Some idiot at Kaplan today (in a piece about how liberals are condescending):
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers. “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?”
In Krugman’s condescending world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people” — only to plumb the depths of their errors and ponder their hidden motivations.
How is this condescending at all? If I call someone a liar and then say “I know you’re not dumb, so why are you telling this ridiculous lie”, how is that condescending?
It’s a strange political world we live in, where pointing out, however politely, that someone is lying makes you uppity and condescending. And where people write entire pieces complaining about how “their side” is called liars without in any way defending themselves from the charge. And where a once serious newspaper publishes all of this.
dmsilev
I’d never heard of the guy, so I scrolled down to the capsule bio and found this:
AEI guest lecturer, huh? For some things, I’m a strong believer in guilt by association.
-dms
slag
I feel condescended to by that article. Condescended to and yet smugly self-righteous at the same time. I must be a liberal.
Tom Hilton
Be there or be…someone who isn’t DougJ.
r€nato
Facts have a well-known liberal bias… and they’re mean to conservatives, too!
Why oh why
Imagine the tears of a bankster billionaire reading Krugman in his mansion…
– What does he mean, “these people”?!
Bob (Not B.o.B.)
I suppose Krugman’s mistake was in not using simpler terms.
He should have just called the Wall Street Journal and bunch of lying Republican whores. That is much less condescending.
Notorious P.A.T.
Liberals are condescending–we know that already. So who needs to back that up? We already know they are latte-sipping arugula-munching ivory tower elitists. No proof is necessary.
How seriously does this fool think we need to take errors? George Will writes that ice caps are growing, while his newspaper’s own reporters write (and prove) that ice caps are shrinking. What else is there to say about Will than to wonder why he does it?
Tom Hilton
The key sleight-of-hand in this piece: pitting actual specific statements by liberals against vague airy generalizations like “conservative ideas” or “conservative arguments”. When you look at the specific things Krugman (e.g.) is talking about, you see that, yes, they really are idiotic and they really are demonstrably false.
DonkeyKong
At this point the column basically fits in with an overall racket. I’m sure the publishers came up with this column at one of the Post power fellating salon’s.
beltane
The proper response to this should be to point at them while chanting “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” . If schoolyard bullying tactics are all they understand, schoolyard bullying tactics are what they deserve.
This is somewhat OT, but Sarah Palin is now going after Greg Sargent of the Plumb Line over the retard controversy. Being that Greg was a good friend of mine back in high school and college, I will happily report that I am oozing with pride right now.
El Cid
He’s got a point — why don’t liberals just shut up and let us polite genteel conservatives call libruls terrorists and Stalinists and tax and spenders and traitors and dangerous economy destroyers and conspiracy theorists and wimps and lovers of Hugo Chavez and Al Gore’s dumb robot minions and giving away houses for free to black people and all the rest of it?
Why? Why? Why must libruls be so condescending and not respecting of us as we call them fools, demons and traitors?
Joel
He’s an AEI clown. Those motherfuckers need to go down.
scav
Oh, I’ll condescend them. I’ll descend those cons to the 11th circle of hello. A little bit of Fry and Laurie I’ve been waiting to use is here. Please click through, I beg you.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Did it occur to this writer that academic, writer, and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman did take these arguments seriously but found them wanting?
Sarcastro
In Krugman’s condescending world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people”—only to plumb the depths of their errors …
So he admits the errors but bemoans us not taking their error ridden logic seriously?
The whole thing is the nec plus ultra of the “we’re not evil, we’re just stupid” argument since it adds the coda “and you should, thus, take us very seriously indeed”.
No. To hell with you. You’re wrong. Demonstrably so. Engage this motherfucker …
Loneoak
I just read that piece and immediately came over here, knowing that BJ would have an invitation to mock it relentlessly.
That piece made me think about the discussion here last week or so about Kristol et al.’s explicit condescension toward the stupid little people who must be kept in line with half truths. Is this article really an artful sociological ratfucking? Does he believe is own bullshit or does he believe that the people he is actually condescending to actually read that asswipe paper? Of course, the grand theory of conservative ‘common sense’ pudito-journalism is that wingnut welfare lecturers at AEI come up with this shit and it trickles down to the local talk radio monsters, but man does it ever get complicated to track this nonsense.
Loneoak
I just read that piece and immediately came over here, knowing that BJ would have an invitation to mock it relentlessly.
That piece made me think about the discussion here last week or so about Kristol et al.’s explicit condescension toward the stupid little people who must be kept in line with half truths. Is this article really an artful sociological ratfucking? Does he believe is own bullshit or does he believe that the people he is actually condescending to actually read that asswipe paper? Of course, the grand theory of conservative ‘common sense’ pudito-journalism is that wingnut welfare lecturers at AEI come up with this shit and it trickles down to the local talk radio monsters, but man does it ever get complicated to track this nonsense.
Gregory
@Tom Hilton:
Good catch, that.
Some people say that conservatives don’t argue in good faith, but we’re going to have to just leave it there.
DonkeyKong
I say we liberals light a bag of biodynamic, hypoallergenic, cruelty free tibetan yak shit on fire and toss it on Freddy Hiatt’s doorstep.
Who’s with me!
Empathize your behind empathy!
Tom Hilton
The Krugman piece (a blog post) he cites is here. Krugman is talking about three specific WSJ editorials: one on the phony EPA ‘scandal’ of climate research that supposedly undermines global warming models supposedly being suppressed; one asserting that the stimulus has had no positive effect; and one claiming that the Minnesota senatorial election was stolen.
So pointing out that three patently false assertions are, in fact, patently false is…condescending?
Zifnab
Krugman isn’t content to keep re-proving that a lie is a lie. He’s refusing to play the conservatives’ game, to constantly roll out evidence against the Laffer curve or Trickle Down Economics.
So now they Kaplan guys are throwing a shit fit. Liars don’t really like being declared liars by fiat. They want a second chance and a third chance to keep coming back and have you believe them.
SpotWeld
Intersting points. He remarks on the Kos poll that reviewed the crazy stuff that a majortity of Republicans believe… and then opines that
And there’s the split.
Kos *actually did run a poll*, and (presumily) formed conclusions based on it. Gerard Alexander seems to find his own opinion superious to numbers and can merely assume that if he had to be bothered to actually check he would be proven right.
Kos: Had opinion, checked it against numbers and was shown to be largely right. (Though I’ll grant you his “rightness” is limited to the scope of the poll).
Alexander : Had opinion, doesn’t need to check it yet still can dismiss Kos because he’s sure that his contrary opinion is just as valid as the numbers.
And who exactly is being condesending here?
licensed to kill time
The thing is, once you’re wearing your Cognitive Dissonance Cap all your Conservative ideas make perfect sense. I guess Krugman misplaced his somewhere, hence his condescending confusion, poor feller. He’s wearing his Reality Lenses instead, which have a well-known liberal bias.
Ash Can
Sounds like someone’s made it his life’s mission to somehow get back at the professors who flunked his sorry ass out of college.
Dials set to Stupid
Chuckie K wrote the same column this morning… I guess condescension is the Kaplan Test Prep word of the day.
Given all their whining, its probably worth revisiting the noble lie theory of conservatism
But since that’s all over my head… back to bread and circuses
SpotWeld
I gotta ponder this:
My question… A lot of the liberals you dismiss are the ones who have research and polls to back up thier opinions.
What research have you done to confirm your opinion that they are in fact condesending?
J.W. Hamner
Has anyone ever examined why it is that conservatives are so comfortable with moral absolutes… and yet anything quantitative and/or scientific is “just a theory” in a wishy washy mass of inconclusive contradictory observations?
It’s weird.
jl
I read the piece. It was a waste of time, but it guess it was my duty to do so before commenting.
At the bottom of the article, I read:
“Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He will be online to chat with readers on Monday, February 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.”
Maybe some BJ-ers could submit some questions and see what happens.
As for snotty, I will lmit myself to economics.
Take a small group, say Krugman, Galbraith and Stiglitz, who I suppose are considered snotty liberals by Alexander. What have they been right about over the last 15 years?
The effect of the Clinton tax increase
The results of irresponsible banking deregulation (Stiglitz started predicting what would happen in 19 fricking 93. it is down on paper at his website)
The results of the Bush tax cuts
The foolisheness of the Iraq invasion
The uselessness and danger of growth of certain financial derivative markets (Krugman missed this, to be honest)
The danger created by irresponsible derivative market de-regulation
The effects of Bush stimulus policy after the 2000 recession
The existence of a housing bubble, and coming collapse and the danger of that collapse producing a severe recession.
The fact that the collapse of the residential housing bubble would produce a general slump due to loss (or, better, reappraisal) of population wealth, and spread to commercial real estate and manufacturing
The effects of the poorly designed Bush-Obama response to the 2008 financial crisis
The long and slow jobless recovery that would follow the recession that started in 2008
The relative ineffectiveness of the Obama stimulus policy
The reaction world financial markets to US fiscal and monetary stimulus in 2008-2009 and behavior of bond markets.
So… they were right and others were wrong.
And, they can explain why they were right by demonstrating their reasoning using Keynesian economic theory.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future. But these guys got more right than most. What does snottiness have to do with it?
SpotWeld
@J.W. Hamner:
Becuase rules like that are for “regular people” and since they are the chosen ones they are certainly in the right position to know more than those silly scientists and experts.
Ash Can
Woo-hoo!
flounder
One of my cousins is a teabagger, and I routinely make fun of his and his dad’s teabaggery. He wrote me this e-mail about how I didn’t respect him or his family and I was condescending because I made for fun of him for believing that Obama was getting rid of the 1st Amendment (among other things).
So his wife got in this online discussion with my Mom about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the cousin-wife says she is using hers to pay bills. I of course start making fun of him and his wife for whining about taxes all the time while they are getting free money from the government. I called them “freeloaders” and they freaked out.
Turns out his wife doesn’t understand what the hell the EITC is, and she was just talking about her tax refund check. I responded that here I was, trying not to be condescending by assuming that when my Mom started a discussion about the EITC that anyone who chimed in knew what the EITC was.
You can’t win…
SpotWeld
The more I ponder this, the more it bugs me.
It’s like working a register job and you tell the customer that the 2-for-1 deal is on the 24 oz box not the 16 oz box. And despite the fact you’re the guy who works at the store and you just check that for another customer 30 min ago you still have to go to the shelf and point out this information as it is printed on the sale sign to the customer who is certain (because “the customer is always right”) that you must be wrong and you should give them the discount anyway.
*headdesk headdesk headdesk*
And of course when proven right, you have to call over your manager because the customer is now convinced that you were “being rude” becuase you failed to be wrong and were acutally performing your job competently. (Which is something they want to file a complaint about.)
The GOP, the sucky customers of the poltical world.
Waylon
Liberals especially liberal journalists can be very condescending to rank and file conservatives. A good example of this is when they call them ‘teabaggers’. The Daily Howler has covered this topic extensively.
I do agree with the point about Krugman. But those kind of accusations resonate with conservatives becuase they are treated and viewed as dumb, racist hicks by many libs. (Really they are good people who are misinformed or just have a different view of a particular matter, which is their right.)
Waylon
Also, people are going to think you are condescending when you call them idiots. Or was that a joke?
AnotherBruce
As far as I can tell by reading this thing, the author is using thousands of fact free, argument free words to whine about how mean liberals are. You are right DougJ, there is no refutation going on here, just whining.
mk3872
That’s just the way it works in DC.
Conservatives are allowed to label THEMSELVES as victims any chance they get.
AND they are allowed to denounce anyone ELSE of calling themselves a victim.
jl
It is difficult for me to think of what Stiglitz and Galbraith have been wrong about.
In order to demonstrate my non-snooty-snottiness, I will list Krugman’s misses:
Krugman credited the Bush macropolicy with more success than it deserved in early 2000s. He also overestimated the persistence of the oil price spike in summar 2008, and did not see its role in precipitating a financial crisis and recession.
I think Stiglitz offered the best analysis of the macroeconomic implications of the 2008 oil price spike, and did it near real-time. Stiglitz did not offer a theory of why the price spike occurred, and that was I think correct on his part, since we do not know yet how much short-run and long-run fundamental economic demand and supply issues, versus financial speculation, contributed to it. However, he did diagnose the impact it would have on the macroeconomic picture, international trade and financial balances, and role in triggering a recession later that year. He did this in the Summer of 2008, when everyone wanted to talk with him about his book on the true cost of the Iraq war.
Get on youtube and search for his interview with John Aravosis in Summer 2008.
jl
I forgot to mention that Alexander is some bigshot who will be giving a wise talk full of deep thought and ‘insightful musings, and regretful truthtelling insights (that is, conservative BS) at the American Enterprise Insitute next week.
That is mentioned at the bottom of the article.
So, I diagnose this opinion piece, since DougJ is searching for a catchphrase, as more SEMFIPIG:
socially engineered mass fear and ignorance by powerful interest groups (SEMFIPIG).
jl
Also, Stiglitz, Krugman and Galbraith were right about the excessively rosy long term budget surples projections of the Bush administration, that were used to justify the Bush tax cuts and corporate tax-revenue give aways and loopholes.
Look for their commentary on Greenspan’s worrying about excess surpluses messing up the fiscal and monetary operatons of the federal government, back in the day.
AnotherBruce
@J.W. Hamner:
Because to conservatives, some things are so self evidently true that they don’t need data and research to support them.
You know, things like the sun revolves around the earth. The earth is flat. All tax cuts are good. Government is evil.
This is just common sense, why would you question it?
geg6
Fuck these assholes. I’m sick of this shit.
Tristero is on it:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-conservative-plea-for-comity-by.html
p.a.
It’s not condescension, it’s elitist condescension.
An obvious prejudice by those outside the ‘created reality’ the Roveistas spoke about.
MBunge
I think one of the things this guy is upset about is the assigning of bad motives to the other side. In one of her frequent pleas for comment thread civility, Megan McArdle touched on that as one of the big no-no’s. The idea is that it’s a personal attack in lieu of addressing someone’s argument.
That’s not a completely invald standard, except for when the other side really does have bad motives and absolutely nothing is ever said or done about it. When folks are arguing in bad faith or are so fanatical they don’t even understand what “arguing in bad faith” even means, there comes a point where you have to start addressing their underlying credibility.
Mike
licensed to kill time
Anybody else hear Linda Ronstadt singing “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” as the conservative soundtrack?
Poor poor pitiful me
Lord these liberals won’t let me be
All condescending on me
I said a-woe oh woe is me
Boo fucking hoo.
Notorious P.A.T.
Oh yes, there are as many Democrats clamoring for their party to prove that Bush planned 9/11 as there are Republicans who think Obama faked his birth certificate.
Sheesh.
M. Bouffant
In this same world, pointing out racism is seen as a racism, & mentioning that the wealthy are screwing people who work for a living is called “class warfare.”
No wonder we “condescend” to liars & hypocrites.
Geeno
@jl:
There wasn’t a 2000 recession. The recession started in March of 2001. It was a republican talking point to mention that growth started slowing (but didn’t actually stop, mind you) in November 2000 so they could try to call it the Clinton recession.
liberal
@Waylon:
While I think the DH has made good contributions to political debate, I don’t agree with Somerby on that stuff.
He’s kind of got a point that (we) liberals need to have better messaging. (E.g. when talking about our broken health care system and comparing to other countries, use dollar amounts, not fraction of GDP.)
On the other hand, IMHO he cuts the uninformed right-wing part of the electorate too much slack. And as someone else pointed out on a thread here awhile back, he’s weird about race. One example: claiming that it’s clearly not about race with Obama, because they did the same things to other Democrats. Of course, that misses the by-now conventional wisdom that intrinsically racist whites associate the entire Democratic Party with blackness, not just black Democratic politicians.
Bottom line, while it’s good tactics to have better messaging, saying “it’s not the people’s fault they’re idiots—it’s the fault of the MSM and the Democratic Party for not informing them” is denying “the people” any agency, which is getting tiresome.
liberal
@Waylon:
Well, IMHO any of the apparently large fraction of the populace who thought that many of the 9-11 hijackers were Iraqis were definitely dumb. Not necessarily racist or hicks, though.
liberal
@Geeno:
In fairness, if you could attribute that recession to the fiscal policy of a presidential administration, you’d have to attribute it to Clinton.
Not that that’s true—it was clearly the bursting of the dot com bubble.
CalD
This is actually a valid point. You can’t honestly know if someone is lying or merely mistaken unless they admit to lying or you have the ability to read their mind. Anyway, it sounds to me like the author prefers to be called stupid. I think I’m OK with that.
Geeno
@liberal:
Granted, but it is still the 2001 recession. I thought the talking was stupid at the time, but the implication wasn’t enough for them. Blame had to be firmly affixed to the Clenis, even if they had to lie to do it.
Tracy
Hey, you want condescending – this Alexander guy wrote an article for the Weekly Standard in 2004 which contains this gem:
“But it cannot be denied that this administration is trying
something bold and serious, something expensive and risky, to solve the terrorism problem from the roots up.”
At least he got the expensive part right.
Mattsky
I cling to my guns and religion and am happy we have a president that would never be condescending. I know the people here at this blog are never condescending to the teabaggers, Taliban GOPer or wingnuts either.
Joshua
@Waylon: Because referring to people with a term they coined to describe themselves is condescending. It’s not our fault they didn’t know what it meant when they adopted it.
Mattsky
Joshua the people of the tea bag movement do not refer to themselves as teabaggers. That came from the folks on the left who thought they were so very clever.
jl
@Geeno: Sorry for the slip. You are right the officially the recession did not start until 2008.
jl
@Mattsky: The first mentions of the verb ‘teabag’ as in “Let’s teabag the White House” that I saw were from the tea bag movement. And first person I saw jiggling two teabags up and down, one each hand on either side of his head, was a tea bag leader on TV.
And I did not know what the slang teabag meant at that time.
So, you are correct, the tea bag movement did not announce “We hereby adopt a name, a symbol, a phrase which has a slang meaning which will be embarrasing and make us appear ridiculous.”
So, you are correct, they did not do that. And after dangling that phraseology in front of the country, anyone who reminds the t * * b * g movement of its own symbol is very bad and unfair. Is that what you are saying?
J
Tom Hilton #20 is spot on. Krugman would be at fault only if he dismissed as a lie something that was not a lie; and it’s the responsibility of the author of the Wash post piece to show that that is what Krugman did, which of course he can’t do.
That means Krugman’s question, and questions like it about things similar to the ones that he was writing about, stands: why do so many right-wingers who should, and almost certainly do, know better spread falsehoods?
It is the height of dishonesty to trade on the fine and noble idea that people can disagree in good faith to defend those who deliberately argue in bad faith. it’s not the people like Paul Krugman who object to lying who are destroying the practice of good faith back and forth between people who honestly disagree, but the liars who exploit the conventions that make this practice possible.
Compare the institution of making and honoring promises. Is it undermined by those who call out people who violate it or by the violators themselves?
Sly
Morons/assholes/bigots don’t like being called morons/assholes/bigots. Film at 11.
@Tom Hilton:
Yes.
Scientists are also condescending toward Creationists for not treating ID as a worthy counter to Evolution by Natural Selection, even though ID does not meet any of the criteria of a scientific theory.
jl
@jl: Lord, I am typing too quick. I mean the official recession did not start until 2001, not 2008.
Mattsky
jl the phraseology that is also a homosexual term was coined by people on the left to be condescending.
Waylon
@Joshua. The point is that it’s a condescending term used in a condesending way.
Spork
Wait a sec. What’s wrong with being condescending anyway?
mclaren
Credit the Politeness Mafia. Whenever I point out someone is lying, people on this forum get hissy fits and shriek “Don’t be so nasty!”
Look, people, when some guy is lying, you have to call him on it. If you don’t, he keeps on lying and everyone gets confused and thinks maybe he’s telling the truth.
That’s not nasty. That’s accurate.
The Republicans have lied and lied and lied and lied and lied and lied about what they’re doing. They have lied and lied and lied and lied and lied about the deficit. The Republicans have lied and lied and lied and lied and lied about the causes of the current economic collapse. The Republicans have lied and lied and lied and lied and lied and lied about their party’s role in this economic collapse.
But no one on the Democratic side, at least in national politics, seems to want to stand up and point a finger at the Republicans and shout: “YOU LIE!”
waylon
@jl – speaking for myself, i don’t think calling the Tea Party people teabaggers is unfair or bad. I do think it is a losing political tactic. we have to win these people over to win elections. calling them teabaggers – may be technically right in your view, fair game – but it won’t help us win them over. we have to win over a percentage of them to keep power. we have to approach them with empathy and show them how our side is better.
divided we fall.
mclaren
@waylon:
Have you seen those people? They’re insane. Absolutely stark staring raving batshit insane.
If we need the teabaggers to win elections, then game over. Democracy’s done. You can’t reason with crazy people. And brother, those tabaggers are crazy.
Jrod
@Waylon: Guess what, when you’re talking about people who go out of their way to be dead wrong about everything in the most assholish way possible, it’s really fucking hard to comment without sounding condescending. So very sorry if that chaps your ass.
Spork
@waylon: bah, concern troll is concerned. We don’t need to gently convince them with the strength of our empathy in order to keep power. That’s fucking ridiculous as a political strategy.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@waylon: Since when did we have to win over the Republican base to win elections? We did pretty well the last two election cycles without them!
Jrod
Seriously, how the hell does anyone from the right get off whining about those nasty condescending libruls after they spent a decade going on constantly about what worthless traitors we are? About how much we hated America for failing to be gulled by the boy-king’s stupid bullshit? Really? Pointing out that lies are fucking lies is just soooooooo condescending, but calling half the country traitors, a crime punishable by death, is just peachy keen?
Tell you what, Waylon, you get your side to apologize for calling our side a fifth column, and we’ll maybe see about being more polite to you shit-piles.
Spork
Not to mention the explicit goal of waylon’s weepy cry for bipartisanship is to “keep power”. That’s strongly reminiscent of a “Permanent Majority”, the right’s cry for authoritarian rule. Even if he’s really a left partisan and not a concern troll, the goal should be good and effective governance, not ends justify the means bullshit about keeping and expanding power for your party.
El Cid
@Jrod: Yeah. Let the fucking assholes who trotted around the 2004 Republican convention wearing purple bandaids to mock an actual Vietnam war vet in favor of an Andover cheerleader and fake cowboy just try to tell me what’s “condescending”. Fuck these assholes. I don’t give a shit what these lifelong insulting jerks think is ‘condescending’ — I would be descending if I were weak enough to pretend that their neo-Cro Magnon screams and grunt deserved some sort of elegant response.
mclaren
Seriously, Waylon…have you listened to what the teabaggers want? They want to increase military spending, cut taxes on the rich, and reduce the deficits.
How do you do that? It doesn’t make sense. It’s impossible. It’s crazy.
Explain to me — how do you do that???
waylon
it doesn’t chap my ass. i’m cool with whatever. call them teabaggers. i just don’t think it’s a good strategy. just my opinion. do whatever you want. especially if you think we’ll keep winning elections and having good and effective governance. i have def. have spent time with these people. i actually went to a tea party rally in dallas (on accident after walking out of a restaurant downtown). they are horribly misinformed by viscous, lying charlatans. it’s very sad.
it is hard to not to be condescending.
but the only way is the right way.
and the right way is the hard way.
sorry to have chapped *ya’lls* ass!! :)
peace
skippy
@Mattsky: it’s not a “homosexual” term. the fact that you are unclear on what it means undermines your authority to condemn its usage as condescending.
or the fact that you allow your homophobia to color your understanding of the phrase not only undermines your authority to speak on its usage, it shows exactly why tea partiers are so hard to take seriously on an intellectual level, thus proving the entire thesis of this thread.
El Cid
To me the phrase “tea party” typically invokes TV and movie scenes of little girls throwing a pretend party in dress-up serving pretend tea in tiny cups to teddy bears.
If that’s what they prefer, okay, but, it’s not exactly macho and revolutionary.
waylon
@mclaren
ya. it’s distressing. you can’t do it. i don’t have the answer. i’m just an average dude. i just think calling them teabaggers is unproductive. no biggie.
handy
Teabaggers = Repubs “doing” protest.
I know Somerby’s grand thesis: we liberals just don’t show how much we care. Politics is dirty. Do they win because they don’t show how much they care? No.
We’re talking about a movement that dumps on political correctness (basically not being able to call AAs “N*****s”) and now expect as much from us. Except for them it isn’t about something very personal that they can’t change, it’s about their ideas, something they can change.
ETA: Ideas at that which are self-serving and destructive.
Glazius
Oh, it exists. European economists have tracked tax receipts and worked out equations for the line and everything.
But, uh, according to those equations the downslope for the United States begins somewhere around 70%. We’re not even seeing serious diminishing returns yet.