobs writing down their thoughts on politics for money. It's not that there aren't truly insightful political experts in the world. Professional political strategists know tons about how elections are won, and philosophers and political science professors and economists at universities across the country can all offer fascinating and sagacious arguments on how and why various political positions are justified. But, with a handful of notable exceptions, these are not the types of people who compose our nation's political pundit class. Our political pundits are mostly just spitballing. You might as well just listen to yourself.

I'd take issue with the "regular people part."  Being charitable, I gather Nolan means "people with no special qualifications."  But that's not really true either.  They need to be confident that they have something to say.  And they need, most of all, to be immune from the tons of relevant, accurate, and devastating criticism.  That's what it takes.

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He is the numerator and the denominator

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Since it is now the height of fascism to call someone who lies a liar, I question whether I should refer to Paul Krugman, who calls the Romney campaign dishonest for saying it has evidence when it doesn't.  But I will anyway, because you'll see.  First, here's Krugman:

So when the campaign says that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the technical term, lying — just as it is when it says that six independent studies support its claims about taxes (they don’t).

What do Mr. Romney’s economic advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they’re placing their faith in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate’s victory would inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In fact, in his infamous Boca Raton “47 percent” remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big boost to the economy simply by being elected, “without actually doing anything.” And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn’t about confidence, it’s about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis? Never mind.

To summarize, then, the true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.

Remember, Krugman sort of supports Obama.  Here is otherwise apparently smart (and therefore? unbelievably rich) guy Mark Cuban, who is a Romney supporter, on Romney's lack of specifics:

Which is the exact detail of the Romney Tax Plan that makes all the numbers add up. Governor Romney is the detail. He will take all the unsolved variables in the algorithm that is our desire to reduce the budget deficit , increase economic growth and thereby increase employment and negotiate them into the outcome that will solve this country's financial problem.

Which is exactly what Krugman said.  If you read the rest of the Cuban piece, it's a list of things he thinks Romney can or wants to do, not, as you might expect from a very large word problem, numbers and equations–or better, reference to actual specifics of Romney's plan. 

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Logic counts, but so do facts

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Michael Kinsley is on to something when he argues,  in a recent post at the Washington Monthly's Ten Miles Square Blog, that people ought to check the logic of arguments in politics.  He's completely wrong, however, to suggest they shouldn't also check facts (but maybe this was a title he didn't assign–"Check Logic, Not Facts").  He writes:

This political campaign has been a frustrating blizzard of numbers and studies.

One side says $344 billion over 21 years, then the other side calls that a desperate lie and says the real number is up to $1 trillion over the next decade. The first side then attempts to validate its number by saying it comes from a recent report by the authoritative Center for Boring Statistics, and the second side says that, by contrast, its numbers are based on the nonpartisan volume “Vicious Figures for Dummies, 3rd Edition” (1958).

How is a citizen supposed to know whom to believe?

Journalism might help sort out which ones are credible. Anyway, on to the importance of logic: 

There is an alternative. Many campaign thrusts and parries can be verified or discredited by reason and logic alone. They just don’t make sense (or, on occasion, they do make sense) without reference to any numbers or studies. Reason doesn’t require the approval of the Congressional Budget Office. It is available to anybody willing to take a minute and use it. And it is self-validating. You don’t need to trust anybody to decide whether reasoning is true or false.

For example, you don’t need any actual numbers to figure out that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan, are talking through their hats about Medicare and Social Security.

Minor quibble: reasoning isn't really true or false, it's sound or unsound, valid or invalid, etc.  That distinction, between inferences and facts, is actually a critically important one to Kinsley's point.  And his flubbing up the correct terminology shows that he really doesn't have a grip on what makes his recommendation, admirable though it is, very difficult to implement.

For people hide behind inferences all of time as matters of opinion.  It's their opinion, they may argue, that A follows from B.  Kinsley needs to find a way to show that it is not a matter of opinion that A follows B.  But that's difficult to do.  It's way more difficult than checking facts.

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Impersonal expressions

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A new debate tonight. Here is a remark from Politico on the last one that almost perfectly captures the post-truth media environment.

It is clear that Biden's substantive high points — and there were several places where he took clear command of the debate on issues ranging from entitlements to taxes — will be partly shadowed by his nonstop succession of incredulous smiles, sneers, taunts and guffaws that were apparently intended to show self-confidence and fighting spirit but struck many viewers as undignified and rude.

"will be partly overshadowed" is needlessly impersonal.  The author might better have written: "Biden won the debate on substance, but I'm annoyed by his facial expressions, so I am going to deduct points from him.  But I'm going to make this a third person passive construction (sorry, I don't know the technical name), so it doesn't look like me who's doing it."

via Charles Pierce

 

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You Lie!

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In an article on why it's wrong to call someone whose accuracy is deeply questionable a liar is out of bounds, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal goes full Godwin:

The Obama campaign's resurrection of "liar" as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.

The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics. That's what is so unsettling about a David Axelrod or David Plouffe following accusations of dishonesty and lies with "whether that person should sit in the Oval Office." And that is followed by President Obama himself feeding the new line in stump speeches without himself ever using the L-word.

For those who are new to the idea, Godwin's law has it, on one corollary at least, that one loses an argument as soon as one compares one's opponent to Hitler.  What's ironic about this employment of it is that there is a much easier argument against the "liar" accusation: it's not true. 

Sadly, that is a road Mr.Henninger has not taken.  He can't, of course, because that road is closed.

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[JOHN LAUGHS]

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So much garbage to write about that can't decide.  So here's a classic hollow man heard on NPR's fantastic "On the Media"

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If you listen to, say, morning radio, one of the most popular shows is Morning Edition, substantive, informative. Would such a program exist, if it were as obsessed with the bottom line as so much of the rest of radio is?

NICK GILLESPIE: I am extremely confident that NPR’s nonprofit ethos would survive any cut in federal spending and, in fact, it might even grow stronger. The federal government is broke, and it’s only gonna get more and more broke. And, at this point, we need to say, what are the core functions of government? And I think most people would agree that defense is one of them, courts, maybe citizenship, things like that. The idea that we have an inalienable right to Car Talk or to Sesame Street –

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

– on tax-supported airways, you know, that strikes me as a stretch. And it’s time to rethink that, not because those are bad programs but because they're not core functions of government, and they will be funded via other avenues.

I think that the analogous model here is religion and religious expression. We all want to live in a world where everybody can worship whatever God they want but nobody is forced to pay for other people’s belief systems, whether we're talking about Presbyterians and Baptists or Fox News enthusiasts and PBS tote bag-holders.

That's Nick Gillespie, from Reason.com, showing us how to assail an argument no one makes.  No one would argue that we have an inalienable right to PBS, no one serious at least.  Rather the argument is that it (a) costs very little, and (b) offers culturally valuable services and programming no one else would pay for on the commercial market.

Worse, of course, is Gillispie's suggestion that funding Corporation for Public Broadcasting informational programming is like funding religion [JOHN LAUGHS].