Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This really is a full service blog.

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

We are aware of all internet traditions.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

He really is that stupid.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

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

I was promised a recession.

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Freddie deBoer wrote for Balloon juice from 2011-12.

Freddie deBoer

Plenty of Indignation, Not Much Righteousness

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Young, affluent, digital types are as a class among the most deeply disingenuous  and full of shit people on earth. If you need to prove that, this Daniel Tosh rape joke thing may be the perfect example.

To recap: Daniel Tosh made an offensive, threatening rape joke to a member of the audience. People got mad, and good for them. Then Louis CK defended him, which was wrong. People didn’t get mad. They came up with long, bizarre, convoluted rationalizations for why they shouldn’t get mad. There’s been tons of justifications of CK on blogs and comments and Twitter and Facebook. And the whole reason for the difference is that the world is currently gargling Louis CK’s testicles, not for any genuine political reason. The exact same thing happened when the world went apeshit about Tracy Morgan’s homophobia and Louis CK defended him. It’s pure hypocrisy and it’s fucked.

Well, you know what? I think Louis CK is funny, too. But he’s just as wrong as everyone else defending Daniel Tosh. These bizarre, convoluted rationalizations are just people struggling to reconcile their politics and their tastes and choosing taste. You could take this Lindy West post at Jezebel, who argues that Louis CK’s rape humor can be excused because, um, I guess because she thinks he’s a good dude. It’s a particularly weak entry, but it’s just one of a whole genre.

Please, understand: your political convictions mean nothing if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for them. And there is no sacrifice for the vast majority of people going after Daniel Tosh because they never liked him in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s a lot to sacrifice in criticizing Louis CK, considering that they like him and his show. But that’s what convictions are, you know? Sometimes, you have to stand for something. It’s cool to like Louis CK, it isn’t cool to like Daniel Tosh, and so the Twitterati judge them accordingly. Which is a perfect example of why that whole class of people should be forced onto an ice floe and pushed out to sea.

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Today in Sucky Methodology

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Conor Friedersdorf posts a video from the Aspen Ideas and Networking for Fatuous Dinks Festival, where New Orleans and its post-Katrina charter schools are discussed. Sayeth Friedersdorf,

 New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explains how Hurricane Katrina created the conditions for school reform in his city. He went on to explain that the transformation was made possible not just because of the need to rebuild physical infrastructure, but because the displacement and layoffs that resulted from the storm sapped the power from the local teacher’s union, whose opposition would’ve otherwise made change impossible.

See, it’s the sapped power of the teachers unions that’s responsible for this (sub-head referenced but otherwise undiscussed) improvement in the schools!

As several commenters on the post discuss, a population decrease of somewhere between a quarter to a third of a city’s residents would make apples to apples comparisons a bit difficult, wouldn’t you say? Especially when the three demographic features most consistently correlated with educational outcomes– economic class, race, and parents’ education level– each had a significant post-Katrina swing towards the groups most likely to score highly. Might be worth mentioning!

If only we had some sort of systematized guidelines for how to accurately evaluate sociological data….

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If Everyone and Everything at the Aspen Ideas Festival Were Engulfed in Flames, the World Would Be No Poorer

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The world’s least sexy circle jerk is well underway at Aspen. I’m imagining David Brooks at a cocktail party, droning on to another Thought Leader about innovative innovators fostering dynamic dynamism through creative creation while he eyes up some waitress and sniffs around for money to be made.

I’m making my way through Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites, for which I’ll write a review. I’m reading about decades of failure– profound, life-altering, willful failure, failure that has caused human suffering on an incredible scale. And one of Hayes’s central points is that the exact same people who contributed to this spectacular failure are still in power, and still possess the ability to groom their successors. It’s not just that the system has fucked up, time and again, but that it has not responded to these fuck ups by removing those responsible, or by reforming the apparatus that put them in power in the first place.

The people currently celebrating themselves at Aspen are the people who best embody the system that facilitated these failures. Even if I thought that “big ideas” helped human beings rather than hurt them; even if the ideas being presented weren’t the inevitable reductive masturbatory techno-utopian self-congratulatory trite rehashes of empty buzzwords and tired cliches; even if I believed that most of the people there assembled have any real interest in improving the world, rather than improving their Q rating and driving up the cost of their speaking fees; even if they weren’t trotting out the same naked money grabs of privatization and stat juking– even then, I couldn’t get past the fact that this class of people is the self-same one that has plunged our country into depression and systemic failure. And there will always be ambitious young apparatchiks working at bloated, self-serious organizations like the Atlantic who will carry the water for the elite failures who speak at such events, in the hopes that they, someday, will get a column in the NYT and the occasional reacharound from Charlie Rose.

Our big idea men are one of the greatest threats to our country; they demand accountability from others and have none themselves, for surely the failed big ideas being debated here will be discarded and forgotten as soon as the checks clear. The Aspen Ideas Festival is expensive; the ideas are cheap, disposable.

Watch this video, absorb the awesome power of people ticking off every cliche on the Vapid Talk About Innovation checklist, realize that they’re selling the same broken promises about technology and privatization, cringe in horror at the emptiness of every word, and weep.

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A Disturbing Potential Future for Paid Commentary

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Alyssa Rosenberg wrote today about the happy news that The American Prospect is going to be saved, and about the vanity project being launched by the former editors of Good Magazine. Rosenberg sounds a guardedly hopeful note about crowd-funding and patronage, although she points out that the scale here is important. I’m rather skeptical.

Think back to the layoffs at Good. In this post from Raw Story, I found a little nugget that I think is interesting: Good‘s education editor, Liz Dwyer, appears to be one of the few who was not let go, presumably because her position is “underwritten” by the University of Phoenix. That strikes me as a more likely development for paid media than a lot of crowd-funding.

I’ve found Dwyer’s work to be interesting and frustrating. She’s written a lot of interesting, appropriately researched posts, and also a lot of head-scratchers. That tidbit about University of Phoenix suggests a possible explanation. To be clear, I’m not accusing Dwyer of anything, and I have no idea what her relationship with U of Phoenix means for her output. But it would make a lot of sense if her inconsistency is the product of her sponsorship, if she feels she has to write certain things (or more likely not write certain things) because of the relationship with the organization that pays her salary. Even if she isn’t directly influenced, there’s a clear conflict of interest here, and what she writes about for-profit and online education is suspect.

This is exactly the dynamic several commenters have described here at BJ, when we’ve talked about these issues: paid commentary as a form of PR or advertising. You can get paid to write online commentary, and even produce smart, insightful stuff, but you’ve got to remember who’s cutting the checks. This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, nor is it bad in all contexts; I certainly understand, for example, that people employed by the Center for American Progress or the Cato Institute are there in part to advance a particular point of view. But sponsorship by a for-profit entity, and in publications that aren’t explicit about that kind of advocacy, is a different story. Might we get the Washington Post Health and Nutrition Blogger, brought to you by Coke? Science journalism sponsored by Monsanto? I don’t think that sort of thing is outside the realm of possibility.

As for crowd-funding in general, well, look– there’s a lot of cool stuff going on out there. I don’t want to belittle the awesome projects being funded through Kickstarter. But crowd-funding is subject to all of the wildly optimistic, idealistic hoopla that you find with any new online development. And there’s a lot of problems with it, principally that most of us recognize a divide between the best projects and the most popular projects. I was discouraged by a recent case of Kickstarter fraud; I was downright pissed off by the reaction of a board member, who insisted that fraud on Kickstarter isn’t a big deal because, hey, it’s only little bits of money, and that Kickstarter can’t be expected to police itself and prevent future exploitation. When a board member is washing her hands of any responsibility to root out fraud and protect the integrity of the business– I’m sorry, “platform”– it doesn’t say much for the future of the website.

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No, Tyler Cowen

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I just wanted to add one quick point to DougJ’s anger at Tyler Cowen’s pure, sociopathic callousness. Elias Isquith is right to say that the post demonstrates what we’ve been saying plainly for years, which is that conservatives and libertarians actually are opposed in principled to sick poor people going to doctors and getting healed. (Tyler Cowen can come right out and say it, and that’s just adult political discourse; if I accuse Tyler Cowen of it, Andrew Sullivan and the rest of the Very Serious People will spit out their gum.) But it also highlights just how stupid this kind of callousness can make you. Says Cowen, “the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree.”

Most importantly status?

Let that roll around in your brain for a little while. Let it seep in. The most important good that the rich enjoy over the poor, in Tyler Cowen’s world, is status. What an ugly, privileged, ignorant, myopic, empirically invalid thing to say. He might as well have said “I am wealthy and have lost all ability to make discriminating observations about social class.”

I really wish Tyler Cowen would walk down to one of the poorer neighborhoods in DC and tell some desperately poor child, “You know, kid, you think you envy me because of my physical safety and security, the fact that I eat enough every day, that I don’t fear eviction, that I can go to the doctor or get medicine when sick, that I got an education, and that I enjoy material comforts and privileges that are beyond the imagination of most of the world’s people. But, honestly, it’s because I’ve just got so much more status than you do. Now stop cluttering the streets.”

In before Beltway progressives pronounce Cowen “one of the good ones.”

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Texas GOP: Everything Our Children Already Believe Is Correct

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I’ve said many times that, in American political discussion, we debate real liberalism and theoretical conservatism; in other words, liberalism is always expected to defend its actual problems and sacrifices, whereas conservatism is only held to the standard of its purely idealistic form. So, for example, you get the claim that conservatism involves a dedication to old ways and values, to the preservation of tradition.

Take it away, Texas GOP:

“We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive,” the platform says, adding that it supports teaching “common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.” In Arizona, where Republicans banned multicultural programs, students in those programs actually out-performed their peers. Texas Republicans also believe “controversial theories” such evolution and climate change — which aren’t controversial at all — “should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced.” There’s more: the GOP also opposes the teaching of “critical thinking skills” because they “focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

Yes, that’s right: the Texas Republicans are opposed to education that challenges the preexisting beliefs of the person to be educated. You’ll note that this is a total contradiction of several thousand years of educational tradition. It’s an attitude specifically rejected by such traditional figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus Christ, Thomas Aquinas, Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, etc. I suppose the Texas GOP would reply that the Declaration of Independence clearly provides for life, liberty, and the pursuit of remaining totally immune to being confronted with new ideas or information.

You’ll note that evolution is a challengeable theory, but challenging student’s fixed beliefs generally is wrong. I wonder what would happen if a student in Texas had a fixed belief in evolution because of parental authority; probably a time-space paradox that would destroy the universe. That’s the funny thing about this conservative regard for tradition– it’s never clear how long a belief has to be around for it to deserve that kind of protection. I suppose it doesn’t matter how long evolution is the scientific consensus; challenges will just keep getting grandfathered in. I wonder how this will go for students who have a fixed belief that the earth is flat, or that two plus two makes five. I think the technical term for the fixed beliefs of children is “ignorance.” If you guys need me, I’m going to be digging a shelter behind the shed and stockpiling canned goods.

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fail Purdue

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Purdue University’s Board of Trustees has just voted unanimously to install Governor Mitch Daniels as the new president. As a doctoral student at the university, there’s a lot to say about this, and I intend to, but for now it’s enough to point out that while in office Governor Daniels pushed to cut funding to Indiana’s public universities again and again. I simply cannot fathom extending an invitation to lead an organization to a man who had worked tirelessly to defund that organization; it simply would not be countenanced in other contexts. In addition, Governor Daniels’s administration has repeatedly attacked public education and public teachers,  pushing for privatization schemes like private school vouchers and ascribing broad educational failures to Indiana’s schoolteachers, without providing responsible evidence. The man is an enemy of public education in Indiana who has now been selected to run one of our public universities. Internal opposition to that selection is the purest, more rational self-interest regardless of the political views of the individuals so opposed. Our media, of course, will regard any protest as a sign of liberal bias, no matter what kinds of complaints are voiced against Daniels.

This is to say nothing of the extreme regression Daniels represents in terms of credentials. The woman he is replacing, Dr. France A. Cordova, holds a PhD in physics from CalTech, was an administrator at Los Alamos National Laboratory, chaired the department of physics at a major research university, was the youngest person ever to hold the office of Chief Scientist at NASA, sits on the National Science Board, was given the Distinguished Service Medal by NASA, and chairs the Smithsonian Board of Regents. Mitch Daniels is a career politician with essentially no educational administrative experience to speak of. Clearly, the Board of Trustees has failed to select a candidate with the kind of qualifications our previous president holds.

Finally, there’s the simple fact that members of a community and organization have a legitimate desire for leadership that reflects their values. No one would question protest of new leadership by firefighters, police officers, or any other constituency if there was a clear divide between the values of the new leadership and those of that constituency. But because our media diagnoses any expression of liberal values or liberal self-interest as inherently a matter of bias, they will inevitably ascribe such bias to protest of Daniels. Just watch.

Today, I’ve heard repeated stories of intimidation by security at the Board of Trustees meeting, including signs that forbid protests that were not in keeping with “accepted social behavior” and the like. I’m also hearing that students who took pictures of that signage and of security were followed and searched by security, unlike other attendees. Many described the meeting as unlike any event they had ever attended at Purdue in terms of the amount and aggression of security. I’m still trying to get all the facts, but as soon as I know enough and have pictures to share, I will report back to you guys.

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