Strange Doctrines

Too, Too True

Just heard Bay Buchanan on CNN: "You don't speak with your mind if you want to reach the American people."

GMAFB

It's real simple, folks: During the Great Depression, FDR addressed the country on the radio in his famous "Fireside Chats."*

Biden amusingly misdescribed this history by saying:

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed.

Which seems to me about as substantive a "gaffe" as saying that you "taped" your favorite television show when actually you recorded it on your DVR.

As compared to Palin's various arrangements of word salad, from which it is impossible to prescind any comprehensible intended meaning whatever.

All told, the comparison is about as close as, say, the current Intrade gap. Which is to say closer than Lou Dobbs will ever be to journalism.

_____________________
* And we can be sure Sarah Palin heard about those (probably in that vast variety of news sources she consults).

There Is That

Tyler Cowen argues that the so-called Swedish plan for bank nationalization won't work in the U.S. because (among other things)

Swedish governance is in many ways of higher quality than American governance.  It involves lower transactions costs, more social unity, and it is more inclusive of many different interest groups.

Commenter Chris (Sep 29, 2008 4:04:33 PM) counters:

I love you libertarians. You always say, "It can't work here because we don't have the social cohesion and good governance," and then go about trying to smash any social cooperation and governance. Well played, jerks.

Do As I Say, Not As I Say

John McCain, on the failure of legislation that wouldn't have been agreed to had it not been for John McCain:

Our leaders are expected to leave partisanship at the door and come to the table to solve our problems. Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame. Now is the time to fix the problem.

Now is the time to consult the contents of your short-term memory...

UPDATE: ...or your long-term memory, or the Internets, or...

Demagogia* as Revealed Dumbness

Scott McLemee argues that what he calls "the routinizing of...demagogic norms in presidential discourse...was not a matter of anyone’s intention" as much as it was "the product of an accumulation and consolidation of trends, with no strong counterforce to resist them."

This is true, but I think only part of a broader trend in marketing generally. The goal in all marketing is to find words, sounds and images that "work" -- that persuade consumers to buy the product. Ad space costs, so efficiency matters. Operationally, this means finding ways to bypass the frontal cortex and stimulate the more primitive regions of our modified ape brains.

Applied to political discourse, the results of this technological project are predictable (and of course well-confirmed).

Note however that this observation actually provides grounds for optimism. It means that the rank dumbing-down of public discourse doesn't necessarily reflect an actual dumbing down of minds. Rather, it might simply reveal the success of the systematic attempt to exploit our extant dumbness.

And doesn't that make you feel better?

(Via Unfogged.)
____________
*'Demagogia' is by convention a synonym for demagoguery. But I prefer to think of it as denoting the mental state induced by demagoguery. (Cf. 'hypnagogia'.)

Credo Quia Ineptum

From the New York Times review of Bill Maher's new documentary, Religulous (citing Pew): "21 percent of atheists and 55 percent of agnostics said they believed in God."

Alrighty then...

John McCain, Counterstatesman

Tonight, one of the candidates "reached across the aisle" and debated his opponent "in a respectful fashion."

It wasn't John McCain:

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Recipropsity Blogging

It's been a little over a month since I exhumed Strange Doctrines, so it's about time to give quick props to the good folks who've honored the blog with linkage since the (re)inception:

• onegoodmove - Lots of interesting content you won't find anywhere else; plus a periodic chance to win cool books
• Inverse Square Blog - Science writer and political commentator
• Thom Brooks - Legal and political philosopher (and fellow guitarist)
• Brian Leiter - Nietzsche scholar and philosopher of law
• Brad DeLong - Economist and general Renaissance guy
• Robert Waldmann - Economist blogging somewhere short of the limit point
• Stuart Buck - Fellow lawyer, guitarist and loyal opponent
• Kieran Setiya - Philosopher in ethics and philosophy of mind
• Mark Kleiman - The one, the only, the unstoppable

Thanks to all.

McCain Campaign "Suspension" in Abeyance

Nice moment at 2:40:

Jeffrey Toobin: But Steve, this is not campaigning what [McCain's] doing?
Stephen Hayes: No, of course it is!

Of course it is.

Anyway, according to reports, the moratorium on the suspension will toll until Friday, at which point you can expect a temporary respite from all postponements, pending further notice. Right now, though, it is time for an intermission...

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Compare and Contrast

Now, I admit it's a challenge to find much contrast, here. But I'd at least have to give the Miss Teen USA contestant an edge on poise and substance.

(Interview with Sarah Palin via Mark Kleiman.)

Real Money

$700 billion here, $900 billion there, pretty soon you're talking, well, about $1.6 trillion.

On Preferring Persons

Prosblogion's Mike Almeida argues that "[b]eing a person does not itself confer greater moral standing than being a non-person." I've been writing a fair amount in comments at Mike's post about this, but I thought it worth talking about here. I'm going to simplify and generalize his argument a bit:*

The Score on Error in the War on Terror

Unless you've been long-sequestered to an undisclosed location, you'll know that the trend in public opinion since around 2005 has not been kind to those who initially supported the invasion of Iraq.

This has forced John McCain, POW ^TM to cast about for various ways to deflect attention away from the perceived error of his pro-war stance.

The main line of distraction these days: That Obama was supposedly wrong about "the surge."

Okay, fine. Suppose (counterfactually) that McCain's right -- that if he was wrong on the War in Iraq, Obama was wrong on the surge.

Question: Which error in judgment would have imposed a higher cost?

And no peeking.

How Downturn 2008 Grew (and Grue)

Alex Castellanos, on CNN (and not the Onion) this morning: "This financial crisis didn't start on Wall Street. This started in the Carter and Clinton administrations...."

Hmmm, interesting...

Richard Nixon 1968-1974
Gerald Ford - 1974-1976
Jimmy Carter - 1976-1980
Ronald Reagan - 1980-1988
George H.W. Bush - 1988-1992
Bill Clinton - 1992-2000
George W. Bush - 2000-2008

I'm pretty sure this is the first time a political "analyst" has ever employed artificial disjunctive predication on national television. (However much less groundbreaking it was in the use of another philosophical concept...)

Mighty White of You

Stuff White People Like is an hilarious* blog. And true enough, as Benjamin Schwarz would have it, the various stereotypes played upon in SWPL are the distilate of an authentic type.

But it's a type that's more or less always been with us: Wealthy, status-obsessed, self-absorbed, self-pampering. Back in the eighties, they were called yuppies. SWPL's "White People" are just yuppies with a no-carb shot of new age liberalism. So mostly, we've scene this act before.

Which is why it's strange that Schwarz tries to read the book as a bona fide indictment of White People as a not only wholly new and distinctive but socially significant demographic. Schwarz is smart, but his argument is forced, empirically wrong and at times just plain incoherent.**

McCain's Healthcare Plan? Don't Bank On It

Brilliant catch by Paul Krugman's correspondent.

Shorter John McCain, POW ^TM: We can fix our healthcare system by making it more like our banking system.

(Via Mark Kleiman.)

On Containing Multitudes

For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us....

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become.

--Jonathan Nolan, "Memento Mori"

One Born Every Minute?

The Los Angeles Times reports on a study that purports to show a correlation between fear response and conservative political attitudes. I don't think so.

The study involved 46 people drawn from the same, small town:

Kreditanstalt für...Wie?

Spiegel reports on the scandal brewing over German bank KfW's ill-timed €300 million transfer to Lehman Brothers on Monday.

I was amused by this description of KfW's business model: "KfW is a state lender which normally offers money to small and medium-sized German businesses -- not, as a rule, to failing Wall Street firms."

Yes, I would have thought not.

Godwin's Law

In Germany, it is the law.