Over There, I think I pretty much said all there is to say about Niall of the Nine Wankages, but since the only purpose of this blog is malice aforethought* there is no reason not to chew through the whole godawful slice of fried dung with a view towards pointing out that Ferguson is an absolute tit.
Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes. Asked to
comment on Keynes’ famous observation “In the long run we are all dead,”
I suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because
he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay.
This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have
children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten
that Keynes’ wife Lydia miscarried.
What an asshole.
Ferguson didn't slur "people who do not have children," he slurred homosexuals, because he does that shit.
Because this is trebly stupid. Gay people as it happens can raise children! No kidding!
As for the rest, "I am only hatefully glib in my public appearances, here are the books where I am thoughtful, and by the way Sullivan" is a load of crap.
--
*If I were a Drag Queen or Roller Derby Bruiser Chick my name would be "Alice Aforethought."**
**Actual Drag Queens or Roller Derby Bruiser Chicks are welcome to steal this, though a Whiskey Fire plug would be welcome, as well as amusingly baffling to your immediate audience.
A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for
contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their
opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each
other. That’s dangerous. Civil society depends on a minimum
threshold of tolerance and mutual respect. Fall too far below
it, and the seething paralysis* you see in Washington could soon
be the least of your concerns. This is America’s biggest
political problem -- and Krugman’s not part of the solution.
People not being nice to each other is not America's "biggest political problem"; America's "biggest political problem" would be intractable high unemployment.
If the "biggest political problem" we faced today were an excess of shrillness, well, the obvious Way Forward is for the New York Times to fire Krugman. Then in a month everyone gets a job!
This is a colossally stupid commonplace:
Meanwhile, for the side that thinks it has the better
arguments, naked contempt for dissenters is plain bad tactics.
That isn’t how you change people’s minds. Better to fire up the
base with a little demagoguery (such as calling conservatives
racist, as Krugman is wont to do) than reach out to the
uncommitted? I don’t think so. The enthusiasm you inspire on
your side is canceled out by an equal and opposite reaction on
the other. Krugman stirs up the right in much the same way that
Rush Limbaugh, for instance, inflames the left. Granted, if
you’re going to have a spokesman, better a Nobel laureate than a
talk-radio clown. The fact remains that Krugman’s weary disdain
for roughly half the country is self-defeating.
Please. Krugman is not talking on behalf of what Crook calls "half the country." Neither is Limbaugh.
The fight here is over who controls Elite Discourse.
The KILL THE DEFICIT nonsense was hardly a consensus arrived at after a period of Learned Colloquy after the 2008 collapse.
Calling for Polite Debate is easy and lazy; controlling the terms of Polite Debate is where the fighting happens.
That Paul Krugman has even caused minute fractures in the Elite Consensus is remarkable.
To the extent that "civility" protects a highly politicized status quo, it is censorship, and ought be pissed on, as there is anyhow nothing else you can do with it.
Because CENSORSHIP = UNEMPLOYMENT BEING CONSIDERED LESS IMPORTANT THAN THE DEFECIT AMONG ELITE YAPPERS.
A state of affairs which HAS OBVIOUS POLICY CONSEQUENCES.
(Good Lord... did I use... all caps?
AIEEEEE!
Well, fuck me then.)
* Can "paralysis," in point of fact, "seethe"? Fuck no!
Academy Award winning actor Jeremy Irons said Wednesday
that while he doesn't have much of a strong opinion either way on
same-sex marriage, he believes it poses interesting questions, including
whether allowing same-sex marriage would open the door for
interfamilial relationships.
"Could a father not marry his son?" Irons asked HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps.
Irons argued that "it's not incest between men" because "incest is
there to protect us from inbreeding, but men don't breed," and wondered
whether same-sex marriage might allow fathers to pass on their estates
to their sons without being taxed.
Yeah, that's a good point. Rich people really are that Poe-Faulkner gothic-gross about taxes.
A young fogey at the American Spectatordeplores the popularity of Rock Memoirs -- i.e., autobiographies and ghost-autobiographies of Rock Stars -- because Sammy Hagar's popular reminiscences are self-serving and full of glaring omissions. Therefore, ergo, and to wit:
To say that rock itself, considered in light of the Western
classical tradition, is a fundamentally unsophisticated musical
form is like saying that Boucher’s portrait of Marie-Louise
O’Murphy is slightly better than a stick figure drawing of a naked
woman. A course in rock theory will (one hopes anyway) never be
offered at Juilliard, not because conservatories are bastions of
cultural atavism but because it would be over after a week of
lectures.
Gosh.
These are two very precious sentences, to be tenderly cherished forever: they are enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light, and also too horseshit.
Wherever do they incubate these specimens?
Our young fogey, whose name I have linked to up there but cannot be arsed to remember, is probably right that lots of Rock Memoirs follow a similar Organizational Pattern, but my sweet lord, does this tit not acknowledge the Structural Censorship that makes him speak lamentable gibberish such as the foregoing, or else this:
“All happy families,” Tolstoy
wrote in 1873, “resemble one another,” an observation with which
many have since disagreed.
Tolstoy said that -- in 1873? How far-ranging your intellect!
And mas:
the above outline might well serve as the RM
equivalent of Joseph Campbell’s influental work of comparative
mythology, Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Or this:
Richards’ antinomianism is not of a
fundamentally different order from that of, say, Criss or Tyler
Yeah, probably not.
And let's spelunk:
For one thing, when
one takes a long view of the matter, it becomes difficult to judge
rock talent in any meaningful way. Between the 4/4 tempo and
snare-driven beat (not rhythm) fleshed out by simple
instrumentation and throwaway lyrics (“Yeah, she’s straight / Just
won’t wait”) of the “first” rock song, “Rocket 88,” and the abrupt
time signature shifts, Mellotron noodling, and pseudo-mysticism
(“Nothing is real”) of the “best” rock song, “Strawberry Fields
Forever,” there is far less musical progress on display than
between two successive symphonies by a minor 19th-century composer.
So much for the Beatles, then. "The White Album? Piffle!"
This is great:
I’m not trying to be a snob.
No, nobody thought you were making any effort in this regard.
An honest list of the records
sitting on my shelf right now would include dozens of rock albums,
including more than a handful of items by some of the idols whose
memoirs I’ve just panned. But I put on albums like Some
Girls on what I think are suitable occasions: while playing
poker or peeling garlic cloves or polishing glasses.
How charming you are!
When I sit
down to listen—really listen, while doing nothing apart from maybe
smoking or drinking a cup of coffee—it’s Purcell or Stravinsky I
want to hear.
That is very impressive.
Here are some other terrific sentences.
TIBOR FISCHER ONCE WROTE that Martin Amis’
Yellow Dog “isn’t bad as in not very good or
slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was
reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look
over my shoulder.”
I have also come to accept that it’s better for
me not to think about what I might have read instead: more than
half the published fictional output of Henry James, say, or the
first three volumes of the Pléiade Voltaire.
Townshend, who is probably the only RM author who can
claim to have once been an acquisitions editor for the venerable
London publishing house Faber and Faber (a position held by T.S.
Eliot)
Yes, you aced sophomore year. Could you now... not talk anymore?
We got a phone call from the Middle School today; during a Reading Lab, apparently, it was discovered that the 13-Year-Old was reading the third installment of the Game of Thrones novels. This we were told is a problem because these books contain "scenes of incest and rape" -- something I knew, as it happens, because I've read them. Anyhow he is not allowed to read these books in school.
I'm more amused by this than anything else; a very brief, polite note will be returned informing the school that he has parental dispensation to read what he will, as long as he isn't, I don't know, reading it aloud or acting it out during quiet study time.
And that, I fully expect, will be that.
I have no grudge against the teacher. It's hard to be a teacher! I would have preferred that instead of being told "he can't read this" we were asked "can he read this?" But in the Grand Scheme of the Universe, worse injustices have been perpetrated. There is no need here for Klingon Opera. We are polite, cultivated human beings, after all.
We are not... libertarians.
And besides, he was already a bookish lad, but now, the True Love of Books?
He has it.
MAS. Meant to say this. The part I like the best is how this is the third book in a very long series we're talking about; any hypothetical damage has long been done.
As an Interesting Historical Nugget, the Irish Censorship Board back in the day did not ban all of Remembrance of Things Past -- they only banned the last of the seven volumes. This to me always raised the grim but hilarious spectre of the poor bastard in remotest Leitrim dying frustrated and screaming, "how does this Proust shite ever fecking end!"
Psst!
Somebody tell Reince Priebus about the blogosphere. Evidently, neither
he nor anyone else at the RNC understands the new information order the
internet has wrought.
Do go on....
William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, a site which regularly breaks new ground in coverage of politics (see for example LI's coverage of Elizabeth Warren's phony claims of Cherokee ancestry when it gave her a leg up in academia) discovered that the 100 page exercise in navel-gazing just published by the RNC does not once even mention blogs.
For the RNC to produce a 100-page report and not have a single mention
of the need to interact with and support the conservative blogosphere
tells me that the RNC simply has rearranged the deck chairs on the HMS
Consultant.
Right! The RNC is totally ridiculous for not paying attention to the sort of Valuable Citizen Journalism produced by savvy grassroots geniuses like William Jacobson, whose shocking exposées of Real Issues Real Voters Care About, like that Warren-Cherokee thing, would have totally changed the outcome of the last Massachussetts US Senate election if only Scott Brown had ever gotten smart and used that shit...
!
... I will only very rarely accuse the RNC of "acknowledging that things that really happened last year actually happened," but in this very special case, they get the booby prize.
Though it is very hard to argue that the reason Obama convincingly won in 2012 is completely and utterly explained by the picture Col. Mustard provides us with, a picture of a meeting with an aide to Joe Biden with some leftist internet bloggers, which was taken in February 2010. Duncan flashed some nip, and that was it for the chick vote, hubba hubba.
The Jacobson piece is in its way brilliant, though. In any pool hall they'll tell you -- even if you ever bother to try, you can't wise up a sucker. Can't be done.
You'll never get Jacobson, or Stacy McCain, or Pasty, or any suchlike buzzards, to ever admit they were just outhustled.
And shit, would you, if you got outsmarted by, say, Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson?
The a lot of reasons why there's not much talk in Serious Circles anymore about the hideous disaster that was, and is, the Iraqi Adventure. But one such reason that deserves attention is that the only way Serious People ever discuss any fucking thing ever nowadays is in terms of bullshit competitions of at most a week's duration -- and where yesterday is garbage.
Here look. Duncan is totally right that Richard Cohen is very good at what he does, even when you can look back and want to throw up upon contemplating what he did.
But the key here is not simply what Cohen did or said; sure he was a dick. But he was hardly alone in this madness. The point is to identify the reasons why this madness took hold so powerfully among the class to which Cohen belonged.
And you can't forget that while to the vast majority of the inhabitants of this planet the clever turns of phrase of people like Cohen are utterly meaningless, in the intimate world of the Village Cohen likely dined out for years on "fools and Frenchmen."
These people compete very intensely against each other. The New York Times and WaPo opinion pages are not meant to inform anyone of anything. They are lists in which morons don elaborate heraldry to engage in fancypants shitheaded jousts.
In such competitions the prizes are awarded, say, weekly. Being proved right ten years later? Who the fuck cares about ten years later?
I agree with everything Scott says here. I remember the dsquared post referenced vividly; I remember reading the original and thinking "I knew that from Irish history, and also from trying to get contractors to give honest quotes on the roof, that the Iraq war was stupid."
The insight here is not that "fibbers lies are useless," but that "people who want to 'win the week' need to shut the fuck up about policy."
They won't. But what's poignant is that these contests aren't even over money.
They are over the weird Rules of Who Rules Pundit Mountain.
A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda
for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign
against a pro-democracy figure there.
The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing
under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning
May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit,
who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a
series of conservative writers.
Could this possibly be the very same Joshua Trevino whom we here at Whiskey Fire, and elsewhere, have long known as the Living Embodiment of Online Integrity? Why yes!
Ahh... those were indeed merry times. I'd forgotten the fun we had at that last link. Some of it was of course juvenile -- though I'm not so mature yet as not to laff at the "Tacitus" link on the "Blogintegrity" blogroll, and I pray I never am.
But this is not about nostalgia for bygone hi-jinks. Something I said back then, is something I'll say now:
This gets to precisely my issue with Tac. Full as he is of himself and
full as his rhetoric is of high-minded platitudes, what he really wants
to do is to is, well, what he wants to do. He sees a public statement of
principles as a definition of a kind of a boundary: "aha, this tells me
how far I can go, and hence anything I do up until that point is fair
play!" Now, me, I see a statement of principles as an aspiration and a
guide for behavior, and not as grounds for endless, twisty, knotty
ethical negotiation and compromise. The weasel's twist, the weasel's
tooth -- sign a pact with Tac, that's what you get.
You have to be pretty fucking twisty to get paid nearly $400K from the fucking government of fucking Malaysia.
I'm sorry; it appears that, on the Internet, I have quite personally been given hectoring, self-righteous shit by someone who has accepted several hundred thousand dollars to make the despotic government of Malaysia seem not so bad in the United States.
Incidentally -- Josh?
One investor has complied a list of reasons why Malaysia is an attractive travel and investment destination. He prefers a hands-on approach, and came up with this list while on a personal walking tour of Malaysia --
Slurp slurp. What the fuck is wrong with you?
And what precisely do you imagine has ever disappeared from the Web?
Oh, I got a lotta these:
Randomly (MAS)
Malaysian royalty has already stepped in to ensure that MPs retain a proper decorum while the parliament is in session...
(The things some people think they've flushed... omigod.)
Here's a nifty little parable about the goofball, yet linchpin, anxieties that animate Movement Conservatism.
Apparently during the SOTU Jonah Goldberg got a bit snotty on the Twitter machine regarding Jill Biden being referred to as "Dr," when she is not a medical doctor and has professionally worked at the (gasp) community college level. Oh here, let Jonah explain what he was "thinking."
Last night on Twitter I commented that I think that the rote insistence
that Jill Biden be referred to “Doctor Jill Biden” is kind of silly
(that’s how President Obama referred to her). This elicited a remarkable
amount of anger. I then made things worse by explaining that Jill Biden
isn’t a “real” doctor. She holds a doctorate in education. That invited
even more bile.
Gosh. I wonder why.
Do, go on.
I find it all so odd. For starters, I never claimed she wasn’t entitled
to the honorific. If anything, it’s out of respect that I think people
should drop the habit. Washington is teeming with people with Ph.D.s
(never mind law degrees!). Among my friends alone, I can count at least a
dozen people who are technically entitled to be called “Doctor.” But if
I caught, say, Shannen Coffin insisting that people call him “Doctor
Coffin” (a great name for an evil scientist by the way), I would mock
him mercilessly.
In my experience inside the Beltway, insisting on being called “Doctor”
when not being addressed by students is a sign of vanity or some other
insecurity (I’m of course talking about non-medical doctors). And people
who insist on calling other people “Doctor” do so for similar reasons —
out of an over-compensating need to show respect.
Hang on to that phrase "in my experience inside the Beltway" a bit. But let's fast-forward to this emanation from Mona Charen. It is delicious.
Mark, Jonah,
your discussion of the honorific “doctor” reminds me of my education on
the subject. When I got to college, I noticed that even the full
professors — 100 percent of whom had doctorates — styled themselves “Mr.
Swensen” or “Ms. Elliott” on their office doors and on their handouts. I
asked a teaching assistant about it. “The only people who insist upon
the title ‘Dr’ in higher education,” he said, “teach at community
colleges.”
And then the teaching assistant stepped on the ball.
Right.
There are two reasons why community college professors are more likely to want the Dr.
First, the personal: as in the case of Jill Biden, the "honorific" means a hell of a lot to the members of families who come up from the working classes.
My own mom was NYC working class Irish; she hard-scrabbled herself two advanced degrees, an MA in Spanish from Middlebury and, much later, an MSW from Fordham. (The first she partly financed by working at the White Castle which is still there at Bell and Northern in Bayside.)
She was pretty goddamn proud of those degrees. As well she should have been. A working class woman in the mid to late 20th century doing that...? Moving on up!
When I got my own PhD fom the University of Miami -- English literature, Irish Studies focus -- she was proud to bursting.
It was at the time a bit awkward, since I can be a bit of a clod about certain things, and also I am not, er, a person who takes formalities of any sort seriously. But my mom spent almost a grand of her own money on my regalia -- and she was there when I got hooded, and it was one of the chief goddamn moments of her life.
If you get a PhD and can afford to be blase about it, you are extremely privileged, and it would behoove you to not be an asshole about anything regarding the usage of the title, which is as it happens not an "honorific".
Which leads us to...
Why do community college professors care about being called "Dr."?
