This morning I got copied on an email blast intended to encourage our graduate students to finish their theses in the next few days.
Cruel, I call it.
But still, it works for me as a goad to push Monday up the rails.
(Credit where credit is due, dept: the vid came to my correspondent via Gawker, btw)
Chat about whatever, with bonus points for any discussion of impossible tasks to be done by Friday. Mine? Finish version 4 (a conservative estimate) of my damn book proposal.
…that has such people in’t
(via)
A 3D printable plastic handgun is now (more or less) available.
As the linked article suggests, there is a nasty possibility of having the thing blow up in your hand if you use too-powerful ammunition…but still.
Talking Points Memo is also on the story, with a gussied up video that adds swelling music and shots of WW II bombers to the mix. They grabbed this quote (warning – do not read while eating lunch):
“I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people,” Wilson said, according to Fox News. “That’s what it is — it’s a gun. But I don’t think that’s a reason to not put it out there. I think that liberty in the end is a better interest.”
Presented without further comment, this story, also now up on TPM.
And this one.
And…hell, wait half an hour and there will be another tragedy to report. (At somewhere north of 50 gun suicides per day, that’s a reasonably non-hyperbolic time period — to say nothing of gun violence imposed on others.)
The nuts, Civil War revanchists, and simple thugs who drive gun policy in this country are a danger to themselves and everyone else. Demographics are getting them too...but not nearly fast enough.
I know John posted on this already, but I was struck again this afternoon by the actual meaning implied by incoming NRA president James Porter’s assertion that Barack Obama is a “fake president.”
Let’s review. In 2008 Senator Barack Obama and his running mate Senator Joseph Biden received 69,498,516 votes, accounting for 52.93% of the total ballots cast. Their principle opponents, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin (yes, that happened) garnered ten million fewer votes, for a 45.65% of the total. Obama and Biden took electoral college victories in 28 states, the District of Columbia, and in Nebraska’s second congressional district, to capture a total of 365 electoral votes out of 538 available.
In 2012, lest anyone has forgotten, Obama/Biden again won an absolute majority of votes cast — 65,910,437, or 51.1% to Romney/Ryan’s 60,932,795, accounting for 47.2% of the total. The President took 26 states and the District to the Republican ticket’s 24 states, and the victors captured a commanding 332 electoral votes to the losers 206.
In other words, Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States, earned and retained his office by every legal measure — handily at that. There’s a strong case that George W. Bush, “43″ was, if not a fake, an illegitimate claimant to that office, losing as he did the popular vote in 2000 while gaining his electoral college victory by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court that one at least of those in the majority now regards as an error.
But Obama? If you accept the idea of small “d” democracy, if you believe that the casting of ballots amounts to an expression of public will, then Obama is as real as it gets.
Which, of course, everyone in eyeshot of this post gets.
So what that’s the corollary to that positive statement?
Easy: anyone who denies the reality of Obama’s right to his office is telling the majority of the American electorate that their votes are fakes too. That public decisions don’t count.
That — given that we’re talking NRA here — the armed rump of the American right, among whom are over-represented amongst those who want to refight the Civil War, are the arbiters of who gets to hold power, and damned be to the rest of us.
I don’t know what you all call an armed minority spreading such stuff, but to me? Well, it ain’t treason until someone actually takes up arms and attempts to enforce that view…but it sure is dancing near that line.
I’m not simply name calling here: this is dangerous talk. There is a responsibility that lands on the elected leadership of the right to reject such talk, to dismiss it, to banish it from public discourse, because the failure to do so expands what Obama wonkishly termed the permission sphere for anti-democratic behavior — along with increasing the potential for political violence itself.
It may be all fun and games for a Republican party that gets to say “hell, we aren’t shooting anyone, so denying voting rights is OK, right?” But if the elected leadership — looking at you Boehner, McConnell, not to mention the 2016ers — fails to shut this kind of talk down, they will be complicit in the results.
Image: Toyohara Kunichika, Sen Taiheiki gigokuden, 1890. (Description, via Wikimedia Commons: Taira Masakado (901-940), an evil usurper of the throne, charges into battle surrounded by look-alike decoys.)
Today’s BoBo column is useful, very useful indeed.
It’s one of his nominally apolitical efforts, and as such, parsing its intellectual flaws and frauds yields a helpful guide to the ways Brooks puts his thumb on the scale of everything he writes. A column like this one helps expose his genius for bullshit without the confusing (to some) aura of partisan argument.
Brooks here presents what seems to be a humble (sic) precis of responses he received to questions posed in an earlier column in an exercise of what he termed “crowd sourced sociology.”
That Brooks might not be the best suited to launch such an effort could be seen in the first of those queries:
A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?
Someone with some methodological insight might see the problem in the way that question is phrased…and I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
But it’s really today’s column that captures BoBo’s skill of finding always and only the conclusion he seeks in any alleged analysis of the alleged data. His key trick: there’s always a turn, a sudden shift in the unstated assumptions of the piece that allows Brooks to assert a claim unsupported by the actual body of information he possesses. Let’s see that in action here, from this beginning
I’ve read through a mountain of responses, and my first reaction is awe at the diversity of the human experience. I went looking for patterns in this survey…
But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there.
Fair enough.
But wait! It’s BoBo, after all. Who needs an understanding of the data when there’s an anecdote that dovetails with his preconceptions:
One of the calmest letters came from Carol Collier, who works at Covenant College.
One of the drums BoBo has been banging lately is the (in his view) value of acceptance of a body of received belief. He’s been writing about modern Jewish orthodoxy, but he’s asserted more than once the importance of revealed religion as a source of stable selves. So it’s no surprise what kind of reader would win his accolade:
She wrote: “As a believer in Jesus Christ, I see myself as redeemed, forgiven and covered in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. I believe that this is how God sees me, all the time and without exception. I believe that his smile and delight in me is unwavering. This view of myself is quite simple yet with profound implications. It allows me to accept criticism without self-condemnation and to accept affirmations without exalting myself. This is the ideal view of myself that I am always working at. It is a struggle, but a good one.”
Just to be clear, my issue isn’t with Ms. Collier; she believes what she believes and she feels what she feels, and, as T. J. Luhrman has been writing a lot lately, that experience is itself both a subjective reality and a data point.
No, what gets my goat is the all-too-predictable-use Brooks makes of Collier’s account:
I’ll try to harvest more social trends later.
Say what!? (BTW — there is no ellipsis there. That sentence follows directly from the quote.)
Let’s review. At the top of his column Brooks tells us that “it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends.” Now, we learn that not only has he shown us (at least) one trend, there will be more to come! Impressive.
So what is this trend? Bobo reveals his discovery:
But, in the meantime, I’m struck by how hard it is to have the right stable mix of self-confidence and self-criticism without some external moral framework or publicly defined life calling.
D’0h. Of course — BoBo’s Kulturkampf never rests. We need to behave properly, as our faith teaches us, as the manners of our mythical ancestors would have us, as the non-sexually-abusing members of Brooklyn Orthodox communities may be claimed to act.
A confession, here. Remember how I said above that this was an apolitical column. There is actually no such thing in Brooks’ repertory. It’s all political, which is why he creates his cultural and sociological fictions. This column is a foundational one, a way to slip in a claim of reality — that enjoying a good life, possessing the crucial human skills of balance, depend on specific allegiances that Brooks can then assert must inform whatever specific political claim he wants to make.
Another thing: Brooks offers in this pair of columns — the questionnaire and now this “results” piece — a veneer of science-yness, the trappings of surveys and analysis that (he suggests) give his interpretations the disinterested authority of a mere reporter of fact. What you actually see here, of course, is that Brooks either has no clue what goes into the construction of an observation or experiment a scientist would recognize as meaningful — or he does, but doesn’t care. Let’s go to his conclusion to see that dishonesty in full flower:
If it’s just self-appraisal — one piece of your unstable self judging another unstable piece — it’s subjectivity all the way down.
So. To review again. BoBo says there are no trends or patterns he can see in his responses. He then quotes a single reply and asserts that it captures one fact — presumably that of the connection of religious commitment to the possession of certain qualities of personality. And then he states, with no reference to any of his data, (ex cathedra, as it were) that another way of knowing one’s self is invalid.
The scientific follies are so many, and so many of them are obvious, it’s exhausting to try and list them all. Just to suggest one — no where does BoBo suggest that he might have to deal with a selection bias in the population of his readers who choose to reply to him. Given that he’s written often about the satisfactions of an externally constrained religious life, that might be a problem — but it is not one that seems to trouble him.
But the fact that his “study” is worthless as actual knowledge is both obvious and besides the point, his point. Look one more time at that last sentence. Notice the double sleight of hand there?
It’s not just the untethered nature of the assertion — our David telling us that self appraisal is suspect — but this too: it’s an answer to a question no one asked.* He began by wondering how men and women compare for self-confidence; now he’s shifted to an assertion about the sources of his respondents self-judgment. Not the same question at all. (There’s the added problem of the subjectivity of religious experience as well, but to ask BoBo to do the very hard work of thinking about about that is like asking a donkey to keep watch for angels. It’s been reported to happen, but very, very rarely.) All of his column is unconnected to this final point; it’s there just for atmosphere, to give this unsupported, culturally and politically freighted claim the aura of reality. It’s pure propaganda. This is David Brooks.
Enough. I’ve wasted another perfectly good hour foaming at Brooks many sins. Here’s the shorter: he always plays a rigged game. The only reason to read him is to play “spot the bullshit.”
To add: what bugs me from my particular bailiwick as a science writer is that he has so little knowledge of, or perhaps respect for, what actually goes into the very hard work of deriving actual understanding from the exceptional complexity of material reality — including the extraordinary tangle of human experience. There are lots of way science is losing some of its cultural capital right now, some self-inflicted. But nonsense like this sure doesn’t help.
Image: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portraits of Henry the Pious, Duke of Saxony and his wife Katharina von Mecklenburg, 1514.
Outsourced entirely to Charles P. Pierce:
If your “way of life” involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, “learning to use and respect a gun” means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it’s sitting in the corner of the parlor like it’s a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way “normal” to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.
Image: Portrait of a girl with gun and hound, after the style of Joshua Reynolds, 18th or 19th century
I suppose it’s not really a surprise that someone who sprays as much verbiage as Mr. Newt Gingrich must on occasion come up with something which which I can agree:
It would be a major mistake to put American troops in Syria.
No one in the region wants us invading yet another country.
None of our allies want our strength diverted from Iran.
There is no practical mission American forces could accomplish without a very large commitment.
Yup, that’s about right.
But still, I’m not going to give Gingrich any props for this one moment of clarity. The problem with Newt is not that he is incapable of clear thought at times, but that he chooses to relinquish that capacity when it’s convenient.
Which is to say that I’m with Tom Kludt, the author of the bit at TPM from which the quotes above are taken, when he suggests that the odds of Gingrich saying something more or less sane sensitively depend on whether or not he’s running for something at the time:
At a Republican presidential debate last year in Arizona, the former House speaker mocked President Barack Obama for not doing more in Syria.
“This is an administration which, as long as you’re America’s enemy, you’re safe,” Gingrich said. “You know, the only people you’ve got to worry about is if you’re an American ally.”
And thus the real problem. It doesn’t actually matter much what Gingrich says when no one (outside of the credulous Village) is listening. We have a deep problem in our politics that derives directly from the fact that the leaders of that feral beast the Republican party has become give tacit and sometimes overt permission to the crazies that form the hardest core of their supporters. Ted Cruz and the Pauls, Bachmann, Gohmert, and all the rest talk apocalypse. The allegedly “responsible” leadership — Gingrich himself in this case, domesticates the truly wild-eyed, the folks who accuse Obama of high crimes and misdemeanorsor. Or recall Romney, dog whistling during the campaign last year:
“Sometimes I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.” This line was straight out of the “Alien in the White House” playbook, a riff that reinforced the worst impulses of some in the audience, as one woman at a Romney rally named Katheryn Sarka eagerly reaffirmed when I asked her what she thought of the line: “Obama doesn’t understand America. He follows George Soros. Obama is against our Constitution and our democracy.”
After his big Nevada win, this line of Mitt’s scripted victory speech stood out: “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.”
As discussed yesterday, we live in a country where 3 out of ten Americans, and 44% of the GOP expect armed rebellion in the next few years. This is not a view compatible with democratic process. The destruction of the American polity is not a both-sides-do-it phenomenon. It is a hail mary act of intimidation, and perhaps outright violence to come, by a failed political party, one whose hopes of gaining legitimate power shrink with every passing year of demographic change.
Hmmm. A reckless, failing political movement threatening violence unless its minority hold on power persists. When before now have we seen that in American history?
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Clown — Claude Renoir, 1909
I don’t even know how to begin with this.
Republican members of the House of Representatives have decided that knowledge of what actually is happening in US society and its economy is just too….
I don’t know what…
Inconvenient?…Unfortunate?…Too…useful?…Too important to the actual act of governing?
That last is the one, I think. Representative Jeff Duncan, out to make sure that his great state of South Carolina doesn’t lose the lunacy title to its sibling to the north, has introduced a bill that would bar the US Census [PDF] from conducting any surveys or censuses except for the constitutionally-mandated decennial one.
What would that mean? Over to this report from the Huffington Post:
Such a step that would end the government’s ability to provide reliable estimates of the employment rate. Indeed, the government would not be able to produce any of the major economic indices that move markets every month, said multiple statistics experts, who were aghast at the proposal….
“It’s hard to take this seriously because they’re really saying also they don’t want GDP. They want no facts about what’s going on in the U.S. economy,” said [Maurine] Haver, [founder of business research firm Haver Analytics and a past president of the National Association for Business Economics]. “It’s so fundamental to a free society that we have this kind of information, I can’t fathom where they’re coming from. I really can’t.”
“It’s so unimaginable. It would be like saying we don’t need policemen anymore, we don’t need firemen anymore,” said [Ken] Prewitt, [the former director of the U.S. Census who is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University]. “To say suddenly we don’t need statistical information about the American economy, or American society, or American demography, or American trade, or whatever — it’s an Alice in Wonderland moment.”
I get Duncan’s reasoning, by the way. It’s a simple syllogism. If the data show that tax cuts, or austerity, or universal gun ownership don’t actually solve all economic and social ills, then, who needs data?
Ladies and gentlemen, your modern Republican party.
Oh, and with a nod to Mr. David Brooks and his paean to disinterested opining: this is engaged writing. I got a horse in the race. I think the Republican party in its present form constitutes a clear and present danger to the Republic. I believe it needs to go the way of the Whigs, so that we can go about the business of constructing an actual second party to engage the necessary debate our politics requires.
It is in the context of that belief that I certainly pay attention to stories like this one. This is the anecdata that, as it accumulates, tells you the problem is real; the Republican party is increasingly simply a freak show, divorced from any conception of governance. But it ain’t my fault — and it is no indictment against this or any other comment like ti that the Republican party continues to advance my argument.
Another thing: I’d vastly prefer it didn’t. But the problem isn’t that I don’t — because I can’t — say that the Democrats are just as bad on, say, anti-empiricism, for example, or that the issue of paying attention to what happens in the world is kind of important in modern political and social life. Rather, it is that in this reality there are consequences when a failed party retains its access to power — and hell, may very well expand its reach.
IOW, pace BoBo, I believe it is my patriotic duty to point in horror at the crater that is all that remains of the Party of Lincoln.
Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Census at Bethlehem, 1566.
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