Shocked by Those Shocked by Trump Win

It looks to me like New York Times readers were especially surprised by Trump's win. It seems that the paper really hadn't prepared them for the possibility. Of course, that's because the Times itself was caught completely off-guard. Many internal and external criticisms have followed. Here's an excerpt of an internal one by Liz Spayd, the Times Public Editor:

The red state America campaign coverage that rang the loudest in news coverage grew out of Trump rallies, and it often amplified the voices of the most hateful. One especially compelling video produced with footage collected over months on the campaign trail, captured the ugly vitriol like few others. That’s important coverage. But it and pieces like it drowned out the kind of agenda-free, deep narratives that could have taken Times readers deeper into the lives and values of the people who just elected the next president.

Funny she mentions "agenda" and "narratives." Because Michael Cieply, an editor who worked for the Times up until July wrote:

[At the Times] by and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line. [...] 

...one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. ... 

I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?” 

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

To summarize, they come up with a narrative, then find stories to fit it. That's journalism? This is the venerable Grey Lady, the paper of record? Really?

When I first read this via a link from Instapundit, I thought it was satire or a hoax or something. After all, if the Times was really doing their reporting backwards by coming up with the narrative first, we would have heard about it long ago, wouldn't we? Isn't that a rather important detail? Wouldn't some Times journalist or Times ex-journalist happen to mention that, perhaps inadvertently, to the world?

It might still be a hoax, but right now it doesn't look like it to me. Many other clearly legitimate media organizations have now quoted this story. If it was a hoax, I think someone would've pointed it out by now.

But what's further bewildering me is that the other organizations' attitudes seem to be something like, "yeah, sure, no surprise that's what the Times does, and really, no biggie." Okay, well, good to know it's no biggie, because otherwise I might've been outraged. No, wait! I am kinda outraged! The Times is trying to tell the country what to think. And they're succeeding for much of their readership. A readership that is fortunately dwindling. A readership that is absolutely baffled about the Trump phenomenon, mostly thanks to the Times (and the rest of the Main Stream Media).

I've been skeptical of the Times for a long time. Now I'm gonna have trouble believing anything I read in that paper.

Why RWR is such a fun topic for me

The recent passing of Nancy Reagan was for me, an interesting reminder of the past.  I was at the time still what the late Andrew Breitbart would call a default liberal.  Left leaning, not the classical kind, but without being a true believer.  Some time during Reagan's second term, I started to think that he got many things right in comparison to his critics.  I had already been looking beyond conventional notions about many things for over ten years by then even though I wasn't yet 30 years old.  Even media and pop culture sources begrudgingly changed from portraying him as an amiable dunce to a bit of an over the top version the other way as in the SNL mastermind skit.

First, thinking of that time and how the media  treated her:

Mrs. Reagan was hated because President Reagan was hated. There wasn’t a great deal to hate about Nancy, and so such vices and foibles as she had — quaint, in retrospect — were exaggerated to unrecognizable proportions. Spend any time around politics, and you’ll quickly understand that the lie lives forever...

Yes, she was likely far more decent and intelligent...

In an interview with Larry Elder Nancy shared these thoughts:

Reagan: Well, I think his legacy was making the country feel good about itself again, making people feel good. There was a whole optimism that he exuded.

Elder: And is that the quality about Ron Reagan that you most admire -- his optimism?

Reagan: Well, that's one of the things that I admire. There are lots of things that I admire about him. That's one of them.

Elder: Tell us what some of the others are, his qualities.

Reagan: Oh, his kindness, his ability to be a great communicator, to communicate with people -- all kinds of people, all different ages, it didn't make any difference. He just connected with them. He was a very romantic man, as those letters he wrote show. A wise man. I could go on and on. How long have we got? (Laughter)

Elder: The thing that people most misunderstand about Ron Reagan.

Reagan: Well, I don't think it's true any more, since they've published the speeches that he wrote, the letters that he wrote, but it used to be that people thought, well, he didn't know anything -- they just handed him things -- but he didn't know anything. Now, with the publication of all the speeches that he wrote, I mean, it shows that way, way back, he had his philosophy firmly in place. He knew what he was doing.

If you doubt the he knew much, I would simply direct you to read  Reagan, In His Own Hand.
He clearly demonstrates a solid understanding of important ideas about the world:

Scrupulously edited and presented, this book assembles and excerpts scores of his handwritten works, mostly from radio commentaries Reagan wrote in the late 1970s. The collection recovers the most powerful elements of Reagan and Reaganism, such as the depth and clarity of Reagan's principles and his fundamental optimism.

More than 50 years from the time of choosing speech, it is still quite a solid exposition of principles of liberty. (transcript)

A source for some of the material that Reagan studied in refining the explanations of what he believed was FEE, The Foundation for Economic Education:

Another person who got hooked on FEE’s materials was a middle-aged actor named Ronald Reagan. The story is fascinating, as detailed in the 2006 book The Education of Ronald Reagan, by Thomas Evans.

From 1954 to 1962, Reagan worked as the host of CBS’s top-rated General Electric Theater and served as General Electric’s official spokesman. For weeks at a time he would tour GE’s 139 plants, eventually meeting most of the 250,000 employees in them. Reagan himself estimated that he spent 4,000 hours before GE microphones giving talks that started out with Hollywood patter but ended up as full-throated warnings about Big Government. “GE tours became almost a post-graduate course in political science for me,” he later wrote. “By 1960, I had completed the process of self-conversion.”

Aside from having formulated his views with real diligence, Reagan was a successful two term governor of California.  Yet, far more often than not the media referred to him as a B level actor.

The blind partisanship demonstrated by demonizing opponents as well as forgetfulness of admirers in not remembering how hard he battled the establishment in getting elected and pursuing his agenda also come to mind.  The U.S. with leadership and vision provided by RWR liberalized economic policy and led the way amongst developed economies in the economic resurgence of the 1980s.  If you want an appreciation for what that was like:

...the presidency that was by far the most analogous to Barack Obama's in terms of the miserable economic conditions inherited was that of Ronald Reagan. And comparing the Gipper's 1986 address to Obama's 2014 was a startling exercise in contrast, illustrating the wide gulf between their competing economic recoveries.

Beyond being open minded enough to appreciate what I was observing, I took the opportunity to read the works of several authors who were instrumental to providing ideas relevant to this great resurgence.  Jude Wanniski,  Art Laffer, Robert Mundell, George Gilder and John Rutledge all had valuable insights to contribute.  Anyone can learn a tremendous amount by reading their papers and books.

As a reminder, the four pillars of Reaganomics that were so effective in revitalizing the economy were: sound money, reduced taxation, limited regulation and freer trade.  Yes, it really did work.

(As an aside, David Goldman who worked with the late Jude Wanniski at his firm Polyconomics  has an interesting observation:  Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan)


I think you can see why Ronald Wilson Reagan is a fun topic for me.  But Reagan being Reagan with a terrific sense of humor, I think the best way to end this post is with a joke:

UPDATE:

Just to make clear - I did not vote for him.  Although far from perfect, he got a lot right.

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts:

In terms of personal character and ideological seriousness, Trump and Reagan could not be more different. Reagan was one of the most dignified politicians of the 20th century, one who turned his cheek to vicious attacks, refused to use profanity, and rarely showed an angry side. Meanwhile, Trump’s crude and vengeful streaks virtually define the man.

Reagan’s ideological principles were derived from decades of reading, speaking, and debating. Trump, meanwhile, is winging it.

“I don’t think he has an ideology,” Pat Buchanan told the Washington Post. “He very much is responding to the realities that he has encountered and his natural reactions to them. It’s not some intellectual construct.”

Here lies both the irony and farce of the cult-like effort to anoint Trump as the second coming of Reagan. The one meaningful similarity between the two men is that they can both be seen as authentic responses to their times. The difference? Reagan was the right response.

A book review titled: The Gipper Wins Another One 

Remarkably, Weisberg dispenses with the ideological bias that has afflicted the authors in this series, and presidency scholars in general, for he has produced a genuinely fair and somewhat admiring book about Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

This is a nuanced account, detailing Reagan’s hatred of nuclear weapons and his somewhat unique assessment that the Soviet Union was doomed.
...
Weisberg’s assessment of Reagan’s effort to trim the size and reach of the welfare state is also quite balanced. He argues, contrary to the hysterical rhetoric of Reagan’s critics then and now, that “Reagan didn’t succeed in eliminating a single major program, which illustrates the truth of his adage about eternal life and government bureaus.” He does note that Reagan’s deregulatory drive “halved the thickness of the Federal Register, which complies new regulations.”
...
And speaking of evil, American liberals hated Ronald Reagan when he was President, although it has become gospel among some of them that Reagan was liked on both sides of the aisle. He wasn’t. Tip O’Neill, arguably the most partisan House Speaker of the 20th century, declared that Reagan, not the Soviet Union, was the focus of evil in the modern world.
...
Weisberg rejects this vicious and vacuous assessment, for Reagan was one of the few public figures to embody “the idealized national character,” with his elements of “simplicity, innocence, and personal modesty.” These qualities are, as Weisberg rightly notes, rare in public life and hard to fake. This book is a rarity as well, and one that hopefully portends more balance in the future from the American Presidents Series.

Like I said, a fun topic for me.

Different paths of development

In discussions on this blog and elsewhere I sometimes have the impression that differences in cultural orientation might have a significant impact on the areas of focus in building up a base of knowledge relevant to the subject under discussion.   That in turn effects historical interpretations even before personality and other things influencing world view come into play.

The first excerpt is about how the history of development in early 1800s New England is different than the impression that most people have.

The Dawn of Innovation pp. 76-77

   Through a European lens, in fact, America looked very backward, if only because of its overwhelmingly rural demography.  In the 1820s, more than 90 percent of Americans still lived in the countryside, a pattern that had changed very little by mid-century.  In nineteenth-century Europe, rural areas were mostly peasant-ridden backwaters, but America’s agrarian patina concealed a beehive of commercial and industrial activity.  By the end of the War of 1812, Gordon Wood suggests, the northern states were possibly “the most thoroughly commercialized society in the world.”  A Rhode Island industrialist made the same point in 1829: “The manufacturing activities of the United States are carried on in little hamlets…around the water fall which serves to turn the mill wheel.” 

   American historians have suffered their own bafflements.  It is only in recent decades that a consensus of sorts has emerged on the nation’s early growth spurt.  Winifred Rothenberg did much of the groundbreaking work—twenty-five years of patient excavation of the account books, diaries, estates, mortgages, and other records of Massachusetts farmers.  What she finds is an organic, bottom-up form of modernization, originating in the increasing prosperity of ordinary farmers.  The British experience was starkly different.  The underbelly of Victorian society mapped by Charles Dickens was a rural proletariat brutally expelled from the countryside and herded into urban factories.
(Although we shouldn't exaggerate the negatives. )

Even if someone wants to point to government actions, don't be fooled - common genius was already a very significant force driving bottom-up organic growth.


Another point worth remembering was that the negative effects of slavery were obvious to visitors from  another country.

Democracy in America  pp. 344-348

   When a century had passed since the foundation of the colonies, an extraordinary fact began to strike the attention of everybody.  The population of those provinces that had practically no slaves increased in numbers, wealth, and well-being more rapidly than those that had slaves. 

   The inhabitants of the former had to cultivate the ground themselves or hire another’s services; in the latter they had laborers whom they did not need to pay.  With labor and expense on the one side and leisure and economy on the other, nonetheless the advantage lay with the former.
…
   The farther they went, the clearer it became that slavery, so cruel to the slave, was fatal to the master.
…
There is only one difference between the two states: Kentucky allows slaves, but Ohio refuses to have them. 

   So the traveler who lets the current carry him down the Ohio till it joins the Mississippi sails, so to say, between freedom and slavery; and he has only to glance around him to see instantly which is best for mankind. 

   On the left bank of the river the population is sparse; from time to time one sees a troop of slaves loitering through half-deserted fields; the primeval forest is constantly reappearing; one might say that society had gone to sleep; it is nature that seems active and alive, whereas man is idle. 

   But on the right bank a confused hum proclaims from afar that men are busily at work; fine crops cover the fields; elegant dwellings testify to the taste and industry of the workers; on all sides there is evidence of comfort; man appears rich and contented; he works. 

   The state of Kentucky was founded in 1775 and that of Ohio as much as twelve years later; twelve years in America counts for as much as half a century in Europe.  Now the population of Ohio is more than 250,000 greater than that of Kentucky.
   These contrasting effects of slavery and of freedom are easy to understand; they are enough to explain the differences between ancient civilization and modern. 

   On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on the Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank: the white man’s intelligent activity is used for work of every sort.
…
   Antiquity could only have a very imperfect understanding of this effect of slavery on the production of wealth.  Then slavery existed throughout the whole civilized world, only some barbarian peoples being without it.
   Christianity destroyed slavery by insisting on the slave’s rights; nowadays it can be attacked from the master’s point of view; in this respect interest and morality are in harmony.

Don Boudreaux  provides additional clarification in an article titled  What's so :

Another historical myth is that Southern slavery harmed only the blacks who were enslaved. There's no doubt that those who suffered most grievously from slavery were the slaves themselves. But slavery also inflicted great economic harm on non-slave-owning whites in the South.  

Most obviously, slavery artificially reduced the supply of workers available to work in whatever factories and businesses might have been established by non-slave-owning whites. Therefore, these whites — who outnumbered slave-owning whites, even in the South — suffered reduced opportunities to launch their own businesses. In the South, chattel slavery stymied the single greatest force for widespread and sustained economic growth: market-directed entrepreneurship.  

Also, by curbing entrepreneurship in the South, slavery reduced the rate of introduction of new goods and services that would have enriched consumers' lives.
There was yet another way that slavery kept the antebellum American South economically infantile. Here's the late economic historian Stanley Lebergott writing about the United States before the Civil War:  

“British vessels began to concentrate their voyages to New York, Boston and Philadelphia. For in these ports they could both deliver a full cargo of manufactured goods (to be consumed in the cities or sent along to the West) and also pick up return cargoes. The demand for manufactured goods and such luxuries as tea and coffee, however, grew far more slowly in such Southern centers as Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington. One reason was that much of the nearby population were slaves, consuming little in the way of manufactured goods.”  

Lebergott sensibly argues that, had slavery not existed, Southern ports such as that at Charleston, S.C., would have gotten a great deal more shipping business. But because slavery artificially kept most Southerners — unfree  and free — poor, it kept the South from being a strong market for European manufactured goods. 

These historical realities should be kept in mind by anyone attracted to the argument that capitalism was fathered by slavery. 

As if this troubled history didn't present enough problems, there were further obstacles to escaping the impediments to progress even long after the botched or neglected Reconstruction.  Earlier in the same article other impediments to Southern development are highlighted:

Everyone knows, for example, that minimum-wage legislation is meant to help the working poor. A study of history, however, shows that this just ain't so.  

What  is so is that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the legislation that created the national minimum wage in America — was designed to protect the higher wages of Northern textile workers, and the profits of Northern mill owners, from the intensifying competition unleashed by Southern textile mills in the Carolinas and Georgia.  

The competitive advantage enjoyed by Southern mills over their Northern rivals was access to lower-wage labor. Even at 15 cents per hour, these jobs were attractive to poor Southern workers, many of whom would otherwise have earned even less as sharecroppers. 

But being insensitive to the plight of poor Southern workers, Congress and FDR in 1938 outlawed jobs that paid less than 25 cents per hour. The purpose was to stifle competition and protect the profits of politically powerful producer groups in the North.

These obstacles, self imposed and otherwise, have delayed and slowed the economic convergence of the South.  Improvements in transportation, communication and infrastructure, combined with lower cost of living and cultural changes are improving circumstances.  Lee Habeeb is both a participant in and an observer of these changes:

When I told my friends in New Jersey nearly ten years ago that I was packing my bags and heading south, they thought I’d lost my mind. Why, they wondered, would I give up the food, shopping, and close proximity to New York City to live anywhere else, especially a place like Oxford, Miss.? I might as well have told them I was moving to Mogadishu. 

I tried to lighten things up by explaining that we had running water in Mississippi. And cable TV. Heck, we even had dentists. The planes coming and going in nearby Memphis got me most places in quick order, too. I then described the quality of life in Oxford and how far a dollar stretches. When I showed them pictures of my house and shared with them the cost of that house — and the low property-tax bill that came along with it — they got depressed.
… 

And it isn’t just millions of American citizens packing their bags and heading south. Last month, in a move that shocked residents of northern New Jersey, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz USA announced it was moving its headquarters from Montvale (just miles from where I grew up) to Sandy Springs, Ga. And it’s bringing nearly 1,000 people along with it, at an average salary of nearly $80,000 per worker. 

“We think the infrastructure in the States has changed,” Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Mercedes, told reporters. “The South is much more relevant than it used to be. We think it is a new start, a rejuvenation of our company to make the move.”
… 

And there’s another angle to the southern-migration story that hasn’t received enough media attention, though it’s perhaps more profound: The past 30 years have seen an epic migration of black people to the South. Indeed, the percentage of the nation’s African-American population living in the South hit its highest point in half a century, as more and more black people moved out of declining cities in the Midwest and Northeast. 

A great many books have been written about the migration of rural black people from the South to the big cities of Chicago and Detroit during the 1940s and ’50s. Nicholas Lemann, former dean of Columbia University’s journalism school and a professor there, wrote one of them: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. 

Why, a curious student might want to ask Professor Lemann, hasn’t he written about the reverse migration, and about the economic and cultural forces behind it? 

I think we know why he won’t. The ideological prejudices of so many journalists and media elites — and the academic elite, too, even in the South — won’t permit it. They’re so invested in the old narrative of the South, so busy reminding Americans about the tragic history of the region, they can’t bear the thought that it’s changed, let alone that black people are fleeing blue northern cities to live in red southern states.
…
But this much is self-evident: If the South is so backward, why are some of the most sophisticated foreign companies moving here? For decades, American policymakers have been worried that we would lose our manufacturing base to the world, but over the past few decades, the South has become a hub of manufacturing for the world. 

This much, too, is self-evident: If the South is so racist, why are so many black people moving back here?
…
You won’t ever see or hear any of the above stories covered in any depth in the media. They’re too busy recounting negative stories about the South’s past — stories that no doubt need telling — to notice the progress.

An appreciation for the differing perspectives that people have of the material presented here provides some understanding of how they might have divergent ideas about economic development in America.

The Smug

A recent Jonah Goldberg column contained the following:

I don’t know who first said, “Behind every apparent double standard lies an unconfessed single standard” (and as far as I can tell, neither does the Internet), but whoever did was onto something.

What looks like inexplicably staggering hypocrisy from the conservative perspective is actually remarkably consistent from the liberal perspective.

Well, “perspective” is probably the wrong word because it implies a conscious, deliberate, philosophical point of view. What is really at work is better understood as bias, even bigotry.

If you work from the dogmatic assumption that liberalism is morally infallible and that liberals are, by definition, pitted against sinister and — more importantly — powerful forces, then it’s easy to explain away what seem like double standards. Any lapse, error, or transgression by conservatives is evidence of their real nature, while similar lapses, errors, and transgressions by liberals are trivial when balanced against the fact that their hearts are in the right place.

Despite controlling the commanding heights of the culture — journalism, Hollywood, the arts, academia, and vast swaths of the corporate America they denounce — liberals have convinced themselves they are pitted against deeply entrenched powerful forces and that being a liberal is somehow brave. Obama, the twice-elected president of the United States, to this day speaks as if he’s some kind of underdog.

A later column titled Blaming America First  had these additional points  :

In reality, the liberal ideological comfort zone is incredibly narrow. If an issue can’t be turned into a critique of America (or: white privilege, the religious Right (variously defined), capitalism, the GOP, or some other float in the parade of horribles that is the legacy of those horrible Pale Penis People who gave us so much of Western civilization), then the conversation must be pulled in that direction. It’s simply where their minds go. Rhetorically they have to fight every fight on home turf.
...
 So what happens when events and facts make it impossible for liberals to change the subject to more convenient topics? They figure out how to make the villain or problem at hand “conservative.”
...
 All of the nonsense about microaggressions and hate speech, all of the namby-pamby self-esteem boosting, the elevation of feelings, the paranoia of offending people, the thousand flavors of political correctness including informed-consent for every romantic overture: They did it. Them. All by themselves. And they are still doing it. Conservatives aren’t behind any of it and libertarians certainly aren’t.

But the moment it becomes impossible to ignore the huge frick’n mess they created, what do they start calling it? Conservatism.

This is all part of the narrative and political branding.  Plenty of bright people are so trapped in the bubble that they can't see this at all.

Later in the same column he continues:

The Left loves wars of national liberation. The Left loves self-determination against colonialism. But when such nationalism becomes a problem, out come the smug lectures about how nationalism is right-wing.

 And that’s the point. Once something becomes too terrible to ignore, it must be labeled “right-wing” or “conservative” somehow. If you don’t believe me, find the smartest liberal you know and ask him or her to list all of the really bad things done by the Left. Odds are you’ll get silence. Or you might get “Well, I don’t believe in labels . . . ” (“Don’t get him started on that again, people!” — The Couch). But what you won’t hear is much of anything about the American eugenics movement, or the internment of the Japanese, or the Black Panthers, Weathermen, the manifest failures of the New Deal (economic and non-economic alike), etc. That’s because liberalism, by conviction if not definition, is never wrong.

Kevin Williamson in a column titled The New Royals :

Other civilizations are big on karma, arete, martial codes of honor, virtus, etc.; we Americans have “Work hard, live well, enjoy good stuff,” which might be sneered at by philosophers and warlords but is nonetheless the best and most humane organizing principle a human polity has yet discovered.

I miss the days when the important status symbol could be something so simple as a Cadillac.
...

Tinkering with the organic, spontaneous orders of human society is a tricky business. In the 1960s, the Western world got it into its collective head that traditional social arrangements, especially family arrangements, were an instrument of oppression that needed to be torn down. And we set about tearing them down, without giving any thought to what would replace them. We were confident that whatever came next inevitably would be better, and about 80 percent of our current domestic-policy initiatives are in one way or another aimed at dealing with the fact that what came after wasn’t better — that it was brutish and frequently cruel — without ever being so gauche as to notice that that’s the case.

Similarly, the old status symbols — the nice house, the car, the sensible two-week family vacation — might have been bound up with a brand of unthinking and insalubrious materialism, but they were also bound up with some important virtues that we are in the process of rediscovering: thrift, frugality, delayed gratification, etc. That is, in fact, why status symbols work as status symbols: It’s not just having the Cadillac or the gold watch — it’s being the sort of person who earns them.
...
 As in the case of the princess in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1835 story, so sensitive that she could feel the pea under 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds, acute dissatisfaction with the tiniest, most ridiculous little details of life is how 21st-century progressives communicate to the world that they are indeed the new royalty, with sensibilities finer than those known to mere commoners.
...
 There is a term for this that is uncharitable but cannot be improved upon: status-whoring. The old status symbols may have been shallow; the new ones are shallow, destructive, and a great deal less fun to drive.

And they don’t even require you to work particularly hard in school.
...
 But there is an important distinction between political-correctness-as-status-symbol and Cadillac as a status symbol. The Cadillac, at least as presented by Neal McDonough, is a symbol of what you have earned; hashtag-activist foie-gras phobia is, like the princess’s sleepless night, an expression of who you are — or who you are pretending to be. Anybody can be dissatisfied; it requires no real expenditure of effort. All you have to do to be a member of the new aristocracy is to convince the prince (or some gender-neutral equivalent) that you belong.

Which is to say, our progressives have progressed right back to 1835.

 These examples are presented in support of what the late Andrew Breitbart described as the frequent practice of the left to exhibit an "unearned moral and intellectual superiority."  This kind of posturing is an attempt to always claim the high ground in all matters.  It's as phoney as heck and it's all pretend even if many of practitioners don't realize this.

This Afterburner video with Bill Whittle explains this Coin of the Realm.


Once matters get beyond modest complexity, there are no shortcuts to acquiring the requisite knowledge and achieving sufficient maturity and wisdom to make sound judgements about right and wrong and to then have sound ideas about what might follow.  That is what I told my youngest child, who is a junior in college.  All that has comprised this post was part of an attempt to give him an explanation of and a vocabulary to describe and deal with an attitude he senses on campus which he calls "The Smug." 

Cost of this effort: some time; look on his face afterwards: priceless!

Worse than you might think, but...

Having recently addressed an example from the past of how a distorted narrative was employed in the world of arts and literature to misrepresent people and circumstances, let us turn to the world of journalism.

The perceptive Michael Walsh makes the following observation:

The suicide of American journalism, and the “objective” ideal I grew up with as a young reporter, continues apace, as I noted in this space yesterday and the IBD website mentions today:

Media Malfeasance: In less than two weeks, bombshell stories of a vicious gang rape and a millionaire teen investor were exposed as frauds that never would have made it into print but for gross negligence and liberal bias.
...
There’s a reason that, back in the day, every revolution began be seizing the newspapers and radio stations. The Left understands, far more than the Right, that propaganda is everything — and if it has to kill American journalism to make its points, then so be it.

Over at Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield has some typically perceptive thoughts on “Life in Post-Truth America.” Well worth a read.

Worse than the hoaxes and reporting of half truths are the errors of omission.  The neglect of both stories that make their side look bad (as if they should be taking sides) and stories that present the opposition in a positive light.

Excerpts from the column by the prolific Mr. Greenfield include:

The unreliable narrator has crossed over from a fictional device in novels to memoirs, journalism and into politics.
...
 The device of the unreliable narrator puts truth out of reach. It says that there is no such thing as truth, only various perspectives on an event.
...
 In the absence of facts, there can be no reality. There is only ideology.
...
 ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in which the America that was cannot exist.

America had prospered because of a firm belief in a discoverable and exploitable reality. That was the country that could build skyscrapers and fleets in a year. Post-Truth America has little interest in big buildings because it’s too busy enacting a psychodrama in which the earth is about to be destroyed. And fleets, like horses and bayonets and facts, are 19th century toys that are much less interesting than the manipulation of people through lies and deceit.

Lena Dunham’s Barry and Obama’s Barry are both imaginary creatures. They are the sophisticated products of disordered minds and a disordered civilization whose leading figures lie as instinctively and as shamelessly as any pre-rational culture that could not distinguish between lies and truth. 

The cause for optimism is that two of the redoubts of the left, media and academia, will come under increasing competitive pressure for many years to come.   (see also here and here)

The new Birchers

Over the last few months on several occasions I have thought about a quote or misquote commonly attributed to Eric Hoffer:

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

• Frequently misquoted as "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

 
For example: the civil rights movement, feminism and environmentalism all seem to have degenerated from what were once valid approaches to noble goals.

Ed Driscoll has his own take on the matter:

The modern left is built around a trio of laudable principles: protecting the environment is good, racism is bad, and so is demonizing a person over his or her sexual preferences. (In the chapter of his book Intellectuals titled “The Flight from Reason,” Paul Johnson wrote that “At the end of the Second World War, there was a significant change in the predominant aim of secular intellectuals, a shift of emphasis from utopianism to hedonism.” ) But just as the Bircher right began to see communists everywhere, the new Bircher left sees racism, sexism, homophobia, and Koch Brothers everywhere.

They’re lurking around more corners than Gen. Ripper imagined there were commies lurking inside Burpelson Air Force Base. They’re inside your video games! They own NFL teams! They’ll steal your condoms! Disagree with President Obama? Racist! (That goes for you too, Bill, Hillary, and your Democratic supporters.) Not onboard for gender-neutral bathrooms? Not too thrilled with abortion-obsessed candidates like Wendy Davis and “Mark Uterus”? Sexist! Disagree with using global warming as a cudgel to usher in the brave new world of bankrupt coal companies and $10 a gallon gasoline? Climate denier!

And as with the original Birchers, don’t get ‘em started on fluoride.
The original Birchers weren’t bad people, but their Cold War paranoia got the better of them. Similarly, as Charles Krauthammer famously said, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” which illustrates how a John Birch-style worldview can cause the modern leftists to take an equally cracked view of his fellow countrymen, to the point of writing off entire states and genders:

...

The John Birch left? I think it’s a phrase whose time has come...

Seems pretty apt.

Symbol, Information Channel, and Meaning

My wife and I visited Indonesia in the early 1990s and did a lot of hiking to visit quite a number of old temples and ruins.  We were quite shocked to encounter a huge number of swastikas adorning these temples in various forms.

We later learned that the swastika symbol has been in existence for 5,000 years and that the Sanskrit meaning of the word "swastika" is "it is good."  The information channel from the creators of the temples thousands of years ago to my wife and me was so intensely corrupted by the Nazi's adoption of that symbol, that our first reactions assumed some sort of virulent antisemitism, hatred, violence, and murder.

I've had the humorous opportunity to watch two daughters and their friends evolve in their choice of clothes between the ages of 13 and 16.  At 13, an overwhelming percentage choose to dress totally inappropriately every possible chance they get.  The 13 year old boys take very little notice as they're not yet ready to "appreciate" that sort of thing.  16 to 19 year old boys take a lot of notice, and that makes this period rather dangerous for everyone involved.

The 13 year old girls believe that the message they're sending is something like, "hey, I can dress like the popular stars of the world." The message is intended only for other girls with which they associate.  They have no idea what message they are sending to the slightly older boys.

The humorous part is that these same girls at 15 or 16 are often appalled and ashamed of how they had dressed when they were 13.  At that point they understand how the message of their dress was received by many others (especially the boys) and they dress much, much more conservatively.  And little sisters who are now 13 get quite a talking to by their older sisters when the younger ones start dressing like sluts - the older sisters often make mom look quite permissive! This is definitely an example of how the channel transmitting the information badly distorts the intended meaning on the receiving end.



Embarrassingly, I either never knew or had forgotten what a confederate flag looked like.  Like the swastika above, it has extreme negative connotations, the topmost being extreme racism towards blacks, including being pro-slavery.  Unlike those who adorned their temples with swastikas thousands of years ago and couldn't possibly guess that their sacred symbol would have horribly negative connotations in the distant future, someone who waves a symbol at a political rally doesn't have that excuse.  The best defense is a fairly lame one, and is that like the naive 13-year old girls discussed above, he didn't understand how poorly the message of waving a confederate flag in front of the White House would be received by a substantial majority of the citizens of the United States, including both liberals and conservatives.

That does, indeed, seem to be the excuse.  Here is an excerpt of something he's written about the event in response to the negative press coverage:

"You sit behind your laptop and type articles about people you don’t know. You sit there and think you know the true meaning of the confederate flag, but in truth you only know what people have told you.Did you know that the confederate flag was flown on the USS Columbia ( CL-56) during WWII. 

"You would be surprised that the confederate flag is often used as a symbol for culture and to display love for one’s country. So to sit there and say you know me is a lie. I fought for my country, My family and my friends."

And according to Wikipedia, that is all true.  Nonetheless, by being oblivious to how the information channel would color and deliver his message, he managed to single-handedly paint the tea party, conservatives, marines specifically, and the military in general, as racist - at least in the minds of many liberals and conservatives.

Wishful Thinking

USA Today requested that readers come up with a single word to describe the state of the union and compiled the results into the following word cloud:

What word jumps out the most?  Well, according to USA Today:

The words that were mentioned the most include: "improving," ...

I don't know about you, but I think that anybody who looks at that cloud and sees "improving" first is "screwed", "pathetic", and pushing "propaganda".

Double Standards are Good Things?

Columnist Stanley Fish of the New York Times has no problem with that which others might consider to be a double standard:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

At least he's honest in his lying sorta double standard kinda way.

When I first read this, I was wondering if some sort of satire or parody was involved. But given the author and the paper in which this appears, I have to believe it's genuine.

Instapundit's Fingers to Lance Armstrong's Tweet

On August 30th, Instapundit asks: IS IT PARENTAL NEGLECT to let your kid bike to school?

Within 24 hours the story is around the globe and Lance Armstrong, the famous Tour de France winner, tweeted his opinion about the story: "That's ridiculous. I'm glad I was so "neglected". #thanksmom"

And mainstream media is gonna compete with the reactive ability and rapid, targeted, viral dissemination of these alternative information channels how?

Post-Normal Science

Climate scientists have not been shown in a particularly favorable light lately. The "Climategate" emails, a number of high-profile mistakes and retractions by the IPCC, and the continued inaccuracy of the predictions of the climate models have shown the climate scientists to be all too fallible, biased, and not particularly trustworthy human beings.

An Oxford philosopher, Jerry Ravitz, has contemplated the special stresses put on the interface between science and the public and policy makers when there is a situation which can be described as "facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent".

He considers it to be a new paradigm and calls it:

"Post-Normal Science, which until now has not really attracted very much attention in the mainstream. I’ve met people who found it an inspiration and liberation, as it enabled them to recognise the deep uncertainties in their scientific work that colleagues wished to ignore. ... We are not saying that this is a desirable, natural or normal state for science.

"We place it by means of a diagram, a quadrant-rainbow with two axes. These are ’systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. When both are small, we have ‘applied science’, which must be the vast majority of scientific work in keeping civilisation running. When either is medium, we have ‘professional consultancy’, like the surgeon or consultant engineer. The basic insight of PNS is that there is another zone, where either attribute is large."

Ravitz, as is the wont of many philosophers, tends to use a thousand words to explain a concept where ten would almost do. The other 990 words are used for nuances that are ornately twisted into pretzels and chained together to embroider and frame the concept (this paragraph is my feeble attempt to directly illustrate the sorts of extraneous prose used by philosophers - did I succeed?). As a result, it's very difficult to know exactly what the hell he's trying to say.

But the gist is that under the "decision urgent" criterion, it is permissible - nay necessary! - for scientists to frame the debate in such a manner that the public and policy makers will come to the "correct" conclusion and therefore take the "correct" actions.

It's no wonder to me that Post-Normal Science "has not really attracted very much attention in the mainstream" since it has some rather serious problems, in my opinion. The most glaring is that if we have "facts uncertain", then in general, and with Climate Change in particular, how can we know that we're in a "decision urgent" state? Especially since "decision urgent" is then used to trump truth, honesty, ethics, legality, and all of the other mores and institutions upon which civilization is built. Especially when the "correct" conclusion involves committing staggering levels of resources, remaking civilization, and consigning masses of humanity to poverty. Other than that, hey, I'm an open-minded kinda guy.

Unfortunately, Post-Normal Science has attracted attention in the Climate Science community. Using Ravitz's logic, Stephen Schneider, a Stanford Climatologist wrote:

...we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

While the above statement is fairly old (1989), at this point it's pretty obvious to me that this attitude is pervasive throughout climate science, especially for those scientists who interact with the media, directly or indirectly. But Schneider left out one thing. Not only are the scenarios scary, but remember, the science is settled, especially if it's Post-Normal Science.

The Wisdom of the Swivel-Eyed Loons

James Delingpole gives blog commenters a big compliment:

... without wishing to flatter you [blog commenters] too much, you blog-addicted, foaming-mouthed, swivel-eyed loons – I’ve found the comments sections on blogs to be bastions of wisdom, rough-hewn common sense, wit, and often amazingly well-informed insight. And I don’t just mean on my blogs. What I always find equally heartening is when you look up an article online by, say, Polly Toynbee or some crack-papering fraudster from the Met Office and find its inconsistencies and idiocies being torn to shreds by a readership far more intelligent and on the ball than almost anyone in the liberal commentariat.

And this, I think, is the crux of the matter. The main reason so many left-liberals so loathe and fear the internet is that it is a medium that favours the libertarian right.

I don't think that the internet particularly favours the libertarian right. I think that it favours any group with at least some reasonable arguments that has limited or no access to any other media outlet. Libertarians happen to be one such group.

Since I'm feeling particularly loony today (though perhaps not swivel-eyed), I'll take the compliment whole-heartedly.

What's News?

I'm sorry, but the entire punditocracy has missed the point.

It is NOT news that someone in show business makes an intensely rude, crude, lewd, insulting, disgusting and/or despicable comment regarding an entirely inappropriate subject. Indeed, if we demanded an apology every time that happened, we'd never get anything else done.

The point is that Letterman's comment is a shot across the bow. He is saying, "Governor Palin, if you so much as poke your nose outside the great State of Alaska, we will insult and smear and humiliate and hound you and your family and your community and anybody who thinks or even looks like you until you feel so degraded and miserable that you run back home with your tail between your legs and never, ever come back. We hate you, we fear you, we loathe you, and we will stop at nothing to destroy you."

That's the news.

Not Their Cup of Tea

Those who read a reasonably diverse range of blogs probably have read that there have been "Tea Parties" (the name related to the Boston Tea Party of 1773) protesting government spending (i.e. the stimulus) and likely higher taxes in the future.

I mentioned the Tea Parties to my wife a couple of weeks back, and she looked at me blankly, wondering what the heck I was talking about. Even though she follows the news via the Main Stream Media fairly closely, she hadn't heard about them at all. She did some Google searching and was shocked to find that the Tea Parties were fairly widespread with significant attendance at some of them.

She's now wondering what else the Main Stream Media is hiding from her.