Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Cenk Uygure: Rahm's Parting Shot at Obama Insiders

Rahm's Parting Shot at Obama Insiders: It looks Rahm Emanuel is done. Dana Milbank transcribed an article written by Rahm Emanuel yesterday in The Washington Post. Never has an article been more clearly written to support a political benefactor.

As I was reading the article lavishing praise on Rahm Emanuel and throwing dirt on everyone else inside the White House, I kept thinking two things. First, how many leaks has Rahm given Milbank over the years? How much do they love each other? Milbank gets a cherished inside source so he can seem like he's got the scoop on what's happening in DC and Rahm gets a hatchet man that'll write whatever he tells him to, I mean whatever he leaks to him as "important inside information."

My second thought was, "Wow, what a hatchet job on Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod!" Since Rahm is obviously feeding this to Milbank, that is very revealing. You don't throw these kinds of bombs unless you've already lost. This is an act of desperation. It's bound to make mortal enemies of these people inside Obama's inner circle. You can't really work with these people anymore. That means you're already finished there.

This is basically Rahm saying on his way out, I was right all along and these guys were wrong. Maybe it's a last minute attempt at a Hail Mary to swing the decision in his favor if he can start a conversation in DC about how he had offered better advice than the other three to Obama (by the way, everything he claims to have been right about inside the article was disastrous advice that led Obama further and further away from his voters). But either way, that means he thinks he is very close to being on his way out the door.

For my part, I don't think it will work at all. It seems desperate, vindictive, political and obvious. If Obama was still considering which direction he was going to go, I think this will certainly cinch it. He hates these kinds of leaks and this kind of internal dissension. Rahm is done. Thank God.

Chris Lehmann: Rich People Things: Richard Epstein's Revisionist History Leads To Revising of History

Chris Lehmann: Rich People Things: Richard Epstein's Revisionist History Leads To Revising of History:

Today’s market idolators don’t know much, but they know what they hate. Take libertarian University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who in his reliably hallucinatory Forbes.com column uses a wonky John Judis defense of the Obama White House’s approach to regulatory policy to divine all sorts of pernicious motives in the Progressive vision of law and policy making.... Epstein, best known for his labored efforts to resurrect the Constitution’s takings clause into something of a free market Magna Carta, leaps upon a passing reference to Progressive Era attorney (and New Deal Supreme Court justice) Louis Brandeis, in Judis’ recent New Republic piece—and from it fashions an all-purpose assault on what he takes to be the incorrigibly paternalist outlook of the Progressive tradition.... Epstein....

The body of the [Brandeis] brief is the absolute antithesis of any scientific argument. Brandeis stitches together an endless array of government reports.... Nor, as a matter of political economy, does he explain why state regulation is needed.... Women themselves could figure that out as well, certainly after reading any of the studies on which Brandeis relies. That done, women could—and surely did—sort themselves by occupation such that the jobs went to those best able to handle risks.

This is all, in Epstein’s judgment, yet another baleful instance of a Progressive penchant for “intellectual self-promotion” against the sober dictates of impartial scientific inquiry into policies that dare to impinge on the sacred right of employer-empowering labor contracts... as witnessed, to take one of countless examples from the era, in the hapless 146 women who failed optimally to “sort themselves by occupation” in the free-contract Valhalla of Epstein’s fond imaginings and so were martyred in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 because their employers thought the best way to beneficially employ immigrant workers was to keep them locked up on site at all times. (The Triangle fire also furnishes perhaps the most cogent reply—again, among countless contenders—to a plaintive sidebar question Epstein poses about modern feminists: “Why aren’t they libertarians?”)...

More to the point, however, the precedent for introducing “sociological” argument about the real-world impact of a high court ruling was not set by Brandeis... it first surfaced in the jurisprudence in the landmark 1905 pro-business ruling Lochner v. New York.... Justice R.W. Peckham dug up a set of contemporary public health and workplace surveys that allegedly showed that there was nothing particularly unhealthy about workdays longer than 10 hours in the baking industry. And like any savvy attorney wanting to exploit the prevailing drift of court opinion, Brandeis crafted his Muller brief accordingly. As Bernstein observes:

Brandeis was likely motivated to write a “sociological” brief by Peckham’s assertion in Lochner that he had relied on statistics demonstrating the relative healthfulness of baking....

While this may all seem like fairly gnat-straining legal history, it actually doubles up the delusion factor in Epstein’s tirade, since our correspondent duly goes out of way to pay obeisance to the wisdom of the Lochner decision.... See, the thing with legal scholarship—at least in a perfect world—is that it’s supposed to flow smoothly in channels of argumentative procedure, and not backwards from preferred outcomes. So to impute grandiose motives of snotty I-know-what’s-best-for-everyone elitism to a tradition of reasoning one finds ideologically suspect, one had better be sure that one has a reasonably firm grasp on one’s facts...

John Cook: A Call for a Moratorium on Cranky Old Writers Complaining about the Internet

From <>:

A Call for a Moratorium on Cranky Old Writers Complaining about the Internet - Leon Wieseltier - Gawker: It first hit us that Wieseltier was masking a tired anti-blogging tirade with a shameless and irresponsible accusation of anti-Semitism when Philip Weiss at MondoWeiss helpfully published the preposterously pompous toast that Wieseltier delivered at the wedding of Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power in 2008. How would Weiss have the text of a wedding toast handy? Wieseltier was so pleased with it that he e-mailed it to some friends lest they miss out on its profound lessons simply for not rating an invite: "Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh." Seriously. Read it. But he regaled Power and Sunnstein's guests with this dour little note that, taken with his vicious sniffing at Sullivan, smacks of the striver trying to knock out the rungs of the ladder beneath him:

We are ceaselessly in motion, spinning up and out, mentally and physically.... We deny distance and we revere speed, not least as proof that we may bend reality to our wishes and our needs; and we have taught ourselves to think swiftly, and also to feel swiftly. We are accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to being celebrated, and what we accomplish in our various callings is often worthy of celebration. These are bad things—bloggy things—to which a lovely wedding is an antidote. Wieseltier is finished with motion and spinning and swift feeling, and he's decided that the spinners are ruining everything and hate the Jews, to boot.

His feelings on the matter were clarified on Friday when Wieseltier issued another diatribe, this time against the crime that interns, young upstarts, and unemployed nonprofessional writers are poorly paid, if at all, when they write for the internet. We are all for editorial workers getting paid for their services (perhaps in free iPads?), so we're not going to argue with Wieseltier on that point. But he betrays the codger in him by going after the medium of wired and wireless text communication as the villain. Otherwise he would have written the same lament two decades ago upon learning that certain venerable magazines like the New Republic, the Washington Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, the Nation, Commentary, and all manner of literary reviews that we're sure Wieseltier feels better about himself for reading have a lengthy history of paying below-market salaries to their editors and writers. Some are even known to employ interns without paying them anything!

But since they're institutional members of the Manhattan-D.C. print aristocracy and not part of the "cheap entropy of the web," they escape Wieseltier's gaze. It's not that web sites don't pay writers enough—it's that they're peopled by "brats" as he described the (paid!) writers here at Gawker, which he confessed to reading with the telling excuse, "see what insomnia can do to a man?" Our understanding of what insomnia can do to a man is that it can prevent them from sleeping and cause them to read whatever it is that they choose to read, you prick. This particular brat happens to be a 36-year-old father of a 16-month-old brat of his own.

Wieseltier's beef is literally with a suite of communications technologies, and the fact that the people who use them are young and unschooled by his lights. "Leave aside the question of the relation of blogging to writing, of posting to publishing," he writes at one point, appearing to take seriously the idea the blogging and writing are different things, or that publication only occurs by virtue of some mystical alchemy of ink and paper. The only difference between the Wieseltier-approved forms of communication and the lowly digital variants are cultural. "Blogging" is done quickly by brats, "writing" is done in garrets or university libraries by people Wieseltier has heard of. "Posting" is a vulgar and lonely thing done by means of a button, "publishing" is a grand process paid for by publications Wieseltier reads. The former is a seedy affair to which virtually anyone has access; the latter is a privilege granted to those who've navigated a decades-old professional maze to Wieseltier's satisfaction.

It's fine to hate Andrew Sullivan, or Gawker, or all manner of bloggers. We do! But it's deeply reactionary to reflexively and arrogantly sneer at anyone who publishes things online simply because they publish things online. Wieseltier's wordy war on "blogging" is as stupid and empty as the 18th century worry that reading novels—not certain novels, just novels—corrupted the morals of young women. Some writing published online is useful, and some isn't. But all of it is fast and scary and cheap and ejaculatory to Wieseltier, because it doesn't conform to the rules that he's become comfortable with. And because it's not long enough:

Brevity may be the soul of wit, or lingerie, or texting, or quail eggs, but all subjects are not the same. Efficiency of expression is in some realms a virtue and in some realms a vice. Brevity is certainly not the soul of news, if by news you mean more than information. "The point" is not always easy. There is not always a "takeaway." Anyway, this is already an abbreviating age. The forces of concision and distillation are winning. After the death of waiting, I do not see the wisdom of preaching impatience. A culture cannot thrive upon a fear of discourse. We're not quite sure what Wieseltier's concern is: We're not suffering from a shortage of long, pointless magazine articles that require patience to finish. The section of the New Republic that Wieseltier edits replenishes the supply on a biweekly basis. His real fear seems to be that no one likes to real long pointless things anymore, notably the long pointless things that he writes—though he's recently learned that long, pointless, reckless allegations of Jew-hatred certainly goose the pageviews. Anyway, the culture will not thrive without them, just as it collapsed after the use of the telegraph became routine. Here's an Atlantic Monthly writer anticipating Wieseltier's whinging 119 years ago:

The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition. New Yorker writer George Packer's arguments against Twitter—which were "published" rather than "posted" on the New Yorker's web site, we gather—are similarly anachronistic. While Packer was simply speaking for himself when he likened Twitter to crack, rather than pronouncing on the bankruptcy of a whole means of communicating with an audience, his irrational fear of what reading people's thoughts via Twitter will do to his mind comes from fear and a reflexive unwillingness to understand what he's talking about rather than curiosity. Packer quotes David Carr's Twitter love in the New York Times—"There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on"—adding, "This last is what really worries me." You're worried that you might learn about interesting things? And your job is to tell other people interesting stories? If Packer bothered to hit the pipe for an hour or so he would have quickly learned that a) nothing anyone writes on Twitter is ever even remotely interesting and b) it's a really easy way to find out about other interesting things that people are writing on the internet. While I wholeheartedly support Packer's decision to not read the things people write on Twitter, it would be easier to understand if he had an actual reason not to that amounted to more than a generalized phobia of Blackberries and such.

These things come in threes, so we're really looking forward to director Michael Haneke's take on the internet—he has reportedly dropped a film about "the humiliation of old age" in favor a to-be-written film about the online world. Perhaps he should combine the ideas and just option the recent works of Leon Wieseltier.