Missing the Point: Policing Rhetorical Acts

So, in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, there have been all manner of calls for civility and toning down the rhetoric of war and violence against political opponents and their policies.  James Fallow, for example, is hold some kind of a webinar on the issue. Mixmaster over to Balloon Juice makes the much more important point that what we need isn't more civility it's less lying because the lying is what causes all the violent reactions.

Relatedly, Clear Channel is removing an ad for Rush Limbaugh because it uses the phrase "straight shooter."  If they're doing this because they think it is uncivil, they're over reaction;  if, on the other hand, they recognize that the claim is false, then good for them.

Real Realism or Empiricism versus Glibness

Matt Yglesias, taking time out from being wrong about education, regulation, and frozen food, decides to be wrong about city planning and asserts that

[t]he number one factor in making a city a congenial place for cycling is . . . having lots of other people ride bikes.

And concludes that

[t]his is why I’ve tended to shift more in the direction of big picture stuff. If you have dense development and don’t have parking minimums, some people will start to bike around. And having those people bike around is the best pro-bicycle measure on earth.

He is, of course, wrong.

Take an actual city that has a lot of cyclists like Amsterdam.  It reputation for being cycling friendly is not an accident and is of recent vintage. Here (pdf) is a very brief overview of the history of cycling in Amsterdam.  The story is that despite pressure groups its high density as late as the 1970s Amsterdam was very much a city of cars.  Then, however,

[i]n 1978, a new City Council took office. It opted to conserve the cultural and historic value of
the city centre and to encourage the use of the bicycle and public transport. Soon measures to
encourage the use of the bicycle were taken. These included the construction of a 'Main
Bicycle Network', the improvement and expansion of facilities for cyclists, and the removal of
physical obstacles within the cycling infrastructure.

And

[i]n the 1980s, a working party was set up to oversee the realisation of the cycle infrastructure.
In addition to city officials, the group included representatives of the Cyclists' Federation. An
additional annual budget was made available to help resolve problems. In the 1990s, the City
Authority continued to put extra amenities for cyclists into place, including some outside the
Main Bicycle Network itself, such as storage facilities at railway and metro stations.

With a complicated plan going forward, it is clear that the development of a cycling friendly city waits upon regulation and related whatnottery designed to make a city more cycling friendly.

It would be nice if before sounding off on something the pundits of today had some consideration for the facts of the matter.

UPDATE:
If you're wondering, I knew about Amsterdam's cycling history because over the years I have read quite a bit on cycling and urban development. 

Enough, Already

A few days ago Matthew Yglesias, in a burst of integrity, admitted that he knew nothing about pedagogy. 
Today, however, when commenting on Detroit's disastrous school cutbacks, he confidently asserts that

[t]he city really should be operating fewer school buildings, and though large class sizes aren’t ideal it’s more important for kids to have access to effective teachers than for kids to have low student:teacher ratios.

So, it seems, that despite not knowing anything about how to teach, he knows enough to know that fewer teachers overwhelmed by larger and ever larger classroom size will be effective because dealing with a large number of often unruly students isn't exhausting; not a bit of it, its exhilarating.

Once you admit that you know nothing about something it's time to shut the door on commenting on the thing about which you know nothing.  In this case the farcical nature of his contribution serves to buttress his admission of ignorance.

Belgium Redux

I, too, will not shave until the land of make believe, aka Belgium, has a real government.

via

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?

Free Marriage

A really nice and concise fact-based discussion of marriage that exposes the stupidity and cupidity of opponents of the coming marriage for all.

One More Thing

The American people should not heed various Senators and Congressmen and women blathering about the need for greater security, either in the totally crazy sense of carrying their own weapons or the unnecessary sense of body guards and plexiglass, because the security state is already too large and already threatens to undermine the Republic.  We don't have to (again) be stampeded into a bad decision because of a tragedy.  If we want to take steps to limit this kind of murderous rampage, whatever the cause, the answer is increased care of the sale and possession of guns.  It won't be perfect, and who said it would be, but better restrictions on guns on increasing police and expanding the state's power panopticon powers. We don't, in other words, have to back Austria's invasion just because someone got assassinated.

Here at The New Yorker

As might be expected, Jill Lepore's essay on the Constitution and its interpretation is real gem of a thing. Well written, insightful, analytically sound, and, in general, designed and implemented to illuminate a fundamentally important set of issues.  Yeah "The New Yorker."

On the other hand, in the same issue, for reasons that remain unclear, David Brooks perfects the art of making up stuff and writing at an undergraduate level. In this case the construct is

the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

If these people exist as such an obvious class that he ought to be able to develop some verifiable statistical categories that show who, how many, what import, etc.  He can't, of course, because that would take work and rely on facts and Brooks hates facts like Ebert hated social revolution. So he makes stuff up:

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

Ha, Ha, see if he can make stuff up he can make fun of the stuff he makes up and then his investigation of a non-existent, so far as he can show, "class," and I think he mean sociological category in stead of class, becomes comic sociology.  As by the way a cyclists thighs:

So having made up and mocked a "class" of people and having misstated the effects of riding a bicycle, Brooks offers a brief and more or less useless discussion of modern notions of the conscious and unconscious mind, and he concludes that

[t]he cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

As by way of further illumination, Brooks makes up a member of the class he made up and discusses how nature and nurture played a role in creating him, making up all the influences and effects along the way.  It's just great.  If you take an series of abstractions, contentment class, cognitive revolutions concerning nature and nurture, and then apply them to a further abstraction, Harold the imaginary member of the made up class, you can prove nearly anything you'd like.

Not content with making stuff up and then applying it to made up situations and people, Brooks offers such stunning insights resulting from his discussion of nature and nurture as this:

Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity.

Computers, get this, aren't people.  Whoda thunkit.

He offers this brilliant apercue on what American culture is all about insisting that

[t]here’s a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections.

Yes, Keroac is all about freedom and adventure and has nothing to do with connections like the comradeship of the road or building communities between and amongst those left who either voluntarily or because of social prejudice are excluded from the dominate connected community.  This is another in a series of examples of Brooks' inability to read and think critically.

One of his better bits of magical, just-so-stories way of thinking, if thinking it can be called:

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family.

Yes exactly, the two made-up people behave exactly the way a bowdlerized version of evolutionary psychology says they would because they are made up people from a made up class in a made up world where David Brooks' understanding of the cognitive revolution determines behaviors and attitudes. No woman on meeting a man for the first time might be "guarded and slower to trust" because of the possibility of, say, sexual assault, could she? Not when the more obvious explanation is what may or may not have happened in dimmest of pasts.

And so on and so forth. Why, I ask plaintively and with a strong feeling of betrayal, did "The New Yorker" see fit to publish this stuff and nonsense.  It's not like Brooks doesn't have a bi-weekly gig with the NYTimes and weekly gabfest in which his content free bloviations about the world as it isn't compete with the reliably flabby views of his competitor that guy from somewhere on the East Coast no one ever pays attention to.

By The Way

Republican campaigning in no way advocated violence against enemies/opponents.

One of the shooters at the Tuesday evening event was Robert Lowry, a Republican candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston. Lowry's target had the letters "DWS" next to the silhouette head.

via

Doncha Kinda Sorta Miss the Old Days

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. 

Hey , I Missed This

It seems that both of the Republicans who violated the constitution when screwing up their oaths we attending a fund-raising event that most likely violated the House's ethic rules.  The Founding Fathers would be so proud.

One Other Thing

Constitutional Conservatives like to ramble on about the Federalist Papers and their importance for understanding the Constitution's original intent or original meaning.  Thanks be to the intertrons, I would like to offer some quotes from Federalist Number 1:

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

Somebody alert Glenn Beck, the Founding Fathers thought America was an imperial power and wanted a one [world] government.

To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Somebody alert Constitutional Conservatives, the Founding Fathers wanted an active, effective, and meddlesome federal government.

So there you have, the Founding Fathers in the Federalist Papers advocated for the opposite of what the Tea Party Patriots wanted, which suggests that they are dumb enough to listen to Glenn Beck and the Republican Party more generally.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

In the past little while, Republicans, particularly in the House, have been busy covering themselves in silliness and related whatnotery.  There are the two congressmen who failed to take the oath, there is Representative Steve King (R-Unconstitutional) seeking to subvert the Constitution by passing a law invalidating its provisions for law of the soil citizenship thus neatly sidestepping the amendment process on the solid constitutional grounds of easier is better, there is Paul "it's spelt 100 billion dollar spending cut but its pronounced nearly none" Ryan and his pal John "I haven't a clue what to cut" Boehner irresponsible gobbledy gook on important matters of governance, there is the sophomoric let's not discuss the problem let's rather name a bill something silly style of governance, there's the let read the Constitution but ignore its evolution as a document style of historical understanding,  and that's just the first few days.

How long, one wonders, until the realization of being sold a bill of goods hits the radical Right? In Nevada, it seems, not particularly long.

Imaginary Realism

Matt Yglesias on his realism

Suppose I say, “DC’s barber licensing rules are bad.” You ask, what do you mean by that? Well, they reduce competition in the barbering field, leading to higher prices and worse service for customers. They reduce tax revenues and employment opportunities. They’re, you know, bad.(emphasis in original)

How many barber's are there in DC and its environs? Lots.  How much do you have to pay to get your hair cut?  As little or as much as you'd like.  How is service?  From excellent to lousy. In other words, not one of his justifications is true in the specific case of barbering but rather are only true in the abstract case of opposition to regulations, which can be applied to puppy mills just as easily.

As a example of a realistic critique of over-regulation, it's wrong to deny felons the right to be barbers, lawyers, and etc unless the crime is related to the occupation and, in all cases, felons ought to have the right to apply their exclusion.

Why Democracies Fail

This Ian Buruma essay on Belgium is very interesting but it misses the essential point that Belgium does not,  in fact, exist.

Serious Sensible Man.

The title is one third correct, David Brooks is a man.  Today he writes some bizarre piece in which the maniacs of the Right turn out to be sober serious men and women, like the guy who declared the federal government unconstitutional, the decision to slash budgets without debate, or the guy who thinks Obama ought to man up and go to battlefield, or the decision to let business write their own regulations, whose primary interest will be governance. 

It's simply odd that a man this dedicated to saying and writing dumb things collects a check.

Eponymous

Andrew Sullivan accidentally makes sense.  He has a series of awards named after different bloggering types; one is for Yglesias, whose career Sullivan had something to do with, officially it's supposed to be for attacking your own side or being glibly contrarian.  Today, however, it seems he gives it to someone who, like Yglesias, can ignore reality:

As we sadly learned with all the sound and fury that attended the Republican Revolution of 1994, the real risk isn't that a tidal wave of right-wing kookery will wash over the land. The greater likelihood is that the GOP rebels will quickly lose their reformist spirit after a few fizzled confrontations with the bipartisan Beltway establishment and end up governing much like the Democrats they replaced," - W. James Antle III, The American Spectator

Yes, if you ignore Fox News, Clinton's impeachment, endless Republican investigations, Iraq, Afghanistan, don't tax yet spend policies, refusing to protect the needy and the week, larger ever larger defense budgets, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Tea Parties, and so on, there was no wave of right wing kookery.

Too Many Teachers

For many on the Right, the key to "fixing" the current "crisis" in education is firing teachers and shredding their unions because it's too hard to fire underperforming teachers.  It's worthwhile to considered that one reason there aren't more fired teachers is the extremely high attrition rate in the early years of public educators' careers with, by some measures, less effective teachers leaving in greater numbers.  It is also the case that there is an oversupply of teachers so that the whole process of getting a job is extremely competitive.

Consequently it's not really surprising that those who do make it past five years are good enough to stick around for a whole career.

Relatedly, if you are incompetent to comment on pedagogy, you are incompetent to comment on teaching reform.

Covering Himself With Glory

How many times has the current administration called the ACA Obamacare without scare quotes?  None, that's how many. 

For example

Q    How many of the Democrats -- of the 219 Democrats who voted for “Obamacare” have invited the President to campaign for them in their districts this fall?
MR. GIBBS:  I don't have a political schedule in front of me, Lester.
Q    Since not one of the Republicans in the House voted for “Obamacare,” and 32 Democrats voted against --
MR. GIBBS:  Do you mean -- I'm sorry, I'm confused.  Do you mean by that the law that the President signed yesterday?
Q    “Obamacare,” yes.
MR. GIBBS:  Okay, I just was -- I didn't know if that was the Internet vernacular or the name of the bill, Lester.  I was a little confused.

How silly is Matt Yglesias?  Very.

Incidentally, I’m glad to see that the “Affordable Care Act” lingo that I started trying to popularize months ago as an alternative to “ObamaCare” has been taken up by the administration.

A Path to Citizenship

The repeal of DADT is the first step toward full equality not only because military service and citizenship are tightly linked in the "western tradition" but also because of the generational split it exposes between and among Conservatives. So, I say, well done Obama well done.

Why I Despair of Glibertarian Gibberish

Matt Yglesias is not, I argue, a serious human being.  His is, rather, an ideological Jack-in-the- box who spouts the usual Glibertarian nonsense at the drop of a regulation. Today he celebrates the beginning  of the end of the regulatory regime painstakingly put in place between 1906 and 1976 with a post lauding Alfred Kahn for deregulating airlines.  This deregulation, he argues, did, in fact, lead to air transportation being "sucky" but only because that's what people wanted.  He offers no evidence for people wanting sucky air transportation but, one assumes, his certainty arises from some Glibbertarian bedrock, like the wisdom of markets.

Airlines have the third lowest customer satisfaction rating on the University of Michigan's survey and, according to the same source, passenger volume was down 6% in 2009.  On average 66% of customers are satisfied with airlines. It's difficult to spin those numbers into evidence of giving people what they want.

But, he might reply -- as he does in the post, that the cost is lower and besides all that luxury of yesteryore was an inefficient use of scarce resources, no really. Costs, it's true, declined but since 2001 have risen kind of dramatically, to say nothing of the nearly 5 billion in 2001 tax payers gave the airlines for free.  From June 2003 until October 2010, the most recent data available, just over 20 percent of all flights arrived late.  Airline passengers don't like paying for baggage and miss the "inefficient" luxuries of the past. There is also problems with maintenance and such like.

So, has deregulation been a success? No.  Is there any evidence that consumers are getting what they want? No.  Is this one more example of Yglesias talking out of his hat because he is a neo-Liberal?  Yes.

Why on earth does Think Progress pay someone to make zombie Reaganite, Thatcherite, neo-Liberal and Glibbertarian arguments?

Andrew Sullivan

John Cole, over to Balloon Juice, is complaining about Andrew Sullivan's stupidity, which is fine.  It ought not go unnoticed, however, that Sullivan created Yglesias and both are equally sillily illogical and ideological bedfellows. Indeed, every time one complains about Sullivan, McArdle, or some other Glibertarian, it ought to be mandatory to include Yglesias.

Google Research

Lots of folks have been all agog at the new Google Ngam Viewer, which searches Google books for words or phrases and then graphs their occurrence.  Here is an image of one such for hitler:

Here's another for Hitler:

Here's another on terrorism versus Terrorism

 In any event, the next time you see some clever Charlies making some kind of argument based on Ngram evidence treat it with all the respect it deserves. Really researching any topic of interest, as opposed to the intellectual sloth that is the Google, is a lot of work.  Something like this might serve as the first step in a long term study but it would have to e a tentative and halting first step.