Driftglass reads BoBo so you don’t have to.
Archives for September 2011
Exhuming McCarthy
James Fallows connects the current inability of Republican leaders to repudiate the haters with some earlier US history:
One of the earliest political histories I remember reading was on why it took Dwight Eisenhower so long to condemn Joe McCarthy and his destructive, bullying “investigations” during the Red Scare years. I can’t now be sure just where I read it, but I remember the mounting sense among Eisenhower’s admirers that he was shaming himself by not taking a stand (and indeed for campaigning with McCarthy during the 1952 election). Ike finally turned on McCarthy late in 1953, after McCarthy began attacking the patriotism of Army officers and challenged Ike’s own Secretary of the Army. The situation now is different now in many ways, but as the reader suggests the basic dynamic is the same. The hateful side of a party is showing itself, and the party’s leaders are either pretending they don’t notice or else are actively pandering to the haters.
Two things. First, it’s worth remembering that even though Eisenhower turned on McCarthy, a fair slice of the conservative intelligentsia still thinks McCarthy was onto something (here’s an example, Buckley’s hedging recalibration of his view of McCarthy). Second, don’t forget about Ike’s other sleazy associate, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon made his name on commie witch hunting but he, unlike McCarthy, was smart enough to quit while he was ahead. Eisenhower didn’t want Nixon as his VP, and personally couldn’t stand the guy, but he took him on to pander to the far-right of the party. When Nixon finally became President, he also used the haters but kept them at arms length, just like Ike. It’s a simple pattern, repeated regularly in post-WW II politics.
The reason that Romney and Perry don’t have the guts to call out the haters is simple. Starting with McCarthy and Nixon, and intensifying during the civil rights era, Democrats threw the haters out of the party, and the Republicans took them in. Like Ike and Dick, the front-runners know that you throw the base under the bus after the election, not before.
Further to our Big Bad President (A (mildly) dissenting view)
Kay recently posted on Republican whining that our president thinks governing is actually something worth doing. I agree both with her disdain for the president’s (and, in my view) our polity’s opponents, and her argument that in fact it is important to try to solve problems before they become crises.
That’s especially true in the case of No Child Left Behind, which threatens real disruption when the day of reckoning comes (soon, in 2014) — with the heaviest impact falling, of course, on those least able to bear it.
But it is important to remember as well that Obama is no knight sans peur and sans reproche in the school reform fight.
I’m no kind of expert here, but what has consistently driven me crazy every time I’ve dipped a toe into the literature on education reform is the near-total absence of any actual reason to believe anything so called reformers say.
So without further ado, I’ll turn the critique over to Diane Ravitch, a stalwart in chronicling and condemning the Overlords’ attempt to remake American education to some abstract vision. In her latest, a damning review of Stephen Brill’s panagyric to the grand alliance of Wall St. viceroys and Silicon Valley technophiles, she offers this summary of the Obama administration’s approach to the reform of reform:
The Obama administration has offered to grant waivers from the onerous sanctions of NCLB, but only to states willing to adopt its preferred remedies: privately managed charter schools, evaluations of teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores, acceptance of a recently developed set of national standards in reading and mathematics, and agreement to fire the staff and close the schools that have persistently low scores. None of the Obama administration’s favored reforms—remarkably similar to those of the Bush administration—is supported by experience or evidence.
Most research studies agree that charter schools are, on average, no more successful than regular public schools; that evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores is fraught with inaccuracy and promotes narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, encouraging some districts to drop the arts or other nontested subjects; and that the strategy of closing schools disrupts communities without necessarily producing better schools. In addition, the “Common Core State Standards” in reading and mathematics that states must adopt if they hope to receive a waiver from the US Department of Education have never been subjected to field-testing.
I am pretty close to an O-bot, I guess, and I do think that we have in President Obama one of the most sneakily effective drivers of real policy change to be seen around these parts for a long time. And again, I’m nothing like an education reporter.
But my background as a science writer makes me very suspicious. The Obama waiver seems better than the alternative of the NCLB guillotine — Obama at his worst is a meliorist, a believer in the possibility of progress through human endeavor. But the weakness of the empirical justification for what is on offer sticks in my craw…and it reminds me that even with the best of our friends, being on the right side of the angels most of the time still means that some moments are spent on the far side of that line. Which bears noticing, and an attempt to repair.
Oh — and this all gives me a very sketchy excuse to post a wonderful video turned up by my Swiss science writing colleague Reto Schneider. The video documents what purports to be a lecture on “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” It is…well see for yourself, and think Sokal before Sokal:
<div align=”center”>
<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/RcxW6nrWwtc” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
See how great all that science-y stuff is for education and all?
For the details on the hoax (and the astonishing fact that even after being told the whole thing was a fake, some members in the audience persisted in seriously-intended questions!), check out what Reto has to say at the link above.
Image: Antonio de Pereda, The Knight’s Dream, 1655
Further to our Big Bad President (A (mildly) dissenting view)Post + Comments (87)
Making Excuses for Authority
If you think that the real standard for a newspaper is whether they’ll dig hard when a powerful local institution is accused of wrongdoing, then compare the lead stories of the Times and Guardian coverage of the Wall Street protests. Here’s the Times lead:
When members of the loose protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street began a march from the financial district to Union Square on Saturday, the participants seemed relatively harmless, even as they were breaking the law by marching in the street without a permit.
But to the New York Police Department, the protesters represented something else: a visible example of lawlessness akin to that which had resulted in destruction and violence at other anticapitalist demonstrations, like the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in London in 2009 and the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.
After seven paragraphs of preemptively excusing the police for their actions by noting that other protests have been worse, that police were trained to protect us against ruthless and scary terrorists, and, furthermore, a bunch of obviously harmless hippies could instantly transform themselves into lawless marauding hordes, the Times finally lets loose a few facts. Did you know that the police officer who pepper sprayed those women was accused of improper use of force in another protest in 2004? If you read the Guardian, you’d have learned that fact first, because it’s the most interesting one.
The Guardian launched their New York-based US operation less than two weeks ago, but they’re beating the Times on their own turf with this story.
Random Barking
Was sound asleep and both girls went TOTALLY FUCKING NUTS barking. Checked the house, walked the perimeter, nothing. Tunch is on his chair unfazed. Immediately, I thought- “I should blog this.”
And so I did.
This is the message the girls gave me.
Open Thread: “Six Flags Over Dagny Taggart”
One bit of good news on a gloomy Monday evening: Charles P. “Idiot America” Pierce has taken up his new position at Esquire‘s Politics blog, and he’s starting with a bang :
… It is not possible to run for president as a Republican these days without at some level having to become a parody of yourself. Running within a radicalized, self-contained universe with its own private, physical laws and its own private history, with its own vocabulary and syntax that has to be learned from scratch almost daily, requires an ongoing manic re-invention that can do nothing but make the candidate look ridiculous to people outside that universe.
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This is how we get Mitt Romney, with his $290 million, telling an audience that he doesn’t “try to define who is rich and who is not rich.” Here’s a hint, Mitt. You’re rich. You’re filthy, stinking rich. You reek of money. You belong on a card in a Monopoly set, okay? Buy a damn monocle already…
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(Since he took his act national, Mitt’s finest moment may well have been telling Brian Mooney of The Boston Globe that, when he was doing his Mormon mission in France, he really wanted to be fighting in Vietnam. In other words, rather than pestering wine-growers in Provence, Mitt really wanted to be humping the pig across the Central Highlands. This is so stupefyingly fraudulent as to be goddamn close to immortal.)
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It is possible — although certainly debatable — that Mitt Romney would be less of a phony if the Republican primary process were not controlled by the gibbering loon faction of the party. Unfortunately, as demonstrated clearly by the events in Florida just now, that remains the case. The obvious story of the whole weekend is that the party’s base is for the moment running utterly amuck. It screamed to be covered. A Republican may well get elected president next year. But, whoever that is, first has to answer, constantly, to the voices in the party’s head. It’s exhausting work. It’s already eaten Bachmann alive, and Herman Cain is next on the menu. Which is probably why so much energy seems to be going into the promotion of candidates who are not running. Right now, the non-candidate du jour is Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who replaced Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who replaced Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who made the capital mistake of actually running, and who already has flummoxed and disappointed Bill Kristol, maker of public men and truly unnecessary wars.
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Kristol, of course, is the yeast behind the intellectual ferment that has produced, in order, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin. A sane country party would be wondering at this point about a party that takes this person seriously as a political thinker and a public intellectual. If Bill Kristol went to the track, he’d bet on the fucking starting gate. Nevertheless, he is what passes for a wise man in a party that has surrendered utterly to its intellectual Id…
Much, much more at the link. Enjoy!
Open Thread: “Six Flags Over Dagny Taggart”Post + Comments (90)
Do Randroids dream of robotic sheep?
Here’s a pretty remarkable interview with independent stock and forex trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC this morning, in which he’s either being perfectly candid about how traders are viewing the Eurozone crisis, or he’s just trolling. Anyway, he’s a sociopath.
He says that the euro’s collapse is inevitable and that the “savings of millions of people are going to vanish,” within the next year, and there’s not much that governments can do about it — not that he cares one way or the other:
“For most traders we don’t really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it,” he said. “Personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession.”
It’s all in the game, I know. But future generations will question the wisdom of worshipping these guys as job-creating geniuses. If there are future generations.