alternative hippopotamus

Our fair city’s own doughy pantload wanders if the greenhouse gas is half full:

The experts think the western Hudson Bay bears are declining because of global warming, but the increasing bears elsewhere have nothing to do with global warming. I don’t know why bear populations are declining or increasing here or there. But I am tired of always hearing everything bad is the result of global warming and everything good has nothing to do with it. The question I’d like answered is: If the polar numbers are indeed rising from global warming, should we take measures to cull their numbers? If nothing good can come from global warming that should be the only remedy.

Someday I’d like to sit down with Jonah and explain to him that objective reality has nothing to do with whether or not he’s tired of it.

I also have to wonder whether the bit about culling the polar bears is what passes for deep thought among his colleagues. Or, was that an effort at humor?

William Arkin writes on Early Warning that both the Right and the Left are Wrong (but he, of course, is certain that he’s on the money):

The simplistic story line that the Democrats are pushing is all about and solely about Iraq: withdraw U.S. forces, defeat the Republicans, tidy up foreign policy by giving human rights to prisoners and being nicer in the world, and voila, terror subsides.

This is a poor summary of the positions expressed by Senator Biden and Ambassador Galbraith (aka, partitioning). A decent summary here. It’s also a poor summary of Murtha’s position (strategic redployment). A modified version of Murtha’s strategic redeployment is summarized in this TomPaine.com article.

These two plans represent mainstream Democratic thought on moving forward in Iraq. Most readers will find that it’s very different from “giving human rights to prisoners and being nicer in the world.”

I’m not sure what Arkin used as a basis for “The Left”. A cartoon based on a Free Republic parody of a Michael Moore film? The voices in his head?

Not only is withdrawal (or “cut and run” as Arkin would likely put it) a Democratic proposition, it’s also an Iraqi proposition. As this WaPo article notes, cutting and running would be okay by the Iraqis:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 26 — A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers.

Does Arkin think the Iraqis are also wrong? Or, perhaps he believes that the Bushies fondness for benevelont global hegemony trumps what Iraqis want?

I like what Glenn Greenwald has been doing lately. He’s really going at the old saw about Democrats being insufficiently manly in the post 9.11 world in a way that shows he understands the psyche of the right-half of the blogosphere. What their strengths and weaknesses are.

Make no mistake, right-wing bloggers are very good at attack politics. Take for instance, this recent post at Power Line: (ellipsis in the original)

Liberals have been announcing the imminent Nazification of America for some years now, and yet…to the presumed embarrassment of nutballs like Keith Olbermann and Howard Dean…the dark night of fascism stubbornly refuses to fall. Not only has Bushitler refrained from rounding up liberals and putting them to the sword, the heady air of freedom has never been headier.

The attack here is that liberals are irrational, and can therefore be dismissed. Any argument that the left puts forth is irrational, and has no basis in fact. Lefty bloggers are “nutroots” and “unhinged”. Noteably, Michelle Malkin wrote a book with that title.

This appears to be a variation on the Rove strategy of attacking an opponent not at the root of his weaknesses, but at his strength. If anything, what distinguishes the left half of the blogosphere is a love of ideas, an interest in the arts, sciences, and humanities, and a fondness for expressing their ideals verbally.

You and I might be tempted to respond to taunts of this variety by pointing out that it’s the Powerlines, Instapundits, Malkins, and NRO’s of the world that are the unhinged ones. I’d like to suggest that the approach that Greenwald is taking is more effective. He’s going after their perceived strength: machismo.

Take this excerpt from today’s post:

The creepy spectacle of watching one warrior after the next insist that we must risk other people’s lives and bomb more people so that we don’t feel girlish and scared and submissive is repugnant enough, in itself, to have to witness on a daily basis. But the fact that these same people are the ones whose deep, irrational fears of The Terrorist override virtually all other considerations, and who demand that we change our nation and relinquish all of the values and liberties which have always defined it and which make it worth fighting for, all because they believe that doing so is necessary to allow them some marginally greater chance of avoiding death, renders their accusations and warrior dances — on top of everything else — an exercise in the grossest and most absurd hypocrisy.

I read this, and am tempted to post something along the lines of: Who’s the girlie man now, Hinderacker?

Hopefully, just as the Washington Post has been careful about documenting the irrationality of the left, they’ll be sure to write something up on the cowardice of the right.

Yes, I saw Young Peter’s op-ed in the WaPo.

On one hand, there’s not too much to say. Is Beinart posturing for the pundit class? Of course. Does this sort of op-ed ingratiate him to the same folks that would hire, say, a Joe Klein? Sure. Is there a grain of truth contained in his op-ed? Hmm. That’s a question I can’t answer. A grain of truth has never satisfied me, or anyone who might pass by this patch of lawn on the internets.

On the other hand, to quote Tevya, there is no other hand.

The chief fallacy lies in this remark:

The Democratic Party’s single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft. It is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience.

You know, if Beinart had also questioned Republican expedience, then I might find that remark understandable. Or, if he had sited polls to back up his assertion, then there would be some meat to his op-ed. Or, if he could explain the broad lack of military service in the Bush administration, and somehow square that with the word “soft” that could have made for an interesting read.

Update: I was tempted to retitle the post “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Beinart,” but “Feh” sums it up pretty well. Particularly given Glenn Greenwald’s remarks:

If you want to know what the U.S. should do about the new Middle East war and any other complex, grave national security matter, you have to talk to Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes and Stephen Hadley and Peter Beinart and Joe Lieberman and John McCain and Tom Friedman and Rich Lowry and Newt Gingrich and all the other “serious” tough guys who might have been wrong about every single thing they said about Iraq but, for some reason that is impossible to discern, are supposed to be the only ones with any credibility on these questions — still.

I’ll also note that there’s an article in today’s WaPo about the White House witholding information on India’s missile sales to Iran, so that the House would vote favorably on sales of nuclear technology to India.

In an alternative universe, a Young Peter Beinart, just back from his third tour of duty in Iraq, would be penning an op-ed about how Republicans undermine national security. In this one, not so much.

I hesitate to call this wingnut post rhetoric. If it weren’t that it adds a dubious comparison of the netroots to the John Birch society, it would be just another ode to mouth breathers everywhere. If you’re curious how the author makes the John Birch/netroots bit work, it goes like this:

Even when it wins the Presidency, it loses the Congress: and even when the President is the inept, uncommunicative George W. Bush, it still cannot make a dent in the ascendancy of its enemies. The end result of this is a group of Americans, identifying as members of the left, that is strikingly similar to the conservative movement of a generation past: inchoate, angry, and prone to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

I’m guessing the author hasn’t taken a look at the leading blogs of the right recently. Which, as far as I can tell have two notes: misdirection and hate-mongering.

At any rate, my favorite bit of this post is where the author puts himself in the shoes of the left. I defy you to read this without laughing:

Consider the average member of this group. He (or she) remembers the era of leftist dominance of American politics — and he remembers the beginning of its end, on election day 1980. He is around 50 years old. He is professional living in a coastal enclave, mostly on the Pacific coast or the northeast. His political consciousness was formed by the McGovern and Carter campaigns — and of course the American retreat from Vietnam. He may have grown up in Iowa, or Texas, or Missouri, or Utah — but he went to college elsewhere, and fell in love with the people in California, or New York, or Boston, who were so much more progressive and intellectual than the hayseeds back home. His initial concept of conservatives, which he’s never really abandoned, was formed by Nixonian malfeasance: they’re all crooks and corrupt, in his mind. The ascent of Reagan in 1980, and later the 1994 revolution, came as a profound shock — how could America forget so soon? He is well-off: and the bulk of his working career — and hence the font of his personal prosperity — was spent in the boom markets of the 1980s and 1990s, under Republican national governance in one form or another. He doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

That’s not exactly how I remember the Reagan years. I remember a recession in 1983. Then the Iran Contra affair. If Nixon’s drama queen antics during Watergate hadn’t made the country sick of impeachment proceedings, I suspect that Reagan would have been impeached. Then came the S&L bailouts, starting with the closing of Old Court S&L.

I do remember boom markets during the 1990s, however. And a budget surplus. Under Clinton. But then, the author doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

There are a couple of posts up at Carpet Bagger that are worth considering as a pair. That may have been the intent, I don’t know. They clearly point towards a common theme of mine: the use of bogus rhetoric and charged language in argument.

The first concerns the House floor debate on Iraq, and the ongoing effort of Republicans to tie Iraq to 9.11. Here’s a sample from Dennis Hastert:

“America’s response started high above a corn field in rural Pennsylvania. Brave men and women armed with nothing more than boiling water and dinner forks and broken bottles stood up as Americans always do when our freedom is in peril and they struck back…. We in this Congress must show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93, the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the Twin Towers.”

In the second post of interest we see the Vice President being toasted by Sean Hannity, allegedly a member of the fourth estate:

Hannity: Well, I got to admit, these are good times for the administration. You got — Zarqawi is dead, revenues are up significantly, the deficit has been cut significantly, the president’s trip. And I’m also told there’s some breaking news that a high-value insurgent has again been captured in Iraq just now.

These quotes were just the sort of thing that Orwell complained about in Politics and the English Language. As he put it:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

This was of course written in 1948. What has changed in the last 58 years is that lack of precision in language has become the goal, not its opposite. If you are a politician (or a talk-show host) all the better to avoid being tied to a clear intent. That way you can’t be held accountable.

What’s more, instead of argument what we have is a recitation of images, as if from a dream, a technique whose value in persuassion has been market-tested. In Hastert’s case we have: “corn field in rural Pennsylvania,” “Brave men and women,” “freedom is in peril, “steely resolve,” “Twin Towers,” etc. Everything else is irrelevant; the emotional theater created by invoking this series of images is the whole point.

Hannity goes beyond merely suggestive imagery. Note how he slips in two questionable “good times” in between two concrete events: Zarqawi is dead, and the president went on a trip. Fair enough. Hard to disagree with that. But the part about revenues and the deficit? Two of these things are not like the other two.

I really have no idea why the Washington Post-It-Note employs Anne Applebaum. Wait a minute, I kinda do. Perhaps it’s because she’s a supporter of Ollie North, and a critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Anne, and Fred Hiatt, Dr. Rathacker and the rest of the Postal editorial page probably get along.

I might even argue that Applebaum is a movement conservative in the guise of a columnist. For instance take this tidbit from Media Matters: (emphasis mine)

On December 13, 1994, The Washington Post reported that Applebaum and her husband, Radek Sikorski — who is a resident fellow and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and who has written for National Review and The American Spectator — are “solidly plugged into a transatlantic power grid of conservative editors, writers and politicians, and have a reputation for politically incorrect social mischief.”

Ms. Applebaum takes joy in her work. And, as far as I can see, her work is bashing various sects of liberalism. In this weeks rhetorical fallacy she hacks away at environmentalists in defense of her recently aquired fondness for windmills:

To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.

But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is “an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies.” Far from being clean and green, “corporate wind is yet another extraction industry relying on false promises,” a “poster child for irresponsible development.”

Such attacks — those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone — are not atypical.

Not atypical? Not atypical of what? Not atypical of the red herrings she uses in her columns? I hope she doesn’t mean not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement. Though that seems to be where she’s going:

The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant.

Those environmental whackos! They’re just anti-progress. If I didn’t already know that Applebaum thinks liberals hate America, I’d guess she thinks liberals hate America.

For the record: here’s the Sierra Club on windpower. Here’s the Mass. Adubon Society. Both are supportive. They are not atypical of the mainstream environmental movement.

Note also what Applebaum leaves out of her pablum, I mean column: the unbending struggle of the Bushies to prevent conservation: tax deductions for guzzling SUV’s, refusing to raise car efficiency standards, or just having his boss, Dick Cheney, say that conservation is a personal choice but not part of his energy policy.

Update: No sooner did I post the above when I got this from GreenPeace about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the Cape Wind project.

Subtitle: The “Angry Left” my left [Expletive].

I was going to let this pass, but then over at Fablog, David Ehrenstein sliced and diced the latest from the Washington Post-It-Note, and I was frankly infotained:

Impotent rage is so entertaining, isn’t it Mr. Finkel. Instead of carnival “geek” biting the heads off of live chickens we have Maryscott O’Connor — smokin’ likea chimney, eyes ablaze with hate. And all because (they claim) she has–

A Rant With Results

Now, I understand why Finkel would write about My Left Wing instead of, say, TPM. It’s the same reason that Tom Sietsema writes about Two Amys instead of Bertucci’s. Everyone knows about Bertucci’s. There’s nothing colorful about Bertucci’s. Though, if they changed the name to Bertucci’s [Expletive], maybe Tom Sietsema would write about it. If not, maybe Finkel would. I’m just saying, he seems to like the [Expletive]s.

I should point out that Maryscott O’Connor wrote about the piece at the Daily Kos, and pointed out that Finkel was a blog newbie:

Finkel said he got my name from an email someone sent him, which led him to My Left Wing. He’d never been to a blog before (gasp! I thought EVERYBODY read the blogs!), and was intrigued not only by the medium but by my particular ‘blog voice,’ if you will.

By not looking at a spectrum of the lefty blogosphere, Finkel is committing a rhetorical fallacy. I’m going to have to call Dicto simpliciter on him. Excuse me, I meant [Expletive] Dicto simpliciter.

There are, of course a variety of purposes that the lefty blogs serve. Some, like Unclaimed Territory go into the kind of detail on domestic espionage that McPost should aspire to. Some, like Factesque, go into local politics, in eRobin’s case Pennsylvania politics. The Sideshow uses links to tell a story about current events. Bullworth uses his blog to write hyper-linked essays which I would distinguish from blogs like Corrente or Firedoglake, which are more about the outrage du jour.

I would argue that in that last paragraph I just told you more about the lefty blogosphere than you would glean from Finkel’s entire story.

One of the points that Finkel makes is that the Left is angry. That might be true. I’ll say for myself that I waste a lot of time pointing out the disinformation and propaganda brought to you by the likes of Jonah Goldberg, John Hinderacker, Michelle Malkin, and Glenn Reynolds. That does make me peevish at times.

Which brings me to an interesting point: why doesn’t Pravda on the Potomac do an article about the fundamental dishonesty of the rightie blogosphere? Or how they create an echo chamber using Bushie’s talking points? That could make for an interesting Saturday afternoon read.

If Occam’s Razor is the principle that the simplest explanation is preferred over the most fantastic, then what do you call the notion that the most contorted explanation, that also supports one’s ideological viewpoint, is closest to the truth?

As you may guess from the title I’m going with Occam’s Blender. That’s where you cherry-pick facts, add some opinion, a little fantasy, a heaping helping of hackery, and puree until chunky. Then, you serve it in a dirty glass and point out that if you drink the whole thing, you’ll also have consumed some bits of truth in the process.

Take for instance Perfesser Insty:

My take: The latest “Bush leaked” story — which doesn’t hold up very well when you look at the actual story — is basically a “spoiling attack” by the NYT and other media who fear subpoenas in the Libby case. As with all their efforts on this front, it’s likely to backfire. The more they say that leaks are bad, even as they rely on politically motivated leaks from insiders for their bread and butter , the more vulnerable they become. That’s why the Plame affair has been more damaging for them, long-term, than for Bush. Bush will be leaving in a couple of years, but the Times and other media will be living with the world they’ve created, and I predict that their position in this regard will be no better if a Democrat is elected in 2008.

Let’s compare Occam’s Razor and Occam’s Blender using Reynolds as a starting point.

Occam’s Razor: Bush, via Cheney, selectively leaked parts of the NIE to bolster the case for the Iraq invasion.
Occam’s Blender: It’s not true that Bush leaked the NIE, but instead “Bush leaked” the NIE. The quotation marks negate the act in much the same way that a silver cross wards off Dick Cheney. Instead, the press is just trying to keep themselves, and the Democrats they are protecting from prison and political disgrace, repectively.

To put it in the terms of an old advertising campaign: This is Occam’s Razor. This is Occam’s Razor on drugs. Any questions?

I think I know Art Levine well enough to disagree with him today, and not wake up with a horse’s head in my bed tomorrow.

In all fairness, Art isn’t a horse-in-your-bed kind of guy. He’s more likely to write me a polite email reminding me of my various flaws: I only listen to music made before Nixon’s second innauguration, my tv set is much smaller than my cable bill, and I can be kind of annoying when I’m right.

Because I speak with Art fairly regularly I can tell you that he follows the rhetorical fallacies of the right fairly closely. Maybe a little too closely. I’m just wondering if there’s a kind of Reverse-Stockholm Syndrome at work here. That’s where you start to get annoyed with the people who don’t want to kidnap you. (I’m using “kidnap” in a metaphorical sense here, like someone might say Bush, Cheney, and Rove are holding the country hostage. I’m just mentioning this because in the following I’m using “kidnap” in an actual, non-metaphorical sense.)

In his post in today’s Huffington Post, for instance, ( Carroll’s Forced Statement: Embraced by the Left? ) Art says this: (emphasis mine)

Now that Jill Carroll has admitted that she was variously forced at gun-point and felt under threat to make anti-American statements, liberal bloggers are relishing — justifiably — pointing out how right-wing bloggers immediately accused her of a “Stockholm syndrome” and betraying her country.

But there’s also some hypocrisy on the left that’s being glossed over: the way some, but hardly all, leftist commentators took her comments and assumed she meant every word, because her criticisms of the war resonated with many progressives.

I agree that the left should stop gloating over the words of kidnapped journalists just because they shore up their anti-Bush talking points. Also, I think that pigs should stop flying. Water should stop running uphill. Glenn Reynolds should stop trying to get Ann Althouse in the sack.

My point is that we should stop all the things that aren’t happening in the first place. Actually, there’s some speculation about Reynolds and Althouse, but that’s beside the point.

It’s just that I have a completely different recollection of “some, but hardly all, leftist commentators” from last weekend. Crooks and Liars has a pretty decent sampling of Jill Carroll commentary including this from Digby:

“First I’d like to call out a big @#$ to all the bloggers and wingnut radio blowhards who assumed that since Jill Carroll isn’t a screeching, GOP operative harpy like Laura Ingraham that she is sympathetic to terrorists. She had the guts to get out there and try to report from the belly of the beast and got kidnapped and terrorized while doing it..”

I also recall this from Atrios:

I hope Jill Carroll stays in Iraq long enough for her position as the latest public enemy #1 of the right to end. As I said, her crime is apparently helping Iraqis.

I saw stuff like that, but didn’t notice that “some, but hardly all, leftist commentators” took her comments to heart “because her criticisms of the war resonated with many progressives.”

The one example Art gives is this quote from Think Progress, the blog for the Center for American Progress. Art writes: (emphasis in the original)

Instead of assuming that something was indeed amiss — such as Carroll being forced to make a statement — the Think Progress blogger responded to Carroll’s passionate anti-Bush attacks in a positve way, because it matched the vituperative terms we on the left often use. He concluded, ” This is a day that we should celebrate Jill Carroll’s courage. She put herself in danger to try to give the world a more accurate picture of Iraq. It is totally inappropriate to assume that her description of how she was treated is motivated by anything other than a desire to tell the truth.”

I agree that if Think Progess had said something like: “No matter how terrible Jill Carroll’s ordeal might have been, the fact that she said some things that can be spun in an anti-Bush, anti-neocon vein, makes the whole thing worthwhile to us.” I agree in that case, Art’s point would have been completely valid.

But what Think Progress wrote was: “It is totally inappropriate to assume that her description of how she was treated is motivated by anything other than a desire to tell the truth.” That was in response to an accusation that she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

As oppposed to Reverse-Stockholm Syndrome.