Tribal Warfare

So I’ve recently come across a new blog that I think is pretty amazing. Why do I like it? First, that was very considerate of you to ask. Thank you. Second, it’s just that this other blog offers an original and interesting perspective that’s light-hearted and funny. Mostly it’s the funny. Reading that blog is a good time. It gives the people what they want. But the weird thing is that I’m an attention seeking whore. The kind of guy who’s desperately trying to make up for the peak-a-boo his parents never provided, or the dates the high school, college, and law school girls never showed up for. So you’d think I’d simply work harder to make my blog fun like theirs so I’d have a larger readership. But alas, I can’t shake this need to go a different direction and be preachy.

So today’s preaching concerns the Rush Limbaugh wanting Obama to fail business. So what’s got me in a pique isn’t even that Rush said it, despite the obvious hypocrisy after he railed against unpatriotic liberals who hated America while the last guy was in charge. (I’ve learned that rage for the hypocrisy of ideologues is a wasted emotion, much like frustration for an autistic kid who won’t mingle at a party. They’re doing the best they can with what God gave them.) What’s got me upset is the way people who should know better are talking about what Rush said. There are some articles saying it’s a good Democratic strategy to run with this, and other articles saying this is a nefarious White House plot (Drudge linked this story with the headline: “Enemies List: White House Plots Limbaugh Coverage”) to focus attention on Rush, and then there are responses to this claim of conspiracy, so basically everyone is just getting bogged down with the political aspect to this whole thing.

But what the essential focus should be, like 99% of the focus by the media and responsible people who want to improve America’s collective consciousness, is how Rush’s comment reflects the us v. them mentality that Obama is trying to move past with his call to bipartisanship. (For a prescient analysis on why Obama was doomed to fail to bring America out of its political tribalism read this guy.) So those who seek to advance human existence should focus on how Rush’s way of thinking is the dogmatic, intellectually lazy, personally vile, and one of the more detestable traits that we humans possess, traits that all people should identify and work very very hard to move past so that we can live in a more harmonious world, a world of sunshine and rainbows where we focus on the proper issues that are threatening our existence like climate change, the overfishing of the seas or the decline of primetime television.

Just look at what Rush said compared to what he could have said. Rush didn’t say (1) “I disagree with Obama’s policies and think those polices will fail.” He’s also didn’t say (2) “I know Obama is going to fail.” What Rush said, four days before Obama took office, was that he wanted Obama to fail. This means he wanted Obama the person to fail regardless of what his policies turned out to be, regardless of how that failure would affect the rest of us God fearing, NASCAR watching, apple pie humping Americans.

Since (1) is the sort of thing a well reasoned person who understands the limits of human knowledge would've said, and since no one expects Rush or any pundit to live up to that standard, there’s not much use discussing it. But even (2) wouldn’t have been so bad. I mean (2) is frustrating, since it's the kind of annoying certainty ideologues possess even though just selecting the proper metrics to determine how successful the New Deal was is a dicey affair fraught with implications of bias and selectivity (even though on balance that argument looks wrong since it counters what most regard as the historical record). But ok if Rush had said (2) like how the WSJ editorial pages say stuff like (2) then that wouldn’t have been that terrible. But Rush didn’t even say he was certain the policies would fail (regardless of how things are currently being spun). He simply said he wants Obama to fail. The enemy. The guy who is a liberal, and a socialist, and all of those evil words that make someone come in the middle of the night and steal your children and seduce your wife and feed your dog because it’s a crafty enemy and he knows how to win your dog’s loyalty.

So no matter how you parse it, what’s happening here with Obama and Rush and Rush's millions of fans who see the world the same way he does is that this is more than strategy, or a nefarious plot, and it deserves to be discussed in a less cynical manner than how it will play with the electorate. My point, again, is that human progress and bipartisanship require an open mind and an open heart, so let’s open those up people and rethink those simplistic platitudes that help define our way of thinking so we can pretend to know how best to deal with certain problems. And let’s see if we can work to overcome the prejudices we’ve developed to protect us from our perceived enemies and maybe we should give them a chance at failing on their own before we wish for any predetermined result. Because when we do wish they fail ahead of time because of these prejudices and our egotistical desire to see our way of thinking validated then we're rooting against America. And people who root against America should be peed upon and then set on fire.

Paul Krugman Tries To Set the Record Straight

So Talking-Points Memo already posted this clip but it's a good one, as Krugman explains how silly the tax cut as panacea philosophy is. He also does a good job of reminding ideologues like Pat Buchanan of how tax raises under Clinton coincided with the largest peacetime expansion of the economy in history. Anyways, I should let the clip speak for itself. The good back and forth starts at the 4 minute mark.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Changing the World One Blog Post At a Time

So I realized how this blog is becoming my virtual soapbox, and I was going write about how I should change the name to reflect that but I first wanted to check to see if I was the creator of this ingenious idea and it turns out I’m not. That’s what I get for starting a blog in 2008. I’m a man behind the times. That’s just what I do. I didn’t get a cell phone until mid 2003, and didn’t set up my IPod until 2007. But enough about my retarded technological savvy, this post isn’t about my tribulations in this interconnected and scary world, even though in future posts I will be constantly discuss ‘me’ related topics in other contexts since apparently my generation is narcissistically self-involved.

As for changing the world and standing on the soapbox, though, I just wanted to talk about a few issues in the news and make points I’m sure other people have made in many other places but since I’ve been too busy living in my ‘me’ bubble I haven’t bothered to notice.

1) I just don’t understand how people can argue for a continuation of the economic policies that have caused the erosion of the federal surplus and have coincided with the economic collapse we’re currently experiencing. I’m referring here, of course, to people who champion tax cuts as a cure-all economic solution. I mean, I do get why people hold on to simplistic catch all phrases. I understand that lay people like me, people who don’t have an informed grasp of macroeconomics, that we want to grip onto simple theories that will allow us to feel informed and engaged in public policy debates. But even with this perfectly understandable human need to feel more powerful inside of and less uncertain about this hugely complex world, I would at least hope for some semblance of reason, some sign that the scientific revolution hasn’t gone to waste. I mean, all I’m asking for is to throw out mantras that don’t match up with the observable data. So could people please stop suggesting tax cuts are a panacea and maybe acknowledge that the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which coincided with the loss of the budget surplus and largest deficits (dollar wise, not as a % of GDP) in the history of the country, and which were unable to prevent this economic collapse in the first place, maybe could you acknowledge that simply offering tax cuts as a plan to stimulate the economy isn’t sufficient because if it was then we wouldn’t be here in the first place?

2) I also don’t understand people who are upset that Obama is capping salaries of the companies that take significant government funds by claiming that the best people wouldn’t be attracted to work for these companies. I mean, I could obviously make the simple point that “Really, best people? Like the people who got us into this mess in the first place?” And I should make that point, and I guess I just did, but it’s more. We also need a fundamental rethinking over what qualifies someone to be the “best” manager of a large corporation. Obviously when these managers are obsessed with their economic self-interest and are offered eight figure salaries and nine figure compensation packages, this doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get the best people. So maybe we need the government to ensure that the compensation arrangements for managers of these behemoth corporations take stock of the long term economic health of a corporation. I’m not sure if Obama’s plan already does this or if it simply limits the managers to a six figure base salary, but maybe they should just adopt the idea I suggested above, or if they have already adopted that then please excuse me for not reading complex policy proposals, but I can be a simple minded and lazy fellow at times.

2a) Anyways, I think the trouble most people have with Obama’s move is that it comes down to philosophic principles that one has adopted in their lifetime. And for those who want an unrestricted free market, they have trouble swallowing the idea of a president setting the compensation of those in the private sector, even if that private sector has come hat-in-hand to the government for a bailout and thus doesn’t quite qualify as the private sector any longer. However, the role of the government is and should be to step in when the free market is unable to regulate itself. Just as we don’t allow the free market to dictate the rules of the road or which airplane takes off first on a runway, I think the current crisis clearly demonstrates there is a role for government to play in ensuring that managers of corporations aren’t motivated solely by their economic self-interest, especially since that interest can so easily diverge from the corporation’s and country’s economic interests. (A corollary point: it’s a simplistic view of human nature to think that the best people are only those who would work for more than $500,000 a year, since many of our brightest minds don’t appear to be motivated only by compensation, as is evinced by the quality of many people who enter public service. Perhaps managers will start to see the public service aspect in working for a corporation that the taxpayers have financed in the hope that another Great Depression is avoided.)

Anyways, the point of all of this is a) I do understand why people adopt simplistic philosophic principles for understanding complex issues of public policy but b) I don’t understand how people can repeat these simplistic philosophies when economic realities demonstrate them to be inadequate methods for understanding this world.

Also, I like to end on a joke, and I don't have one right now so I'll just have to steal a line from Mitch Hedberg until I come up with my own: "I walked by a dry-cleaners at 3:00 in the morning and there was a sign on the door that said, 'Sorry, We Are Closed.' I was like, 'Don't be sorry, it's 3:00 in the morning, you're a dry-cleaners...there is no need to apologize.'"

Post Partisianship and Heath Ledger

Um, so I just have a few points I want to make. We Americans will never get past partisanship. Just can't do it. The us v. them, Hutu v. Tutsi, yin/yang, Kobe/Shaq mentality is just ingrained in the human psyche. Evolutionary, biological, chemical -- whatever the cause, it's a phenomenon that won't go away. Wait, I got an theory on the cause. The universe is too complicated for any of us to fully understand. To understand ourselves and our place in that universe requires us to define ourselves by who we are not. And so to deal with the uncertainty, we must always find an enemy.

Regardless of whether you buy into that explanation or not, just know that I want to go on record now (future edits notwithstanding) that if Barack Hussein Obama wins the election, he will not be remembered as a president who destroyed partisanship. I mean, I believe him that he wants to move beyond partisanship. And I believe there are others who do as well. I'm just saying it won't happen cause they are vastly outnumbered. There's too many people in this country that will never move beyond tribalism, no matter how that tribalism is reflected. And in our first world modern post industrial society, our tribalism is the partisanship where the enemies are members of another political party.

I mean, c'mon people. Seriously. If you don't think you're part of the problem here, write down your political principles -- you know, all the reasons that you said you hated a candidate -- then hold yourself to a standard of complete honesty -- to see how and when those principles waiver. Cause they will waiver, they always do. (Many ideologues now denounce Bush for going away from conservative principles like expanding the size of the federal government and debt but when creating new entitlement programs resulted in electoral success there was a curious silence.) And what it comes down to in a lot of cases is essentially just picking a side and sticking with it. A predetermined friend versus the amorphous enemy.

Also, must keep my word about reviewing the Dark Knight. It was good, not great and Heath Ledger was pretty awesome.