Category: Rants

I was going to post something to the following effect back in January but I didn't. I wish I had, as it might have made me look prescient.

This is going to be a long four-to-eight years. If you're on the bunker-dwelling fringe of the right, I can only imagine the extent to which you believe your own personal endtimes have arrived. The election of Obama must be seen by militiamen as an angry bull sees a waving red flag – liberal, black, "foreign-sounding" name, insufficiently Christian (or secretly Muslim), fan of the U.N., in favor of gun control legislation…well, it's no wonder that some of these people think we have elected the antichrist. When the left is out of power, they do two things: whine and scheme to get back in power. On the right, the preferred option of 99% of conservatives is to whine. The remaining 1% start loading the guns and picking targets.

During the Clinton years we had the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh, the Olympic bombing (by a pro-life extremist), and a revitalization of the neo-Nazi and nationalist right. In the past year we've had a man go on a shooting spree to kill as many liberals as possible while another murdered three police officers because he was convinced that Obama was coming to take his guns away. Think it's unfair to pick out these "isolated" examples? Fine. Find me one example of a liberal snapping and rushing off to "kill as many conservatives as possible until the cops kill me." Go on. I'll wait.

Republicans get elected and the worst that happens to America is some shrill rhetoric, empty threats to move to Canada, and the occasional public protest.
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Democrats get elected and the right instantly goes over the edge; we get Federal courthouse bombings and shooting sprees. These incidents, I'm afraid, won't be the only ones of their kind during the Obama years. I worry that we're going to have another Oklahoma City.
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I worry that we're going to see more unhinged white guys who dabble in neo-Nazi circles snapping and going on shooting sprees. I worry that someone's going to take a shot at the President. I worry because I think all of these things are virtually assured to happen in the next four or eight years.

My Instaputz colleague BT opined that people like Glenn Beck and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA have blood on their hands as a result of their shameless scaremongering and willingness to fan the flames of far-right hysteria. I'm of two minds. On one hand, I think Mr. Pittsburgh Cop Killer was getting his paranoia from much harder sources than the mainstream media and the NRA – news reports indicate that he frequented white supremacist web haven Stormfront and numerous conspiracy fringe sites. I doubt that the plain ol' conservative right was strident enough for him.

On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to accuse the conservative punditry of irresponsibility at best and incitement at worst. Listen to Michelle Bachmann's insane ass:

And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.

Now, does that sound like a responsible thing for a Member of Congress to say when fully aware of the fact that there are extremists with a history of violence who are currently at the end of their psychological ropes? Is it responsible for Glenn Beck to make excuses for spree killers by pointing out that "political correctness" can drive any reasonable person to go on a rampage? Is it prudent for the FRC to blame "the secular media" or for Tom DeLay to blame the teaching of evolution for the Columbine killings?

The punditry seems to be of the opinion that domestic terrorism and spree shootings are the inevitable consequence of conservatives not getting what they want.
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And in every case, liberals drive the individual in question to do it. Right wingers, of course, bear no responsibility for their constant, hysterical fearmongering and willful dissemenation of the kind of paranoid misinformation that pushes all of the militiaman buttons.

This is going to keep happening. If people like Bachmann and Beck had any decency they'd tell their meatheaded followers "We all hate Obama, but for god's sake, killing people isn't the answer you morons." I won't hold my breath. If anything they seem to get off on their own ability to incite people to violence.
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They understand that their audience already sees the world through the scope of a rifle; a Democrat in power is nothing but a great opportunity for turning words into "actions."

It began, as so many things do, with me being a dick.

Mike is related to a person who has become a champion of the vaccine-autism link, and when I discovered this I sent an email along the lines of "I mock this and hope you have fun chatting about this at family gatherings." What followed was a very interesting back-and-forth. I consider the vaccine-autism theory to be roughly on par with the 9-11 Was an Inside Job theory in the intellectual hierarchy.

Before I go into any details, let's be emphatic about two things up front to avoid wild accusations at the end: Mike was not arguing in favor of the vaccine-autism link and I was not arguing that autism is made up or nonexistent. Are we clear on that? Great.

What Mike argued is that a steady rise in cases of autism is cause for concern. While the vaccine link appears to have no empirical support (but plenty of Hollywood celebrity support!) there is a non-trivial increase in children with autism in the last decade and it requires an explanation. The existence of substantial statistical noise – which was my counter-argument and which I will describe momentarily – does not negate the potential existence of an underlying trend.
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My response was lengthy but centered around what I feel is a key semantic point: it's inaccurate, until solid evidence can be provided, to say that autism is on the rise. The diagnosis of autism is what is on the rise. I believe that the rise in diagnoses is as likely to be attributable to the following two factors as to a legitimate increase in the occurence of autism.

First, autism is relatively new in the context of medical issues. It hasn't been on the radar screen of the general public or the non-specialist medical community for more than a decade or two.

I doubt that many people had even heard the term prior to the mid-1990s. So I believe that one valid hypothesis is that doctors and parents, spurred by successful public awareness campaigns, now diagnose cases that would not have been diagnosed in 1970. To prove that autism is on the rise, someone needs to convince us that the kids diagnosed autistic today are not the same kids who were called "slow" or "learning disabled" or "retarded" prior to 1980.

Second, the downside of increased public awareness of the disease is the inevitable hypochondria and hysteria that set in with panicky parents. After 10001 Oprah segments about autism, some parents become convinced that their child has this new, fashionable disease and, seeking to fulfill their own martyr complex, shop around for a doctor who will agree. You may think this is a poor argument, but anecdotally I am convinced that it is some part of the increase. It exists. To what extent, I cannot say. But there are parents out there who operate like this. The hysteria can also affect well-intentioned school psychologists or medical professionals who practically fall all over themselves in a rush to diagnose autistic every child who stacks up his toys or fails to make eye contact for a few minutes. As prior experience with social panics about psychological illnesses (ADHD, depression, etc) has shown us, over-reaction leading to over-diagnosing is a legitimate concern.

Of course the "marketing" of a new medical problem often involves our friends in the pharmaceutical industry; drug companies are pushing autism diagnoses just like they pushed depression and ADHD. They've been pushing the idea of an "autism spectrum", i.e., not really autism but close enough that we can start prescribing drugs for it. Like doctors were encouraged to throw fistfulls of pills at people with even the mildest depression symptoms, they are now being encouraged to stick the autism label on any child whose behavior even hints at behavior outside of a narrowly-defined idea of normality. There is a widespread public perception that drug companies wouldn't get involved because autism treatments are non-pharmaceutical. That is false. More than 50% of children diagnosed autistic are put on antipsychotics, an incredibly powerful and expensive class of drugs, despite the fact that no medical evidence proves that drug treatments work.

If something really is causing more children to develop autism, I certainly hope that we discover what it is quickly. I have no doubts at all about the seriousness of the problem. Autism, depression, ADHD, and other mental illnesses are real and they are serious. However, the subjective nature of psychological disorders means that over-diagnosis is very easy. So before we get all twisted up about a rise in autism I think we should make sure that we are dealing with a rise in autism rather than a rise in diagnosing it.

What do you think? I'm afraid that I didn't do justice to the other person's argument here, but let's be clear about the fact that I consider it an entirely reasonable one.
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Given the amount of environmental contaminants and chemicals that end up in our bodies these days it is in no way inconceivable that something is causing autism and causing more of it than ever before.

Hopefully you've seen the video of Joe Samuel the Unlicensed Plumber War Correspondent Anti-Union Shill admitting in the midst of his speaking tour in opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act that he doesn't know jack shit about the Employee Free Choice Act. No? Maybe it's time to watch it. Oh, those gotcha questions! The man who thinks the American public doesn't deserve him was Shanghaied by some (licensed, real, not-on-welfare) plumbers who appear to have read the legislation in question, thus giving them an extraordinary advantage over the paid plant from an organization called "Americans for Prosperity."

This is why I'm convinced that the political right is comprised almost entirely of morons. Let me explain.

It's not a sign of stupidity that Mr. Pretzelbacher knows little about the EFCA or current U.S. labor codes. I don't know much about them either. I'd almost certainly fail an impromptu quiz on this subject. No, the latent stupidity of the right is evidenced by the apparent fact that no one, as the corporate PACs and right-wing think tank operatives were preparing this series of public appearances by their hand-picked spokesperson, asked a question like, "Hey, did someone make sure that he's read the fucking thing before we send him out there?" It apparently occurred to no one that he might be asked a question or two about labor laws and therefore it might help if he prepared and practiced a few responses. How long would this have taken? An hour or two with a PR guy?

He was not asked about the minutiae of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. The question put to Mr. Studebaker was: "Are you aware that the existing law has card check in it?" This is not an unreasonable question. A logical person might even expect it. Did anyone say "Samuel, how would you handle this question, one which you are almost assured of receiving?" Apparently not. It's possible, of course, that he was coached through answers but didn't retain any of them. That would lead one to ask, quite logically, if a person who could not retain a few pages' worth of information was the best choice as a spokesman.

Any way you slice this situation, it boils down to the fact that the people behind the scheme are seriously lacking in forethought and brainpower. The party of social Darwinism, ever advocating culling the weak from the herd, is in need of one of its own lectures. Perhaps it's time to point inward all that sermonizing about personal responsibility, prudence, and being smart enough to avoid making mistakes. In other words, the ideological right just needs to pretend it's a poor, black homeowner behind on her mortgage and then act naturally.

Over at the Putz my attention was directed to this news item in which Glenn Reynolds expresses his opinion about a bill in the Tennessee legislature to allow concealed firearms on campus. As an experienced educator, Glenn takes the only sensible position:

Yet UT-Knoxville law professor and Libertarian Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds said he supports Campfield’s bill. “I have a number of students who are licensed to carry weapons and I’d feel safer, not less safe, knowing that they are carrying on campus. I certainly would feel safer if some of my colleagues were armed, too,” he said.

Such a comment would lead me to question whether the speaker has ever stood in front of a classroom in his or her life.

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Since Mr. Reynolds clearly has done so, I must proceed to questioning just how profoundly this person is retarded.

There I go throwing around that word again.

Sorry. I can think of none other to describe someone who has stood at the front of a giant public university lecture hall packed with 150 sleep-deprived, emotionally unbalanced, substance abusing, clinically depressed, and stressed out 20 year olds and thought, "You know what would make me feel safer? If they all had fucking guns."

It's important to absorb that point before moving on. He is arguing that if people carried loaded, concealed firearms around on campus it would be a less dangerous place.

"But a concealed carrier could have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter!" they say, cherry-picking a scenario that suits their argument. OK, let's grant that. Someone shoots the rampaging lunatic before he can kill more than a couple folks. 30 lives are saved. I wonder how, in a year-end accounting, those 30 lives would stack up against the – what, dozens? hundreds? not thousands, of course – of additional homicides that would take place by giving a huge, mentally unstable group of adolescents and young adults ready access to a loaded firearms at all times. Like, "My girlfriend dumped me, I failed Calc 242, and I've been awake for three days on peyote and playing Counter-Strike. I'm 19 and prone to irrational behavior befitting my inability to control my emotions.
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If only I had a…wait, I do have a gun!" Of course, other concealed carriers could shoot this hypothetical person before he could go on a rampage, so Glenn is right: the campus would be safer excepting (and in his opinion, thanks to) the intermittent vigilante gun battles between unstable teenagers.

A historian and firearms enthusiast who I am pleased to know once waxed lyrical about the American Old West, which he considered to be a more polite and mannerly time. His argument was that with men constantly armed they were more civil to one another lest the six-shooters be called into action. This logic (or "logic") always amazed me. People were more polite to one another because they were afraid of insulting someone who was armed, and they were afraid because people who insulted one another regularly resolved their differences with guns. So it was a more polite and genteel time because people shot the living fuck out of one another in public in the not uncommon event of insults being traded, bets being welched upon, or the heroic intake of hard liquor made in the boiler tank of a locomotive.

Ah, the good old days. Hopefully they'll be here again soon, at least in Tennessee. As about half of the undergrads in a freshman/sophomore class are either totally devoid of life experience, drunk 19 hours daily, on drugs, being treated for depression, some combination thereof, or just plain ol' immature, I can think of no way to improve upon the situation except to introduce into it a lot of loaded guns. I mean, what could go wrong?

My students have been assigned this brief article written immediately after Joe Biden was chosen as Obama's running mate. The purpose is to initiate a discussion of Biden's colorful history and lack of "wow" appeal, neither of which were disqualifying because Obama didn't really need anything from a running mate. He was doing fine on his own. This contrasts with McCain, who needed a running mate to come on board and save his trainwreck of a campaign.
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That is, of course, too much to ask of any running mate. Obama had the luxury of picking whoever he wanted without worrying about what it would do to Save his campaign which didn't need saving.

Pretty standard stuff.

Now spend a few minutes reading the comments. I couldn't even get past the first dozen without my jaw locking in a permanently dropped position. It appears that the general public's analytical abilities regarding elections are as good as their math and geography skills.
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The reaction appears to be evenly split between right-wing fantasy and that overwhelming forced pessimism from liberals that made me want to punch everyone for the last three months of the election. The first comment:

I can't believe Obama made this choice. It is just so dumb. They needed to reach out to working class Whites, OK I accept that. Biden is going to help? I don't see it myself. They needed a hunter, a shooter, a drinker, a fighter and a worker. Who opposed abortion.

Need bold predictions? There were bold predictions:

Biden is a disastrous choice forced on Obama by AIPAC because of Obama's incurable wobbliness on the Israeli-Arab question, as in everything else…As the gaping void behind his JFK image becomes more and more visible to the American public, Obama is reduced to pandering to televangelists and Israel-firsters, thereby cementing his certain defeat.

Not defeat. Certain defeat. Cemented. And cement is indestructible.

He really is the Democrat's Vince Cable.
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The wrong candidate has been chosen. Prepare for President McCain, the Dumocrats have gon' dun' it' agun.

Those considerations are only relevant should Obama win and at this moment he's trailing McCain. So the immediate task is how to deal with McCain.

Yes, he was formidable! Maybe we need someone with expertise:

I can say as a lifetime American, the things said about Biden in this article are 100% accurate, and were put quite mildly, to say the least. I'm hardly a rabid McCain fan, myself (I'm not even a Republican) — but if these two poor blokes are the best the Democratic Party has to offer, well…it's no wonder they've lost seven of the last ten U.S. presidential elections, with number 8 very possibly on the way.

I feel like I have lowered myself to write a post in which I consider internet comments to be representative of public opinion, but in scanning this thread I found myself instantly transported back to the first week of September. I remember clearly riding an escalator at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston and being told by a colleague that McCain just made his VP choice and…oh boy, Obama was in trouble. His choice of Biden, which had been made a week earlier, was bad. He was losing (or losing "badly" depending on who was speaking) and now McCain harnessed the talents of this young, sexy conservative superstar who was going to win over every Hillary Clinton supporter and help McCain expose Obama's shallow cult of personality and lack of intellectual substance. The sky was falling, President McCain was an inevitability, and one could hardly maintain balance between the gloating conservatives and the liberals looking for a quiet corner in which to commit suicide.

Remember all that? What the fuck was everyone thinking? I know people always view their own behavior more favorably in hindsight, but it would be interesting to make people reconcile their opinions at that time with the events of the subsequent two months.

I can't tell if people really are that dumb or if the emotional rollercoaster of following politics closely simply overwhelms good judgment. Internet comments may be where hope goes to die – hey, at least I didn't use YouTube comments – but I think it serves a purpose here. It can be pretty embarrassing to leave a written record of one's opinions, the wisdom of which will be analyzed after the fact. For most people, forgetting what they say almost immediately functions as a very effective defense mechanism against self-improvement.

There are a lot of people in the political world with whom I disagree. If I was locked in a room for several hours with Richard Shelby or Bob Corker, for example, we'd probably argue when the conversation turned to politics. I think they are wrong about most things political. Fundamentally, though, I doubt there's anything wrong with them as people. They're of average or better intelligence, sane, and probably pretty nice to people who know them well. They're normal people; they're just wrong about a lot of things.

In a second category are the profiteers, the people in the political world whose primary interest is padding their own bank accounts. They're performers. They know what to say to get their mug on TV, land that precious talk radio gig, or become the next wingnut best-selling author. Sean Hannity, for example, was a garden variety, bland media conservative for many years before he figured out a few things about showmanship. He knows that people pay to see over-the-top, hyperbolic entertainment and angry catharsis, so he delivers. He knows which buttons to push, how, and when. As hard as it is to believe, Hannity probably isn't much like his TV character in private. He may still be a douchebag and an idiot, but I bet that one could have a normal conversation with him about fine Italian restaurants in New York or baseball or the iPhone or something.

Then there is a third category – the elected officials and pundits who, in all seriousness, appear to be categorically out of their fucking minds. Not "crazy" in the colloquial sense ("Man, Sean Hannity is crazy.

Did you hear that bullshit he said yesterday?"). Not "crazy" because he or she makes shit up or is wrong about everything.

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I mean legitimately mentally ill and in need of professional help. While it's very Republican (or at least Bill Frist-ian) to attempt to diagnose medical conditions from afar, I cannot shake the feeling when watching some of these people that I am watching a person of tremendous power and influence whom a competent psychiatrist would consider unfit to be in society unsupervised.

Take Glenn Beck, for example. There are lots of right-wing talking heads on radio and TV. And I find nearly all of them to be complete jackasses. Beck, though…there's something wrong with that guy. Accuse me of whatever nefarious motive you prefer, but I have seen and heard enough legitimately mentally ill people in my life to suspect that he and reality have a strained relationship. Among the semicoherent rambling, the baseless and readily disproven paranoia, the increasing overlap with lunatic fringe fascist ideology, with and the bug-eyed thousand yard stare of the cult leader dousing the compound in kerosene while distributing the grape Flavor Aid, it's very difficult to imagine a psychologist or psychiatrist having anything but a field day with this guy. Telling the truth is one thing, being wrong is another and being wrong on purpose (i.e., lying) is yet another. Being unable to tell the difference is cause for medical intervention.

Beck is not alone. I'd add Michelle Bachmann (no, seriously), Helen "Black Helicopters are an important issue to my constituents" Chenoweth, B-1 Bob Dornan, and Jim Bunning among others. It's not that I think people with whom I disagree are insane; I think that people who regularly display multiple symptoms of mental illness are insane. I suppose this would be irrelevant (but fucked up) if people were only tuning in to Beck to mock him or if Michelle Bachmann was the kind of third party candidate whose repeated campaigning is encouraged for comedy value (a la Alan Keyes or Lyndon LaRouche). But listening to Beck and Bachmann talk about the impending One World Government it is important to bear in mind that he is a famous talk show host on a major network and she is in Congress. Their supporters represent a large group of Americans, Americans who either cannot tell the difference between sane and insane or can but don't care. Either reflects poorly on the health of our political culture.
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The economic history of the United States over the last 60 years – our rise to the wealthiest and most powerful economy in recorded history and long, slow lurch into insolvency and economic balkanization among the population – is a direct result of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Allow me to explain.

Not pictured: subprime lending

In the conduct of the Second World War, technological advances in aircraft allowed air forces to develop the techniques of strategic bombing. For most of the War, the Allies' ability to turn Axis nations into powder and rubble was constrained by the range and capacity of the existing bomber aircraft (primarily the B-17 and the British Lancaster). In other words, in 1943 it took an unreasonable number of aircraft, each with a small bomb load, to reach Germany and drop a worthwhile number of bombs on a target. In the Pacific, well, our bombers simply didn't have the range to reach Japan at all.
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When the B-29 came along, everything changed. With tremendous range and payload it could travel exceptional distances and, more importantly, rain a fuckload of large explosives on German and Japanese soil. We're not talking about the modern laser guided bomb that can be fired down a chimney. This is pre-computer era heavy bombing – if you want to drop a bomb on an oil refinery you drop 700 bombs and figure one will hit it.

It's incorrect to say that the B-29 won or turned the tide of the War. It didn't. But it brought the War to a more rapid end…and it did that by turning Germany and Japan, civilian and military targets alike, into smoking piles of gravel. We bombed the living shit out of them as fast as we could build B-29s and bomb casings. Eventually, as the military term goes, we "broke the enemy's will to fight." Daily firebomb raids on Tokyo will do that. Now consider the fact that the German military had already done unspeakable damage to the Soviet Union, Britain, Poland, Greece, Eastern Europe, and France earlier in the War. After we sent Germany and Japan back to the Stone Age, consider the economic standing of the United States at the end of 1945.

There was one industrialized nation in the world that was not in ruins, and we were it. Throughout the War our enormous production capacity and economy were able to arm the world – Britain, Soviet Union, France, Poland, and ourselves. Then we pulled a neat trick; after we had used that enormous capacity to help the world destroy itself, we immediately transformed our ecomony into a means of rebuilding it. Only the US had the ability and means to churn out the cars, the steel, the machinery, the resources, and everything else Japan, Britain, and continental Europe needed rebuild itself.

This is why the 1950s were our economic high water mark.

People without educations could not only get manufacturing work, they could get highly-paid manufacturing work. Employers grumbled about Unions but, hey, everyone was making so goddamn much money that they forked over the salaries that made the middle class with relative good humor. The post-War generation and its prodigious number of Boomer children established a level of prosperity that working people had never before experienced. Then things got complicated.

By the late 1960s Europe and Japan had largely rebuilt. They started cranking out their own manufactured goods to compete with American ones. We could no longer name our price or our wage. We lost our position as the only functioning manufacturing economy on the planet. The unparalleled prosperity of the American middle class came to an end and employers started fighting back, cutting costs, outsourcing, and all of the other harbingers of economic doom that became prevalent in the 1970s.

Then Reagan came along and reminded Americans how much better everything had been in the 1950s, reminding the Boomers that they had earned at least the standard of living that their parents had achieved if not better.

One problem – real wages were not increasing. They peaked in the early 70s and have stagnated or declined since. In order to let Americans afford the lifestyle that Reaganism was selling we had to get a little creative.

We repeatedly cut taxes, which made people feel like their earnings increased. We gave people a convenient list of scapegoats (the short version: black people) to blame for our fading prosperity. And most importantly, we began expanding credit. We emphasized consumerism as a combination of a birthright and a civic duty but we were no longer giving people the large middle class wages the WWII generation enjoyed. So we had to fudge it. If you want Joe to keep shopping while you cut his wages, you give him a Mastercard. Or, you know, four.

The 1990s brought two developments: the explicit removal of economic borders with NAFTA and the brief fantasy that the stock market was magically going to make us all millionaires. With intense competition from cheap Asian and South American goods, only the law was preventing many American manufacturers from relocating overseas. NAFTA was the final act of selling the American blue collar worker down the river. Bad turned into worse because not only were real wages falling, which had already been the case for 20 years, but the jobs disappeared altogether. By the end of the decade, at which point we realized that the NASDAQ was not in fact going to make us all rich, the smoke-and-mirrors required to delude the middle class into thinking they could afford the American Dream became overwhelming.
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To keep people buying homes, cars, vacations, and shopping binges they couldn't afford there remained only one solution: abandon all lending standards and start loaning money like drunken sailors.

The alternative, of course, was letting people realize and get angry about the fact that they couldn't afford a house, a car, copious consumer goods, and all those other things their folks enjoyed.

Then the financial industry had the bright idea to make investment instruments out of their bad lending decisions, theorizing that if shitty assets were packaged together they somehow became value-packed financial assets. This part and what happened next is already familiar to you. We all discovered that A) mortgage-backed securities are a bad idea since banks can make more mortgages on demand and B) a credit House of Cards only stays upright as long as debtors can minimally service their debt. When mass prosperity falls to the point at which people can't even make minimum payments, well…that's the endgame.

This isn't in my usual style; I'm too exhausted after a 48-hour interview (in Texas; rural Texas) to cite, link, and otherwise provide the kind of evidence that I think good arguments need. Nonetheless I wanted to express my dissatisfaction with the common wisdom about the important economic events in the post-War era (the Arab Oil Embargo, the end of the Cold War, supply side economics, the dot-com bubble, etc). Fuck all of that. The economic history of the past sixty years is the story of B-29, the instrument with which we flattened whatever parts of the industrialized world Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany had left standing. Subprime mortgages are no more explanatory of our current problems than that first, fateful meeting between Curtis LeMay and Robert McNamara when they looked at the B-29 and said "Hey, I know what we could do! Let's get these things in the air 24-7, and…."

Six decades later, here we are.