Niall Ferguson, to his credit, has apologized for claiming that Keynesianism was a big gay conspiracy:
I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.
My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.
Not surprisingly, Niall’s old friend Andrew Sullivan rushes to his defense. How could Ferguson be a homophobe when he and Sullivan shared so many good times together during Michaelmas term at All Souls?
This was never about Ferguson being a homophobe specifically. It’s about some conservatives’ (and not just conservatives’) need to put down their opponents for being part of an out group: Obama is black like Felix the Cat, Dixie Chicks are fat slags, Al Gore is fat, Nate Silver is effeminate.
Name-calling is fun — I certainly enjoy it — and it has its place, but “Keynes was a fag” isn’t much of an argument, and whether Ferguson wants to admit it or not, his hatred of Keynesianism is irrational and tribalistic, and much of what he writes in opposition to it is only marginally more sophisticated than “Keynes was a fag”.
When the serious Burkean mask slips for a moment, you see that it’s about punching down at the people below you.
Yutsano
His ass should still be fired, apology or no. This is the kind of shit that makes Hahvahd look like a joke, and that can be much more difficult to rectify.
The prophet Nostradumbass
I don’t think you could find a better example of bullies “punching down” than the Breitbart operation and their little friend, O’Keefe.
PeakVT
Well, so what? This isn’t the first Ferguson has made aspersions about Keynes sexuality.
Ferguson is a shitty human being no matter how much he apologizes for this incident.
Howard Beale IV
Ferguson flunked as a historian for failing to hew to the first rule of Histroy:
Maude
Oops. Ferguson didn’t know he couldn’t get away with that sort of thing anymore.
His reputation is trashed.
Jackass.
Joseph Nobles
In his 1999 book “The Pity of War,” Ferguson makes the same kind of “off-the-cuff” remarks about Keynes. So while credit is due for crafting an actual apology, I’m not buying it.
http://historymike.blogspot.com/2007/09/book-review-pity-of-war.html
Jonah Goldberg got out the paste jar to defend Ferguson, too.
the Conster
But Sully read Corinthians at his wedding! So Sully says case closed on this whole affair, and pay no attention to the fact that he cheered on the Iraq war because lefty queers were mean to him.
GregB
So what does it mean to modern day American conservatism that two of their most influential messengers are a thrice divorced childless man named Rush Limbaugh and a never married childless lawyer named Ann Coulter?
Redshirt
MoDo has cooties. Pass it on.
Nemo_N
You forgot “Paul Krugman is uncivil” (because we all know this wouldn’t have happened if Paul Krugman were civil).
“Uncivil” might not be much of an insult but the principle is the same; attack the messenger, ignore the arguments.
Patricia Kayden
“X is a gay” as an insult is amusing given that rational people see nothing wrong with homosexuality. At least his apology appears to be sincere.
scav
A Historian that can lie in his own apology with written documentation easily available and Economists that insist their conclusions hold despite the public explosion of their data analysis. How Post-Ironic can Harvard manage?
Irish Steel
Exactly. Just own it, you chicken shit. Now you are a bigot and a coward. Nice job!
Mandalay
No credit is due. The apology was a matter of necessity, and any delay in apologizing would have made things worse for him.
And, as others have pointed out, his claim in the apology that “I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise” is a demonstrable lie, since he has also previously slurred the sexuality and character of Keynes in print.
fraught
this is Sullivan’s fatal flaw. He loves the contradictions in his character. He seems to feel they give him an interesting, eccentric complexity that is “very English” and is so fascinating to those who happen to be observing him. It’s what allows him to blather on about his religion endlessly, and his ‘real’ conservatism, and his gayness and how they all compete inside his superior brain for space. He needs to meet that dude in Cambridge who went off on the infowars asshat. “You got nothing, diickwad, you got your dick in your hand, fuck you.”
Frankensteinbeck
His insult couldn’t exist without a backdrop of homophobia. You do not insult someone by calling them gay unless you somehow think being gay is bad. If you call them gay in a heated moment and your argument is that being gay cuts you off from making moral decisions, you have betrayed some serious homophobia. It does not matter if Andrew Sullivan is your Gay Friend or if you like to say you detest prejudice. There are no backsies on this, Ferguson.
Bruce S
“punching down at the people below you…”
In this case, Ferguson is definitely punching “up” – no matter how he sees it and despite the sting of “otherness” he uses in an attempt to slime Keynes. Frankly, given Ferguson’s academic credentials, it’s more embarrassing that he doesn’t even attempt to understand the quote by Keynes he was referencing than that he subjects something about which he is clueless to some cheap, gutter psychologizing.
Sullivan is who he has always been. I’ve never liked the guy and the fact that he is capable of some modicum of embarrassment and shifting of positions once they’re obviously untenable doesn’t make him any more of an interesting or credible “public intellectual.” His tenure at The New Republic was marked by some of the most disgusting and dishonest episodes in that magazines checkered history – he’s never really apologized for any of that sick shit. He’s a self-absorbed twit whose marginal efforts to lean in the direction of decency are in direct proportion to his self-interest.
Chris
I fucking hate these people (Sullivan in this case) – the ones who go out and pat bigots on the head with soothing tones and say “there, there, you’re not REALLY prejudiced if you’re okay with having dinner with them and interacting with them. If IN YOUR HEART you don’t hate them, it’s all good.”
Wayne t
Sullivan is the gay Clarence Thomas. The acceptable type acceptable types love.
Bruce S
There’s really not much difference between Niall Ferguson regurgitating a long-standing slur against Keynes – essentially repeating some wack crack that even the Neo-Con harpie Gertrude Himmelfarb was able to dress in more intellectually pretentious rhetoric – and the new NRA President yammering on about “The War of Northern Aggression.” The idiot from the NRA didn’t “apologize”, but then it’s not really in his interest to back-track. Ferguson, in his gut, has exactly the same rhetorical instincts and intellectual integrity as that flaming fucking yahoo gun nut.
Bruce S
@Wayne t</a
Except, unfortunately, Sullivan isn’t mostly mute.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
It wasn’t even just the homophobia – it was also Ferguson’s weird assertion that people who don’t have their own biological children can’t possibly care about the future of the human race. He seemed to assume everyone else shares this belief. What it says to me is that HE doesn’t give a crap about anyone who doesn’t share his DNA.
techno
Ferguson is at Harvard because he is as close to an intellectual the conservatives have. This blast at Keynes is a perfect example of his problem. The Keynesians are so far advanced in their economic thinking that the neoliberal sludge we have been dealing with for a generation cannot respond on an intellectual level. It’s like comparing Copernicus to the Pope. So he lashes out at Keynes’ sexuality.
I have known about Keynes and his ballerina for over 40 years now and find the story utterly charming. But much more importantly, what Keynes did or did not do in the bedroom has NO relationship whatsoever to his writings. It is telling that the knuckle-draggers have this VAST body of work on economics to debate and yet they want to talk sex. Pretty much demonstrates the bankruptcy of their ideas. Discussing macroeconomics intelligently is hard—having an opinion about sex is easy.
Ferguson’s problem is that he is not very bright or well-read. He IS smart enough to to impress rich people and unfortunately, that seems to be enough for Harvard.
reflectionephemeral
I doubt that it matters. He’s a made man. His professed bigotry is beside the point, under the table with a chemical shake.
Hopefully this is enough to affect his reputation beyond blog-readers-and-commentators like me, but… I doubt it.
Suzanne
I hate anti-fat prejudice so much. (This is when someone steps in to call me fat, just watch.) It’s sickening how so many people, including liberals who should know better, conflate a body shape that might not be aesthetically pleasing with sloth, gluttony, poor morality, and trashiness. I had hoped we’d be over this shit.
Mandalay
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. His apology certainly acknowledged that he should not have said what he said, but did nothing to explain what really provoked him to make such bizarre comments.
I suspect that is because the real truth – known only to him – is dark and ugly.
Though far less serious, his mini-meltdown reminds me of the n-clang tirade from Michael Richards a few years ago: something snapped and the foul truth spewed out.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Suzanne: you can thank Christopher Hitchens for the “fat slag” comment about the Dixie Chicks.
Villago Delenda Est
Fuck the vile shitstain Ferguson and double fuck apologetic asswipe Sullivan.
Chris
@reflectionephemeral:
I’ve never heard the phrase “made man” used to describe people of notoriety on the wingnut welfare circuit. Obvious really. Well put!
Mandalay
@Suzanne:
I second that (and I’m not fat). And add mental illness to the list.
Even here, where other obvious forms of prejudice get smacked down quickly, mental illness has been a ripe target for mockery.
Suzanne
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Oh, I know. But even on this blog, some commenters seem to think that calling Chris Christie “fat” is a worse insult than calling him “disingenuous self-involved asshole”.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Suzanne: oh, I know who you’re talking about.
El Cid
Are you fucking shitting me? Kudos to him for admitting once publicly embarrassed that a fucking ridiculous, not-for-one-fucking-second legitimate point which never should ever have been made was ridiculous?
What is this idiot fucking bullshit courtesy to this fucking pathetic courtesan about anyway?
Fuck this worthless son of a bitch.
There are hundreds of fucking grad students who are better colonial historians than this preening sack of shit.
Fuck him.
SO god-damned tired of these worthless pseudo-intellectuals occupying the public sphere and we’re supposed to fucking genuflect and shit out piles of forgiveness for the latest backtracking of whatever cravenness they just issued.
Suzanne
@Mandalay: Considering that I had to involuntarily commit my mother a couple of weeks ago and she’s still a hundred times the quality person some of these clowns could ever hope to be, I concur with you 100%.
Suzanne
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Not talking about any one person in particular.
Mandalay
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Strange as it may seem, I suspect that Hitchens was actually attempting to be humorous, since there used to be a popular British comic strip with that name. Of course most Americans would not know about that, and presumably Hitchens didn’t give a shit either way.
DPS
I think that Niall is experiencing fear. He has gotten away with this same argument before. He was not aware that the world had changed and that what he had done before had become riskier. I’m not sure whether he’s afraid that this will have consequences at Harvard or that it’ll harm his speaking fees or both. But he didn’t just come up with this off the cuff; this is something he’s used before (as other commenters have pointed out) and something that you’d have to have thought about to come up with (which isn’t necessarily to say that he planned to bring it out at this particular event—maybe he’d decided to retire it but he just couldn’t help himself.)
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Mandalay: I’m familiar with the comic. I think Hitchens knew exactly what he was doing, and wasn’t trying to be funny at all. He was deliberately calling them “whores”, to be nasty.
Nemo_N
Another gem from Ferguson:
Why can’t shrill liberal Paul Krugman be more civil!
Viva
Over the years I’ve discovered Niall Ferguson to be such a jerk and such an egomaniac that I ignore everything he says – and am unsurprisingly no less informed.
Mandalay
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Without doubt, and what he said was vile. As with Ferguson’s comments yesterday, Hitchens revealed his ugly inner self to the world.
I’m just suggesting that there was a reason he chose that specific insult, and it was his pathetic private joke that most Americans would not understand that reason.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
Sullivan and Ferguson can both DIAF. Apology or no.
Yutsano
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS): Wholehearted concurment.
Mandalay
@DPS:
This is the most plausible explanation I have seen for what happened. He IS homophobic, he has done this in the past, and managed to get away with it.
Even Republicans have learned in the past year or so to mostly STFU about gay issues, but Ferguson’s giant ego led him to believe that he could still say whatever nasty thoughts entered his head.
Chris T.
With or without apologies, the argument that “the long run” is all that matters—this seems to be their argument—is still completely bogus.
(1) Just how long is this “long run”? Is it 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? 200,000 years? numbers, anyone?
(2) If only “the children” (or even “the grandchildren”) matter, and “long run” is “50 years and onward” so that it does not affect anyone who is, say, currently 50 or older (assuming no one lives past 100): let’s say things continue to be miserable for the next 50 years, after which “the long run” kicks in and makes everything totally better. That means kids born today, who have your grandkids in 20 or 30 years, suffer for their first 50 years, and their grandkids suffer for their first 20 to 30 years. So (speaking to “them”): you austerians plan to inflict all kinds of pain and suffering on those alive today AND their kids AND their grandkids, just so that once the kids are 50+ and the grandkids are at least 20, their lives will be better? How about making their lives better now?
NotMax
@Suzanne
Agreed. Facile, cheap and crass, yet shows up here disturbingly frequently. Although feel that some of those comments reflect not staunch prejudice but are just easy and shallow slurs tossed out casually but unthinkingly.
Incidentally, you might be interested in this story of a photographer documenting some of what you speak.
Frankensteinbeck
@NotMax:
There is a legitimate (if sad) point to discuss with Christie that his weight and appearance affect his electability. I don’t think anyone here would disagree that the American public is shallow and these things make a difference. Unfortunately you are right and some posters just make fun of him for his weight.
Petorado
So Ferguson resorted to the old trope of dehumanizing his intellectual opponent because he has nothing to surpass Keynes with intellectually, so he’ll just try to make Keynes less of a person to the audience. That’s the last resort of a complete hack.
Harvard winds up looking like a complete piece of sh*t in all of this because everyone with a degree from there looks like they are only well-connected descendants who’ve been subjected to utter bullish*t by the flavor-of-the-month conservative “intellectual” who just proved they ain’t got sh*t and all they can pass along to the next generation is “if you’ve lost the argument, just bitch-slap your opponent.”
Ferguson is an idiot passing himself off as something more, and all he did was open his mouth and prove that to the rest of the world. Fk you Niall.
Ruckus
@Nemo_N:
He must have been looking in a mirror when he said that. Talk about kettle and black.
ChrisNYC
Yeah, I’m with the no credit for the apology crowd. A good part of his life is devoted to saying the not Western means lesser. He’s an asshole. This is what he has to say about his wife:
IOW, she’s the very noblest of savages. Completely creepy.
Gian
@Suzanne:
I’d hope we could distinguish a list of right wing schoolyard insults without picking one to get personally offended by.
I mean if I get it if that particular issue gets your goat. But the original person posting it wasn’t doing anything other than illustrating a point about right wing personal attacks. Is it not a right wing argument that Al Gore or Michael Moore for that matter has a BMI that is higher than average? To clarify, I think I understand the basic point, I’m just not certain it applies to the original post.
And I even see it politically. When I see the bits in right wing media about how poor people are overweight, I know damn well that “dollar menu” fast food is nearly a necessity for people living Bush’s American dream of 3-4 part time minimum wage jobs without benefits.
Steve J.
SCHUMPETER, CAPITALISM, FATS AND FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
You may recall that Fats Limbaugh attacked Mike Huckabee for not being a real conservative because the Huckster wasn’t a devotee of the Free Market Fairy. At the time I thought this signaled an irreparable breajk between the Jeebus Fundies and the Free Market Fundies but I was wrong (e.g., Michele Bachmann). That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rift between these religious sects and Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th Century Apostles of the Free Market Fairy, admitted as much in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,. first published in 1942. You can get an image PDF here and convert it to searchable text if you have Adobe Acrobat.
On pages 157-58 Schumpter notes that the calculations of Homo Economicus lead to the conclusion that having children simply doesn’t pay:
Still more important however is another “internal cause,” viz. the disintegration of the bourgeois family. … To men and women in modern capitalist societies, family life and parenthood mean less than they meant before and hence are less powerful molders of behavior;
As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action–or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting -they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets. These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety-alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a critical analysis of increasing severity.
Posted by Steve J. at 5:53 PM
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Gian: She’s not talking about DougJ’s post. She’s talking about some of the commenters here.
Chris
@ChrisNYC:
Every now and then I hear them compliment the “noble savages” that way. “They know the true goodness of our civilization, and you liberals and activists and moochers should be more appreciative like them!”
Funny enough, though, they don’t seem to care about These People’s opinions when it comes to anything else. Like, “don’t bomb us.”
bad Jim
The Austerians keep talking shit about Keynes in support of their argument that anything that increases the deficit is a crime against the future. In their eyes, a policy of fiscal stimulus is not merely mistaken but utterly immoral, even perverse.
Calouste
@ChrisNYC: That is indeed very creepy. Otoh, his Wife has worked out that being the right wings anti-Muslim house Muslim is a pretty sweet gig, suggesting that Islam is in the dark ages is pretty much the core of her career.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris T.:
“The long run” is, for vermin like Ferguson, a signal that things cannot change, that there is no arc of history, that no improvements are possible, and that you should just wait for the big rock candy mountain in the sky to take you away from this mortal coil.
It’s the same bullshit that the oppressors have always given the oppressed.
Keynes was mocking the apologists for the shitty status quo in his quote. We can make things better, for everyone. We have the means, but we don’t yet have the will.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Nemo_N: The number of times I’ve seen some Republican/Tory issue a statement that amounts to nothing but one long ad hominem attack on Paul Krugman’s character or manners in his “attacking” other economists while somehow missing the fact that this is all that the one doing the accusing is engaged in that very moment is truly astonishing.
Self-awareness and haughty denial of reality don’t cohabitate well, clearly.
Also lest it get lost in the shuffle, Ferguson’s argument even without the gay bashing is a deliberate distortion of a truncated line from Keynes:
Chris T.
Incidentally, the “deficits! debt! disaster!” people remind me of someone coming across a horrible auto accident, where the driver has been thrown out of the car and has had an arm or leg broken and is rapidly bleeding to death, with the Austerian standing there, stroking his beard, and murmuring: “the patient appears to have high cholesterol, we must put him on statins immediately!”
AA+ Bonds
Uhhhhhhhhhh he is a homophobe. Would “oh, Mexicans are all lazy” slip out of the mouth of someone who didn’t hold that view?
Xenos
Of course, Sullivan believes Ferguson is not a bigot because Ferguson had Sullivan be godfather to his child. Since Ferguson is an avowed athiest, how is this supposed to be proof of something? Talk about offering someone the sleeves of one’s vest.
Narcissus
He accidentally said what he really thinks. It happens.
Anne Laurie
@ChrisNYC: His second wife. Ferguson ran out on his own first three kids when he knocked up his ‘completely differently civilised’ mistress. But, hey, in Conservaworld serial polygamy probably just indicates an alpha male who’s too important for mere fidelity!
PeakVT
Let’s move on to Brits doing something constructive: Johnny Marr plays and sings (!) How Soon Is Now?
Suzanne
@Gian: Uh, I am talking about the fact that, despite the blog master himself being admittedly overweight, some frequent commenters here think it’s okay to insult fat people. Coming from people who ostensibly care about ridding our discourse of prejudice, it is exceptionally jarring and disappointing. And I personally have been called fat before when I bring this up, despite the fact that 1) my BMI is in the healthy range and always has been, and 2) “fat” shouldn’t be an insult anyway, no more than “brunette” or “tall” or any of the other words we use to describe our bodies.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@PeakVT: Here’s another version of that song that I’m sure you’ll love :-)
PeakVT
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Cannot unhear. Damn you! /shakes fist
JenJen
Posts like these are exactly why I heart DougJ.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Chris T.: It’s actually sort of worse than that, like the doctor calling for anti-coagulants instead of stopping the bleeding. The austerians are not only refusing to do what’s needed to stop the bleeding, they’re actively doing things that are making it much worse.
Plus, to extend the metaphor a little further, when the victim’s wife says to the doctor “Fine, when he’s stable we should take measures about the cholesterol but for God’s sake stop the bleeding right now!”, the doctor later characterizes this as “His wife said that she doesn’t care about the future” or “she believes that high cholesterol is a good thing that we should never worry about” or etc.
SRW1
Ah, come on. Just a bit of counterfactual history. It’s what Nial does. Professionally.
Aimai
@Bruce S: right on. Perfectly stated.
The Other Bob
@GregB:
Not sure what Limbaugh and Coulter being childless means to conservatism, but to the rest of America, I call it a blessing they did not reproduce.
Xenos
@The Other Bob: Maybe they would have children who decent, honest people, and not sociopaths like themselves. That would be a pretty good punishment, having to justify themselves to their children.
The Other Bob
@Xenos:
Good luck to that. I see a Limbaugh kid as Luke Russert, and having to prove himself by being more outragous than daddy.
Lurking Canadian
@Chris: I’ll go further. The good wogs WANT us to bomb them, so they can welcome us with flowers. Therefore, any wog who doesn’t want to be bombed just proves himself the enemy.
WereBear
This incident illustrates how impossible it can be to wrench the seething mass of wingnuts away from their special pundits, be they “elite Ivy League intellectuals” like Ferguson or grassroots down-home fellas like Limbaugh.
They both drip the poison these damaged minds find so sweet.
Cygil
Niall Fergusen isn’t a homophobe. He’s just willing to exploit the homophobic prejudices of his audience to win debates he can’t win on an intellectual or technical level.
So he’s just a manipulative hypocrite, right? Andrew Sullivan, your dickery had once again freed me from having any sympathy for you. Andrew Sullivan’s “principles” are invariably about what’s good for Andrew Sullivan at any given moment, including defending his clique of elitist psuedointellectual friends.
debbie
It’s been that way throughout history, but as a historian, you’d have thought Ferguson would have known that.
aimai
@Cygil:
This is basically true. He isn’t calling Keynes a fag because he thinks fags are bad (he’s a homophobe) he is calling a Fag “Keynes” because he thinks that a liberal economist is a bad thing and should retroactively be stopped and smeared and attacked so he can stop influencing people to be liberal. This explains why he can (sincerely?) be friends with Sullivan. He cares less about who Sullivan is so publicly fucking than the fact that Sullivan is his friend and a permanent Tory on matters that matter.
Also the entire written attack on Keynes linked at Lawyers Guns and Money reeks of at attempt by a second ranker to join a more important crowd at college by pretending to a familiarity and an intimacy that he could never have earned on his own merits. “I saw Keynes with the pool boy” comes across as a way of extorting and exploiting an an intimacy which he could never have had socially or intellectually.
Cygil
@Chris:
I fucking hate these people (Sullivan in this case) – the ones who go out and pat bigots on the head with soothing tones and say “there, there, you’re not REALLY prejudiced if you’re okay with having dinner with them and interacting with them. If IN YOUR HEART you don’t hate them, it’s all good.”
From a review of Hitler’s Vienna in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
At the risk running afoul of Godwin’s law, point proven, I would say.
WereBear
This is explained by the fact that he’s not a historian; he is simply “sold” as one. Just like he’s not an intellectual… he has only been labeled as such by the people who market him.
The right wing billionaires have financed a Shadow Civilization that runs parallel to our own. It has its own pundits, intellectuals, investigative journalism, religious leaders, and politicians… much like the real world.
But ALL of these are merely puppets, interchangeable meat which the Dark Lords have dance. It is to seduce the weak-minded into thinking they are intelligent for agreeing with someone from Harvard, and that they are not racist because someone wrote an “explanation,” and that their paranoiac fantasies are real, and so shall be their wish-fulfillment.
We cannot pull back the curtain, like in Oz, and exclaim it’s all smoke and mirrors. The fans know that, on some level, but they love what they are being told so much they do not care.
The only thing we can do is stop creating these vulnerable idiots by advancing the culture to encourage learning, art, compassion, and actual thinking. Look at how far we have come in just the last half of the twentieth century.
That’s my glass half-full.
Kay
Sorry. He’s still repulsive. The mention of the miscarriage means he’s still clinging to some theory that ties having children to responsibility or prudence.
The original story made me laugh. For some reason I love that he felt he had to mention that the wife was a ballerina.
Do people start giggling at these conferences? WTF does “ballerina” have to do with anything?
debbie
@WereBear:
Like Kathleen Parker on Chris Matthews this morning. Her “scoop and prediction” was that her sources were telling her that something powerful would be exposed when Benghazi hearings start on Wednesday. In response to others’ eye rolling and saying her sources were Fox, she protested that it would be good for Matthews’ program — it would give it credibility — for her to say what she had said.
Kay
@debbie:
The Benghazi stuff is intended to damage Clinton, I think.
Even if they don’t find anything they can create a cloud.
It’s so hackish and obvious that I’m a little insulted.
Hunter
@efgoldman: So did digby, and also went on to point out some statements by Ferguson that indicate he doesn’t care about the future, either — at least, not anyone else’s.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/wanker-of-century-niall-ferguson.html
debbie
@Kay:
Insulted is the polite way to put it, but it will be yet one more distraction from the issues that matter most, unfortunately.
Loviatar, Firebagger
Why is it always to someone’s credit when they apologize, especially when they’re apologizing for making bigoted remarks. Shouldn’t the credit be given for not making bigoted remarks in the first place.
Kay
@debbie:
They so bungled it. They made it about Susan Rice’s statement. Why was that the focus? Why not State or the CIA?
It’s annoying to me that they made it blatantly political right from the start, and now they want to claim some higher “truth!” mission.
If they had wanted to find something out they shouldn’t have spent months on Rice’s statement. The fact that they did that damages their credibility.
debbie
@Kay:
Susan Rice was a woman and a minority. It was too tempting for them to resist.
cat48
I’ll Never Forget It: “Obama is black like Felix the Cat.” I thought maybe the FT was letting children write that week. It’s just unbelievable to me that a grownup would come up with that.
Anya
@cat48: The full quote is even more impressive. Notice how he packed in this little paragraph a lot of right wing crap — black man is not accomplished or crafty but lucky. Also, too, look he’s taking a vacation. Only thing missing is the affirmative angle. This idiocy and the Newsweek cover prove that no one edits anything this man writes.
Mandalay
@AA+ Bonds:
An interesting example, since Bill Maher goes down that path a lot. I don’t buy the argument that comedians get a free pass to say whatever they want because they say it for laughs rather than from malice.
Maher’s crafty. He may make the slur seem to come from the mouth of a wingnut rather than himself, or quickly (dis)qualify his slur with his meaningless “just kidding!” disclaimer. He might argue that he is ridiculing the prejudice rather than Mexicans, but that is not the end result; he keeps resuscitating an ugly and very dated stereotype, and makes it OK to laugh about it.
lojasmo
@Mandalay:
I never found that to work out well for him. Nor did I ever find him to be entertaining or intelligent.
Mandalay
@Kay:
In that instance “they” was really just John McCain. He had a fierce personal hostility towards Rice because she had publicly mocked McCain over Georgia (“We are all Georgians now…”) and safety in Iraq. At the time other Republicans were actually distancing themselves from McCain over his ranting against Rice, but he threw such a tantrum that he won.
It was nothing to do with politics or the statement; it was personal. I am not sure why you think they “bungled it”, since Rice withdrew herself from possible nomination as a result.
Mike in NC
@Chris: Sully and Fergie are Tory assholes.
aimai
@Mandalay:
Wait a minute–so Hitchens was trying to be funny by making a sly reference to an entirely forgotten musical band instead of a direct and insulting reference to ugly whores in a demotic form while Maher is guilty of “reviving old sterotypes” and thus perpetuating racism when he refers to right wing shibboleths? Have I got that right?
Patricia Kayden
@Calouste: Given that the Muslim fanatics in Holland killed Theo Van Gogh after he co-produced the film Submission with her, I understand where her anti-Islam feelings come from. Not saying that she’s 100% correct, but she had to flee Holland based on death threats from Muslim extremists. There is some validity to her opinions on that particular subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_%28film_director%29
Roy G.
Mitt Romney apologized and tried to recant his 47% comment too – what he and (De)Niall and the others who get caught are truly sorry about is that their true feelings were made public, outside of the bubble.
Patricia Kayden
@debbie: Let’s all hold our breaths until Wednesday then. Dying to hear this big scoop!
/not.
RaflW
Brad DeLong totally nails it:
Indeed.
That this Niall chap could so easily, in an off the cuff moment, slide into (attempting) a gay slur shows that he’s full of shit when he says “As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.” Why did going after Keynes on teh gey pop into his head in an unguarded moment? Hmmmm.
DeLong goes deeper into the historical record to doubly condemn him on that.
Mandalay
@aimai:
No. Not even close.
SATSQ.
debbie
@RaflW:
Wonder if he wishes he’d had a teleprompter?!?
aimai
@Mandalay:
Well, if you won’t admit to the incoherence of your own views, I suppose I can’t be surprised. Its incoherence all the way down with you.
Uncle Cosmo
Were Sully & Rusty Niall bloody-brothers at All Souls, or All Heels? Or maybe All Shills?
I find Ferguson interesting & thought-provoking when he addresses “counterfactuals,” i.e., what might have ensued if something different had happened in real life. But no one should let him within a botched assassination attempt of actual history.
El Cid
If no other real historian is available, Ferguson does a good imitation of one, especially if you imagine a historian to be an aristocratically-minded, imperial fetishist.
Don’t mistake him for a serious intellectual, even though the accents are similar.