He, She, It, Them, They

Via LRB a list of all "epicine pronouns." This sort of series seems the most popular: hesh, himer, hiser, hermself. Odd that none of them ever struck, ayna?

David Brooks Uses Words As Weapons

Against reality and meaning, that is. Here is a paragraph from his op-ed thingy today:

Here in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is trying to foster that sort of society. Until Cameron, Britain — like the U.S. — had one party that spoke on behalf of the market (the Conservatives) and one party that spoke on behalf of the state (Labour). But Cameron is initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital.

Labour spoke for, you know, laboring men and women and tried to use the state to overcome the unfair advantaged enjoyed by the monied classes and their dependents, like Brooks.  The "Big Society" seeks to privatize and individualize all positive state functions, positive in the sense of making life better for working men and women and the various kiddiewinks and seniors. So, in other words, after Blair the UK, like the US, has two parties dedicated to market fundamentalism with a basic disagreement about how much the state ought to protect its citizens from the rapacity and cupidity of capitalists.

Not Quite Right

The other day, Paul Krugman argued that pragmatism isn't really pragmatic because

But I’d also like to register a philosophical protest. There’s an old joke to the effect that you’re an ideologue; I’m just being sensible. The point is that everyone has an ideology — which is another way of saying that everyone has (a) values and (b) some view about how the world works. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Ideology isn't what he thinks it is. Knowing something about the way the world works is entirely different than constructing a totalizing narrative of how the world works that ignores reality. In the first case, if I push something hard enough it will fall down. In the second case, free markets' efficiency increases as onerous regulations decline. In this case, efficiency means buyer beware and allows the seller to lie, pollute, and etc. Ideology is a means of masking reality while a pragmatic commitment to what works allows me or you to work for solutions to problems that work

In a similar fashion, values have little if anything to do with ideology. Values might shape desired outcomes but ideological commitments determine policy preferences. Neoliberals all claim to value human equality but their ideologically driven policy preferences ensure radical inequality.

And, while we're on the subject, his point that as he

 recall[s], the last president we had who viewed himself primarily as a manager was … Jimmy Carter.

The point here, it seems, is that Carter was failed president because he eschewed ideology in favor of working on policies that worked. As I recall at least part of the reason Carter lost the presidency is because Reagan et alia were willing to make odious deals with America's enemies in the service of a partisan political victory.

My point here is not that Obama is right because he is being pragmatic but rather that if he were pragmatic it would be better for all. Instead his is a center right Neoliberal or, in any event, he governs as if he were a center right Neoliberal.

The Problem With Liberals

A man of many names over to Balloon Juice laments the spinelessness of NPR in the most recent edited videogate

Why does every liberal in establishment media except Paul Krugman have to be such a mealy-mouthed fink? Part of it, I know, is that not many are actually any kind of liberal, but I am sure there are plenty of tv types who vote the same way I do and feel the same way I do about most issues.

See what he did there? Rather than sticking to the obvious point many of the professional Liberals aren't Liberal or the deeper point that American Liberalism is really Neoliberalism, he mealymouthedly lets them off the hook.

Renegotiation Isn't Another Word for Dictation

Andrew Sullivan exposes his ignorance:

Like the NYT, the WaPo and many other news sources, the Dish has focused on the horrors in Bahrain, the looming confrontation in Iran, riots in Libya, and the sudden earthquake in the Middle East, not a newly elected governor trying to curtail government spending, especially on healthcare for public sector unions. Readers are very irate. Well, we make choices here. But we're of no party or clique, which may be why I'm not that galvanized by a partisan mudfight. But, no, I don't see it as outrageous that a freshly elected GOP governor and legislature want to renegotiate some deals with public sector unions, and I see no reason why the president should intervene. Joe Klein makes a lot of sense here:

Anyone who thinks Joe Klein makes sense isn't paying attention. Sullivan focuses on events far away because, you know, folks demanding that alleged democracies behave democratically is so much more exciting than folks demanding that an alleged democracy behave democratically if there is no chance of invading them.

There is no "renegotiation" going on. Walker presented a bill with no debate stripping unions of the various rights necessary to behave like unions.  His inability to get the facts of the matter straight in country where he speaks the language and thinks he's competent to weigh in on all manner of matters really calls into question his ability to understand countries so far away.

Furthermore, as a good Catholic, Sullivan ought to be front and center demanding that the state live up to the standards set by Popes Benedict and John Paul for dealing with union

Missing the Point

One argument emerging from Congresswoman Giffords' shooting is that the rhetorical violence launched hither and yon in the hope of obtaining some sort of advantage, narrative, electoral, or other, ought to be dialed, as they say, back.  Yesterday, I think it was, Sarah Palin, long of lung and short of ideas, emerged from her northern fastness to accuse "journalists and pundits" of creating a "blood libel" against honest and plain-spoken Americans like herself and the rest of the mama grizzles. 

The use of "blood libel" rather than indicting the various pundits and journalist exposes Palin's fundamental lack of seriousness and her limited understanding of words and their meanings.  The blood libel is the long running anti-Semitic claim that Jews needed the blood of health young Christians for cooking and religious purposes.  Over the years, the blood libel led to and excused outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and murder.  Arguing that demonizing your political opponents as enemies is wrong was something Conservatives and the Right more generally was happy to do when Obama said it; however, from Palin et alia's perspective asking that people stop rhetorically murdering one another or predicting that if the Democratic Party succeeds in providing health insurance to more Americans at a reduced cost means that America has become a Maoist dystopia is identical to accusing them of killing the young to bake their bread.  It is, in other words, an example of the rhetorical excess that makes reasoned debate difficult. 

It is also such a deeply unserious response that I wonder if Palin and her image makers have a clue concerning their client's image among those not convinced that Obama was born on the moon.

UPDATE:
It's this kind of bizarre and self-serving ranting about Christianity or family values or whathaveyou that leads many to criticize Conservatives as more interested in whipping up division than in resolving crises.

UPDATE II:
With measured rhetoric like this, who needs deranged maniacs?

Taking Responsibility

I think we can all agree that Paul Sr. is responsible for the family dysfunction. It strikes me as a much harder case to implicate Sarah Palin et alia in the Tuscan tragedy is a bit more complicated.  Conservatives and the right more generally, as the gnash their teeth at the unfairness of it all, might do well to pause and remember all the hyperbolic rhetoric they and their allies heaped on the heads of, for example, the rock and the rollers as the cause of the decline of western civilization or the Ponnuru's "Party of Death" gobbledygook.

Palin et alia ought, it seems to me, not use the kind of language and imagery they use and those seeking to exculpate them ought read ED over to GinandTacos; indeed, we might all benefit from asking the unasked question.

One thing that is clear, to me in any event, that this kind of flippant nonsense from Jonah Goldberg is doing no one any good.

It is also the case that folks like Palin et alia cannot simultaneously give themselves encomiums (encomia?) for changing the conversation without at least considering that the nature of the conversation, its tone, matters. See also, too:

 

Settled Law

Mark Krikorian claims to support law of the soil citizenship but he finds the stridency of law of the soil proponents irksome.  Why?  Because of arguments like this:

[Linda Chavez] writes:

The language is unambiguous: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

By “unambiguous,” of course, she actually means “ambiguous,” since the meaning of the “jurisdiction” part is not at all obvious and is the focus of the whole debate.

That's right, if you point out that all the Supreme Court decisions, like this one, dealing with "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" mean being here regardless of how you got here makes the legal meaning of the 14th unambiguous you're "sneering" at those constitutional Conservatives who only want to "debate" the possibility that American values require the creation of a second class of non-citizens. 

Another Article I Never Finished Reading

The opening paragraph:

On August 8, 1897, Michele Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist, shot Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain. Cánovas had dominated Spanish politics for decades, even during periods when he was nominally out of office, helping shore up Spain’s tottering monarchy and its possession of Cuba and the Philippines through torture and wide-scale military repression. Spanish imperialism in the Americas died with him: Cuba and the Philippines soon drifted out of Spain’s sphere of control and into that of the United States. A bullet from an anarchist’s pistol had changed global politics.

In the first instance, Canovas's policies had already failed before his death and, what is more, even had he lived Spain was in no position to retain its empire.  More importantly neither Cuba nor the Philippines "drifted" into the growing American empire.  Cuba was winning its long struggle for independence from Spanish rule when the USA stepped in. Initially, we went to aide our friends to the south in the brave struggle for liberty until imperialists realized that we could win Cuba for America at which point the Cubans went from brave liberty strugglers to inept racial inferiors who need our help in gaining and maintaining their freedom and liberty.  It really is a sordid little tale, much like the violent takeover and occupation of the Philippines. 

If you cannot face fairly and squarely the US's use of violence to create an empire why should I think you can get the ins and outs of anarchism right?

That's Our Georgie Boy!

What is a "Decision Point," anyhow?

UPDATE:
On George's new book:

And so the Wagner Question poses itself yet again. Every Saturday when the Brazilian sea monster murders his X-Factor song, 14 million people ask themselves how and why he is there. Reading these ghost-written titbits, you ask yourself the same. How in the name of all the saints did George W Bush, wastrel drunkard son of an East Coast patrician family, find his way to Pennsylvania Avenue by playing the genial good ol' boy from the South, and why in heaven's name did he want it anyway? And answers come there none.

and

The reduction of Bush's two terms to a satirical sequel to one of those US prep school movies in which the smirking, idiot boy breaks the honour code but is rescued by his Brahmin dad had come to seem shamefully hackneyed. But the one cliché worth trotting out here is that clichés are clichés because they are true. Somehow this half-witted frat boy journeyed, via some jovially preposterous sequence of events involving failed oil deals and baseball team franchises, from japes with Alpha Sigma Phi to possession of the nuclear codes.

Words! Words! I'm Sick of Words and Their Meanings.

Andrew Sullivan is a silly man.  He once insisted that opponents of the the Invasion, who he labeled 

"[t]he decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead . . .may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" (part one, part two).  Then, he wrote this:   "[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a   paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will   surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

The  internal links no longer work for me, and one can understand why.  If  you or I had written something that monumentally silly, stupid, and mean  spirited the desire to scrub it would be irresistible.  Sullivan has  since equivocated and sort of recanted.  He continues his campaign to prove that Sarah Palin is actually a character in East Enders, and yet people  link to Sullivan without pointing out that this man is profoundly silly.

Remember the debate on torture? Sullivan, shockingly, was right on that one. What I have in mind here, however, is the argument the pro-torture camp used.  It went something like this: what is torture anyhow? Torture opponents, which is to say reasonable and decent human beings, got bogged down in this semantic turn. Today, because of Obama's go ahead to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen actively engaged in fighting against US troops, Sullivan launched an attack on the use of assassinate as the proper term when the state in engages in assassination.  He would rather use the phrase "killed in wartime" which is his "plain English word." Obviously killed in wartime isn't a word; it's a phrase.  And, more importantly, its a phrase that obscures reality.  Does the President have the legal right to assassinate American citizens actively fighting against US troops?  I have no idea, but there is something queasy-making about the idea, and Sullivan's desire to obscure this reality lies behind the move to turn the debate over the legality and moral consequence of giving or approving this Presidential power into a discussion of the appropriateness of the word assassination.

Sullivan also writes, concerning the tactical, operational, and political problems, errors and grotesqueness growing out the current war on terrorism and other related nouns that:

I have  had only a few days to chew on these complicated eddies some more, but  have ended up closer to where I started than I first thought I would in  the full blast of criticism.)

I'm not sure you can chew on a eddy, and if you have to create an obfuscatory phrase to justify a policy of assassination, it's more likely than not that you're wrong.  Again. And, as by the way, you don't unleash "warfare" whose awesome power does this and that.  You mobilize your military and then send young, middle-aged, and old men and women to go kill people knowing full well that some horrible things will happen and if you failed to chew these eddies when you cheer led the Invasion, then you're not really not being serious.

UPDATE:
Link fixed.

UPDATE
Link really fixed

Illiterate

According to the Slactavist:

Tea partiers tend to revere the U.S. Constitution in much the same way that many American evangelicals revere the Bible, which is to say they read it without comprehension, looking only for ammunition that can be used against their enemies. And since neither text was written for such a purpose, this so-called reverence is an exercise in illiteracy.

And there you have it.

Words! Words! Words! I'm so sick of Words!

Andrew Sullivan is a silly man.  He once insisted that opponents of the the Invasion, who he labeled 

"[t]he decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead . . .may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" (part one, part two). Then, he wrote this: "[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

The internal links no longer work for me, and one can understand why.  If you or I had written something that monumentally silly, stupid, and mean spirited the desire to scrub it would be irresistible.  Sullivan has since equivocated and sort of recanted.  He continues his campaign to prove that Sarah Palin is actually a character in East Enders, and yet people link to Sullivan without pointing out that this man is profoundly silly.

Remember the debate on torture? Sullivan, shockingly, was right on that one. What I have in mind here, however, is the argument the pro-torture camp used.  It went something like this: what is torture anyhow? Torture opponents, which is to say reasonable and decent human beings, got bogged down in this semantic turn. Today, because of Obama's go ahead to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen actively engaged in fighting against US troops, Sullivan launched an attack on the use of assassinate as the proper term when the state in engages in assassination.  He would rather use the phrase "killed in wartime" which is his "plain English word." Obviously killed in wartime isn't a word; it's a phrase.  And, more importantly, its a phrase that obscures reality.  Does the President have the legal right to assassinate American citizens actively fighting against US troops?  I have no idea, but there is something queasy-making about the idea, and Sullivan's desire to obscure this reality lies behind the move to turn the debate over the legality and moral consequence of giving or approving this Presidential power into a discussion of the appropriateness of the word.

Sullivan also writes, concerning the tactical, operational, and political growing out the current war on terrorism and other related nouns that:

I have had only a few days to chew on these complicated eddies some more, but have ended up closer to where I started than I first thought I would in the full blast of criticism.)

I'm not sure you can chew on a eddy, and if you have to create an obfuscatory phrase to justify a policy of assassination it's more likely than not that you're wrong.  Again. And, as by the way, you don't unleash "warfare" whose awesome power does this and that.  You mobilize your military and then send young, middle-aged, and old men and women to go kill people knowing full well that some horrible things will happen and if you failed to chew these eddies then you're not really not being serious.

Definite Article

The use of the definite instead of the indefinite article is sometimes revealing.  After defending his industry getting a bazillion dollars in bail outs, this crazed maniac argues

Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.

Because

[t]here’s danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be,’” Munger said at the event, which was moderated by CNBC’s Becky Quick. “At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.

You might think that he has in mind a specific culture dying form the specific mistake of giving money to people who, through no fault of their own, cannot find work.  And you'd be wrong.  Giving money to the bankers and etc would've have saved Weimar Germany.  Leaving aside that this is most likely wrong, Weimar Germany also didn't give money to people who couldn't find work through no fault of their own but Charles Munger is okay with that..

What he means is that if you give people the money they need to survive the catastrophes created by efficient markets, profit maximization, and financial innovation the culture of not giving money to people who aren't Charles Munger or his ilk will wither and die. Therefore to ensure that the culture of giving money to the creative class, that is the the class that created the catastrophes through their worship of efficient markets, financial innovation, and profit maximization, and not to the parasites, that is the people who do all the work but were fooled by all that efficient market, financial innovation, and profit maximization stuff , endures you must give the money to Charles Munger and not the tens of millions of unemployed.

One wonders what, exactly, he'd like us to suck in.

Gottcha.

This is an Odd Verb Use.

In a book review in the NYT this Sunday we learn that Liz Murray's father was "continually renewing his library card in a new name because he never returned the books"  Initially, this struck me as odd.  How do you renew something yet change the name? 

Then I thought that the reviewer, Tara McKelvey, was unaware of the difference between renewing and reapplying. That seemed unlikely because she is

a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.”

Then I thought the editor was unaware of the difference, which also seemed unlikely because it's the NY Times.

Then I thought, aha, the memoir or parts of it are fake.  I checked, however, and Murray wrote applying not renewing in different names. 

So what you ask? It is more evidence that the decision to reduce copy editing was wrong.