A Tale of Two Advertisements

Lena Dunham made this video



Which is pretty funny and is driving the Right nuts. This ad, on the other hand so far as I can tell has slipped underneath their radar, perhaps because Wheedon is rich:



(via)

Why does the Right hate humor? Why does the Right lie about everything? Because if they told the truth they would be less popular than TB that's why. 

Odd Morning

I was going to comment on David Brooks' attempt to prove that being a moderate meant one agreed with him on all things political and cultural when I was distracted by a headline that read Officer Held in Plot to Cook Women and Eat Them. It seems that a NYC police officer planned to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat women.

Happy Halloween.

War On Women

Indeed:



So vote your conscience.

Debate

I plane on watching but not for long. Why? Because tonight, like last time on drilling and coal , we can expect exactly neither candidate to make this  point:

Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land-young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.”
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.
And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: “A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

via

That's right George McGovern on the war and  the need to not have more wars. Oh, as by the way, he fought the one good war in human history.

David Brooks

likes Mitt Romney because they both lie like rugs. I was going to write something about today's bullshit but this is much better. It has charts and everything. Brooks' is deal is to sound like he 1) has a clue 2) takes the problems confronting the world seriously so that he can 3) prove it is all the Democrats fault.

He likes the way the rest of us breathe and, to be blunt, he needs find a new line of work. I am thinking that he, Mitt, and Ryan can start a road show selling omni-balsamic reinvigorator. Indeed, like the whole panoply of Melville's confidence men, the Three Liepateers and the Right have nothing to sell that doesn't depend out the purchaser's credulity, which is too say their voters have been had.

Also, too.

He's Right, You Know That?

It was true then and it's true now:

The solution?

This:

If that is too much than surely this:

Or maybe just more of this:

Which might one day lead to this:

Conservative Fact Checking

Over to the NRO's Corner Online Eliana Johnson fact checks the Democrats on Planned Parenthood and access to mamograms. According to Johnson five phone calls to some New York state Planned Parenthood offices proves that the claim is nonsense. Two seconds with Google finds specific examples of PP providing free mamograms and pap smears.

It is simply bizarre that a fact so easily checked is twisted into its opposite in a desperate attempt to deny that the water is wet, which is to say that providing funds to an organization dedicated to offering low cost health services to poor and less well off leads to the poor and less well off obtaining necessary medical services at lower costs.

The Romney Tax Plan Explained

Mitt Romney or some one closely linked with his campaign have finally unveiled his tax plan and I for one find it incredibly compelling

Lies

Paul Ryan

is stupid. Mitt Romney is a lying conman. Between the two of them they embody the worst of American exceptionalism: exceptionally dim and hero of their own fantasies.

Oh Shit

George Hincapie is my favorite bike racer. He was a drug cheat for at least part of his career. Life sucks.

Lies or Necessary Myths

Fred Clark has shown repeatedly that the evangelicals need for there to witches when clearly there aren't any. Here is a representative post. In an profile of Lynn Vincent in the current New Yorker, she insists that her mother, who was -- she tells us -- a drunken whore of a sluty drug addict, just prior to her death was learning to be a witch. Indeed, Vincent let us know that the witch with which her mother study was Wanda the Witch from Wisconsin.

Here is Wanda:



I call bullshit, in the Frankfortian sense of bullshit. What baffles me is that the New Yorker reports the whole thing as fact without making the relevant point that, you know, evangelicals lie about witches all the time.

The Real Romney

I was thinking about it today and Romney is a triple personality. He is the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and Scarecrow who never met the Wizard and thus he remains heartless, timid, and brainless. With George Bush people like to quote Molly Ivins, I think it was, on how he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Romney was born on third base had pinch runner get to home on a wild pitch whose team lost a meaningless game because it was in the cellar yet insists that his home run won the World Series. He is a man who has no idea what truth or honor or decency mean and should he win we are all so screwed that words cannot express it.

Last night he was enthralled with his own lies and viciousness that he all but jumped out of his skin enraptured with his ability to  tell one lie after another. The mind boggles that anyone thinks that that lying liar won the debate.

The real Mitt Romney is a national disgrace and more evidence, should more evidence be needed, that successful business folks are immoral monsters driven to "win" even  or especially if winning necessitates trampling decency and humanistic values in the mud.

Debate

On the whole it was a train wreck. Romney lied, condescended, and generally acted like the privileged prick that he is. Obama tried to have an actual discussion based on previously stated positions or the lack thereof. To the extent that this tactic failed, which I am not sure it did, it failed because Romney lied and acted like a privileged prick.

I suspect that most people watching the debate decided that Romney is a privileged and lying prick and that Obama did he best he could trying to pierce the squid ink. As evidence I offer the always wrong Andrew Sullivan's analysis.

When Facts Matter

Mitt Romney and his running mate are famous for their allergies to facts and specifics. Between the two of them they have perfected the art of lying and using vagaries instead of policies in the hopes of getting elected in the recent New Yorker profile (sub req) of Romney he is quoted as insisting that in the private sector fluff is denigrated while substance is the drug of choice. He also insists, all facts to the contrary, in the private sector when you screw up you get fired.

He is so marvelously unself-aware that he doesn't realize that he is the person he has warned us about: an empty suit spewing lies and fluff who cares not at all about our collective future.

When Facts Don't Matter

Romney and his supporters are being done in by facts or more precisely their disdain for facts, truth, justice, and -- dare I say it? -- the American way.  There are however intellectual enterprises of real value in which facts get in the way. For example Charles Babbage to Tenyson on truth and beauty:

Sir:

In your otherwise beautiful poem "The Vision of Sin" there is a verse which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,

Charles Babbage

Romney out to give poetry a whirl when is being president of these United States doesn't pan out.

The Reason Romeny is Losing

Men and women on the Right aren't very bright. Here, for example is Ross Douthat burbling on about Romeny's most recent assault on his fellow citizens:

The way Obama and Romney employed these stereotypes are not actually equivalent. Both behind-closed-door comments were profoundly condescending, but only Romney explicitly wrote off the people he’s describing. As Slate’s William Saletan notes, Obama embedded his bitter- clingers characterization in a longer riff about why it’s important for Democrats to keep fighting for blue-collar votes. Romney’s remarks were more dismissive and therefore should prove more politically damaging: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said, of millions of his fellow countrymen, and left it at that.

He then asks that we

set aside the short-term politics for a moment. What does it say about our culture that the people funding presidential campaigns on both sides of the aisle seem to regard their downscale fellow countrymen as a kind of alien race, to be feared and condescended to in equal measure? 

The obvious idiocy of this "argument" is that Romney first blames the mythical  47% and they writes them off while Obama see's the creation of narrow minded bigots as a failure of public policy and outreach and demands that we do better. The "short-term" politics are likely to be less important than now might seem to be the case.

 However, the longer-term political implications are that the left-half of the neoliberal political world is going to continue to try and ameliorate the ravages of market capitalism, albeit insufficiently and sporadically, while trying to convince their fellow citizens to be less bigoted and fear-filled.

This dynamic, indeed, helps to explain the decline of the Republicans as a national party and their increased reliance on voter suppression and lies.

Romney Dead Man Walking?

According to Think Progress he is:

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty announced Thursday morning that he would step down as co-chair of Mitt Romney’s campaign to become the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade organization that represents the 100 largest financial services companies in the country.

Pawlenty might be a wretched little man, but he has so far shown the wisdom of a quitter who knows when he is beat.

There at The New Yorker

I was going to write something about the bipolar nature of the current New Yorker. There is dishonest and disingenuous article by Malcolm Gladwell on the Penn State child raping debacle and great essay by Jill Lepore on the roots of modern corporate conservatism's inability to tell the truth. The problems with Gladwell's article, however, have been laid out here  and his essential dishonesty and mendacity here, here, and here.  

Lepore delves into a now obscure PR firm and lays bare the roots and consequences of several decades of the Right and corporate America to use lies, astroturfing, and smears ton smother popular desires for universal medical insurance and, by extension, nearly ever desirable reform of market capitalism and the society on which it feeds.

One of the understated aspects of the article is the way in which a left-leaning reporter wrote a profile of the firm's founders that was fair and balanced, not being sarcastic, and because of that led to the conclusion that corporate funding of political action was necessarily bad for Americans as citizens. Despite which the reporter actually liked the dynamic duo. Odd the world is.

The Nanny Plutocracy

So Bloomberg's ban on 16 oz or greater sugary drinks in certain location and in specific kinds of containers passed. It is, we are assured, an attempt to deal with the obesity crisis in these United States. It seems like an attempt to stop people smoking by limiting the pack size to 10 cigarettes, which is to say silly, a waste of time, and generally a misuse of the state legitimate regulatory function.

Matt Yglesias Still Dumb

Re the Chicago strike he writes that

[i]f you think that Chicago's teachers deserve the right to form an association to advocate, lobby, and bargain on behalf of the interests of its members (and why shouldn't they?) then you have to think that they deserve the right to advocate for ideas that may not be in the public interest

Without a rough definition of "public interest" the claim that if I support public unions then I must support advocating anti-public interest ideas is devoid of content.

Indeed, given that teachers have a set of concrete demands, both in this case and in general, it would be helpful in Yglesias offered some examples of anti-public interest advocacy or policies. Given that his example drawn from private sector unions is the increased cost associated with increased wages, he seems, although given his dunderheadedness it is hard to know, to mean that increased wages mean increased taxes.

The problem here, of course, is that only neoliberals and libertarians fully support the notion that providing adequate funding for public services is anti-public good.  Paying teachers a decent wage, protecting them from the  arbitrary authority of administrators in thrall to the latest educ-scam, and the like are, actually, policies that promote the public good. Smaller classrooms and more teachers make for better schools. Limiting the power of the administration or rabid maniacs riding various political, religions, or other hobbyhorses to dictate curriculum or tenure and promotion decision is another public good. And so on.

People babble on about rubber rooms and lazy teachers but the fact of the matter is that teaching is a highly competitive profession and thee most teachers care about students and want their schools to continue to improve. Assuming that they and their unions want to advocate for policies that decrease the public good is one way to assure that the best and the brightest of this and any future generation will seek to join a profession, like banking, investing, or punditry, where failure is not an option and even the dimmest  of bulbs is free to fail upwards.

Pay Attention to the Details

 Over to The New Yorker there is long and well done evisceration of evolutionary psychology. It has in it, however a howler of an interpretive error. Gottlieb offers a little anecdote from Darwin's reception:

The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders . . . and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.”

The problem here is obvious. Natural selection and Empedocles' just so story have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Darwin hadn't heard or read and was not working in that intellectual tradition. He was, rather, engaged in a  modern scientific endeavor in which the facts mattered. Take, as an example, the peacocks tail or sexual selection. As Gotlieb points out Darwin, like all of us, was a prisoner of his culture. Nonetheless, he recognized that females had enormous influence on evolution even though it violated his cultural assumptions about women's inferiority.

In addition, Lamarcks' theory of acquired characteristics, which is a nearly perfect example of just soing, was one of Darwin's targets as were all the then current just so stories about speciation.  Darwin, for all his faults and warts, was most emphatically not just soing and, indeed, one reason why the Darwinian solution to evolution, natural selection plus descent with modification, was and is so important is that it provides both a wealth of evidence against just so but also a nearly-perfect example of how the application of scientific method to a knotty problem can resolve the problem and limit the distortion of cultural assumptions.

Who is the Real Crook?

In a review of Hamilton's book on why he doped the NYTimes reviewer makes a key point:

Rightly, Mr. Hamilton notes in “The Secret Race” that punishment has focused far too much on cyclists while minimizing the role of team owners, sponsors, race organizers and cycling’s bureaucracy. Yet for someone who repeatedly preaches the value of speaking the truth, Mr. Hamilton lets himself off lightly.

Unfortunately this comes in the third to last paragraph. And the conclusion, Hamilton didn't either have to dope, undermines the argument that systemic doping in a profitable business owes more to the structures created by the sports owners then to the workers yet some how or another the workers are the guiltier party.

Unequal Forces

From The New Yorker comes this image of one or another of the recent conventions:

Seems about right.

Status Update

My computer, it seems, is dying. Posting will be light.