Thatcher, Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton and Major Never Existed, to Say Nothing of New Labor

From the NRO

They say everything old is new again, and that is certainly true of the British riots. The main areas of outbreak — Tottenham, Brixton, Toxteth in Liverpool — were scenes of similar riots and disorder in the 1980s and early ’90s. To that extent, they show how 14 years of Labour-party rule merely papered over the cracks in British society.

What baffles is this Thatcher and Reagan get all the credit for changing the debate from "welfare state" to "neoliberal state." And since then, we have suffered under one form or another of neoliberalism. It didn't work. There were clearly inflationary problems with the post-War Consensus prior to the horrors of "stagflation." However, the right  neoliberals insisted that under their watch the rising tide would life all boats while the left neoliberals insisted that welfare would aid those whose boats leaked.  Neither state of affairs have come to pass.

So what is to be done? At the  moment, here in the US it's Obama's neoliberalism, Romney's whateverism, or Bachman/Perry Christianism. It is, I think, too early to start drinking and too late to follow John Prine's advice:

If Mr. Burns Ran America

One of my favorite weblog thingies is Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. For the most part, WIIIAI reads the NYTimes from 100 years ago and reports on the best of the day's news. Occasionally there are comments on contemporary developments. Today, however, there was a comment on today's political clall that sounded like a statement from 1911:

Michigan state senator Bruce Caswell proposes that the $79 a year the state spends on clothing for children in foster care only be spent in thrift shops for second-hand clothing, saying that when he was a kid, “I never had anything new.”

What on earth is wrong with these people?

Wrong but With Awesome Sauce

So Matthew Ygelsais reads something about how if citizens get to choose how their tax dollars are spent there is less on defense and more social programs. He concludes:

This is a reminder that one of my least-favorite sayings about politics is the idea that democracy is the worst form of government except for the alternatives. Not that I favor dictatorship, but this often seems to me to reflect a failure of imagination. There are lots of non-authoritarian modes of governance, including selecting people by lottery (like we do for juries), plebiscites, direct citizen input (as in this tax choice concept), along with different balances between elected officials, appointees, and civil servants. It’s important to actually think about the flaws in our current approach and whether better ideas exist.

Did you know that the Athenians used lottery to fill some of the offices of their democratic system of government? Did you know that California uses plebisites? Did you know that "direct citizen input" is nearly the dictionary definition of democracy? Are you, in other words, aware that with the exception of the meaningless stuff about balancing between different agents in a democratic form of governance, you are arguing against democracy by pointing out all the different ways democracies have and continue to organize? It's almost like he paid no attention in any of classes because he was busy being interesting.

Invasion: Incoherent Edition

From all manner of sites and places, I landed on Jonathan Chait's attempt to specially plead for bombing stuff without any post-bombing scheme or pre-bombing argument:

Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere is a question that needs to be asked. But it's not a question that needs to be asked to determine the wisdom of intervening in Libya. Should we also spend more money to prevent malaria? Yes, we should. But I see zero reason to believe that not intervening in Libya would lead to an increase in in American assistance to prevent malaria.

Libya will suck up billions of dollars and further dispirit the kind of people who would like to spend money on malaria prevention. Furthermore, Libya confirms that America's foreign policy elites, whatever their motivations -- Power and Susan Rice aren't Bolton and Rice but they act like, are more interested in bombing things than, you know malaria prevention.

He goes on to "argue' that

But suppose there's no answer whatsoever. Does it matter? If it were the 1990s, and the Clinton administration were contemplating an expansion of children's health insurance, would it be important to determine exactly why we're covering uninsured children but not uninsured adults? No. The question is whether this particular policy intervention is likely to succeed or fail.

This is remarkably incoherent. First, the obvious answer is yes, we would want to ask why kids and not adults and, second, killing people and blowing things up is nothing like providing access to medical care. They are, in a very real way, the opposite of each other.

Staying on point he concludes that

[t]he question of whether or not we ought to intervene in some other country, or in some other way, is an important foreign policy issue, but not an argument against intervention in Libya.

So if someone argues that this invasion is unlikely to work, and proves by pointing slightly eastward of Libya, and proves that there is a better method, that's not an argument against blowing stuff up? If even in his imagination Chait cannot imagine that there is an argument against blowing stuff up, why doesn't he just argue for blowing up those uninsured kiddies and the malarial mosquitoes?

Contemporary Conservatives Explained

I think that they think that the theme song to All in the Family is a political handbook and not a satire on contemporary Conservativism.

The Wrong People Run The World

Tom Vilsack was a govenor of Iowa and is currently sec of ag in the Obama administration.  This interview with Ezra Klein is a sign that he isn't fit to fill either role. Vilsack argues that, among other things, that as  44% of our military comes from rural areas we have to continue to subsidize corporate farming or

we would have fewer people. There’s a value system there. Service is important for rural folks. Country is important, patriotism is important. And people grow up with that. I wish I could give you all the examples over the last two years as secretary of agriculture, where I hear people in rural America constantly being criticized, without any expression of appreciation for what they do do. When’s the last time we thanked a farmer for the fact that only 6 or 7 percent of our paycheck goes to food? We talk about innovation and these guys have been extraordinarily innovative. We talk about trade deficits and agriculture has a surplus.

It is one of the oddest examples of pure bullshit, in the Frankfurt sense of bullshit, I've run across. Klein, who I find superficial and boring, actually makes a whole series of good points, although he misses the obvious point that corporate farms aren't rural Americans, that make Vilsack look even dopier. Rural values don't define America because they don't exist as a coherent doctrine of one hundred percent Americanism in large measure because urban values, which don't exists as a coherent doctrine, offer a counter weight to the nonexistent rural values.

They Hate Us Because We're Free, to be Asshats

Over to Balloon Juice there is a post and heart rending video of people, some of whom are elected officials, who hate America verbally assaulting a religious group which

[o]n February 13, members of a faith-based charitable organization gathered in Yorba Linda, California to raise funds to support women’s shelters, help the homeless and combat hunger.

I watched some odd movie today in which various dead people, including Paul Henried and John Garfield, had their immortal souls judged by Sydney Greenstreet. One of the dead was regular sort of a fellow who took all manner of pleasure from doing this and that, including walking down the street, Greenstreet argued that this was the proper way to live in the world. In the ordinary, the argument ran, there are extraordinary pleasures. For my money, nearly everyone thinks like that, except for the sundry and various losers who make life unpleasant. Perhaps because the they, like John Garfield's character -- who might be saved by his equally dead but unknown tom him mother, find themselves beneath contempt. 

Bombing For Freedom

The other day, I made what I thought was a joke about the neo-Cons love of freedom elsewhere because they get to bomb things. Today, Daniel Foster of the NRO emotes

With reports that the Gaddafi regime — or what’s left of it — has effected the indiscriminate massacre of Libyan civilians, up to and including air strikes in Tripoli and the planned carpet-bombing of Benghazi, the suggestion that President Obama establish a “no-fly zone” above Libya has begun popping up on social media.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think POTUS must so act. U.S. Sixth Fleet under AFRICOM may or may not have a carrier “chopped” (that is, assigned) to it at the moment (Ed Morrissey has a good post on why it’s so hard to pin down where our carriers are at a given moment), but it appears that one or several aircraft carriers are within striking distance.

Sound familiar? Let's, for once, let Libya be Iibya, I suspect they'll make the right choices or, at least, choice close to right. Follow the neo-Cons advice and its five front war, which can't be good.

As I Was Saying

An alert reader, while demanding anonymity, alertly alerts me to this fine blog post

Being a mild-tempered person, I'm surprised to find myself in a state of almost constant rage at the extent to which public discourse has been overtaken by the language of commerce: that disgusting phrase "UK plc", the way that words like passenger, pupil, citizen are replaced by "client" and "customer", the constant reiteration of the notion that business is "the real world" (with the implication that the business of government - running schools, hospitals, armies, rescuing abused children, locking up criminals - is mere froth). I was alarmed to notice, in yesterday's Financial Times, the new Westfield shopping centre at Stratford referred to as the "gateway" to the 2012 Olympic Games: evidently, the plan is that visitors' dominant impression of the London Olympics will be of a great shopping opportunity. 

To which I say: Amen.

Tarp

Yesterday, I watched this guy quiz Timothy Geitner on lot of things but one of them was why Geitner wasn't trying harder to get banks to absorb more of the losses associated with underwater homeowners.  It actually took Silvers three tries before Geitner would even address the issue of lowering banks' profits.  One weird exchange, it was.  It seemed as though Geitner had no idea that lowering profits, as opposed to funding homeowner bailouts, was possible.  Indeed, Geitner claimed that the government couldn't do a thing when it came to banks' profits; hands tied, not possible, he said.  Why on earth would that be, one wonders?  If what Geitner said was true, and Silver thought that it wasn't, it is almost as if the governments only power over banks is to give them money when they get drunk and blow it on hookers and bad drugs or mortgage backed securities, whichever comes first.

In any event, the whole thing is worth watching, if only for Geitner's cluelessness when it comes to effective regulation and the government's power to persuade. 

Explain How This Works

Over to the NRO former McCain flunky and all around dishonest fella Douglas Holz-Eakin looks at the bleak job numbers and thunders:

But mostly this is an alarm bell for the lame-duck Congress. No more games — extend all the tax cuts for two years, patch the AMT, and turn to cutting spending and tax reform.

The thunderousness of his thundering renders, it would seem, making an argument about how further job reductions and less money in circulation and more money in rich folks pockets is going to create jobs unnecessary.

Uff Da

Sarah Palin makes up a word and is roundly mocked for making up a word. It was soon clear that she made up the word out of ignorance. Colbert's Truthiness, on the other hand, mocked the rising tendency of folks who preferred a world in which that which they wished was the fact of the matter was treated as the facts of the matter even if the facts of the matter were the opposite of that which they wished. This act of creation was both funny and intentional  Yesterday, the OED declared Refudiate the word of the year. The OUP Blog, on which the announcement was announced, makes a weak argument in favor refudiate..  One, which is to say I, hopes or hope that the elevation from scattered-brained to dictionary is withdrawn due to popular refudiation.

Shark!

Why did Russ Feingold lose to an inarticulate dolt with no ability to articulate his policy preferences? Sharks, that's why.

Voters have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country’s well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not. In the summer of 1916, for example, a dramatic weeklong series of shark attacks along New Jersey beaches left four people dead. Tourists fled, leaving some resorts with 75 percent vacancy rates in the midst of their high season. Letters poured into congressional offices demanding federal action; but what action would be effective in such circumstances? Voters probably didn’t know, but neither did they care. When President Woodrow Wilson—a former governor of New Jersey with strong local ties—ran for reelection a few months later, he was punished at the polls, losing as much as 10 percent of his expected vote in towns where shark attacks had occurred.

New Jersey voters’ reaction to shark attacks was dramatic, but hardly anomalous.

This time, of course, the sharks' bite was 30 years of failed neo-Liberal, Reganite, Thatcherite, and Libertarian policies.  Which is to say, stuff over which Feingold had less control that Wilson did sharks.

The idiotic sharks attack therefore I won't vote for the incumbent dynamic explains why this dust up between Glenn Greenwald and Larry ODonnell is so embarrassing for  O'Donnell; he, after all, blamed policies when its was sharks.

Election Fallout

Did you see Obama's press conference?  Did you think that the press corps wanted him to rent his garments and rub ash in his hair? Me too. Did you think that Gingrich's suggestion that Obama take a short nap until the victors came to town was silly? Me too.  Did you find all the lies about the cost of the trip to India and points east idiotic?  Me too.  Do you think that retaining Pelosi as Minority Leader the right choice?  Me too.  Is the proper response here to double down and continue doing what is right and what works instead of triangulating and such?  Me too.  Do you think that Obama will continue to govern from the slightly left-of-center?  Me too.  Do you think that the Republicans and Conservative will continue to push an anti-American agenda wholly, as opposed to slightly, owned by corporations and the idiotically rich?  Me too.

Journalism

E.D. Kain over by Balloon Juice wonders why Conservatives are such lousy journalist given that

[j]ournalism is merely the act of gathering and disseminating news and information – and good journalism is simply this effort minus any bias or attempts at propaganda. I don’t think that at its core it is either liberal or conservative in any modern, American sense of those words, or any other ideology for that matter. So then, what do I mean by better conservative journalism?

His conclusion is that NPR minus obviously Liberal programs, even though he is unclear what Liberal means, like Democracy Now is Conservative journalism.  Given that every Conservative in the country, give or take, thinks that NPR in its totality represents Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism,  and Dhimitude, the question he asks answers itself.  The fact gathering and fact-based analysis is antithetical to the Conservative agenda in that the facts argue for a different set of policies unless the goal is to re-create late  19th and early 20th century America in which the super rich ran the show and the rest of us ate dirt.  Because, after all, that's what 30 or so years of Conservative, Neoliberal, Thatcherite, and Reaganite policies have produced and here we are listening to all Republican/Conservative candidates demanding more of the same while some Democratic candidates nod their heads in agreement.

Dignity

So


via

Read the Damn Book

Recently folks have complained about having to read badly written "great books." The general argument here is wrong on, at least, two fronts.  In the first instance, it elevates important books, like "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to the category of great books. Great books are great books because they are both well written and important. Really they are. Even Hegel, who people like to find impenetrable isn't if your willing to do the work necessary to understand him, and, as by the way, I've never understood the bias against Kant as prose stylist.  In the second instance, it assumes that if you read accounts of a great or important book you get more than you need to know about the original argument.

The second problem is the more pernicious.  Take Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," please. It's clear that Burke was aware of the book's problems; he thought that it was sprawling, undisciplined and difficult to read.  And it is sprawling, undisciplined and hard to read.  You can read all manner of explications of Burke's argument, given that it's supposed to be a foundational document of modern Conservatism. But none of these take the place of actually reading this badly written but important book.  It is not the case that reading Burke is "character building" but rather it is the case that if you read the book Burke's contempt for all of the diverse actors in the French Revolution become clear, as does his absolute abhorrence of folks getting above their station; to say nothing about his willful refusal to accept the political, social, and economic incoherence of old regime France. 

Some of the interpretations of Burke are going to make this argument; the question, however, is which ones and how to know if you got the right one. Reading  Burke takes a deal of time and deal of patience. If you persevere, you would be in the position of understanding the extent to which a foundational text of modern Conservatism relied on strawmen and manifold misrepresentations of reality.  Assuming, of course, you done some work on the multifarious actors and stages of the French Revolution, which is to say the key to understanding Burke is to first read about the French Revolution and then you could see how Burke misrepresented things to make his larger polemical points. In other words, dismissing important books because they are badly written is to reduce a book's importance to its author's argument instead of trying to figure out if argument has any basis in reality.  This is true for primary and secondary sources.  Understanding a text, issue, or event requires more than understanding arguments about a text, issue, or event: it requires understanding the text, issue, or event.

This is, of course, a lot of work. However, doing a lot of work in an attempt to understand complicated texts,  issues, or events is well worth the effort and claiming the opposite is evidence of laziness and willful stupidity.  Refusing to engage texts, issues, or events on this level, which is to say taking them seriously, is evidence of a general intellectual morbidity.

On the other hand, you could read a great thinker without knowing anything about anything and write stunningly stupid things. Like this:

The first thing I noticed was that a lot of Franklin’s folksy little gems were a bit on the obvious side, the sort of things anyone but an outright idiot would already know. For example, who needs to have explained to him that an innocent plowman is more worthy than a vicious prince? Who exactly would be unaware that to be proud of virtue is to poison oneself with the antidote? Who but a knucklehead would fail to appreciate that experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other? And who needs to be told that vice puts on her mask precisely because she knows she’s ugly?

Take point the first, every Burkean idiot who argued that hereditary  monarchy is better than democratic republics needed to know this.  Take point the second, every Pharisee of whatever religion who disdained the Publican needs to know this. Take point the the third,consider the history bankruptcy in these United States of America. And so on. Franklin's points weren't silly and obvious when he wrote them. They might be silly and obvious now, if you ignore all the people who continue to do exactly what Franklin condemned, but they weren't in the late 18th century.

Consider as well that folks who want to claim that great books are badly written often don't understand that words' meanings change over time:

But a surprising number made no sense whatsoever. For example, why would anyone think that “hunger is the best pickle”?

Because Franklin's pickle wasn't a kosher dill; it was a relish and being hungry makes the least appetizing food taste better in the same way that a decent relish improves the taste of a hot dog.

On the other hand, you could make glib comments about the worthlessness of primary sources because the Idiots Guide is so much more pithy.  Let's call this the Dilemma of Franklin's Pickle: people too bone lazy to do the work necessary to understand the text, event, or issue under consideration will deprecate the work necessary to understand the text, event, or issue under consideration because they are bone lazy.

Free Riders

Everybody in the known universe has weighed in on the case of

Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground.

And, as is often the case, various morons have tried to defend fire departments not putting out fires because of a failure to pay 75 dollars on the grounds of glibertarian nonsense, I'd just like to remind the world, who might think we Americans have lost our minds, that a truly great American once argued that

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15--I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

He then went on to win WWII over the objections of right wing nut jobs who hated democracy. Were he alive today and were he confronted with the stupidity of a fire department on the scene refusing to put out a fire and, it seems, allowing dogs and a cat to die, his response is easy to imagine. That anyone anywhere defends the fire department's failure to act is a condemnation of their commitment to real America.

UPDATE:
Read the whole of the link for FDR. It really very good.

Horrific Historical Analogies

An alert non-commentator alertly alerted me to this exchange between Obama and some random crooks and malefactors of great wealth.  In response to increase regulation and potential changes in tax rates

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman had the nerve to say this:

"It's a war," Schwarzman said on the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."

When Hitler and his henchmen invaded Poland, they rounded up and began murdering Polish intellectuals, Jews, and others they deemed of being unworthy of life.  Obama proposes increasing tax rates by some small percentage or another. Clearly, the two situations are analogous, which is to say they aren't. 

A Licit Religious Test

Everyone is in a tizzy about Pew's new religion quiz.  The numbers break down like this:

Pew doesn't, for some reason, give all 32 questions but only fifteen, you can take it here. I'll wait. 

What struck me was how much people don't know:
Only 39% of the test takers knew who Job was? 40% understood the controversy over Transubstantiation? If I thought like the educational reformers who wanted fire all the "bad" teachers because they have failed the "value added" test, every priest or pastor, be they a man, woman, or child, in the land would be out on their ear by sundown.  Sometimes assessment measures fail to capture effort expended by students and teachers.

While 89% understood the establishment clause; only 23% understood the difference between proselytizing and study. Apparently, the ranting ranters ranting about secular machines are more effective than the truth.

My score, you ask?