Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

Charles Krauthammer, General discussion, Things that are false

Too dumb to thrive

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Charles Krauthammer complains that liberals think people are stupid and treat voters with disdain.  This is no doubt true of many of them.  Just as it true, on the other hand, of many conservatives, such as Krauthammer.  That liberals, and people in general, are stupid seems to be implicit in his opening howler:

"Iam not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.  

Because only an idiot would not see that Krauthammer has provided no context for understanding this outrageous claim.  You see, dumbass, it isn't the largest spending bill–at least if you measure by percentage of GDP:

The Obama stimulus package compares in size as a percentage of GDP to the First New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt but is significantly smaller as a reflection of the government budget at the time.

Roosevelt's First New Deal in 1933 created the Public Works Administration, at a cost of $3.3 billion. Jason Scott Smith, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, estimates this was equivalent to 5.9 percent of U.S. GDP at the time.

But compared to the size of the federal budget in that year, it was 1.65 times the amount of federal revenues. That ratio is more than five times greater than the same measure for Obama's plan.

Roosevelt followed up with a Second New Deal in 1935 based on the Works Progress Administration, which built airports, bridges and public buildings across the nation. Smith said the initial $4.88 billion appropriation for this program equaled about 6.7 percent of GDP at the time.

The funny thing about this dismal piece, however, is not its dishonesty (that's not surprising for Krauthammer), it's its complete lack of self-awareness.  Krauthammer gripes about the unfair characterization of conservatives by liberals by doing the same (to liberals).  It's a kind of op-eddy "I-know-what-you-are. . ." 

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a "jobs bill."

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity." Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.' "

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

Really?  Again, no doubt many liberals think this is true (many conservatives think liberals have a mental disorder, or are stupid, or have funny ethnic properties, or lack manly attributes, or disregard moral virtues, or they have guilt complexes), but Krauthammer is engaging in the same kind of activity–only worse, because he (1) childishly rips quotes out of context, (2) he picks people who don't really represent "liberalism" (Joe Klein?) and (3) he ought to know better.  He ought to know better because, for instance, too much of the opposition to health reform ("death panels", "2,000 plus pages!", "socialism!", "government take over") of leading conservative figures  was premised on the gullibility of a significant part of the electorate.  In certain quarters, such claims get a lot of traction. 

What explains, one might wonder, some people's belief in evident falsities such as these?  Well, one might say they're dumb (some are extremely dumb).  One also might say they've been lied to systematically by people such as Krauthammer.  One might say, as some have, that there has been a failure to get the message to them.  That's what Obama did.  Following directly, here's Krauthammer on that notion:

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex." The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

This objection is a variation of the argumentum ad paginarum numerum (argument against the sheer number of pages).  But anyway, Obama's point is not that he didn't talk enough about it, it's that he didn't speak clearly enough.  Those are different.   Even Krauthammer should be able to get that. 

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments, Ross Douthat

Every little dollar is sacred

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Ross Douthat, noted abstainer, argues in yesterday's New York Times that despite evidence that abstinence only education is as effective one of its alternatives (comprehensive sex education), which is to say, not effective, the federal government should continue to fund it anyway, because it might be effective.  Besides, people in Alabama don't want to hear about condoms, and people in Berkeley don't want to hear about abstinence.  You see, it's all relative.  No really:

Predictably, the rare initiatives that show impressive results tend to be defined more by their emphasis on building social capital than by their insistence on either chastity or contraception. A 2001 survey published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, for instance, found that “most studies of school-based and school-linked health centers revealed no effect on student sexual behavior or contraceptive use.” The exceptions included an abstinence-oriented program with a strong community-service requirement, and a comprehensive program that essentially provided life coaching as well as sex ed: participants were offered “academic support (e.g., tutoring); employment; self-expression through the arts; sports; and health care.”

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

As someone who thinks government money ought to be spent wisely, I find this puzzling.  Douthat argues that while neither approach works unequivocally well at its intended goal, a third one has been shown to be effective (I don't know, by the way, whether any of this is true, my sense is that it isn't, but that's not my point).  Given the option between the three things–two ineffective, one effective, Douthat argues that it doesn't matter, because it's all a matter of community values:

The debate might be less rancorous if the naturalists and sacralists didn’t have to fight it out in Washington. This is the real problem with federal financing for abstinence-based education: It drags the national government into a debate that should remain intensely local.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached. (And yes, this goes for the dollars that currently flow to Planned Parenthood as well as the money that supports abstinence programs.) Don’t try to encourage Berkeley values in Alabama, or vice versa.

America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.

But as long as they are, it shouldn’t be Washington’s job to choose between them.

How about another school of thought on sexuality: the empiricist.

General discussion

. . . Then the terrorists will win

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According to a recent report, Bin Laden has now blamed the US for global warming.  He has called for a boycott of American products.  Since Bin Laden believes in global warming, we must now not believe it, because we must do the opposite of everything Bin Laden does.  (update to follow)

In other news, so to speak, there's this item:

Department of Homeland Security officials told reporters that it could take months to determine the full extent of the damage from what they are calling the worst-ever ad hominem strike on American soil, even as crews worked around the clock to salvage whatever bits of Harris' self-respect they could from the wreckage.

Ok, that's from the Onion.

UPDATE.

As I imagined, this did not take long.

General discussion

Silly arguments

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My favorite line:

Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions -– our corporations, our media, and, yes, our government –- still reflect these same values.  Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper.  But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow.  Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith.  The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away.  

No wonder there's so much cynicism out there.  No wonder there's so much disappointment. 

I like the "silly arguments" line, but I'm somewhat wary of the causal claim.  My sense is that people like silly arguments.  Unfortunately.

Ad hominem tu quoque, General discussion

You would be a hypocrite

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Arguments against gay marriage tend to fall into one of two groups: (1) the slippery slope group, which alleges that if gay marriage is permitted, all sorts of outrageous consequences will follow (such as the very Biblical polygamy or man-beast marriage); (2) question-begging Buckleyesque appeals to the natural order: gay marriage is contra naturam.  We saw one of those yesterday.  Somehow according to His Eminence Cardinal Rigali, opposite marriage is implied by the some kind of logical law.  Such is the power and strength of this logical law, that it has inspired calls to civil disobedience if such obvious contradictions are allowed to exist. 

Anyway, it's fun sometimes to look at things going the other way.  Perhaps some have heard that Karl Rove, champion of traditional marriage, has just been granted his second divorce (compare that to that other serial defender of traditional marriage, Newt Gingrich).  Rove's misfortune (such as it is–he may feel differently) prompted prominent blogger Glenn Greenwald to observe:

Karl Rove is an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, citing "5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage" as his justification.  He also famously engineered multiple referenda to incorporate a ban on same-sex marriage into various states' constitutions in 2004 in order to ensure that so-called ""Christian conservatives" and "value voters" who believe in "traditional marriage laws" would turn out and help re-elect George W. Bush.  Yet, like so many of his like-minded pious comrades, Rove seems far better at preaching the virtues of "traditional marriage" to others and exploiting them for political gain than he does adhering to those principles in his own life.

So I wonder whether we have a case of the tu quoque here (and in other analogous places).  Rove has argued (however badly) for the legal exclusivity of "traditional" marriage yet at the same time, he has now been divorced twice.  Whether we have a case of the tu quoque–the ad hominem tu quoque that is–depends on Greenwald's conclusion.  It's obvious, of course, that Rove is a hypocrite.  He doesn't adhere to the principles of traditional marriage in the most traditional sense of it.  So here's what Greenwald is arguing:  

I've long thought that the solution to the cheap, cost-free moralizing that leads very upstanding people like Karl Rove to want to ban same-sex marriages (which they don't want to enter into themselves, and thus cost them nothing) is to have those same "principles" apply consistently to all marriage laws.  If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives — the way that "traditional marriage" was generally supposed to work — the movement to have our secular laws conform to "traditional marriage" principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death. 

So it's not that Rove is a hypocrite now that bothers Greenwald, it's that he would be a hypocrite if he (and Gingrich and Vitter and the rest of the them) were actually forced to chose the old school style of traditional marriage.  I think this might be an instance of the non fallacious subjunctive tu quoque: were situations different, and you were the object of this law, you would not support it.

General discussion

Disappearing comments

3 Comments

Here's a "deep thought" from the eschatonblog:

People who disagree with me are ill-informed and have their views clouded by an unrealistic ideological agenda, while I am a clear-minded pragmatist.

Anyone guess who he is talking about?

In all seriousness, however, because of some inefficiency in the comment spam system, many more legitimate comments are being swept into the spam folder.  When I rescue them, they get deleted anyway.  I am working to fix it.  Keep commenting everyone. 

General discussion, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, specious comparisons

Biocentric anti-vegan arguments in the NYT

There has been a lot of coverage of veganism in the major media recently–Jonathen Safran Foer–bears much of the credit for this: And so, it was probably just a matter of time before we saw desperate and silly self-justification start to be printed. I was unprepared for seeing one of the silliest arguments that I have seen in the New York Times op-ed pages.

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.

The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

I take it that her point is that there is a moral fault in eating plants. This is because plants are sophisticated and have responses to the world around them. Of course, these are not the reasons that anyone thinks that animals are morally significant and our use of them for food is a moral fault in the circumstances in which most people (in the West at least) consume animals.

Perhaps, I wouldn't have a problem with a form of this argument–there are many interesting biocentric ethical positions, which hold that non-sentient living things have interests in a morally significant sense. But, when this argument is deployed to create a moral equivalence between harvesting grain and the slaughter of sentient animals for non-necessary purposes, we end up with this twaddle bent, it seems, on scoring cheaply a clearer moral conscience.

Charles Krauthammer, General discussion, Michael Gerson, Sarah Palin

One hundred and twenty percent

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The Washington Post has become the go-to newspaper for climate change skeptics.  They have twice published pieces by (!) Sarah Palin, and they continue to justify running the factually and logically challenged work of George Will on the same subject.  On the latter, rarely does one see an objection in print–either in the form of letters to the editor, interventions of other columnists, or the contribution of the public editor.  On the former, however, we get this:

Now, the American public is again being subjected to those kinds of denials, this time about global climate change. While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of daily weather changes and long-term climate trends when she wrote that "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes." Her statement inaccurately suggests that short-term weather fluctuations must be consistent with long-term climate patterns. And it is the long-term patterns that are a cause for concern. 

Today, two more climate-critical, for a lack of a better term, pieces.  One by Krauthammer (it's the new socialism!) and another by Michael Gerson.  Gerson, however, affirms that climate change is real, but he blames the private behavior of some scientists for all the skepticism.  He makes his case on two grounds: (1) the trust one must have in a former Bush administration speech writer and (2) a recent Rasmussen poll. 

Climate scientists are clearly accustomed to deference. Theirs is a community coddled by global elites, extensively funded by governments, celebrated by Hollywood and honored with international prizes.

But outside the Copenhagen bubble, the field of climate science is deep in a crisis of professional credibility, which many scientists seem too insular to recognize. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now believe it is at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research to prop up claims about global warming. If the practices at East Anglia are dismissed as "scientists at work," skepticism will rise as surely as temperatures.

Now Gerson must not read a lot of news, because that Rasmussen poll had a funny problem.  Following the link in his own article to the very number he cites, one finds this:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.

59 + 35 + 26 = 120 percent.

Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion, George Will

Qui tacet consentire videtur

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It really did not take long for George Will to engage in unwarranted triumphalism over the very selective violation of some scientists' right to engage in private and informal communication about their work.  He writes:

Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain — a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

The story basically runs like this.  Some hacker broke into a server, stole, yes, stole a bunch of emails, and published them for the selective misinterpretation of people across the media-opinion complex–which, in this case includes the usual suspects, and, sadly enough, the Daily Show.  The emails show the scientists speaking candidly about their work and their frustration at the phony skepticism they have to answer.  Now comes George WIll, writing that answering phony skepticism (such as his) means one's certainty in one's view is not "unassailable":

The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.

The Financial Times' peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming "is growing more rather than less compelling." If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" — this "moment" is in its second decade — "and it is a travesty that we can't."

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars — and substantially diminished freedom. [such as diminished right to privacy–non seq. eds].   

For a discussion of the Post's sloppy handling of the email theft start here (and for more on this particular piece start here).  Briefly, however, no one has been goaded into intellectual corruption–that's the Post's view (which Will confuses with actual fact).

Speaking more broadly, however, it's obvious the scientists who work on this stuff–I mean the ones with bonified credentials–are frustrated by the very vocal and well-funded parade of numbskulls who think the non-geometric certainty of models and of climate science in general entails that the thesis of anthropogenic climate change is all a role of the dice and that any skepticism, even the a prioristic George Will kind, is just as warranted as accumulated empirical research.

Sadly, however, the more detached from even a third-grader's understanding of the scientific method Will becomes, the more pressing he makes his case that any critique of him amounts to an apparent lack of confidence in the person doing the critiquing.  That strategy, however, is just silly: not answering George Will's silly denialism would no doubt amount to agreeing with it–or as he would put it, qui tacet consentire videtur!

Equivocation, General discussion, Jonah Goldberg, Plain Bad Arguments

Doesn’t anyone read this stuff before they print it?

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For half a second–OK, a couple paragraphs–I thought Jonah Goldberg might have an interesting argument for an interesting distinction. Goldberg is tired of hearing about moral hypocrisy, understandably perhaps, given the exposure of the pecadillos of so many of his party's stalwarts. But, this just fuels his desire to accuse those pointy headed liberals of some form of hypocrisy. Since, he can't seem to wait patiently until Geithner is caught shacking up with a Bolivian movie-star, he tries to invent a charge of hypocrisy.

Regardless, what I don't think we hear enough about is intellectual hypocrisy. What do I mean? Well, if moral hypocrisy is saying what values people should live by while failing to follow them yourself, intellectual hypocrisy is believing you are smart enough to run other peoples' lives when you can barely run your own.

I'm not entirely sure that this is a coherent idea (see my comment below), but let's play along for the time being. If someone is "barely able to run their own lives" and yet believes that she or he is able to "run other peoples' lives" then lets call this "intellectual hypocrisy."

The chairman of a small college's English department thinks it's obvious intellectuals should take over healthcare, but he can't manage the class schedule of three professors or run a meeting without it coming to blows or tears; a pundit defends government intervention in almost every sphere of economic life, but he can't figure out how to manage the interns or his own checking account.

Goldberg seems to have forgotten his definition just two paragraphs earlier. Our chairman does not seem to be "barely able to run his own life" nor does believing that "intellectuals" should take over health care meet his own definition. The same can be said for the pundit. So maybe we can revise his definition in the light of his actual examples:

I.H. occurs when a person believes that intellectuals (does he just mean "experts" here?)  should manage parts of our society while being unable to manage every problem in their lives (run an obstreperous department or manage interns). But, what's wrong with this? Does it make any less sense than saying that I am unable to diagnose my own health perfectly, while believing that others are smart enough to diagnose other peoples' health. I'm not sure that this is an analogous, but the general point seems right to me–there is nothing intellectually dishonest occuring in either of these examples.

But, Goldberg has some more loaded examples to try to make fit his definition.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) offers a more timely example. Rangel heads the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code, and he recently backed the imposition of an income tax surcharge on high earners to pay for healthcare, calling it "the moral thing to do." Yet he can't seem to figure out how to file his own taxes properly or, perhaps, legally. The lapses are the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation.

Is the problem here really intellectual hypocrisy, or perhaps the moral hypocrisy that Goldberg is tired of? Perhaps, Goldberg didn't have time to revise his op-ed to free it of this self-contradiction, but this example does not seem to bolster his case for intellectual hypocrisy.

Now I also know lots of conservatives who are basket cases at everything other than reading and writing books and articles, giving speeches and thinking Big Thoughts (just as I know lots of liberals who despise conservative moralizing about sex and religion who nonetheless live chaste and pious lives themselves). The point is that conservatives don't presume to be smart enough to run everything, because conservative dogma takes it as an article of faith that no one can be that smart.

So, even when conservatives think that they're smart enough to re-write tax code, and have the same difficulties paying their taxes on time, they aren't being intellectually dishonest, because they hold an ideology that takes it as an article of faith that no one can be smart enough to re-write the tax code!?

Moral hypocrisy is still worth exposing, I guess. But we are living in a moment when revealing intellectual hypocrisy should take precedence. The American Enterprise Institute's "Enterprise Blog" recently ran a chart from a J.P. Morgan report showing that less than 10% of President Obama's Cabinet has private-sector experience, the least of any Cabinet in a century. From the stimulus to healthcare reform and cap-and-trade, Washington is now run by people who think they know how to run everything, when in reality they can barely run anything.

Hmmmm. Somehow Goldberg seems to infer from a claim about people not having run a business to a conclusion that they can barely run anything.

If I follow the implicit argument here it seems to be: 90% of Obama's cabinet are intellectual hypocrites. By hypocrites I mean people who haven't worked in the private sector (but who now work in government). Intellectual hypocrites should not be in power. Therefore 90% of Obama's cabinet should not be in power ((All liberals are Nazis, by Nazis I mean people who vote democratic. Nazi's support genocide, Therefore all liberals support genocide.)