cheese it, the cops!

well, exactly. but i do want to point out that 'it's not my fault' is perhaps the most characteristic human utterance. we are the blame-shifting animal, distinguished from all others in the order of nature by our innate refusal to take responsibility, and our innate need to find someone else to blame. only one conclusion is possible: it must be the result of natural selection!

yes it's true: airstrikes save lives. it follows that the more people you kill with airstrikes, the more lives you save. indeed, if we want to save as many lives as possible - which of course we do, for we believe in the preciousness of every human life - the best or even only approach is to kill absolutely everyone.

well now, this, by the very-often-excellent michael gerson, is absolutely exactly right.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," he recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, "and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared."

Let's unpack these remarks.

Obama clearly believes that his brand of politics represents "facts and science and argument." His opponents, in disturbing contrast, are using the more fearful, primitive portion of their brains. Obama views himself as the neocortical leader -- the defender, not just of the stimulus package and health-care reform but also of cognitive reasoning. His critics rely on their lizard brains -- the location of reptilian ritual and aggression. Some, presumably Democrats, rise above their evolutionary hard-wiring in times of social stress; others, sadly, do not.

Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president.

The neocortical presidency destroys the possibility of political dialogue. What could Obama possibly learn from voters who are embittered, confused and dominated by subconscious evolutionary fears? They have nothing to teach, nothing to offer to the superior mind. Instead of engaging in debate, Obama resorts to reductionism, explaining his opponents away.

 

why should you vote democratic, particularly obama style? because he's smart and his opponents are stupid, which ironically isn't exactly itself a scientific result, or even a non-fallacy. but if you want to be smart, or at any rate want to fail to be regarded as stupid, here is a very easy way: agree with whatever bo says. because where other people have policies and values - quaint notions from a previous stage of human evolution - obama speaks as Reality Itself. where other people have beliefs, har har, he has Facts. at any rate, i hope that as the american liberal becomes an entirely reviled vestigial minority - corrupted by continual self-congratulation, eeking out a subsistence living in the cliff dwellings of nyc or whatever, huddling together muttering the same words in the same order as evidence of their critical capacities - he or she will be able to comfort him of herself with his or her sat scores or with something tantamount to the ability to read the scientific american. 

tom friedman, quoting:

“China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

exactly. as if science itself wasn't supposed to consist of questioning scientific data. but chinese leaders treat it like luther treated scripture. while i'm trafficking in stereotypes, let me point out that that the chinese tolerate a thoroughly authoritarian government: really we don't know who's in charge. the chinese, evidently, don't care, and they display complete deference to incomprehensible authority that would persist even if there were no authority. at any rate, i strongly suggest that tom friedman is an advocate of the chinese system of government, and, like our beautifully-educated advocates of reason, he treats science exactly like a messiah, and its word as law.

this one learns during one's friedmanian education: science as a series of conclusions, starndardizedtestable; as a scripture; but to say that "science" is a varied mess is an understatement - from the most entirely speculative physics a la hawking's latest toe to the most solemn of the latest social science - in education, for example - that is deployed without knowing it as the expression of a moral system. in between there we get something a little more reliable; we are entirely - i say globally - unable to study ourselves scientifically. every study is a new rationalization, self-deception, or self-expression, self-loathing, or expression of solidarity. every study is prescriptive: it wants a policy. "science" emerges as a kind of scholasticism: something to be accepted in virtue of one's training; an actual claim of a certain class or group to have a special access that you can't have to the truth. 

"A fundamental question thus becomes why some people are willing to undertake repeated and focused practice and others aren’t. It is not sufficient merely to log 10,000 hours “practicing” a complex task; one must sustain an intensity that seems beyond the reach of most people, and that must come from loving the process. You can’t just force yourself to do it; you must somehow actually enjoy it.

So why can some people do this and others can’t? And even if the end result of purposeful practice is not always (or even usually) performance at the gold-medal level, are there lessons from those experiences that can be useful in earning the equivalent of the bronze?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that what she calls“mindset” (in her 2006 book of that name) plays a crucial role in sustaining the necessary type of intense practice — and that the right mindset can be quite useful even if your goal is not to win the gold. Dweck puts forward two mindsets — a fixed mindset, which occurs when someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are immutable, and a growth mindset, which occurs when someone believes that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort. In the fixed mindset, success is showing you’re talented; in the growth mindset, it’s developing yourself."

now to me peter orszag might want to do more than recapitulate malcolm gladwell. the idea of "mindset" is a typical psychological pseudo-explanation, a dormative virtue : little more than a restatement of the original facts. and if you're actually asking why people don't spend 10,000 hours learning particle phsyics or computer programming, you might ask yourself, say, what it's like growing up in an american ghetto, or on a farm, or what happens when you have a kid when you're 17, or when you have to have a job to eat, etc.

in terms of things like fonts and indentation, the typepad word processor can be amazingly difficult to use.

right. again let me say this: recounting one quote from a dude from a year ago, and then smearing on the verbal abuse like strawberry jam on bread is lazy, self-congratulatory, and counter-productive. you had a half million people on the mall, and perhaps you had better ask why. mere abuse - know-nothings manipulated by demagogues = isn't helping you yourself understand what's happening. it is obvious to you that only an ignorant fool could possibly disagree with you, for example, on levels of federal power and spending. i congratulate you on your self-esteem, which is precisely proportional to your capacity for self-delusion, but i think you're going to get bludgeoned politically. now when you are bludgeoned, it will be unaccountable. or it will be because people are being manipulated and deceived. or it will be because people are horrendous racists and sexists. now ask yourself: why am i committed to the idea that no one could possibly genuinely or reasonably disagree with me? why would i require my beliefs to be strictly speaking rationally unassailable, not merely true?

what actually undergirds the incredible arrogance and elitism is not real commitment to truth or rational argumentation or something. that's is entirely obvious from the rhetorical moves. what drives american liberalism is extreme commitment to cultural affiliation, unanimity. everyone spends all day telling everyone else how smart they are for agreeing with one another. now really you shouldn't bother arguing with people who are that unable to think, who are that unable to stand on their own, whose entire epistemology is peer pressure and self-subordination to authority (e.g. "science"). tell you what. display some rudimentary capacity for independent thought and i will try to address you with arguments.

one begins slowly to take in the profundity of frank rich, for whom the bp oil spill, let us say, is almost as significant as the season premiere of mad men. i just want to remind him that someone actually wrote the script, not by channeling the voice of an entire era but by sitting there typing. cool. now write your own shit. rich doesn't really appear to be able to connect the script of mad men to anything in particular; he just uses it the way david brooks uses...reality.

good column. but what brooks needs to understand is that only ignorant racists could have a moment's doubt about the obvious desirability of an ever-growing state. only ignorant racists could think that we have a form of limited government, or that the social science of five years ago shouldn't tell you how to raise your children. is it any coincidence that the level of your education coincides precisely with the enthusiasm of your capitulation? capitulate.

roger cohen does what they do: just mechanically lobs insults. he doesn't even make them up himself. he calls the tea party "a toddler-tantrum expression of individualism run amok." now first of all i'm just going to say this, and later maybe i'll prove it, that you can be insulted too, roger, and if hurling cheap abuse was an argument, you'd already have been refuted, or would be refuted if you were actually asserting or or arguing for something, and not just choiring out a series of mechanical phrases together with the rest of your demographic. ok. maybe you can't think or actually generate reasons or whatever. but just muttering along with olbermann's writers isn't exactly writing. but it is, we might point out, anti-individualism: a vision of our collective future in which we're all beautifully educated and completely incapable of independent intellection or formulation. at any rate the piece is entirely empty, first because it just re-hashes what everyone else is saying, and second because what everyone's saying makes no sense. so he builds the piece around a contrast between the toilet as a collective technology to cell phones as individual technologies. wait. think that through for a second. and as always when we contrast individualism with whatever these people have in mind, it becomes clear that the correct contrasting term is "coercion." "coercion" also turns out to be the meaning of the term "responsibility" in the pair "freedom and responsibility." cohen and his whole demographic, of course, emphasize "responsibility." this is deeply, deeply ironic, in that coercion is incompatible with responsibility. 'responsibility,' in the hands of these lobotomized weasels, means simply capitulation.

at any rate, these people all say the same thing at the same time in the same way, as they congratulate themselves and one another for their independence, critical use of reason, and so on. if they became aware of who they actually are, they would dangle themselves by the neck from a tree somewhere: they are precisely the opposite of what they believe themselves to be. on the other hand, i suppose that their own incredible unanimity, extending to every shred of their prose and every cell of their personalities, is in keeping with their total repudiation of individualism: they have achieved a kind of mechanical shared consciousness with their fellows simply by chanting the same words together. they really, really want to all believe the same. they form one super-individual, covering the planet like a layer of peat.

that's cool but it's getting repetitive to the tune of billions,. i would suggest destroying all the bodies involved except one. no loss, because the individuals don't exist at all; just leave one person to mutter the collective consciousness off the cue cards all day. if you insist, it could be bill maher.

douthat, as always, is sharp. now, exactly: rigid adherence to principle does not really work in practical politics, and this is precisely what's gotten rand paul in trouble. this is exactly why the libertarian party has essentially gotten no traction in its whole history, despite the fact that it is the repository of fundamental principles of american government.

now on the other hand, you can't quite do without principles to the extent that we usually do, either. so the opposite of a rigid adherence to, say, government non-interference with individual autonomy, or to the equality of all human beings, would be a thoroughly "pragmatic" approach. just do what works! but just like any philosophy prof i'm a ask you what you mean by 'works': what are the standards by which you measure whether it worked: it might easily be a standard of freedom, or of equality, of prosperity, life expectancy, justice, happiness. right of course what is happiness etc? 

you can take a "pluralist" approach and seek a balance of multifarious ends, and so on, but you can't stop thinking about ends without renouncing anything we would recognize as politics. if you don't have some ordering of ends, then we might say the results are unintentional. the idea of "legislation" is nonsense without practical syllogisms.

so say you wanted an element of genuine inspiration in a leader; well i say it can't really configure around pragmatism. that's why there's an empty heart of obama: the most you get, really, is "change" or "hope." for what? to what? why? it's not that he would be silent at that point in the conversation, but it's going to blow hard: big words intended to to be taken in contradictory ways by different hearers; expressed with total simulated passion as the american dream, the more perfect union, but with no definite entailments: a restatement of the question.

now at a minimum, i say a sudden outbreak of libertarianism into the main line of political discourse would be most welcome because it challenges the other people to produce their principles. well that could lead to a nice conversation, anyway, - a useful conversation. it's useful for this reason if no other: i say each of the mainstream american left and the mainstream american right is incoherent. a contradiction entails all propositions; you have no idea what these people might do or why. well, they're muddling through. fair enough only stop once every five decades and ask muddling through to where?

but actually if i were advising rand paul i'd basically be telling him what douthat is telling him. but that is also how ron paul got traction: by saying: of course we have some pretty radical ideas. but look it's a question of what kind of congress we're working with, what people are ready for; this is a democracy; we're talking about a gradual adjustment to a somewhat smaller state. let's see how that goes. the pragmatic approach.

munna say this again: ross douthat is really good. exactly: the bush administration consolidated power as a security state; the obama administration continues consolidation apace in other dimensions.

i have to say brooks is very right about students, especially the best, these days: "If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic." and one might point to the culture of standardized testing - again bushobama's only idea in education, or for the eradication of education - as a symptom and a cause of this slavishness.

but in addition to finding that disturbing ("What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess"), i find it surprising that someone is a law professor at chicago or a dean of the harvard law school, without an elaborate record of scholarship. maybe i don't understand the standards operating in that zone of the academy. can you be those things as mere academic entrepreneur?

offhand one would suppose that paul krugman - a very big fan of government borrowing and spending - would be a bit chastened by the meltdown of greece and the potential meltdown of the world. but one doesn't win nobel prizes by being chastened.

i guess i do this every week, but frank rich sucks, and he sucks in a way that reveals the state of our political discourse. an emblematic sentence: "In just that week, the Party of No’s intransigent campaign of obstruction and obfuscation went belly up." this is just a series of catch-phrases made up by other people; rich is collaging rather than composing. it's like he's writing a strategy memo summarizing other people's strategy memos. he has nothing to do with the language that appears under his name; he might as well be software.

there's nothing distinguished, rhythmical, amusing, or, of course, persuasive. really the first qualification for being a new york times columnist should be excellent or distinctive writing.

this idea that the fragmentation of our media has led to a fragmentation of our culture, which david brooks probes with typical thoughtfulness today, has been reviving apace on the occasion of the ok city anniversary and everybody's fears about right-wing, "anti-government" violence etc cocoons, echo-chambers, fox, msnbc etc. let me just say that if there is danger in balkanization, there is surely danger in unanimity, or everyone getting their news from one source. you can't mobilize an ideologically balkanized culture into a genocide, for instance, and the idea that we all have common beliefs and experiences sounds good until these common beliefs and experiences turn us all into monsters simultaneously. i, personally, am into the splintering of culture right down to the point of splintering each individual consciousness. or i would be, if there were such a thing as individual consciousness, which of course is an anachronistic notion that we left behind decades ago.

for frank rich et al, the election of a blackish, a blackesque dem pres has been an incredible boon, because it entails that anyone who disagrees with me, frank rich, about anything - healthcare, relations with slovenia, tax policy - is a racist. i, frank rich, don't even need no argument no more! which is good cause that's really not my strong suit. now let me, little crispy, also say that the idea that the civil war was not basically about slavery is idiotic. and . . . racist.

here is a good piece by ruth marcus on the phoebe prince bullying case.

charles blow today:

The Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies have branded [Obama] the enemy. This has now become an article of faith. Obama isn’t just the enemy of small government and national solvency. He’s the enemy of liberty.

This underscores the current fight for the soul of this country. It’s not just a tug of war between left and right. It’s a struggle between the mind and the heart, between evidence and emotions, between reason and anger, between what we know and what we believe.

this is a fine crytallization of where today's left is at. there is no argument at all, just continual, insufferable self-congratulation. the fact that you assert every day that you are smarter than your opponents doesn't make you smarter than your opponents. insults are not arguments, which is something you should learn from limbaugh, if you get me: your rhetorical level and his are identical. the accusation of rage etc - that you run on emotion while we run on reason - is just ridiculous. first off, nothing wrong with anger in politics, for god's sake. second: what you say and how you say it enacts precisely anger: a breathtaking performative contradiction. there is nothing in this piece but...propaganda, agitation, insult. then to represent yourself as the apostle of reason is...mind-numbing.

one central idea is that the views of blow's opponents are manipulated: the "echo chamber" effect. this is part of the presentation in which left=reason and right=emotion. well then i suggest you listen to obama throwing down the anecdotes about bankrupt unemployed people trying to get healthcare for their kids etc. and if the left's opinions were less manipulated or echochambery than the right's, i think they'd be less incredibly unanimous than they are. they wouldn't all be saying the same words in same order.

whose country is it? right. black folks'. latinos'. but white folks' too, right? this land is, etc. it won't do just to reverse the oppressions, will it? it's the tea partiers' country too even if they are unemployed, and for that reason among many others, the wrong sort of people. you'd get the feeling from blow or eugene robinson, say, that these folks are to be disqualified on the basis of their race and, most particularly, their class.

robinson, blow and their huge dominant ilk lob the term "anti-government" at these people as though to be anti-government was self-evidently to be insane. (to which i would just say: right. and you're therefore pro-government, i.e. a lover of your own subordination, a political masochist.) robinson in some column and many of these people at one time or another associate the claim that "obama is a socialist" with psychotic hyper-violence. well i am a political philosopher, a professional, and i'm here to say: i'm comfortable with the claim. but surely y'all said far worse about dick cheney, for example (come to that, so did i).

start out with this presumption: a large protest movement might just have a legitimate set of grievances, whether it's students at columbia or unemployed waitresses from amarillo. and make up your mind that any peaceful political expression - in particular that which is critical of the government - is protected by the first amendment and in any case is absolutely central to the idea of democracy. catch yourself sneering at people on the grounds that they went to the wrong college, or no college at all. listen to yourself just constantly hurling abuse at the "wingnuts" or "tea-baggers" and understand that lobbing names at people is not an argument, even if you went to harvard. consider the idea that america might really have to do with something other than the domination of the state in every aspect of every person's life, cradle to grave. pretend to care about freedom in some rudimentary sense: pay it lip service or something.

you can glory in your capitulation. that's cool; i congratulate you for finding someone to whom you can capitulate enthusiastically. it's obvious now that that's what you wanted all along. well, most folks do. but as you do, i want you to remember that dick cheney ran this country ten minutes ago and sarah palin will run it ten minutes from now. then what kind of terms are your going to be using in your extreme anti-government insane rhetoric? then are you going to take responsibility for the actions of a few anarchists at the wto when they break windows at the bank of america? etc.

the picture that blow or frank rich deploy is one of steady inevitable progress, so their idea is that the tea-partiers pine for an america that is lost forever. but white right-wingers (of a kind) ran this country a year and a couple of months ago. and the pendulum can swing again. see? it's never time for anyone to assume that the government is on their side forever and hence that to be anti-government is to be an evil extremist.

here is a piece by ruth marcus that, bizarrely, takes a thoughtful and even humble attitude toward health reform.

the contrast devloped by david brooks, among others, between communitarianism and libertarianism, is tendentious. unless you're intention is to build a community through coercion - which is indeed the secret center of communitarianism - they are perfectly compatible. and if you think you can build a community through coercion, i think you are confused.

krugman this morning, crowing as usual about his moral superiority to you:

Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.

i don't think anyone actually feels your pain until you hurt them, which i suggest would be a reasonable procedure.

the bland beast of technocracy tom friedman roundly asserts today that taxes have been going down for the last 70 years. i must say that this news surprises and pleases me.

And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.

but as our tax rates approach zero i do want to say that "leadership" in the friedman sense is not about giving things away or making grants. it is about coercion on a massive scale to reach whatever ends tom friedman wants us to reach.

michael gerson is a pretty excellent columnist and thinker. and that defense of brit hume on tiger woods seems basically right to me.

there are probably no actual political positions on which david brooks and i agree. but he is the best op-ed columnist working right now. he's been in rare form of late, and this is excellent. one thing it shows about brooks is his distance: it's about what things are like without having to hop immediately to how the anti-"educated" are evil dolts. implicit in this treatment is the idea of the tea party movement is virtually or will become a third party. i've been waiting for the two-party chumpocracy to disintegrate since i was a child, and i've lost hope, really. still it's interesting. not only that, but i agree with every position brooks attributes to the partiers, so it seems like a hopeful moment to me.

brooks sets the thing up as tea party vs educated opinion. one reading of course is that teaparty-type opinion is uninformed, ignorant etc. another way into this is to understand that american education is indoctrination and subordination, both in the 'information" it conveys and in the institutional framework through which it conveys it. a perfect expression of this is that the people who manage to persist as students in such institutions for 25 years - professors in other words - are entirely unanimous; they finally achieve a critical consciousness equivalent to that of mud puddles. i bet if you examined this in detail, you'd see that people who have twelve years of american education agree with one another and with, say, al gore, more than those who have ten years, and so on throughout.

gene robinson, making the good argument vs the krauthammer etc, somehow got all messed up this morning:

In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.

Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away. And our troops' military success actually helps to further the jihadist narrative about a "crusade" against Islam.

wait. is he saying that it's absurd and obscene to assert that the west has a long history of exploiting and occupying the muslim world? or that we never install corrupt lackeys, like we did this week in afghanistan? i guess the kind interpretation would be that what is absurd and obscene is the claim that these things justify atrocities (well, it is absurd to claim of anything that it justifies atrocities), but it certainly appears to say that it is absurd and obscene to assert what is obviously true.

me on texting and driving in today's phily inquirer.

how not to write an opinion piece, cont'd:

For this past weekend saw not only the political sleight of hand that stripped millions of women’s abortion coverage from the House’s health care reform bill; it also brought the season finale of AMC’s highly popular pre-Roe-era series, which concluded with the unhappy housewife heroine Betty Draper leaving her philandering husband, Don, for the promise of marriage to another man she barely knows.

an astonishing coincidence of reactionary backlashes! to which the only real response is: so, judith, which do you think is worse?

dude. this "we live in stories" crap is so over. actually, if we were the stories we tell, there'd be no evil at all. your body getting riddled by bullets is not a story. at any rate, i just want to point out that the wearethestorieswetell thing originated with literary critics, who really wanted to live in stories - that is, curled up on their couch with books - and then somehow entered public consciousness in a kind of hackchump postmodernism. it sort of sounds good, or like an explanation or something. push it even slightly and you realize it's a bizarrely backwards and misleading metaphor. it doesn't help with the ethics, the aesthetics, the metaphysics, the science, the history, the psychology. it's a gigantic univocal pseudo-explanation that does absolutely nothing.

brooks: "Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged." ok. so. i freely select my story, and i select a story that leads to cooperation and goodness. (really?) what is my story, my story of the whole world and human history? ain't got one, dave. maybe you do. but if you do i can guarantee you this: it's false. but of course "false" makes no sense in a world consisting of stories, whatever that could possibly mean. actually i have a thousand stories and a thousand beliefs and experiences that don't fit into my thousand stories. it's a mess out here. but at any rate, if you wanted to explain islamic extremism, how useful is it to say that they selected a bad story? =0.

how am i ever going to deal with my envy of slavoj zizek? christ now he's writing for the nytimes. well, maybe like this: for all of zizek's super-bold rhetoric etc - admittedly toned down here - the position is an extremely conventional statist leftism; really he just wants us all to be swedes. the great imagination of the prose is matched by the utter dullness of the actual positions. it's cool that he loves utopian thinking: a kind of nice reversal. but what does he actually want? "socialism with a human face." gee whiz.

just to give the capsule refutation: once you've constituted a state sufficient to give you your socialism, then whether it retains a human face is entirely at the whim of those who operate the power you've constituted.