The video below is an excellent attack on the Humane Society of the United States. Watch it and then I’ll add a little extra information:
I agree that we should not support the HSUS, but your local “shelter” may be no better. As I wrote in my article Arms of a Death Angel, most shelters do little but kill animals. Find out about the no kill revolution and support it!
And as usual, here is a picture of a three week old kitten:
Robert Reich has taken on the fiscal cliff and Moody’s statement that they might downgrade the United States government credit rating. I know: we’ve seen this before. But there is something different. When S&P downgraded us, it was because we weren’t dealing with our debt problem. That was bullshit, of course: there is no debt problem. As Dean Baker notes, we are paying about half as much interest on the debt as we did during the glory days of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton:
Now, Moody’s wants to downgrade our credit rating because we are too concerned about the debt or, more precisely, because we may go over the fiscal cliff and stay there, thus throwing us back into recession. At least this is a reasonable concern. S&P seems to have downgraded us just because they didn’t like the look of us. (Not that I blame them exactly.)
As always, Reich is very informed and thoughtful. But one thing he said really bugged me:
I agree that given that we can borrow money at more or less (Yes, often less!) the rate of inflation, we should be investing in human and physical infrastructure. But it is really not “the world” that is loaning us money; it is “the United States.” Just look at this graph from an article by libertarian nut Nick Gillespie:
As Gillespie writes, “All told, it’s looking like 70 percent of the debt is held by domestic suckers…” He is right on the number, but wrong on the “suckers”: does he really believe that the United States government is going to default on its debt obligations?
We need to understand that our debt is, as Paul Krugman likes to say, money we own to ourselves. We are not beholden to other countries. We are not on the verge of China pulling the rug out from under us and turning us into Greece. As a country, we really are the master of our own destiny.
Okay, I know it comes as no surprise that Chuck Norris and his wife are freaks. But really, this is over the top:
I think it will be really bad for our country—and perhaps the world—if Mitt Romney becomes President. But I don’t think it will be apocalyptic. I don’t think it will lead to “1,000 years of darkness.” I know a lot of Republicans would like to limit the right to vote. Ann Coulter thinks 21 should be the voting age. (Why? Because they tend to vote Democratic!) But really, can the most naive and ignorant voter really compare to the Norrises?
I don’t think so.
I really like Melissa Harris-Perry. But I haven’t paid much attention to her MSNBC show. She’s clearly thrilled to have the show, and I’ve thought that after she calmed down, the show would be worth watching. For the time, she was just too damned chipper.
Well, perhaps it is time to take another look at the Melissa Harris-Perry Show. This is a catch of Crooks & Liars. There is a panel discussion about the racist stigma of the word “welfare.”
Much of the segment is what you would expect. Throughout, fucktard not-a-blond-bimbo-conservative-only-because-she’s-not-blond Monica Mehta plays the foil to the other liberal guests. But at about the 8:00 mark, things get very exciting. So exciting, I lost my breath. It was thrilling.
Mehta drags out the standard conservative canard that class mobility comes from “taking risks.” At this point, Harris-Perry loses it and says:
Really. Watch this. It is great:
Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman blasted William Saletan for his adoring love letter to Paul Ryan. Now, Saletan wants his letter back. He was blinded by his (typical) desire to find that mythical beast, the Reasonable Republican—just as Krugman said. And now that Saletan is repudiating his love, Krugman is the first—likely of many—to congratulate him for finally seeing the light. I’m afraid that Krugman may be falling for Saletan himself who claims to be another mythical beast, the Centrist Pundit.
William Saletan claims to be a liberal Republican. I’m somewhat impressed by this. Most such people call themselves centrists. Although I think “liberal Republican” is a misnomer, it has at least some information content. But I can see the problem with this naming thing. Whether Saletan or Friedman or any other Serious Moderate, they must grapple with the fact that they are socially liberal and economically conservative. This is what defines almost all of the Washington pundit class. And it is what allows them to claim that they are centrists or—even more perniciously—independents. They are no such thing. In fact, they are often extremists in both categories.
What most people find annoying about centrist pundits is the arrogance of their supposed objectivity. A quick look at their almost comically stereotyped views within the social and economic areas shows this clearly. Saletan’s social views are typically liberal: pro gay rights; pro abortion rights. I’ll bet he even believes in evolution! But his economic views are typically conservative: pro free trade; vaguely anti-union. Would you believe he’s very concerned about the deficit?!
The reason that Saletan and his peers share this kind of political outlook is clear enough: it speaks to their personal interests. They are socially liberal because the corresponding views improve their lives. They have friends who are gay. They’ve had girlfriends who have had abortions. Their careers depend upon a strong first amendment. So their lives would be poorer and their bank accounts too, if the social conservatives got power in the United States. As a result, they are socially liberal—even extremely so.
On the other side of things, they are rich. Whether on the TV, in newspaper, or increasingly even on the internet, pundits are rich. They are all well inside the top 20% of earners. As a result, Saletan finds it easy to be a booster for so called free trade. No Chinese worker is going to take his job. (Not that there aren’t about a million who could do it as well.) But unionized IT professionals might reduce his income. And increased taxes on the upper class could certainly reduce his income. So it just makes sense to argue that Social Security must be cut while ignoring the obvious fix of increasing the payroll tax cap, which it just so happens would increase his tax burden.
It is no accident that professional moderates like Saletan so often skew socially liberal and economically conservative. It is in their own best interests. And I don’t blame them. But I do blame the system itself, which selects for exactly this kind of thinking. It does it in the name of objectivity or “even handedness.” When accused of liberal bias, they can trot out conservative economic bona fides. When accused of conservative bias (Rarely!) they can trot out their liberal social bona fides. But these pundits are not objective or even handed. They are on the extremes in a very predictable way.
No one has written more about the supposed liberal bias of the mainstream media than Eric Alterman. When it comes to most issues, he shows that such claims are ridiculous; the media are generally moderate to conservative. But Alterman notes in What Liberal Media? the case on social issues is far from clear—reporters tend to skew liberal on these. But whereas reporters have responded to this kind of bias, pundits seem to have been blind to them.
Here is a typical example of Saletan using the social liberal/economic conservative combination to falsely imply his reasonableness:
Although this kind of belief combination is better than that of the modern wackos of conservatism, it is nothing like reasonable. It is self-serving and utterly subjective. We need to stop pretending that it is objective or centrist.
In reference to the wonderful debt graph that Ezra Klein presented yesterday, Dean Baker presents an even better graph. This one is not on debt, because as Baker notes, the issue is not debt; it is interest on the debt. He notes sarcastically, “We don’t get back to the same devastating interest burdens we faced in the early 90s until 2019”:
Ezra Klein has again posted the following federal debt graph on WonkBlog, and I thought it was a good idea to put it up here. It is from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The main thing that it shows is that the Republican obsession over debt and deficits is completely hypocritical. The only part of the debt that is truly unsustainable is the Bush tax cuts. And that is the only thing that the Republicans are committed to keeping.
I watched a little bit of the RNC tonight. I saw parts of the Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker speeches. I know that I’m a partisan, but I still think I call my own side for its bullshit. I rarely see things that are clearly wrong or highly distorted by Democrats. But with these two guys at the RNC, there was almost nothing that wasn’t false or at least deceptive. One of the biggest things was this claim that we have a trillion dollar deficit. Everyone knows that the reason the deficit is so high is that the economy is bad so there is less revenue and more expenditures on safety net programs. But even apart from this larger context, there is the graph above. The biggest part of our deficit woes are due to the Bush tax cuts and this will only become worse as the decade continues.
I’m willing to admit that there are good ideas on what used to be called right of the political spectrum. But these ideas are all part of modern Democratic Party thought. The only thing that the Republicans have to offer are lies. The one consolation is that if the Republicans get in power, their economic policy will be the same as it always was—you know, socialism.
Sarah Silverman did a TED Talk that wasn’t released and it got me thinking. I’ve written before that as good as these talks often are they have a pernicious philosophical basis. In particular, they imply that they are just “telling it like it is.” They claim to be objective.
This in itself is a big problem. It is fine for an individual to think that he is just following where the facts lead. Little delusions do little harm. But when an institution suffers from the same delusion, it can do great harm.
For example, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame gave a talk about how the idea of self actualization was bad. Based upon his experience, people doing grungy manual labor were the most happy. For all I know, this is true. To me, the biggest problem in modern life is finding meaning, and if I were a shepherd, I might well be much happier.
But the rich and famous Mr Rowe hasn’t actually lived with the people who appear on his show. He only sees them while the cameras are around. People tend to be happy when people show a sincere interest in them.
What’s more, there is a selection problem. Unsuccessful farmers don’t show up on Dirty Jobs. For most people, it isn’t a choice between a secure job as a museum curator and a secure job as a farmer. Higher prestige jobs tend to be more secure.
Rich men telling young people that they will be happiest if they forego college and take a menial job are just evil.
TED Talks are geared toward the elites and what their interests are. Basically, it is a series by, for, and of Michael Bloomberg. And there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is the implication that these talks don’t funnel the truth into a very narrow Overton Window: that occupied by the mainstream media — socially liberal but economically quite conservative.
And the thing is that as much as I care about social issues, economic issues are the ones that most affect people in America today. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a repugnant policy, but income inequality is destroying our society. DADT harmed a relatively small number of people in the military, but income inequality harms hundreds of millions in this country. DADT could have waited, but income inequality cannot.
I was shocked to hear that Sarah Silverman’s TED Talk was effectively banned. Chris Anderson — that bastion of thoughtcrime policing — called the talk, “God-awful.” Luckily, someone finally leaked the video. And guess what? All she did was a stand-up routine that was completely in character for her:
I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that as much as I might generally agree with certain rich people, they are all pernicious actors. Because of what our society values, these people have too much power. This isn’t the power to explicitly force us to do anything. Instead, it is the power to force their ideas — regardless of how extreme — into the public discussion.
I may agree with Paul Krugman today, but tomorrow, he could say anything. And because of his wealth (and not his arguments), he will be heard. This is a major problem and it is well on display in the over 1000 TED Talks online.
Sarah Silverman by Joan Garvin under CC BY 2.0.
Matthew O’Brien wrote A Full Fact-Check of Niall Ferguson’s Very Bad Argument Against Obama earlier this week. It was in reference to Niall Ferguson’s disgusting counterfactual Newsweek article Obama’s Gotta Go. It seems everyone has written about this at some point during the week—even me. But Ferguson took the time to rebut his attackers in Correct This, Bloggers. The argument he makes is that his facts were technically rarely wrong and that we should all applaud him for writing such a deceptive article.
Today, Matthew O’Brien again takes on the issue, going point by point through Ferguson’s rebuttal, in The Age of Niallism: Ferguson and the Post-Fact World. It is detailed and angering; how can a man like Ferguson be taken seriously? I recommend reading the article.
What is most interesting is the end of the article, where O’Brien gets to the heart of his argument as indicated in his title:
We live in a post-truth age. That’s the term David Roberts of Grist coined to describe the way lies get amplified in our media ecosystem. (If I were feeling cynical, I might say we live in a pre-truth age—maybe things have always been this deplorable.) It’s bad enough when politicians do it. It’s even worse when journalists do too. Now, everybody has biases and those biases unwittingly slant the way we frame facts—myself included. That’s why I try to follow best practices of writers like Felix Salmon. I try to show my work, and admit when I make mistakes. The irony is that there’s an academic who would probably agree with all of the above. His name is Niall Ferguson. His early academic work was as good as his punditry is bad. It’s a shame that Niall Ferguson wasn’t the Niall Ferguson who wrote the Newsweek story.
The Age of Niallism, indeed.
This is from Sarah Kliff at WonkBlog in an article Who rejects abortion in the case of rape? It tells you all you need to know about abortion politics. If you are very religious in a fundamentalist way, you’re for rapists getting to keep their babies. If you are very ignorant, you are for rapists getting to keep their babies. If you are conservative, you are for rapists getting to keep their babies. Strangely, women are more likely than men to think that rapists should be allowed to keep their babies.
Update (22 August 2012 9:40 pm)
The anti-choice movement is anti-woman. They hate women.
When I wrote about Todd Akin, I got a little push back regarding my insinuation that Akin was some kind of a sexual deviant. I want to be clear: I do think that Todd Akin is a sexual deviant. I think that all the fundamentalist religious people are—at least, based upon their obsessions. Sam Harris noted this in Letter to a Christian Nation when he said something to the effect that the Bible warps people’s priorities and this is why Christians are usually more concerned about premarital sex than they are about genocide.
Todd Akin claims that he cares about women, but he shows no signs of it. I suspect in his mind, he sees a blastocyst as a living, breathing human being. He’s like the serial rapist and murderer who weeps while watching Old Yeller: he is immune to actually human suffering while falling apart over imagined suffering. It is sick. Todd Akin is sick. Those like him are sick.
My issue is not with allowing abortions for rape victims. I think that humans have a right to their own bodies and that society has no right to interfere. There are questions in my mind regarding fetuses that are developed enough to experience pain. However, I would note that very few people are against abortion because of the suffering of the fetus, and this is clearly not an issue in the first few months of a pregnancy.
I at least understand people who say they are against abortion in any case. Their claim is fantastical: a single cell should be given equal rights to life as actual breathing human beings. (I don’t know when fetuses get lungs, but it certainly isn’t at conception.) But given this belief, the rest follows. If a fertilized egg is a human being, then it doesn’t matter how it came into being. If two serial killers mated, that would be no excuse for killing their baby. The baby is innocent. (Although I’d want to keep an eye on it!) So I at least understand where these people are coming from.
Those who allow exceptions to their abortion restrictions are vile. If you deconstruct the rape exception, it comes down to, “If you enjoyed the sex, you have to host that fetus even if it kills you, but if you didn’t enjoy it then we will allow you to avoid your hosting duties.” In this kind of thinking, there is no thought of the fetus as an individual. This is just punitive. Girls that enjoy sex should suffer the consequences! I can’t see this attitude (and it is the most common) as anything other than patriarchal: women must be kept in their places.
The no exception crowd get into trouble when a pregnancy is life threatening. Here it is not just a question of the fetus’s life; it is a choice. What’s more, it could end in mother and fetus dying. Regardless, anyone who chooses the life of the fetus over the life of the mother[1] just hates women.
The whole abortion debate really is about hating women. I don’t think the no exception crowd are just morally rigid. I think they started off hating women and over time they learned that they needed to be consistent. It is only quite recently that people have made “fetus rights” arguments. In the past it was normally “father rights.” This is why I don’t accept the term “pro-life”; these people are anti-choice and anti-woman. In contrast, the pro-choice movement really is made up for people who are in favor of choice.
In the long run, the pro-choice movement will win. Our only way forward is to empower women ever more. And I pity the man who tries to stop them from empowering themselves. A necessary result of female empowerment will be reproductive rights. So we will get there, as long as we don’t move backwards.
Afterword
Note that if the anti-choice movement got its way, it is clear that they would next go after birth control. This is all about un-empowering women. What’s more, they would also pass laws about health standards that women would have to maintain, because from their perspective, until a woman spits out a baby, she has rights only to the extent that they don’t affect the fetus. All you have to do is listen to what these people say today to know how they will act in the future; it is all in their ideology.
Update (22 August 2012 12:51 pm)
This via Digby, the GOP Abortion Platform Survey offers only three answers to the question, “What do you think of the GOP’s platform outlawing abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest?”
The GOP have defined “pro-choice Republican” out of existance.
[1] Other than the mother herself. Although I think it is wrong, people can choose to die so others may live.
Dylan Matthews over at WonkBlog has a very good article looking at the current crop of Presidential campaign ads. One is the Americans for Prosperity “Has President Obama Earned Your Vote?” ad:
Matthews correctly notes:
While this is all true, what is most interesting is the line, “He inherited a bad situation, but he made it worse.” This is an exact quote from Romney’s stump speech. You would think if Americans for Prosperity wanted to put together an ad showing former Obama supporters who have changed their minds, they would put words in their mouths that are different from the words in Romney’s mouth.
WonkBlog is really good today. Ezra Klein has an excellent article, The worst case against the Obama administration. It discusses Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek article that by all appearances (I’m willing to suffer for this blog, but I’m not willing to read any more Niall Ferguson) repugnant hatchet job on the Obama administration. It is well worth reading. And if you just can’t get enough, Matthew O’Brien wrote A Full Fact-Check of Niall Ferguson’s Very Bad Argument Against Obama over at The Atlantic.
The main thing is this: if Ezra Klein is angry, then you’ve really gone off the rails.
Noah Smith has a great article on Ferguson too.
Alex Pareene writes over at Salon, Niall Ferguson trolls everyone in Newsweek:
