[Winstonm]

hrothgar, on Apr 21 2009, 05:25 PM, said:

I forgot to mention Andrew Bacevitch... Definitely well worth reading.

Still waiting for the for the opposite side of the aisle to make any kind of contribution.

I concur. I read his last book and it was terrific.

[y66]

Who is Michael Savage?

Good story by Kelefa Sanneh in this week's New Yorker.

Quote

Radio host Michael Savage is an anomaly: nearly as contemptuous of his fellow radio stars as he is of President Obama. His daily broadcast, “The Savage Nation,” is one of the most popular talk shows in the country.  The magazine Talkers ranks Savage third on its “Heavy Hundred” list, behind only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and estimates that he reaches more than eight million listeners weekly. What he gives those listeners is one of the most addictive programs on radio, and one of the least predictable. San Francisco is his adopted home town, but he delivers his analysis and anecdotes in a vinegary New York accent, occasionally seasoned with Yiddish. He yields to no one in his disdain for liberals, not to mention illegal immigrants, gay-rights activists, and Judge Sotomayor. Just about any news story leads him back to his central thesis: that lefties are ruining the world, or trying to. Earlier this year the British government put him on a list of twenty-two “hate promoters,” who had recently been banned from entering the country. His regular listeners know him to be a marvelous storyteller, a quirky thinker, and an incorrigible free-associater. He records two or three hours of live radio every weekday, customarily working from a home studio. Savage is sometimes seen as an heir to earlier radio provocateurs, like Father Coughlin and Bob Grant, but his chief influences were the personalities he listened to as a kid: Symphony Sid, Mel Allen, Jean Shepherd. Mentions his new book, “Psychological Nudity: Savage Radio Stories.” Savage was born Michael Alan Weiner, in 1942, the son of Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Queens College with a degree in biology, and, in 1974, he settled in the Bay Area with his wife, Janet Weiner. In 1978, he earned a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the Unviersity of California at Berkeley. As Michael A. Weiner he built a small empire as a consultant and the author of a string of crunch advice books. But he was unable to ascend the academic ladder, and became convinced that he was being discriminated against because of his race and gender. Mentions the AIDS epidemic. Savage started his radio career in 1994, at KGO, and he got his own show in 1995. By 2000, radio stations across the country were broadcasting him. When Savage gets really apocalyptic, it can be hard to separate his political observations from his medical complaints. Listen to him long enough and you may be persuaded to think that liberalism is code for all the stupid things we just can’t conquer: weakness and decadence and human frailty and death itself.

[y66]

Saw a link to this post by Tyler Cowen on Andrew Sullivan's blog today.

Quote

What is progressivism?

Arnold Kling asks this question, so I thought I'd try a stab at it, but trying to cast progressivism in the best possible light.  Of course my answer is not exclusive to Arnold's, as we might both be right about the elephant.  From an outsider's perspective, here is my take on what progressives believe or perhaps should believe:

1. There exists a better way and that is shown by the very successful polities of northwestern Europe and near-Europe.  We know that way can work, even if it is sometimes hard to implement.

2. Progressive policies offer more scope for individualism and some kinds of freedom.  Greater security gives people a greater chance to develop themselves as individuals in important spheres of life, not just money-making and risk protection and winning relative status games.

3. Determinism holds and tales of capitalist meritocracy are an illusion, to be kept only insofar as they are useful.

4. The needs of the neediest ought to be our top priority, as variations in the well-being of other individuals are usually small by comparison, at least in the United States.

5. U.S. policy is not generally controlled by egalitarian interests,  So it is doing "God's work" to push for such an egalitarian emphasis at the margin.  At the very least it will improve the quality of discourse, even if the U.S. never actually arrives in "progressive-land."

6. Limiting inequality will do more to check bad governance than will the quixotic libertarian attempt to limit the size of government.

7. Skepticism about the public sector is by no means altogether unwarranted, yet true redistributive programs are possible and they can work and be politically popular; we even have some here in the United States.

8. We should support free trade, more immigration, and more foreign aid, but the nation-state will remain the fundamental locus for redistribution.  That means helping the poor at home more than abroad; a decision to do otherwise would destroy political equilibrium and make everyone worse off.

9. State and local governments are fundamentally to be mistrusted (recall segregation) and thus we should transfer more power to the federal government, which tends to be bluntly and grossly egalitarian, when it manages to be egalitarian at all.  That is OK.

10. The United States has to struggle mightily to meet the progressive standards of western Europe and we should not equate the two regions in terms of their operation or capabilities.  Yet there is an alternative strand in American history, if not always a dominant one, showing that progressive change is possible.  Think Upton Sinclair and Martin Luther King and the organizers of early labor unions.

11. The evidence on economic growth is murky and so it is not clear that doing any of this carries much of a penalty in terms of future growth.  In some regards it will enhance the especially beneficial sides of economic growth, even if it does not boost growth overall.

In due time I'll be writing more systematically about why those views are not, on the whole, my own.  But not today!

It would be interesting to see a progressive try to sum up an intelligent version of libertarianism.

[kenberg]

I mentioned before that although Michael Gerson (a.) is religious and (b.) was a speechwriter for Bush, I find him interesting. Colman McCarthy is a writer i often found many reasons to disagree with but who can be quite interesting. Both of these gentleman gave support to my faith in them by their tributes to Eunice Shriver today.

It is difficult to explain to thos of a new generation how dominant the Kennedys were in the 1960s. I voted for her brother John in 1960 and hoped to vote for her brother Robert in 1968. The Special Olympics are a magnificent achievement.

In addition to the tribute, their were of course some pointed remarks about moder life.

I quote from McCarthy:


"I've often wondered why no biography, nor even a New Yorker profile, has been written about this singular woman who bettered the lives of uncounted millions of the otherwise rejected. Of late, we've had biographies of Brooke Astor, Helen Gurley Brown, Julia Child, Mae West and Gypsy Rose Lee (two of her, no less). Apparently fewer people are interested in reading 400 pages about a life of unglittery goodness and giving. About a woman who was faithful to one husband, one church, one mission -- and, worse, who was never jailed, never overdosed and never threw things at stakeout reporters. ?


And from Gerson:


"It is, in some ways, an odd movement, applying the values of the Kennedy clan (relentless competition, high expectations, rough play) to a community from which people expected little. Tim Shriver, chairman and chief executive of the Special Olympics, describes his mother as "very tough, very demanding." "I never saw her baby an athlete," he told me the day before her death on Tuesday. "She never applauded a last-place finish. She wanted to see achievement -- for athletes to run strong, to swim strong. She never had a low-expectation problem -- what the mind couldn't do, she thought the body could. It wasn't 'everybody is a winner' -- that wasn't her."




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9081102754.html


and


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9081101878.html


A remarkable life.

[Al_U_Card]

It is, at once, testament and condemnation of the level to which the attention of the information consuming public has sunk. With no lurid or titillating details, no scandal, no intrigue....where is the fun or interest?

Now surely as the "soninlawtors" MIL, there must have been fun aplenty as dope-smoking (did he inhale?) steroid-ravaged Arnie wooed her daughter. Oh the humanity! And the profanity! And the insanity!

[y66]

From Jack McCallum's tribute to Eunice Kennedy Shriver in this week's Sports Illustrated.

Quote

What Eunice did -- and she understood this from the beginning -- was use sport as a vehicle to show what this misunderstood society of the mentally challenged could do. "Everybody told my mother that intellectually challenged kids would start crying if they lost," says Bobby Shriver, "to which my mother said, 'So what?' 'That's what everyone does.' Her thought was, you compete, you exalt if you win, you get sad if you lose and you go back and try harder."

[Fluffy]

cherdanno, on Apr 11 2009, 05:58 PM, said:

If you are a liberal, name conservative thinkers/journalists/columnist that you find very much worth reading. If you are conservative, the same with liberal writers.

What if I don't know what I am on the US poliics scheme?.

The only columnist I know about US politics is winstonm, and I don't find him worth reading often

[mycroft]

Simple Fluffy. If you are in Canada, if you're Conservative, you're left-wing. If you're Conservative and from Alberta, you're right-wing. If you're not, you can probably still see the lefties' camp off to your right somewhere, unless you think NDP, in which case, the lefties can't see you in the shadow of Stalin's Kremlin.

If you are in most of the EU, you're left-wing. If you think the Ultra-Nationalists have the right idea, if it wasn't for the racist stuff, you're probably just to the right of center (correct spelling in context).

Please note, I am a moonbat leftie in Republican North Alberta, so that might colour things. American center is so far away from anything I could possibly believe in that I can't even twist my mind to the right of center. In Canada+Europe, I'm probably reasonably liberal.

[Winstonm]

Quote

The only columnist I know about US politics is winstonm, and I don't find him worth reading often

That's odd. He's one of my favorites.

[Fluffy]

sorry winstonm it is not about how you write, it is rather about what you do write about.

But you have your moments

[Winstonm]

Fluffy, on Aug 25 2009, 04:34 PM, said:

sorry winstonm it is not about how you write, it is rather about what you do write about.

But you have your moments

No need to apologize - you are as entitled to be completely wrong as anyone else.

[cherdanno]

Winstonm, on Aug 25 2009, 01:20 PM, said:

Quote

The only columnist I know about US politics is winstonm, and I don't find him worth reading often

That's odd. He's one of my favorites.

We could tell.

[Winstonm]

cherdanno, on Aug 25 2009, 04:54 PM, said:

Winstonm, on Aug 25 2009, 01:20 PM, said:

Quote

The only columnist I know about US politics is winstonm, and I don't find him worth reading often

That's odd. He's one of my favorites.

We could tell.

[hrothgar]

hrothgar, on Apr 11 2009, 09:21 PM, said:

I read Andrew Sullivan quite frequently. (He certainly describes himself as a conservative) I used to read Safire. I hope that Douthat will do a better job with his slot...

Douthat's latest is down right offensive

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/...uthat.html?_r=1

[MattieShoe]

I'm not really conservative or liberal (or both, depending on the issue I suppose). That said, I love NPR. I don't think they lean in any particular direction and they provide a clearer view from both sides. Jon Stewart is definitely liberal and it's a comedy show more than political commentary, but in between all the jokes, his comments are usually very insightful and compelling.

It's just so satisfying to watch him rip Jim Cramer to shreds.

[y66]

Quote

Douthat's latest is down right offensive

What is the offensive part? His assertion of a "global encounter with a resurgent Islam" and characterization of Benefict's action as "the first step against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe"?

Isn't Douthat a devout Catholic? Seems like he's not letting this get in the way of calling em like he sees em. Most definitely not pandering a la so much of what passes for conservative commentary these days.

Speaking of pandering, I recently read Douthat's NYT predecessor William Kristol's comments on a new Gallup poll reporting

Quote

Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009, confirming a finding that Gallup first noted in June. Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group.

I can't remember the last time I read something by Kristol that didn't seem mailed in.

[y66]

Good story about liberal economist Paul Krugman in current New Yorker by Lisa MacFarquhar.

Excerpt:

Quote

Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.

“Hi, everyone!” he called out.

“Hi!” everyone called back.

Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”

With Hari Seldon in mind, Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.

This was, he discovered later, a development that Keynes had helped to bring about. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, economics had been more like history: institutional economics was dominant, and, in opposition to neoclassical economics, emphasized the complicated interactions between political, social, and economic institutions and the complicated motives that drove human economic behavior. Then came the Depression, and the one question that people wanted economists to answer was “What should we do?” “The institutionalists said, ‘Well, it’s very deep, it’s complex, I mean, you just talk about what happened in 1890,’ ” Krugman says. “Keynesian economics, which was coming out of the model-based tradition, even if it was pretty loose-jointed by modern standards, basically said, ‘Push this button.’ ” Push this button—print more money, spend more money—and the button-pushing worked. Push-button economics was not only satisfying to someone of Krugman’s intellectual temperament; it was also, he realized later, politically important. Thinking about economic situations as infinitely complex, with any number of causes going back into the distant past, tended to induce a kind of fatalism: if the origins of a crisis were deeply entangled in a country’s culture, then maybe the crisis was inevitable, perhaps insoluble—even deserved.

“What does it mean to do economics?” Krugman asked on the stage in Montreal. “Economics is really about two stories. One is the story of the old economist and younger economist walking down the street, and the younger economist says, ‘Look, there’s a hundred-dollar bill,’ and the older one says, ‘Nonsense, if it was there somebody would have picked it up already.’ So sometimes you do find hundred-dollar bills lying on the street, but not often—generally people respond to opportunities. The other is the Yogi Berra line ‘Nobody goes to Coney Island anymore; it’s too crowded.’ That’s the idea that things tend to settle into some kind of equilibrium where what people expect is in line with what they actually encounter.”

[y66]

From Paul Krugman's blog today:

Gary Younge reminds us of another great Orwell essay, In Front of Your Nose:

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

.
Orwell's essay Looking Back On The Spanish War, which Krugman also mentioned recently, contained these memorable lines among others:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'--well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five--well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

This guy's stuff is as cogent as ever.

[mgoetze]

I seriously doubt Orwell would be any conservative's favourite liberal columnist. Not that he is anywhere near what USians think of as a "liberal"...

[y66]

What's up with Indiana? They seem to have way more than their share of sensible Republicans. This guy, in addition to Richard Lugar, makes 2.