This is a good segment from The Young Turks, about another MSNBC “scandal.” What happened was that Melissa Harris-Perry had some comedians on her show and they made a joke about the Romney family. Immediately, there is a freak out in the right wing media. The comedian then apologized and Harris-Perry apologized again and again and again. What’s interesting is that there is literally nothing to this. And the fact that Harris-Perry feels the need to beat herself up publicly, just shows how successful the right has been at working the refs.

Jimmy Dore is great in this segment because he totally calls it: this is false equivalence. Now, whenever anyone on MSNBC says anything that ruffles a single feather on the right, those on the left are equating it with the really vile stuff that is said on the right. This isn’t an MSNBC problem; this is a liberal problem. For all of their awful behavior, at least the right wing is loyal to itself. The left wing throws its own people under the bus for the smallest of causes.

Where I disagree with Dore is that Harris-Perry wasn’t over-apologizing because she isn’t smart. She was over-apologizing to protect her job. Given that both Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir were fired over minor things, there is no reason to believe that MSNBC wouldn’t have turned on her as well. And notice, these two guys were fired, but when Phil Robertson says the vilest of things about happy blacks before they were allowed to vote, nothing happens to him.

I have gotten used to the mainstream media bending to the whims of conservative outrage. But this is totally out of hand when the supposed liberal cable channel (that I no longer watch because of the firing of Bashir) allows itself to be worked the same way. Have you noticed that very little has been said about Sarah Palin’s outrage about Bashir and then her great defense of Phil Robertson’s free speech rights? Come on liberals. Grow a fucking backbone. We’re fighting this war of ideas on the conservatives’ terms. So even when we win, we lose.

Check out the segment; it is really good:

Because of a bit of a mix-up, I happened to read David Brooks’ yearly discussion of the Sidney Awards, The Sidney Awards, Part 1. There is nothing quite like reading David Brooks or Thomas Friedman or oh so many other major newspaper columnists to make a writer feel good about himself. With Brooks, one gets a beautiful combination of lazy thinking, boring prose, and intellectual pretense. And all of this comes together perfectly when Brooks discusses work by people who can actually think and write reasonably well without undue pretense.

In this collection, he tries to figure out if there is more to humans than just a bunch of electrochemical processes going on in the brain. Brooks is clearly divided on the issue. The religious part of him wants to think that there is something other-worldly about humans—that soul that’s gonna go to heaven and party until forever never comes. But the political part of him wants to think that humans are just a special kind of resource that businesses use to bring products to market. Having read him for years, I know where he comes down on all this. Profits over Prophets. I’ve never met a big time conservative who wasn’t perfectly clear on that issue. Profits over Prophets.

Does Science Explain All?

He starts by discussing two opposing essays by Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier. Brooks refers to them as “two intellectual heavyweights.” Well, he got that half right. Pinker is an intellectual heavyweight. Wieseltier is best described as a prominent fight promoter. These two guys tackle the question of whether science can or rather more correctly could some day tell us everything about everything. I haven’t read the articles and I have no intention of doing so. It would be hard to find a more boring question to think about. But the way that Brooks writes about the articles is so shamelessly biased as to be comical:

That’s a knockout for Wieseltier, don’t you think? Of course, there are a couple of problems. One is that, in fact most believers take Scripture literally. A 2004 CBS poll found that 55% of Americans think that God created man literally as it says in the Bible. That’s not “few,” that’s “most.” This is the number one weapon in the arsenal of religious apologists. Well, no one really believes that nonsense! But of course, they do. And when they are all alone, they encourage each other to think that nonsense. But that’s a minor issue. Let’s get to the big problem.

Pinker is not talking about finding beauty in the chemistry of the paints used by an artist. He’s a cognitive scientist. When he says that science can explain everything, he’s talking about understanding the chemistry that goes on in the brain. Why does one painting cause the brain to release endorphins while another does not? I don’t know if Wieseltier is presenting this “chemistry of the paint” strawman to knock down, but Brooks sure is. And that’s where he leaves it.

If two intelligent people were going to discuss this kind of thing, they wouldn’t be talking about a human’s reaction to art. They would be talking about whether humans could ever understand why the universe exists. And by the way: it is possible that there is an answer to that question. I believe that certain findings of math indicate that some day we will be able to prove that such a question is beyond the power of a machine that is limited to the perfect intellectual potential of the universe. In other words, it might be possible to prove that nothing can ever fully explain itself. If Pinker wants to write a book about that, I’d be interested in reading it. I’m not sure Wieseltier is even capable of understanding the question. And I know that Brooks isn’t.

Do Elephants Have Souls That We Can’t Bother Defining?

Brooks next discusses Caitrin Nicol’s essay Do Elephants Have Souls? All I can tell from what he wrote is that Nicol thinks elephants do have souls, but isn’t really clear on what souls are. I don’t know what the big deal is. To me, the soul is the essence of a person. It is what I think I am that is distinct from the environment that I live in. But for religious folk like David Brooks, it is far more difficult. And his difficulty with the word takes him back to his unfair discussion of the Pinker-Wieseltier debate. But I don’t think it is just Brooks’ problem.

He quotes Nicol as writing “when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved.” Really?! That’s award-winning writing? Because I don’t think the eyes are the windows to the soul, I don’t think people bare their soul except in the sense that they always do, I don’t usually refer to music as having soul, unless I am referring to the music of the 1960s and 1970s that combined R&B with gospel music. I don’t think we all mean more or less the same thing. Most of the people I talk to think the soul is something that lives in the body and goes up to heaven when they die. I don’t think that at all. I’m sure that elephants have souls in the sense that I understand the term soul. But it doesn’t seem like Nicol and Brooks are clear enough on the term soul to say anything at all about elephants.

Did Aaron Swartz Die Because He Was Too Free?

It seems that Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a “brilliant” profile of Aaron Swartz. That may well be. But clearly, Brooks has an ax to grind when it comes to the question of the brilliant and depressed Swartz. Brooks callously observes, “He began writing big books or starting great projects, but he usually didn’t finish them.” Well, I guess that’s one way of saying that he was an idea guy. He was Frank in “Frank, Frank turned the crank; Joe, Joe made it go.” But you could just call him a loser who didn’t finish what he started. Less than a year after his tragic suicide, I guess the “loser” definition is the reasonable choice to explain Swartz. He uses the story to argue in favor of structure and not allowing those kids too much intellectual freedom. No mention is made of a government “justice” system gone wild, pushing an already fragile “soul” over the edge. But who needs those details when Brooks has an important story to tell about the evils of freedom and the uses really smart people put that freedom to.

Can Interviews Reveal the Ghost in the Machine?

Finally, we get to Don Peck’s essay about better ways to hire people to become corporate cogs, They’re Watching You at Work. The old ways of hiring are not working. I have no trouble believing that. “In one study at Xerox, previous work experience had no bearing on future productivity.” What’s more, people are hired more for how they get along socially with the existing staff than anything else. (This isn’t how Brooks puts it, because he doesn’t think that deeply.) Now I guess some companies are making people play video games so they can get the perfect employee with “a strict work ethic but a loose capacity for ‘mind wandering.'” Brooks tells us that it won’t matter if you went to Harvard or Yale. Of course, Brooks doesn’t like this idea at all. He thinks the analytics can’t work because there is something special in there that you just can’t test for. So these video games can’t find that special Brooksian “soul” but graduating from Harvard or Yale or (Brooks’ own school) the University of Chicago can.

I can tell you one thing. If these computer analytics do take hold in corporate America, they will only be used at the end of the interview process. Management will first make sure that you are the right kind of person. If you are black, they will make sure you are the right kind of black. You know the drill. And then they will do a background check on you to see if you’ve ever be arrested for possessing half a joint. And then they’ll run a credit check to make sure yours is at least in the high 700s if not a perfect 850. And then they’ll give you their little analytic test. But at that point, who really cares? They know you’re the “right” kind of person and you’ll fit in fine.

It’s possible that there really is a “ghost in the machine” of us humans. David Brooks really wants to believe that. At the same time, all of his political philosophy just wants to treat humans like they are cogs in the business machine. Like most conservatives, the idea that humans are special and deserve dignity and respect is just dogma you recite for the hour or so per week when you go to your holy institution. The rest of the time, the world is a social Darwinian nightmare where the weak get eaten by the strong because that’s what really matters. Humans are really important in the mythical afterlife. But in the real here-and-now, humans don’t matter a bit.

Profits over Prophets.

I’m trying, as much as possible, to make my political writing more understandable. It’s very easy to throw around words that don’t mean much to most people. One of those words is “austerity.” In a general sense, there is nothing special in the word. I live a life of great austerity because I don’t have much money. And in a political context, it means much the same thing. Unfortunately, it implies a lot that is just nonsense.

In America and especially in Europe, people who call for austerity are really calling for deficit reduction. But as we’ve seen, it is not just any deficit reduction. When France reduced its budget deficit by raising taxes instead of cutting spending, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn was furious. Rehn and others claim that raising taxes is bad because it will slow economic growth while making poor people go hungry will not. You don’t have to know much about economics to know what nonsense this is. What’s really behind this is that Rehn wants budgets to be balanced on the backs of the poor because they aren’t his friends; he doesn’t want them balanced on the backs of the rich because they are his friends.

The idea is all the same, though: balanced budgets will lead to business confidence and the economy will improve. I’ve shown many times before that this just isn’t true. Let me repeat it here very briefly. When the economy is booming, government borrowing depresses the economy because private businesses have to spend more money to borrow so they can invest in and grow their businesses. But that isn’t the case right now! In fact, private businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash and doing nothing with it. So all that a balanced government budget would do is take even more money out of the economy and make the economic downturn worse.

This morning, Paul Krugman put together a great graph that shows how this is working in Europe. There are five countries in Europe that have been struggling the most: Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Iceland. These countries are usually referred to as GIPSI (gypsy) or, by people who are jerks, PIIGS (pigs). For the last 5 years, these countries have been cutting their budgets like good little boys and girls, because the heads of the European Union have told them that this is the medicine that will fix their ailing economies. Well, how is that going? Not well:

On the y-axis, we see that the countries can now borrow money at a lower rate. This is because the European Central Bank (ECB) decided, after a long delay that they would be the lender of last resort; in other words, the ECB is guaranteeing that the countries won’t go bankrupt. But look at the x-axis. Despite all the austerity: the budget cuts and “belt tightening,” the governments of all these countries now owe more than they did before!

How can that be? After all, aren’t they spending less than they were before? Well, yes they are. The problem is that by spending less money, they put less money into their economies. This meant that more people lost their jobs—both government workers and private sector workers. Consider an example. There’s some government worker who was planning to buy a new car. But now that he’s lost his job, he can’t buy a new car. That means the guy who was going to sell him that car didn’t make his commission, so he isn’t going to buy that flat screen television he was looking forward to. And on and on. By cutting government spending, the economy gets even more depressed.

But how is it that the government that is spending less actually owes more money now? Well, spending is only one side of the budget. If you cut your spending by 3% while reducing your revenue by 5%, you are going to owe more. All those spending cuts meant that people in the economy didn’t have as much money. As a result, they didn’t owe the government as much taxes. Thus, all the austerity—all the hardship placed on the working classes—actually made the problem worse.

What’s especially bad about this is that all of this was predictable and was predicted by a large number of economists. It isn’t hard economics. In fact, the economics used to justify such austerity programs was hard. Economists and politicians had to twist themselves into knots to justify how cutting spending in a depressed economy would help. They used an idea called “expansionary austerity” promoted by a guy named Alberto Alesina, who by all accounts is a very smart economist. Instead of the obvious idea that if people have money they will spend it, Alesina flipped this on its head. He claimed that if businesses see governments getting their budgets in order (But only through spending cuts, not tax increases!) then they will have “confidence” that will make up for the massive decrease in demand that budget cuts cause.

That’s fancy foot work. And I have to admit, as a non-economist but someone who is very good with math and all that, I’m impressed with the theory. It does take a smart guy to come up with a theory like that. But it fails the Ockham’s razor test. We already had a very simple model of how the economy works. And as is usually the case, the simple model was the one that was right, not the complex one with its loopy loops.

Yet here we are. Throughout Europe and the United States, conservatives are calling for more budget cuts. It doesn’t matter how much evidence piles up that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. But they aren’t pushing these policies because they work. They are pushing these policies because these are the policies that they always favor. And now they have an excuse for pushing the policies. The fact that the work of Alesina & Ardagna and Reinhart & Rogoff has been shown to be wrong doesn’t matter. They still use this work to justify their policies. They want to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

We declare our right on this earth to be rich, to be ever richer, to be respected as the rich, to be given the supreme rights of the rich in this unjust society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

Afterword

It was easier to parody Malcolm X’s quote than Sartre’s. Actually, Sartre’s quote is closer to what I believe. Malcolm X’s quote is almost plaintive, “We demand to be respected.” In our society he was thought to be so radical and scary. But what was he asking for? Just the simplest of things: human dignity and respect. Our society seems to have gotten worse since that time. Now Sartre better speaks to our larger problems, while Malcolm X’s demand still largely goes denied:

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

By the way: those means do no include armed rebellion. Modern war is the most unjust thing imaginable. If a group of people want to go to war, that’s their business. But they always end up harming those who just want to live their lives. These are the other 99%—Jesus’ meek. War makes things worse. War exists to perpetuate itself. It is not a form of politics.

Images are from a great cartoon by Brian McFadden in the New York Times. Check it out!