Monthly Archives: June 2010

George Will

Statism

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The caricature of the Tea Party type holds a sign and calls every single government action "communist."  Please tell me how this caricature is not on display here:

Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government's control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is.

For the uninitiated, "statism" means "any increase in government activity."  That is a charitable interpretation (on my part).  Because the other one would be "communism," which wouldn't make this any different from the average Tea Party screed about health care or guns. 

So let's get this straight. 

  1. An under-regulated and unmonistored private industry, which enjoys by the way subsidies of all sorts (highways, etc.) incentivizing its products, caused what appears to be a calamity affecting the economy and ecology of entire region, if not the world.
  2. One contributing factor to the disaster was lax oversight.
  3. Therefore, this is not an argument for government regulation. 

That's really silly I think.  If we have an argument for effective government regulation, even if it requires "statism" (God is that term dumb), then this is it. 

On the other point in the paragraph, by the way, oil is dirty in the procuring (seeMexico, Gulf of) and dirty in the using (see Warming, Global).

General discussion, Michael Gerson

The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong

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Some of you may remember the recent case of Mark Souder.  He was the latest in a string of Republican social conservatives to go down in a sex scandal (with a female staffer).  Pardon the pun, but it turns out one of our favorite deep thinkers, Michael Gerson, worked for him way back when.  Aside from cheating on his wife, turns out Souder's a nice guy or something, which leads Gerson to meditate on the meaning of morality:

Moral conservatives need to admit that political character is more complex than marital fidelity and that less sensual vices also can be disturbing. "The sins of the flesh are bad," said C.S. Lewis, "but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

I think I agree with this stuff.  There is a lot more to morality than what one does with one's private parts.  And indeed, the "pleasure of putting other people in the wrong" is up there for me in the list of bad things. 

Gerson continues:

Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

I don't think anyone (serious) fits the description of "moral liberal" here.  The failure of self-righteous jerks like Gerson's former boss does not mean the values those self-righteous jerks hold are empty.  That's like a logical fallacy or something (play along at home–name that fallacy).  And I think attributing such sloppy thinking to non-existent opponents is a kind of "putting people in the wrong."  Moreover, it's just dishonest arguing.

But it gets worse.  Gerson seems to think that there is a stark choice–live among the inconsistent, but strident proponent of that old-time morality, or be a moral relativist.  He'd be first of alll hard-pressed to find moral relativists of the type he suggests anywhere.  Second, granted their existence somewheres, it doesn't follow that they are the only reasonable alternative to moral hypocrties.  That would indeed be a logical fallacy.  Can you guess which? 

h/t Alicublog

General discussion

A link

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Here's an article worth reading.  A sample:

A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.

And another:

Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.

Reminds me of this meta-news story story.

Equivocation, hollow man, Inexplicable, Plain Bad Arguments

3/5ths

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Lately I've been thinking of making some modifications to my usual practice here.  One thought is that I should wander into some of the darker corners of the internet (by which I mean the National Review or Ann Coulter's website–if she has one, but she probably does).  One reason for this is that it's a sure bet you'll find something really silly.  Another reason is that I confess I sometimes think I'm guilty of the philosopher disease: shoddy and imperfect public discourse is too uninteresting to bother with (oddly enough, this disease produces two contrasting sets of symptom: (1) ignoring shoddy public discourse while engaging in the same; (2) being overly charitable to shoddy public discourse because it's not worth one's time to look at crappy arguments).  Well, crappy arguments exist, they really do.

And you don't need most of the time to leave the hallowed pages of the major dailies to see them.  Take this little gem from our favorite paralogist, George Will:

The name "progressivism" implies criticism of the Founding, which we leave behind as we make progress. And the name is tautological: History is progressive because progress is defined as whatever History produces. History guarantees what the Supreme Court has called "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

The cheerful assumption is that "evolving" must mean "improving." Progressivism's promise is a program for every problem, and progressivism's premise is that every unfulfilled desire is a problem.

Funny.  "Liberalism"–Will's usual name for the hollow man brigade he attacks–implies and endorsement of the "Founding" ("liber" means "free" or "book" or "child," well anyway).  Nonetheless, this has to be one of the sillier things he's written of late.  In the first place, a progressive, I would imagine, does not define his view tautologically, as Will says.  I think rather they have a pragmatic definition: are things working better, as in, "did you make any progress on the problem of the oil spilling in the Gulf of Mexico? " "No, we've made no progress.  Time has marched forward, so we have progressed into the future mind you, but we haven't made any progress with regard to our goal of an oil free Gulf of Mexico."  See, it's just not that hard. 

Second, in that phrase he quotes from the SCOTUS, evolving does mean "improving."  Oftentimes, however–at least in a scientific context–it doesn't. 

These objections of Will's are just silly.  Besides: didn't the "Founding" leave much to be improved upon?  After all, we had to declare that corporations were persons.  Also women.  And African Americans.

David Brooks, Ignoratio Elenchi

Gusher

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So by now everyone knows that oil is being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate higher than 0 gallons.  That's bad for all involved.  What lessons do we draw from BP's epic failure to be regulated?  Let's ask David Brooks:

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.

Well if by "everybody" David Brooks means "everybody on Fox News and in the Right Wing think tanks David Brooks listens to," then, yes, everyone is comparing this unrelated thing to Hurricane Katrina.  In any case, the real parallel doesn't seem to be the Hostage Crisis either.  By all accounts, the Iranians had something to do with that (and it wasn't an accident).  (Funny thing: the other day George Will said that BP's failure demonstrates the failure of the regulatory system–rather than the failure of specific regulators). 

Brooks is drawing, I think, some pretty weird conclusions from the tandem failure of BP to control their own mess and of the government to make sure they don't make a mess in the first place.  What this fiasco tells me is this: BP ought to have to get some kind of permit and submit to some kind of honest inspection if they are to put everyone's oysters at risk. 

Indeed, perhaps it's time for the extreme socialism Obama has been advocating.

(For the humorless, the last sentence is a joke)