Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

I was promised a recession.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Bark louder, little dog.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

You are here: Home / Archives for Freddie deBoer

Freddie deBoer wrote for Balloon juice from 2011-12.

Freddie deBoer

Inflection points

by | 61 Comments

This post is in: 

I hope to have something of considerable substance up about the Chicago teachers’ union strike up in the next three days, specifically looking at the empirical evidence concerning teachers’ unions, student demographics, and academic performance. (For example: complaining about the high school dropout rates at Chicago Public Schools without mentioning that 90% of Chicago’s public school students are eligible for subsidized lunch is unhelpful at best, dishonest at worst.) But I wanted to take a minute and say, simply: this is where the rubber meets the road. I think you should pay very close attention to this strike and how the usual suspects talk about it. The issues at hand here are very basic and vastly important, for the future of the left. I know that people tire of the meta discussions, but I think that it’s always important to define what we believe and who we stand with. These questions are existential in the broadest sense.

It doesn’t take a wild guess to know that I stand with the picketing teachers. It also probably won’t surprise you to know that rising neoliberal wunderkind Dylan Matthews, writing to his patron’s large readership, has come out on the other side. People are going to take sides and those sides will tell you everything– about their grasp on empiricism and social science, their respect for working people and labor, and whether they are willing to extend American abundance to public employees.

Do you think that teaching should be a high-status position that carries with it a decent wage and the chance for meaningful pay raises? Or do you want to continue the relentless assault on the profession? That is the essential question at stake here.

Update: Corey Robin is essential here.

Inflection pointsPost + Comments (61)

Tweet It, Like It, Drop Copies of It From an Airplane

by | 46 Comments

This post is in: 

Forgive me for posting just to link to something, but I’ve wanted to share this for awhile. It’s a blog post by Greg Laden on the constantly expressed “correlation is not causation” line. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t hear someone online respond to data by saying “correlation does not imply causation!” as if that were an argument against any specific claim, rather than a vague and frequently unhelpful truism. Laden:

 Sometimes, we have reason to believe that two things co-vary because of one or more external causes. Aridity in one region of the world is correlated with higher rainfall in another reason of the world, and it turns out that both meteorological variations are caused by the effects of the Pacific El Nino. Quite often, especially in complex systems like are often dealt with in the social sciences, we can replicate correlations among various phenomena but we may have multiple ideas about what the causal structure underlying the phenomenon at hand may be. Repeated observations rule out random associations or meaninglessness in the data, but we are faced with multiple alternative models for where to put the causal arrows. In other words, we’re pretty sure there is a “causal link” somewhere, but we can’t see, or agree amongst ourselves, on what it is.

I can, for example, show you a correlation between the percentage of a given school’s students that utilize the free lunch program and that school’s performance on certain standardized tests of academic performance. Now: does whether a student eats his or her lunch for free cause him or her to perform worse on a standardized test? Of course not. We are using that as a convenient, easily-accessible and highly effective proxy for socioeconomic status. But even then, are we claiming that it’s actually the money (or lack thereof) in a parent’s bank account that causes academic deficiency? Of course not. We are assuming a line of influence from an observable and influential variable that frequently results in a given outcome, even though we are still unsure about every discrete step within that line of influence. We are pointing out that a complex, multivariate phenomenon like the relationship between parental income and student performance can nevertheless be understood as producing certain consistently observable consequences through which we can make educated decisions about our policy.

To look at such a correlation and say “poverty is definitely the sole cause of this particular student’s performance on this standardized test” or “all students from poverty will score similarly on a standardized test” would indeed be stupid; but who is suggesting such things? And it is, in my opinion, equally stupid to look at the remarkably consistent and robust correlation between socioeconomic status and educational performance and respond by saying, “well, correlation is not causation, so we just have to consider these as separate phenomena.” Like Laden says: don’t be a dumbass. Use your head; use common sense. Because frankly, if we are afraid to speak about correlation because of the true but frequently irrelevant fact that it doesn’t ensure causation, our jobs as both students of reality and citizens of the world become vastly harder.

Read the whole thing.

Tweet It, Like It, Drop Copies of It From an AirplanePost + Comments (46)

The Party of Petty Resentment

by | 103 Comments

This post is in: ,

Can you imagine– can you imagine— if a leading Democrat deliberately dissed the intended honorees of, say, Memorial Day? Can you imagine how the mainstream media would report on it?

Eric Cantor, it almost goes without saying, has never worked a day in his life. A career politician, as so many haters of government are, his only work in the private sector was spent in the family business that he was lucky enough to be born into. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to mock workers with talk of “earning your own success” when working for your Daddy’s business is the closest you’ve ever come to honest labor. What a childish, classless display.

Tonight I drink for everyone who ever worked and suffered for it, the people who built the country that Cantor and his party exploit. The dignity of our working people is beyond the cheap insults of the Eric Cantors of the world.

The Party of Petty ResentmentPost + Comments (103)

Bias Is As Bias Does

by | 94 Comments

This post is in: 

Jon Chait’s peculiar, pointless wander through Hollywood’s liberal bias says a lot, I guess, about a lot– about mainstream liberalism’s passionate self-hatred, about liberal commentators’ refusal to straightforwardly express the superiority of their values (as conservatives have done to incredible political effect), and about what a weird form of toothless cultural liberalism New York Magazine now represents.

I find Chait’s repeated claim that conservatives are no longer fighting the culture war against Hollywood to be self-evidently absurd. We’re living in a world with Big Hollywood and An American Carol and Archbishop Dolan and seemingly hundreds of conservative groups that “monitor” Hollywood and televsion…. Michael Medved, quoted credulously and at length in the piece, enjoys national prominence. The Parents Television Council makes national news just about every month. It’s a bizarre claim, the kind that you can only make if you are living the secluded, myopic life that you think you’re critiquing.

But I’ll leave that fight to others. For my part, I just want to point out the incoherence of trying to talk about bias as an expression of anything other than the preferences of the person making the claim. Chait wants us to take conservative claims of cultural bias in Hollywood seriously. He wants to suggest that bias is somehow illegitimate even if he doesn’t agree with the perspective of those claiming bias. “Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion. You’d probably be angry, too.”

You’ll note that conservatives would never undertake a similar project; you are not going to find a conservative writer concern trolling about the massive conservative bias in our military, or in our corporate world, despite the fact that both of these are vastly more powerful forces than Hollywood. Nor will you hear conservatives worrying aloud about the conservative bias of American Christianity, or sports media, or video games. The reason, of course, is that these biases are not seen as bias at all, but just the way things are. To conservatives and ostensibly liberal worriers like Chait, bias is only and ever liberal. Liberal bias in our African American studies programs is a problem to be solved. Conservative bias in the chambers of commerce? Hey, that’s life.

The truth is that there is no vantage point from which you can observe bias that isn’t your own contingent, ideological perspective. Nor are complaints about bias qua bias ever consistently applied. After all, I too hate Hollywood’s biases. I hate Hollywood’s bias towards capitalism, towards simplistic Manicheanism, towards militarism, towards the notion that all problems can be solved through violence, towards the very idea of righteous violence. I hate that Hollywood acts as if every happy life ends in romantic coupling, or that every happy couple has to maintain sexual monogamy, or that raising children is necessarily the endpoint of the good life. I hate Hollywood’s cultural colonialism, its sexism, its heteronormativity, its treatment of gender confusion as comedic. I hate Hollywood for its empty, useless cultural liberalism that suggests that structural changes are never necessary. I hate its bias towards the establishment.

Now: there’s nothing inherently different between my claims of bias and conservative claims of bias. And yet knowing Jon Chait’s work, I can say with certainty that he would never take my complaints seriously in the same way that he takes conservative complaints seriously. He would not ask you to put yourself in my shoes. In fact, as he is the kind of Very Serious liberal that merely dislikes those to his right but passionately hates those to his left, he would be far more likely to treat my complaints with straightforward contempt– which of course is merely to say that he is, himself, biased, as we all are. That’s the problem with claims of bias: there’s no way to stand outside of yourself. Better just to advocate for what you think of as right. (You know what I call more gay characters on television, more nontraditional families in movies, more anti-big business narratives out there? Moral progress.)

Oh, by the way, since it wouldn’t be a piece of neoliberal big think without some flat factual errors: Chait claims that “In Red Dawn, the paranoid 1984 action film about a Communist invasion of America, the Cuban commander of the occupying Communist forces (don’t ask) ultimately lets rebel leader Patrick Swayze go free, and the story ends with a meditation on the evils of war.”

And here’s IMDB’s transcript of the end of that movie:

Erica: [closing narration] I never saw the Eckert Brothers again. In time, this war – like every other war – ended. But I never forgot. And I come to this place often, when no one else does.

[we see “Partisan Rock,” with its memorial plaque, which she reads for us]

Erica: “… In the early days of World War 3, guerillas – mostly children – placed the names of their lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives, so that this nation should not perish from the earth.”

Yeah, it’s straight out of Eugene Debs.

Bias Is As Bias DoesPost + Comments (94)

Another Casualty of the Administrative Invasion of the University

by | 88 Comments

This post is in: 

People are often surprised at how adamant I am that cutting administrative costs is a huge part of making college less expensive. Surely, the administrative costs– which means, to a very large degree, the salaries of administrators and the number of administrators employed– can’t be that much higher than they once were, right?

They can be. And it’s a huge, huge problem.

Here’s one of the saddest stories I’ve read about in ages. The University of Georgia’s student run newspaper, The Red and Black, is a no-bullshit great student newspaper. Or was. Yesterday the entire student leadership walked out, thanks to a paternalistic and heavy-handed Board of Directors who are uncomfortable with actual journalism. In a heartbreaking open letter from the former Editor in Chief:

The newspaper has always been a student-run operation, but recently, we began feeling serious pressure from people who were not students. In less than a month, The Red & Black has hired more than 10 permanent staff with veto power over students’ decisions.

In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial director at The Red & Black,” a member of The Red & Black’s Board of Directors stated the newspaper needs a balance of good and bad. Under “Bad,” it says, “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism.’ If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.” I took great offense to that, but the board member just told me this is simply a draft. But one thing that would not change is that the former editorial adviser, now the editorial director, would see all content before it is published online and in print. For years, students have had final approval of the paper followed by a critique by the adviser only after articles were published. However, from now on, that will not be the case. Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take “grip and grin” photos and compromise the design of the paper.

It’s totally disgraceful for a great, student-run– and thus student-centered– program be forced to bow down to ten pencil pushers who almost certainly got their jobs because they know somebody with connections. And for it to happen in a way that threatens journalistic independence is shameful. (For context, my public high school’s student newspaper was also quite acclaimed, and we enjoyed more editorial independence than is described in the letter.) Why is this happening?

It’s hard for people outside of the university system to understand just how many layers of useless bureaucracy have been added in recent decades. There are more buildings filled with more people with vague and redundant titles at the average university now, it’s incredible. Completing minor tasks gets you shuffled through the byzantine architecture of a vast bureaucracy. Jobs that were once performed as part of the duties of the professoriate have now been shuffled off to administrators who have no educational experience and no educational credentials, resulting in a massive hiring binge; meanwhile, the ranks of tenure track faculty continue to shrink, to say nothing of stagnant wages among the actual educators.

The bureaucratic takeover is more pronounced in public universities because of the explicitly political nature of recent changes in their structure. Republican state lawmakers realized that public universities could be a tool to enforce their political ends, but first, they needed to stack the deck by filling them with cronies. And fill them they have, as typical estimates for the increase in the number of college administrators from the late 1990s to the late 2000s are typically between 30-40%. This court-packing has multiple benefits for conservative state apparatchiks: college administrative jobs are a nice bit of influence to peddle, and these administrators can act as loyalists when there is a conflict with faculty and students. I’m afraid that, if there’s a major change in a university in the last decade,  it’s more likely to have come from a petty functionary than from someone in the actual faculty. You’d be amazed at how much control these administrators truly have.

This article from the Washington Monthly gives you a good overview; it’s an adapted excerpt by Benjamin Ginsberg from his book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. If you’re interested in these topics I highly recommend it.

Update: Here’s the actual, disgraceful memo. “I guess this is ‘journalism.'” “Things we will not tolerate: Liable.”

Update II: Twitter has suspended the account the editorial board started, @redanddead815. No word as to why.

Another Casualty of the Administrative Invasion of the UniversityPost + Comments (88)

William Saletan’s Love for Paul Ryan is Based on Fantasy

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

In American national politics, it doesn’t get much more extreme than Paul Ryan, or the Ryan-Romney budget. That’s reality. Mitt Romney taking on Ryan as his running mate is like Barack Obama taking on Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich. The Ryan-Romney budget is one of the most extreme policy proposals in the history of our country, as extreme as the PATRIOT act or the Alien and Sedition acts– wartime legislation that drew on national panic. Romney’s purported strength is that he’s a moderate technocrat, a can-do businessman who will use his fiscal prudence and New England moderation to help get our national house in order without, you know, letting New Orleans get swallowed by the sea or accidentally invading Turks and Caicos. This is, of course, bullshit; Romney is neither a moderate nor a technocrat nor a fiscal conservative nor a particularly skillful executive. The Ryan nomination is merely the coup de grace, the last confirmation that Romney is an extremist beholden to a mad, extremist wing of a mad, extremist party. This is not business as usual; this is arch-conservatism by any measure.

The question is whether our media will tell the truth about this extremism. If Obama was actually to nominate Sanders or Kucinich, our political media would report on it as if the President had personally sodomized Lady Liberty while reciting The Communist Manifesto and paying children to go gay. Romney’s nomination of the even-more-extreme Paul Ryan has mostly been met with observations about Ryan’s good looks and his supposed seriousness and “wonkiness.” In the war for the Presidency of 2012, one of the key battles will be over this issue exactly: will our comprehensive failure of a new media tell the truth about the extremism of Romney, Ryan, and the Ryan-Romney budget? Will those of us opposed to Republican extremism be able to call a spade a spade and spread the word about the Romney ticket’s ultra-conservative policies?

Today we get William Saletan, Slate’s Official Correspondent on You’re a Slut and I’m in Charge of Your Uterus, waxing orgasmic about Paul Ryan. Ryan, you see, is the way a Republican “should be.” I take it that part of the point here is that those mature, centrist types like Saletan believe that we’re best served if our politicians fill predetermined roles based on vague and artificial standards, as if choosing elected officials is no different than a casting call for some shitty movie. So, you see, what the Republic needs is not for the party that is correct on the merits to succeed; what the USA needs, instead, is for someone to fill the role of Meta-Republican. That this is a vision of politics that should be reserved for children and imbeciles, I take as self-evident, but it’s almost entertaining to see someone lay their dysfunctional political ethos out there. Hey, Billy– supporting politicians based on how well they’d play the role of generic Republican on The West Wing is fucking insane.

Ah, but the specifics! The details! For, indeed, Paul Ryan is a details man. (Except that he isn’t.) Let’s get to them.

show full post on front page

William Saletan’s Love for Paul Ryan is Based on FantasyPost + Comments (68)