Today, Ezra Klein asked a question, What’s the Liberal Equivalent of Climate Denial? But he doesn’t have an answer. Or more specifically, Ezra being Ezra, he can’t think of any equivalent so he leaves the question open. He is, after all, a liberal. And that’s the kind of thing we do. Or do we?

If you listen to Dan Kahan, liberals and conservatives are exactly the same. They believe what they believe and then they look for ways to justify it. There are a couple of problems I have with this work. First: why liberals and conservatives? As any Radio Lab listener can tell you, that is true of all humans about everything. Second: the fact that there is a tendency doesn’t mean it swamps other factors. Kahan makes what I think of as a classic scientist’s mistake of thinking his results are far broader than they actually are.

But the most important thing is this is really not about how our brains work; it is about how our media work. Klein argued that it is too simple to show that conservatives and liberals actually make up their minds first and then justify them. He noted of Kahan’s work, “His experiments don’t say anything about how political coalitions reason.” And I think that gets to the heart of the matter. Conservatives can listen to right wing radio all day. And they can come home and watch Fox News all night. It is not necessary for them to ever hear a word that pushes against their established narrative. The worst that will happen is that they will see the Nightly News and wonder why no one is talking about Benghazi or whatever the conservative echo chamber is on about at that moment.

That just isn’t true for liberals who are far more dependent upon mainstream sources for their news. Look at NPR. It’s funny to me that conservatives consider it liberal, because given the political beliefs of the country, it is scrupulously evenhanded. But conservatives who think that NPR is liberal also claim that CNN is liberal. What they mean is that these middle-of-the-road news sources are not explicitly conservative.

What’s more, look at actual liberal sources. Look at this blog. I hate it when I’m wrong. That doesn’t mean that I don’t pitch things from a liberal perspective. But I never attempt to deceive because the purpose of this blog is not apologetics; it is to find the truth given my biases, which I am extremely open about. Consider the supposed IRS scandal. Even at the beginning of the coverage, it was known that both liberal and conservative groups were targeted. And now we know that liberal groups were targeted more than conservative groups. But Fox News viewers would be forgiven for not knowing this because it is hardly if ever mentioned. But had things been turned the other way around, there is no way that people reading this blog would have gone away with the idea that the IRS was targeting only liberal groups.

In my experience, liberals who aren’t totally obsessed with politics often have silly, but weakly held, beliefs. However, liberals who care enough to grind out five articles a day really do care. So liberals simply aren’t misled nearly as much as conservatives. So I don’t think that liberals are any less self-deceiving than conservatives. But Kahan’s tests check to see if priming distorts the thinking of liberals and conservatives. And it does. But the question we most care about is whether one group that gets a steady diet of lies is just as likely to figure out the truth as a second group that gets reasonably accurate, if still distorted information. I don’t think we need a study to test that.

I’m sure you’ve heard that Cliven Bundy spouted some racist thoughts to Adam Nagourney at The New York Times, A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side. Ed Kilgore summed it up well, stating that he has “views about black folks that might embarrass your local Grand Dragon.” In case you haven’t heard, Bundy said that blacks were actually more free under slavery. There is actually a lot more but I’m sure you get the idea.

This whole things brings my mind to the argument that Jonathan Chait has been making that even though we all know that modern American conservatism is all about racism, we liberals shouldn’t assume that any given conservative is racist. That’s true as far as it goes. But there is a larger issue here.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this morning, “Prick a movement built on white supremacy and it bleeds… white supremacy.” The fact of the matter is that regardless of what any particular conservative thinks, as a culture, we only take these radical definitions of freedom seriously because there are a lot of people who hold them, and most do so because of their racist underpinnings. As an example, most people are not against welfare programs because they are concerned about the budget or dozens of other seemingly innocuous reasons. Most are against them because they don’t like one or more minority groups who they think benefit from them.

To some extent, I’m sympathetic to Chait on this. It doesn’t do us much good to constantly focus on the racism that provides the popular support for conservatism. Just the same, not doing so turns politics into a frustrating game of whack-a-mole. We beat done the notion that food stamps are a budgetary problem and up pops the concern for fraud. Beat down the fraud claim and up pops Paul Ryan’s hammock “that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” As long as we don’t beat down what is behind the latest argument, there will always be another argument.

Note that what Cliven Bundy said is part of this whack-a-mole game. Take away the racism and the idea that slavery was just great and you are left with Paul Ryan’s hammock argument. In Bundy’s mind, I’m sure he thinks that he is the hero of the black man. He’s the one who is trying to break the bonds of dependence that the modern welfare state has enslaved African Americans in. In this mind, he’s a modern day Frederick Douglass! In reality, he’s just the conservative base.

But he’s not the one we are arguing with. We are arguing with politicians and pundits. And here is where I think we make a mistake on the issue of racism. I don’t think that Rand Paul has any racial resentment or animus. But he is more than willing to use racism for his political gain. And I think that makes him far worse. Most racism is due to ignorance—just not knowing who other groups are and basing opinions on stereotypes. But people like Paul are using racism (that they mostly don’t share) in a calculated way to get what they want.

In this way, they are like the slave owners of old. When I think of the Antebellum era, I think of three classes of people. There were the slave owners who were mostly interested in profit. There were the poor whites who had been trained to be racists by the elites. In the early days this was an explicit policy of rich land owners to keep the poor—white and black alike—from organizing themselves and fighting for their collective rights. And then there were the enslaved blacks. Now Bundy is basically a political figure in the same way that the Koch brothers are. But the basic dynamic here is the same as it was 150 years ago: political elites use racism to set poor whites against poor blacks.

What I wonder is if anyone would say that a slave owner wasn’t racist just because he didn’t hate blacks or think they were inferior. If he would be just as happy enslaving whites as blacks, would that mean he wasn’t racist? Maybe so. But if that same slave owner did everything he could to make poor whites hate blacks, then he would be a racist. And I think that makes Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, and really most other elite Republicans racists.

On this day in 1914, William Castle was born. I have a great fondness for the independent filmmakers of that time. Just getting a film made was a major accomplishment. And getting people to go out and watch it was even more so. On the first count, I think his films stand up rather well today. Too much has been said on the second point, but there is no doubt that he was one of the greatest promoters in film history. To get an idea of what he did, check out the sadly neglected Matinee where John Goodman plays a character clearly based on Castle.

Castle worked in the studio system, even working as second unit director on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. But he wanted more, so he mortgaged his house (not the last time he would do so), and made Macabre. The film is mostly memorable because of the $1,000 life insurance policies that all audience members received in case of “decease by fright.” Silly and wonderful at the same time. According to Wikipedia, the film cost $90,000 to make and grossed $5 million in the decade after its release.

Perhaps the greatest bit of real time silliness came in the initial release of The Tingler. Castle had technicians install buzzers onto a couple of theater seats that were activated at the climax of the film. That must have had quite an effect on the audience. Of course, it was all in good fun as you can see in the following opening to the film. Castle looks like he’s about to burst out laughing:

Ultimately, Castle’s career is the prototypical American story. He was hugely successful. But he was never allowed into the inner circle. He continued to make “B” films for all his career. Near the end of his life, he managed to acquire the rights to Rosemary’s Baby. But the studio would not allow him to direct it, going instead with Roman Polanski. It’s hard to complain with that selection, but I’m sure the decision was entirely in-group/out-group politics. Success doesn’t much matter in the United States. It has to be the right kind of success. That’s why Bernard Madoff is (rightly) in jail but not the drug money laundering executives at HSBC.

Happy birthday William Castle!

Like many people, I have a great love of misheard lyrics—especially my own. My favorite is in the Janis Ian song “At Seventeen.” One line toward the end of the song is, “In debentures of quality and dubious integrity.” I can probably be forgiven, because I had no idea what a “debenture” was. For those of you similarly in the dark, it is, “An unsecured loan certificate issued by a company, backed by general credit rather than by specified assets.” But I heard what I think is a better line out of context, “But death insures equality and dubious integrity.” It is only at the end of the verse that Ian pays off the metaphor with, “Their small-town eyes will gape at you / In dull surprise when payment due / Exceeds accounts received…” That’s one of the reasons that Janis Ian is a great songwriter and I’m just a guy with a knack for appreciating great songwriting.

But by far, the best lyric mishearing is from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of “Blinded by the Light.” The original version by Bruce Springsteen doesn’t really have the problem for a couple of reasons. One is that he doesn’t pronounce “deuce” as “douche” the way that Chris Thompson does in the Earth Band. But also, the original line makes the meaning clear, “Cut loose like a deuce.” What meaning? No meaning, just a pleasant rhyme. In the Earth Band version, it is supposedly “Revved up like a deuce.” But of course, everyone hears, “Wrapped up like a douche.”

What’s brilliant is that we humans are so great at finding meaning in meaningless things that doubtless millions of people have given those lyrics some meaning. And admit it, you’d believe me if I gave you some lame meaning for the line. How about this one, “The deuce, of course, was short for the Chevy 270, straight-6 engine popular among drag racers in the 70s. So the song is about hesitating at the start of race when the light changes color. But more broadly it’s a metaphor getting on with your life and getting out your hometown.” In addition to everything else, you’d believe me because that is what most people think the meaning of every Bruce Springsteen song is.

“Blinded by the Light” also has that “Hooray for Hollywood” problem. The opening lyrics are so engaging that most people forget what happens afterward. The melody is what matters anyway. But while “Hooray” is a very funny song with much to say that is even more true today than in 1937, “Blinded” really has nothing to say. So why not douches or Chevy 270 engines?

All of this is grist for comedy. And indeed, toward the end of my years in graduate school, I came upon this skit from a very short lived sketch comedy show The Vacant Lot. The skit involves four friends playing poker. One of them starts singing “Blinded by the Light” with ridiculous lyrics. The others make fun of him. But then it turns out that their lyrics are at least as ridiculous. It ends with one of them cracking and setting everyone straight. Except that his lyrics aren’t quite right either. I’m not sure if that is supposed to be part of the joke, or if the writers themselves are suffering from the same problem. Watch:

Springsteen said during a VH1 Storytellers that the song was just him playing around with a rhyming dictionary. So what does anyone expect? Certainly, Springsteen doesn’t seem to care. I’ve heard him joke that “douche” was a better line given how much better the Earth Band version did than his own. (I think it is more a function of production.) Regardless, I’m sure that Springsteen was happy to cash all those royalty checks from the megahit.

William Shakespeare was not born on this day in 1564. Or at least we don’t know if was. He was baptized on 26 April 1564. And it was conventional for people to be baptized three days after they were born. So what the hell, why not say that he was born today? After all, Shakespeare isn’t a man, he’s a myth. Also: he died on this day in 1616, so what the hell. It’s Shakespeare day!

The truth is that we know shockingly little about him. We actually know more about Christopher Marlowe because he lived a more colorful life. And we know loads more about Ben Jonson because he wrote so much about himself. Plus, he had the good sense to live his whole life in London and not go scurrying off to a backwater like Stratford-upon-Avon.

I have deeply mixed feelings about the immortal bard. On the one hand, I really do like a great deal of his work. On the other hand, he was hardly the romantic writing hero that I would prefer. There’s no doubt that Cervantes would have written regardless of its earning potential. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Shakespeare. It seems that writing and the theater more generally was just a way to make ends meet. Not that it really matters but it is clear that we all think a great deal more of his work than he did.

But as much as I like his work, it is wrong to place it above the other work at the time. If you just look at the poety—the work on the micro-scale—it is not different from what other people were doing. And that’s clear enough in the fact that work thought to be Shakespeare’s has turned out to be collaborations. He just wasn’t the Wayne Gretzky or even the Michael Jordan of Elizabethan poetry.

Still, given how much the British Empire managed to cram Shakespeare down our throats, we all know him. Even people who have never seen a play can quote at least some Shakespeare, even if they are unaware that they are doing it. And so watching or reading Shakespeare is very much like taking a nice warm bath. It’s comfortable and pleasant. And it is endlessly fascinating what actors and directors manage to do with the work.

The following very short video is funny. And despite itself, it gets to the pleasures and annoyances of Shakespeare: I absolutely don’t believe that Shakespeare invented all of those phrases and words. But even the ones he did coin are only considered impressive because they are now widely used. And why are they widely used? Because of the literary imperialism of the British Empire. There’s a tautological element here: Shakespeare is great because Shakespeare is great. It’s similar to Facebook, which is popular only because it is popular; if there were only six Facebook users, it wouldn’t be very usual and thus popular.

Happy birthday or death day William Shakespeare!

You may have heard about the Pornhub report that indicated that people in blue states watch more pornography than people in red states. To some extent, I think it didn’t get more attention because it goes along with people’s prejudices. Now if it had turned out that people in blue states were more into scatological porn, I would have been surprised because I assume (perhaps wrongly) that people in those states tend to be sexually repressed and so tend to get into what I think of as sick and twisted stuff. But the truth is that there is really no reason to think that porn consumption has anything to do with politics. There are various issues.

Jordan Ragusa addressed probably the most important issue in a brief post, Nickelback, Herpes, and Obama’s Vote Share in 2012. The issue is simply that meaningless correlations show up all the time. And that’s especially true when you are looking at a lot of different things. For example, imagine correlating first names with cancer rates. Because you would look at an enormous number of first names, some would—through random chance—be correlated with high cancer rates. The problem would be even worse if you subdivided the kinds of cancer. Being named Jerry makes you twice as likely to get testicular cancer! Um, no.

Seth Masket addresses the problem more directly in his post, Are Democrats Pervs? Some Problems with a State-Level Analysis of Individual-Level Behavior. He’s actually focused on an important issue that I doubt is at play here: the ecological inference problem. This is the problem that we are looking at aggregate data and trying to say something about individuals. In other words: maybe it’s the Republicans in the blue states who are consuming so much porn. Like I said: I don’t think that’s actually the problem here.

Masket doesn’t seem to think this is the problem either. As he wrote, “Chances are that even if there is an individual relationship here, it’s not a direct one.” That is to say that higher levels of porn consumption and Democratic voting patterns correlate to something else. What I original thought of was youth: people (okay: men) consume more pornography when they are young than when they are old. Blue states have younger populations. Social Security and Medicare are the main reasons why red states take more from the government than blue states. So I suspect that population age is most of the effect.

Consider the youngest state in the nation: Utah. It has far more porn consumption than would be indicated by its 2012 voting. On the other side, we have the oldest state: Maine. It has far less porn consumption than the model predicts. And if you go through all the data (Age and Sex Composition: 2010) you will see this pattern over and over. In fact, as far as I can tell, that is the only thing that we see in the data.

But Masket brings up a couple of other interesting possibilities. One is marriage levels. I’m sure that’s part of it. But I suspect that age and marriage are highly correlated, so I doubt this tells us much more than we already knew. He also mentioned poverty. I don’t exactly see how that works. Certainly unemployment could raise the rates of porn consumption. And he mentions high speed internet availability. That could certainly be a factor; you can’t watch porn if you can’t watch porn.

The main thing is simply that correlation is not causation. Age, marital status, and internet access all provide potential mechanisms. Liberalism really doesn’t provide a mechanism except in the sense of a caricature that social conservatives might have of the abortion-on-demand, sodomy-requiring liberal. And it doesn’t really get us anywhere. So when you hear that Democrats are more interested in pornography than Republicans, remember what that means: the Republican base is dying.

H/T: Jonathan Bernstein, Read Stuff, You Should