This chart was posted on his blog purporting to lend some “perspective” to the “current rightwing freakout over shaking hands with Hugo Chavez.” You see, Obama did - on his visit to the recent Latin American summit.
Let me go ahead and say that I personally have no problem with Obama shaking hands with Mr. Chavez. Let me go ahead and say that I agree that the general reaction in right-wing columns to this is indeed a “freakout.” And let me further go ahead and agree that there’s some truth to what Mr. Yglesias (apparently) takes this graph to show: that the right-wing “freakout” over shaking hands with Chavez is a predictable sophomoric ploy for attention given just how unpopular the Republican Party currently is.
None of that, however, excuses the commentariat from doing their statistics homework. So let’s see if we can spot what’s wrong here.
Well, first, obviously, the numbers for “Venezuela” have been tampered with. Everything other comparison looks like it plausibly adds up to 100% (note: it would be OK if it added up to less since presumably not everyone polled will have an opinion one way or the other) - but Venezuela is pushing 110%. Hmmm… So some people find Venezuela both favorable and unfavorable all at the same time?
Second, where are the Democrats on this? The only way to make sense of Republican popularity ratings, given the way our system operates, is to compare them with the popularity ratings of their biggest competitors, and yet…
Third, is it really OK to compare popularity ratings of nations with those of domestic political parties? Nation states don’t stand for election here, after all - nor are people’s opinions of nation states formed entirely on the basis of the country in question’s politics. This isn’t even comparing apples and oranges - it’s more like apples and sofas.
Fourth, since when does the popularity of Venezuela have anything to do with the appropriateness of shaking hands with its leader? I think Venezuelan women are as hot as the next guy does, so all told I have a pretty favorable opinion of the place. That doesn’t stop me thinking their government - the president in particular - is silly.
Fifth, isn’t it even a little bit fishy that there’s no “no opinion” bar on this graph? I don’t know how much you can really conclude from this kind of forced choice - especially if you’re trying to detect animus. I was, for example, all ready to vote for McCain in the last election despite strongly disapproving of him. The issue was that I didn’t approve of the Libertarian Candidate either, I was voting in a swing state, and I had a visceral allergic reaction to the Democratic candidate, whom I continue to find completely unacceptable. It’s simply wrong to assume that a party has to win popularity contests in a two-party system. All it really has to do is cough up something better than the opposition.
Since point five is closely related to point two, my composition algorithm tells me to stop. The conclusion register contains the information that Matt Yglesias could vastly improve his blog by taking an introductory course in Experimental Methods.
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I came across this photoessay on East Germany. According to the captions, they were taken by Karlheinz Jardner - a West German photographer - during a trip through the DDR in the spring of 1990. This technically places it before official reunification (3 October 1990), but only barely. The border was officially open as of 9 November the year before, Honnecker had been deposed, discussion of monetary union was already mostly finalized, free elections had been held in March replacing Egon Krenz and the SED government with a new Western-cooperative coalition government, etc. etc. By whatever they mean by “Spring 1990,” East Germany was rapidly disappearing - at least as a political entity. So it’s kind of startling how normal most of these pictures look. There are shots of nice-looking houses, comfortable restaurants, well-maintained landscapes, and so on. Generally speaking, what you would expect the west to look like in 1990 more or less, minus the advertisements.
I understand that East Germany was considerably better off than the rest of Eastern Europe (though facing a potentially insurmountable foreign debt crisis by 1987, it must be added, so it’s somewhat uncertain how long this would have lasted), but my memories of East Berlin ca 1994 were that it was a noticeably different place from the western half - even four years after reunification. There were construction projects everywhere, but in general the city was grey and rundown - a quiet and depressing place. And in 1996 I had a chance to travel by train through the East - and there again, the differences in the countryside were even more noticeable. It was certainly emptier than the west German countryside, and while there were old buildings here and there in comparatively good repair, the town centers were dominated by drab government-built monstrosities - train stations and town halls and apartment blocks and such.
In that spirit, there are some pictures here that, forgive me, seem a bit suspicious. For example, I have two problems with this one:
Yes, the scene is appropriately drab, but the green house just barely visible in the background seems in unusually good shape. Perhaps it’s just been restored? More interesting is the “PDS” graffiti on the wall. That’s the acronym for the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democractic Socialism) - the reformed version of the old SED that stood in elections in the united Germany as recently as 2 years ago (they’ve since renamed themselves simply “The Left” after merging with another western left extremist party). If this is April or May 1990, did the PDS exist? I guess it must have - but it would have to have been a very new thing. According to the German Wikipedia entry on the SED, the party officially renamed itself to SED-PDS in December of 1989, and dropped the SED bit altogether in February of 1990. So there you go. It still seems very West German for some schmuck to spraypaint PDS on the side of a building - in red, no less. I guess this was for the recent election?
“Skins verpisst euch” - anti-Nazi graffiti - seems kind of unlikely for 1990. Certainly it wouldn’t be long after that the far right started gaining traction - especially in Berlin - but as early as 1990? And in Eisenach?
A shop showing all the horrible East German “fashion” on display. Note the sticker in the corner - a political sticker from the recent election probably nowhere to be found in Germany anymore urging people NOT to vote SED-PDS.
None of this, of course, is to cast doubt on the authenticity of these photos - just mostly to express surprise at how close the two countries already were by 1990 in retrospect. There has been a lot of griping in Germany about how difficult the transition supposedly was, but all things considered it was comparatively easy considering how it might have been without the maintenence of close ties, and the consequent relatively openness of the East.
The US has something of an analogous situation with Cuba. Well - go to Miami and tell me if you don’t agree. We in Indiana might not feel much comraderie, but lots of people living in Florida have relatives in Cuba, regularly visit Cuba, etc. - and certainly before the Castro Revolution ties between the US and Cuba were quite strong. Cuba isn’t the long-lost half of our nation or anything - at 11million people it’s about 4% the size of the US, and US occupation only lasted for about 3 years a century ago - but the histories are intertwined, and people in the past could have been forgiven for thinking that Cuba might someday be one of the United States. The Castro Regime can’t last; it’s inevitable that new ties will be forged sometime in the near future. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about dragging Cuba into modernity the way that West Germany did with the East in 1990. Still - all said, it’s better for everyone if economic development in Cuba takes off sooner rather than later. President Obama seems to be taking the right steps. Will it continue?
For a good example of Brad DeLong making a complete ass out of himself, see this thread on ThinkMarkets. The post takes issue with something that DeLong said on his own blog to the effect that for stimulus spending, “government spending is as good as anybody else’s.” Of course, it isn’t, as any economist will tell you, because government spending is more independent of market reality than other kinds of spending. That, in fact, is one of the major reasons one hears advanced in favor of various spending programs: that government takes care of needs that the market won’t on its own, etc.
DeLong, apparently embarassed to be caught making this kind of elementary economic mistake, has the first comment on the thread, claiming that they’ve deliberately taken him out of context, apparently to smear him. But if you read the post they’re quoting, it’s clear that they haven’t taken him out of context at all. DeLong gives a list of examples of stimulus spending and concludes that government spending is as good as anybody else’s. That’s an actual quote. IN fact, here is the passage in question:
Spending – whether by the United States government during World War II, following the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, by Silicon Valley during the late 1990’s, or by home buyers in America’s south and on its coasts in the 2000’s – boosts employment and reduces unemployment. And government spending is as good as anybody else’s.
Sorry, Brad, but that’s the context, and you DID say what they say you said.
Now, maybe he really does understand that private market spending is more efficient than government spending for employment creation. In a later comment on the same post, he argues that he does understand that, and that furthermore the authors should know that he does because he had an article in the Economist making that very point in December.
Here’s DeLong:
If that is indeed your point, that’s my point–and I was there first. As I wrote last December 18 in the *Economist*…
How very childish. The mature thing to say here is “oh, I see how you got your impression - I guess I could’ve been clearer. No worries - in fact I understand the point well, as my December 18 article in The Economist shows.” But instead he opts for “don’t read any of my blogposts EVER unless you’re familiar with the entire body of my work and are willing to do all the crossreferencing it takes to make sure I come out looking intelligent.”
Um, no. If you’re a blogger, it’s up to you to be clear about what you meant. Your careless writing is not our problem. And the point you’re making there, by the way, is not an idea that you came up with, so there’s no sense in which you were “there first.” It’s an idea that Economists have been entertaining for a very long time now - before you were born, in fact.
Any daily reader of DeLong’s blog knows what an ass he is, actually, so I guess there’s not much point to pointing it out today. But somehow those comments really rubbed me the wrong way.
It goes like this: Newt Gingrich has been married three times, and at least one (but more likely two) of those marriages failed owing to infidelity on his part. Ergo, he’s not qualified to put forth the position, beloved of certain Religious Right conservatives, that legal gay marriage might hasten the decline of traditional marriage in America. I’m tempted to say “fair enough,” but then it occurs to me that someone whose marriages have frequently failed is actually probably more qualified than most to talk about what weakens a marriage. After all, “how to succeed” and “how to avoid failure” are not necessarily the same sets of advice. A person who got it right the first time is a good guy to ask about what you should do, but he’s unlikely to know much about what the pitfalls are. And in the particular case of marriage, someone who finds it difficult to stay faithful acting on his own is precisely the kind of person who would see an important role for the community in maintaining a marriage. Indeed, if you click on and read the link that Yglesias provides, it seems pretty clear that Gingrich’s position comes from exactly that experience: his successful third marriage has a religious component that, one presumes, the other two lacked.
But this is all beside the point for me - because I don’t see any profit in combing a person’s life decisions before deciding whether to pay attention to his arguments. In a proper debate, one plays the ball and not the man. Either Gingrich’s position is logically coherent, or it isn’t, and if it is logically coherent, either it’s convicing, or it isn’t. Just that. Testimonials can be informative, but they’re never conclusive, and Yglesias does his readers a disservice by suggeting that it’s rational to discount a person’s arguments on the basis of his biography. After all, if we adopt this principle, then all conservatives have to do to counter Yglesias is dig up dirt on some prominent gay marriage proponents. I think Mr. Yglesias would probably agree with me that this wouldn’t advance the debate any.
But the worst part of it is the conclusion, in which Yglesias proposes that:
…if we want to bolster traditional marriage it seems to me that a much more reasonable measure than discrimination would be to say that you only get two divorces. After that, you can go about your business as you please, but no more spouses; you’re clearly not a person capable of making credible commitments.
OK, well, first of all I suppose I should point out that as Gingrich doesn’t fall afoul of this prohibition, considering that he’s been divorced exactly twice, one is at pains to see what the point of bringing it up is. But even if there is one, it’s a silly policy. Actual “traditional” marriage allows for no divorces, or only church-approved ones - so it’s hard to see how allowing for exactly two and no more has any basis in tradition. Second, if it’s “traditional” marriage we’re seeking to preserve, then the conservatives win the debate before it’s even started. After all, there’s nothing less “traditional” than a homosexual marriage! Yglesias could have been more precise and said that “if we’re seeking to promote marital fidelity…” But there again, that would put an undesireable burden on proponents of homosexual marriage to show that homosexuals are just as faithful on average as heterosexuals, a point they can hardly hope to win.
As always, these rationalist cheap shots on the part of gay marriage activists are meant to distract us from the real issue - which is whether the government should have the power to legally enshrine certain kinds of relationships to the exclusion of others when no rights are otherwise violated. I argue that they should not. The government should not be in the business of promoting this, that or the other kind of relationship at all. That is a matter for individuals to decide. When two (or more) individuals decide to share their life and property, then the government’s responsibility begins and ends with enforcing whatever property contract they come up with. The “sharing their lives” business is entirely in the private sphere.
I wonder if Mr. Yglesias even has any idea at all why he thinks people should only be allowed to marry three times at most? What’s the supposed benefit? Wouldn’t we prefer to allow people to get it right, even if that takes some people more attempts than others? And what’s with the magic number two? How is it that one divorce is an honest mistake, as are two, but three is somehow a sign of irredeemable irresponsibility? And is there no provision to be made for the circumstances of divorce? That is, does a no-fault divorce count the same here as a one in which there’s abuse or infidelity or long periods of absence that border on abandonment?
The overall point is that Yglesias has taken a long look at marriage and decided what, to him, are its essential characteristics. For him personally, it apparently has more to do with the duration of the contract than with the genders of the signatories. That’s fine - he’s certainly entitled, in my book, to define marriage however he likes. I’m just not sure on what basis the rest of us are to decide between his opinion of what’s essential to “marriage” and the opinions of those who think the genders of the signatories is indeed a crucial ingredient. In both cases, it seems like we’d be making laws based on some limited number of people’s arbitrary feelings about how marriage should work. That strikes me as a wholly inappropriate use of the law. If there are differing opinions about what “marriage” is, and if there’s no compelling reason why the government should decide which of these opinions is correct, then why can’t we just let people decide for themselves what it means to be married? Why is this a political decision at all?
No doubt Mr. Yglesias and his regular readers think he’s scored a “good one” on those dusty ol’ conservatives by beating them at their own game. For my part, I think it’s pathetic that anyone trying to argue against discrimination is playing this game at all - for it all comes down to this: what gives Mr. Yglesias any more right to enforce his preferences of how people should organize their lives than conservatives have? Letting Mr. Yglesias decide who can marry rather than Mr. Gingrich is a false choice. In a free society, Mr. Yglesias can decide for himself whom to marry and how often, and Mr. Gingrich can decide for himself whom to marry and how often, and I personally want marriage advice from neither of them, certainly not if I haven’t asked for it!
One thing that I dislike intensely about Coen Brothers’ movies is the ethnic pornography angle. Every goram one has to take place in some Location with a Distinctive Culture, and half the goram movie has to be “about” the Place Itself. This is such an obvious sophomoric sop to critics that I get frustrated more people don’t see through it. It’s like watching one of those people who compulsively recycles dig through the trash to pick out the glass bottle you just threw out. They know damn well that one bottle isn’t going to change the fate of the universe - it’s just that it’s a compulsion for them. And in the same way, movie critics have GOT to be hip to this game by now. By the time we get to No Country for Old Men, for example, they’ve GOT to know that there’s nothing particularly difficult about making West Texas look empty and hiring dialect coaches to get the speech right - and yet any number of critics will have compulsively inserted some lines about the “sensitivity” with which the Coens take an alien place and make it their own - or some such tripe.
So the first thing that ingratiates a movie like Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead to me is that it’s “Fargo” without Minnesota. Just that.
Actually, it reminded me more of 25th Hour while I was watching it - for reasons I still can’t quite put my finger on. It was only later that I realized how many thematic similarities it has with Fargo.
Those similarities are everywhere. The basic plot is driven by two brothers who pull a criminal stunt on their family that goes terribly wrong. It goes wrong primarily because the weaker brother involved an outside party he didn’t really know in the heist. Attempts to patch the holes only end up making everything worse. And yet, we sense that holes could be patched in the hands of more decisive and confident people. But then, more decisive and confident people wouldn’t have accrued the shady debts that lead them to crime in the first place, so there you go. There are father issues too: the criminal mastermind in this movie seems primarily motivated by trying to one-up his father the same way that Jerry Lundegaard’s schemes are insinuated to have been born in trying to achieve financial independence from his father-in-law in Fargo. Honestly - it plots like Fargo but feels like 25th Hour. If that appeals to you - see this movie!
It appeals to me. I’m not generally a fan of either Spike Lee or the Coen Brothers, but I must honestly admit that 25th Hour and Fargo were brilliant (I also liked No Country for Old Men quite a lot, actually - it’s all the other Coen movies that have rubbed me in some wrong way or another). And so I predictably really liked this one too. Like those other two - it positively lives from the performances of the actors. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Albert Finney all do standout jobs in their roles. It helps that they’re typecast - I don’t think casting them required a lot of headscratching - but it’s the end effect that matters.
Like Fargo, it’s not really a pleasant movie - and it hammers the unpleasantness home maybe just a little bit harder. There’s certainly a lot less comic relief. But it’s all worth it for the interesting study of motives. In particular - and in a clear difference from Fargo - it seems to have a lot to do with unresolved issues about dealing with women.
All told, I’m not as enamoured as Roger Ebert was. This is a good movie - it’s not so wonderful that you need to go out and see it immediately. 25th Hour was both more entertaining and more thought-provoking. But it’s highly recommended all the same - especially if you’re as sick of ethnic pornography as I am.
Today I finally got to see Pumpkinhead - a movie I’ve been wanting to watch for some time for nostalgia’s sake, but kinda unwilling to pay for. It showed up on Comcast’s free OnDemand, so … mission accomplished.
I say for “nostalgia’s sake,” but actually this is the first time I’ve seen it. The “nostalgia” is more for the late-80s/early-90s in general. It’s the kind of movie my friends in high school would’ve liked, it frequently gets high ratings on horrorfan websites, and it has Lance Henriksen in the main role, so it seemed like a good choice.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be somewhat overrated, even on those terms.
Don’t get me wrong - everything that’s generally praised about this movie is indeed praiseworthy. The cinematography is quite good, Henriksen does a good job with what he has to work with, and the makeup and monster effects (from the guy who worked on Alien) are indeed impressive - especially, in my opinion, the makeup job for the old woman Haggis. Another odd sign that a lot of thought went into this: the kid who gets killed looks like John Denver. You’ll know why that’s funny if you’ve seen the movie.
But taken as a whole this views like a lot of wasted talent on display. It’s sort of like they lined up all the best and worst people they could find for every relevant department, made them pair off, and required that input from each half of the pair make its way into the final production.
So - the Good Screenwriter tries to set up a complex story. A kid is killed completely by accident, and the teenagers who do the killing (they were racing dirtbikes) are conflicted about what to do. The guy responsible has had a beer or two, and he’s already got a drunk driving rap on his record. So what would be an innocent accident done by anyone else is gonna give the local authorities an excuse to pull out the stops. But it really wasn’t the beer’s fault - and so it seems unfair. Being teenagers, the less involved each was, the more willing he seems to be to do the Right Thing. Them that stand ready to get prosecuted are rightly frustrated by what seems like friends aping maturity at their expense. There’s endless potential for exploration of how people on the cusp of adulthood deal with collective responsibility for events just beyond their control … but of course the Evil Screenwriter gets to write half the script, so instead what happens is that the Stock Badass locks his good friends in a closet and hits a lot of people, thus completely destroying my ability to believe that these people are actually friends, or to care about what happens to them in any way.
The Good Cinematographer gives us some pretty amazing haunted forest lighting. But then the Evil Cinematographer makes sure we can’t enjoy it by really overdoing that religious lighting thing - you know, the one where someone is bathed in pale beams as though coming through a window every time they do something eeevviiil. Not to mention, the Evil Producer decided that this all takes place in California somewhere (rather than Appalachia, as was clearly the original intention), so there shouldn’t be haunted forests about in the first place.
The Good Costume Designer and the Good Makeup artist give us the completely convincing Old Woman - and Pumpkinhead himself. Not to mention - the final shot of Pumpkinhead, which would be a spoiler to reveal, but which is completely convincing. The Evil Costume Designer and the Evil Makeup Artists, however, give us families of people in dirty brown overalls, apparently meant to be convincing “locals.” Uh-huh.
And so it goes. Unfortunately, by the time it’s all over, the Evil Team has won. So you get what could’ve been a really good movie dragged completely through the mud by incompetent hangers-on. It’s almost as if they go out of their way to ensure that this is yet another genre flick - not in the clever ironic sense, but just in the banal “this is what the kids like” sense that’s ruined many a horror movie.
All-in-all, I’d say I saw this one in the only acceptable way: it just happened to be on TV at a time when I just happened to be in the mood to watch mindless schlock. Under any other circumstances, I would’ve been really Put Out.
I believe in native cognitive gender differences. With due apologies to the politically correct crowd, men are, on average, better at some things, and women better at others. One thing that women are better at is learning foreign languages. This is especially true of getting the pronounciation right. Here’s some evidence:
And even more so this - for which embedding was disabled.
This person is a native speaker of neither Japanese or Korean, but her pronounciation in both is simply astounding. Of course there are hesitations and slips in the Japanese video, and no doubt native speakers have little trouble hearing that she’s foreign. It’s the Korean video that’s really amazing to me. If we take her at her word that she’s just aping stuff that she heard on he internet (i.e. at the time of filming, she had had only about a couple of hours of intro Korean), this is stunning, as she sounds completely native.
Yes, yes, I know she’s just one person, and no doubt anyone reading this can easily find some girls who flat-out suck at foreign language pronounciation. This is just one data point that supports an impression I’ve had for a long time. I taught English in Korea and Japan for 5 years, and the pattern there was quite clear. The best student in the class was invariably female, and of those students who stood out for me and the other teachers at the schools I taught at as “cream of the crop,” I would say well over 70% were girls. I think the pattern gets clearer when you start talking about people who have learned multiple languages. That is, of those students who, in addition to English, had learned some other language that I knew and could talk to me fluently in that language (German and/or Japanese), nearly all were female.
There isn’t really a point to this - I just wanted to say that I’m impressed by this person’s Korean pronounciation - speaking as someone who enjoys learning foreign languages and finds Korean pronounciation a bit difficult himself.
PZ Myers is having fun with the fact that the Governor of Texas, speaking at a Tea Party Protest yesterday, made some oblique references to the idea of Texas seceding. Here’s the actual quote:
We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.
Here’s the response from the self-styled champion of Secular Reason against Religious Superstition:
I seem to recall from my history books that some states tried that, once upon a time, long, long ago. How did that work out?
Wha…? So if something has ever failed at any time in the distant past, it’s pointless trying it again? What rot. Yes, the Hungarian uprising failed in 1956. Yes the Prague Spring failed in 1968. But damned if the Velvet Revolution of 1990 didn’t bring the Iron Curtain down for real. Imagine PZ Myers as a Czech citizen. “Aw, geez comrades, this again? I seem to remember the Hungarians tried that back in 1956 - how did that work out?” Or his advice to Galileo: “Aw, geez G, I dunno. People have tried publicly contradicting the Church before and it’s never gotten them anywhere. I think we’re just gonna have to accept that the Church has the final word on Scientific Truth.”
There’s more:
I also seem to recall from not too long ago that Republicans were rather free in slinging accusations of treason at Democrats (Ann Coulter wrote a book about it, and Jonah Goldberg tried to imply it), yet here is a governor actively inciting mobs with the idea of secession, which is a rather blatantly anti-patriotic act. Funny how their attitudes change.
Lost on Myers is the irony that Democrats who go around plastering their cars with “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” stickers and threatening to move to Canada if their candidate doesn’t win aren’t in much of a position to complain about Republicans here. No doubt Myers would defend himself saying he never threatened to leave for Canada if the election didn’t work out how he wanted. So fine - dig me up an example of Ann Coulter or Jonah Goldberg threatening to join a revolution and you can shout hypocrisy about those individuals all you want. Absent some evidence that Gov. Perry ever called the “move to Canada!” crowd treasonous, there’s just no case.
I could go on all day about the medical condition Myers suffers from that enfeebles his reasoning ability when politics are under discussion - but my real point here is just to let off some steam about how wearying it is that we’re barely three months in to the new Administration and the Democrat ground troops are already engaging in all the same behavior they complained about from Republicans under the old one. Look, people, this is how it works. Either we give protestors the benefit of the doubt about their patriotism, or we don’t. If you think that Gov. Perry crossed the line with some of his statements, that’s fine, but have the decency not to lump all Republicans under his banner, ‘kay? It’s not as though it’s difficult to find similar hyperbole from any one of (a) anti-Globalization protestors, (b) anti-Iraq War protestors, (c) pro-Kyoto Protocol demonstrators, etc. Protests are emotional things, and people speaking at them tend to exaggerate. I think the healthiest attitude to take about public discussion is to start by avoiding any semblance of the genetic fallacy. That is, I agree to respond to your reasoned points reasonably if you agree to do the same for me. There are douchebags in abundance in every corner of the political arena (Lord knows I don’t want to be personally judged on the basis of what some Libertarians have said!), and we just never get anywhere if political debate amounts to nothing more than “No, see, I just saw another one on YOUR team, so nyah!”
So I say this without any reflection on left-wingers in general: PZ Myers is a retarded douchbag no matter whose team he’s on.
The loony Christian lobby just officially stepped off the deep end. I have no idea what the message of this video is, but it’s definitely worth two minutes of your time. Hat tip Obama Shill Andrew Sullivan, via Will Wilkinson.
Andrew Sullivan thinks the Tea Party Protests are a waste of time - primarily because the protestors haven’t agreed on a list of programs that need cutting.
If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against.
Meh. Alright - let’s get it out of the way:
If you favor no bailouts, then say so.
I favor no bailouts.
If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so.
Non sequitor, mate. The banking system will not collapse without the bailout. In fact, if you have evidence that it will, I’m sure we’d all like to hear it.
If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so.
I think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus. In fact, I think the fiscal stimulus will ultimately prove counterproductive.
If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so.
I favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Defense.
Can I go to my protest now?
I think it’s pathetic that this laundry list is apparently seriously meant to bully us into moral shame. None of these questions are actually necessary in the present case since the current runup in national debt is COMPLETELY UNPRECEDENTED. The current budget deficit, for example, is not only bigger than it’s ever been, it’s a whopping four times bigger than the formerly biggest deficit ever. Furthermore, the public opinion polls at the time the measures responsible were passed showed something like 2/3 of the population opposed to the actions. Most of all, last I checked the government didn’t even know what all this money was for. They’re very clear on the point of needing it for something, but I don’t think they’ve ever told us what the magic actually was. In fact, I seem to remember a market plunge in February that virtually all comentators attributed to the government’s lack of specifics. When the government steps this far outside the lines of what’s traditional in brazen defiance of public opinion and doesn’t even say for what, then it’s really OK to protest it without coming up with a point-by-point alternative. The alternative is simply that the bailout not happen.
But even so - take a look at Mr. Sullivan’s actual laundry list. No bailouts? Yeah - that’s 2/3 of the population, there, kiddo. Recession demands no fiscal stimulus? I don’t have any poll numbers on that, but that’s certainly an option that’s on the table. Any number of reputable economists prescribe exactly that - and Ronald Regan won an election in 1980 campaigning on it, so it’s not like we don’t have precedents. And is there really an honest commentator alive today who doesn’t tell us that our Medicare and Social Security budgets are unsustainable over the long haul? And aside from some neocons here and there, are there really any Americans who DON’T think the that military budget should be cut and our overseas commitments scaled back? Since when, actually, did ANY of these items become controversial, let alone taboo? And as for that non sequitor about the banking system, has Sullivan just slept through the past 8 months or something? A couple of banks went under and well should have done. Others survived. Thanks to the bailout, the market is now unable to tell the difference between these two kinds of banks, and so we have no informed way to decide where to put our money. Does Sullivan honestly think this is a way to save the banking system? By keeping the people who made the bad choices in charge of it?
This bit is the most disingenuous of all:
But it seems odd to describe this as anything but a first stab at creating opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.
Everyone at these protests had serious objections against Mr. Bush’s spending plans, as Sullivan well knows. What’s sparking these protests is that deficit spending is now higher than it’s ever been in the history of the planet. If McCain had won the election and tax day rolled around with these kinds of deficits on the books, you can rest assured just as many or more people would have been out protesting. Anyway, what’s the difference? If the goal is to get the government to cut spending, and the Democrats are the party traditionally associated with big spending (perhaps unjustly in some year-over-year comparisons, but that’s political reality), and if change usually comes not by reelecting the incumbent but by electing a determined opposition, then doesn’t protesting Obama’s spending plans seem like the most expedient way to accomplish the goal? This is just the public signaling to anyone who wants to oppose Mr. Obama’s reelection bid in 2012 that spending cuts are a good way to get their vote. If Mr. Sullivan doesn’t consider this a legitimate use of the political process, he really is new to this whole democracy thing.
I’m completely unimpressed. Far from offering what Samizdata’s Jonathan Pearce calls some “hard but fair questions,” Mr. Sullivan is simply shilling for his presidential pick, as always. This bit of commentary is neither intelligent nor informative, nor is it even fair.
