Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

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.

bad Jim on Clive Crook

Swaggering, sneering incivility: This is kind of priceless:

The problem in my view is less Mr Obama and more the attitudes of the claque of official and unofficial supporters that surrounds him. The prevailing liberal mindset is what makes the criticisms of Mr Obama’s distance from working Americans stick.

If only the Democrats could contain their sense of entitlement to govern in a rational world, and their consequent distaste for wide swathes of the US electorate, they might gain the unshakeable grip on power they feel they deserve. Winning elections would certainly be easier – and Republicans would have to address themselves more seriously to economic insecurity. But the fathomless cultural complacency of the metropolitan liberal rules this out.

The attitude that expressed itself in response to the Palin nomination is the best weapon in the Republican armoury. Rely on the Democrats to keep it primed. You just have to laugh.

So, what. Democrats are just deracinated urban cosmopolitans, which is to say sneering Jews? Sorry, Clive, I have two guns in every closet[1] and I think health care reform is a wonderful thing and carbon output reduction is a critical issue.

[1] Not entirely kidding. Three closets have two each, including some antiques. I only bought one of them, and probably shouldn’t’ve.

Henry Farrell and Daniel Davies on Clive Crooi's Swaggering, Sneering Incivility

Henry Farrell: Swaggering, sneering incivilityr: Clive Crook tells us that Americans are ever so much more polite than Brits, and then goes on to complain about blogs.

Jarringly different standards apply in politics, and especially in the political blogosphere. There, “coarsening” is too mild a word. All that swaggering, sneering incivility: maybe I find it disgusting because it’s so unAmerican.

Fair enough if you don’t like it, but I am still at a loss to understand the difference between all this twuly vewy howwid incivility and suggestions that civil liberties types would be perfectly fine with the deaths of millions of their fellow citizens if only they could get their way. Perhaps it isn’t incivil by definition when it’s an FT pundit doing it rather than a nasty little leftist blogger?... I’ve previously invited Mr. Crook to explain the difference between the kinds of things that he says about lefty civil liberties types and the forms of debasing discourse that he so deplores; so far, he has unaccountably failed to do so. In the absence of such a clarification, I can only presume that his distinction rests on the Yes Minister theory of irregular verbs – I engage in vigorous yet fair truthtelling, you perhaps say things a little too stridently for your own good, he is a disgusting, swaggering and incivil boor.

Daniel Davies: Just scrolling down the blog, I see this on Paul Krugman:

Interesting for once (off the top of my head I cannot think of another instance) to see him express the view that Republican ideas are not wrong by definition. That’s a breakthrough. If it keeps up, he might soon be judging issues on the merits. What his admirers will make of that, I shudder to think

I think that that the irregular verb is more to do with the object than the subject; ie, one is “vigorous and yet fair” in criticising the Democratic Party, “perhaps a little strident” in criticising large banks and “disgusting, sneering and swaggering” when criticising Clive Crook.

Greg Sargent: Journalists Cheerfully Urinating On Senate Bill’s “Ideological” Critics

Journalists Cheerfully Urinating On Senate Bill’s “Ideological” Critics | The Plum Line: It would really be nice if certain Beltway journalists could get it into their heads that the Senate bill’s critics on the left have actual substantive differences with the bill’s proponents, and are not motivated solely by “ideology,” whatever the hell that means.

Ronald Brownstein, for one, is actually trying to claim that Howard Dean opposes the bill because he’s a “wine track” Democrat who doesn’t lack insurance and hence has the luxury to indulge in ideological struggles.

Brownstein writes that Dean and the “digital left” are able to “casually dismiss” the bill because “they operate in an environment where so few people need to worry about access to insurance.” He adds that for these critics, the debate is “largely an abstraction” and merely a crusade to “crush Republicans and ideologically cleanse the Democrats.”

Brownstein doesn’t meaningfully respond to any of Dean’s substantive policy objections to the bill. If he did, he could no longer claim Dean’s critique is purely “ideological.”

He’s not the only one making this claim. Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The Times today wrote that “ideology” is “smacking the pragmatic president in the face,” presumably meaning that the word “ideology” is a good catch-all for all criticism of the bill. And Joe Klein has dismissed critics for being in the grip of “ideological fetishes.”

People using this word need to explain what they mean by it. Anyone who actually reads criticism of the bill on sites like Firedoglake and DailyKos can immediately see that much of it is substantive and detailed. Agree or not, most critics are making a case against the bill as flawed policy that will have adverse real-world consequences. Why is it “ideological” to claim a mandate with inadequate subsidies risks forcing people to buy insurance they can’t afford?

Indeed, some serious proponents of the bill — Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Steve Benen, etc. — are largely refraining from such blithe dismissals of the bill’s critics. That’s because they understand that there’s a real and complex policy debate underway, and realize the best way to serve the bill is to actually rebut the critics.

I think proponents are making a strong case. And no question, it’s excessive when the kill-the-bill camp denounces them as insurance industry toadies or weak-willed enablers of Joe Lieberman. But surely the debate isn’t well served by reckless shouts of “ideology,” which reveal nothing but an unwillingness to engage the substance of foes’ criticism.

Tim Fernholz: Don't Read Robert Samuelson

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: Robert Samuelson is the archetypal Washington columnist, who's managed to write about federal politics for years without learning a thing about it. He's also got the cliches down, one of which is the "to be sure" paragraph, where editors ask writers to stick the strongest counter to their own argument; it usually comes at the end of a piece. The Post's editors had Samuelson stick his "to be sure" in the fourth paragraph, and it's a doozy. Here's what we're talking about:

Barack Obama's quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. .... of course, it is about him.... To be sure, [health care reform] would provide insurance to 30 million or more Americans by 2019. People would enjoy more security. But even these gains must be qualified. Some of the newly insured will get healthier, but how many and by how much is unclear.

So, according to Samuel, this whole year-long legislative effort is entirely about Obama's ego ... except for the 30 million people who will get health insurance because of the effort. It's a "to be sure" so big that it blows Samuelson's whole argument out of the water.

Except that there is no argument there. Samuelson argues that the bill will fail to cover more people and cost much more than expected based on his own back-of-the-envelope calculations about immigration, a report from the Lewin Group, which is funded entirely by the private insurance industry, and a 2007 CBO report that discusses total federal spending, not health care. He totally ignores all of the current studies by the CBO and other independent analysts that say the bill will cut the deficit -- a notoriously stingy CBO's latest estimate says the bill will save $132 billion over the first decade, and a corrected estimates of the long-term costs say the bill will cut the deficit by "between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of GDP" over the second decade while cutting the growth rates of Medicare and Medicaid costs in half. These facts don't make it into Samuelson's column.

The biggest joke is that Samuelson once again fails to understand the political dynamics that led to this bill's creation; in fact, it is the same mistake he made in the summer with the stimulus. (Remember what I said about not learning?) He totally elides Congress from his analysis -- this is "Obama's plan" despite the fact that he didn't write it, Congress did, and that various members of Congress (none mentioned in this column) put in things that Obama didn't like, and took out things he did. Obama will have to own these reforms, and he played a role in their creation, but to assign him total responsibility here is just willful blindness to the basic facts of how the U.S. government works.

Star Trek and Moral Judgment — Crooked Timber

John Holbo: Star Trek and Moral Judgment: Kevin Drum is amused, and rightly so, by this bit from the Corner’s Mike Potemra:

I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility).

Kevin notes it is not every day you get conservatives to admit they oppose (or at least dislike) peace, tolerance, due process and progress. But the hole Potemra digs is deeper, and I think there’s actually a (semi) serious point to make here. Poterma forges on:

I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show’s appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there’s something to that: Patrick Stewart did indeed create, in that character, a believable and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness.

But surely the proper conclusion to be drawn, then, is that being an ethically upright and generally virtuous person is, however surprising this result may be, consistent with being tolerant, peace-loving, even with upholding due process. And there is no particular difficulty to the trick of being in favor of progress while being skeptical about human perfectibility. I say this is a semi-serious point because I think, for some conservatives, the main objection to a somewhat vaguely conceived set of liberal values really is a strong sense that they are inconsistent with a certain sort of hardassery in the virtue ethics department. End of story. But then Star Trek TNG ought, by rights, to be the ultimate anti-conservative series. At least for the likes of Potemra.

Potemra then pens a sort of Hail Mary follow-up post in which he asserts, if I have understood him aright, that basically Burkeanism is equal to a kind of (Spinozist?) view sub specie aeternitatis, all of which again redounds to the credit of conservatism and the good captain. And they all lived happily ever after in an old village in France. (I remember that episode.)

Frank Foer Badly Needs to Exercise Some Quality Control Over The New Republic. Badly.

Marty Peretz: About the time I bought The New Republic, the British satirist and editor of Punch, Alan Coren, published a book titled The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin, purporting to be the actual writings of the then dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin. They were attacks on the belly and politically smart, too. I got in touch with Coren and his publisher with the idea of putting the collection out in America. Frankly, I chickened out because the lingo of the volume was black jive talk which seemed uncannily apt for an African tyrant-bullshitter. Well, it was for that reason deemed by those around me too sensitive or rather insensitive for TNR. So I stopped negotiations with the publishers in London, and the wonderful book was never issued on our shores. It made plenty of money in England. Some of the book's pieces are reprinted here. If you don't laugh at these ... well, you're a stiff.

---

Alan Coren: De Chrissermuss Broadcast, 'Punch' December 5 1973: DIS DE POINT where we steppin' into de worldwide role good an' proper, on account of dis bein' de tex' o' de pop'lar Xmas Broadcast, goin' out f'om de famous Radio Uganda station in de trendy downtown Kampala to ev'ry corner o' de world always provided we gittin' de plugs in proper an' not leavin' no bare wires hangin' out o' de skirtin' in Studio B. which is wot happenin' durin' de birfday broadcast an' it blowin' all de valves out o' de transmitter, had to wait six weeks fo' a new one f'om Hamley's, also all de wattles comin' off of de roof.

De broadcast goin' out at three o'clock pee em on Xmas day, an' de whole popperlation o' Uganda gonna be lissenin' in wid de love an' loyalty an' devotion, on account of we got de detector jeeps out an' anyone still guzzlin' de mince pies at 3.01 gonna find hisself havin' de brandy balls stepped on, not to mention bein' arrested by de ear an' taken down to HQ fo' a touch o' de seasonal goodwill, such as bein' worked over wid a lead-filled turkey. Now, here de scrip', hot f'om de miraculous four-colour Biro: Hallo word an' all de loyal subberjecks, especially all those on de Wolf Rock Lighthouse an' sim'lar, dis here are President Idi Amin speakin' f'om de centre o' de known universe an' hittin' you wid de Peace on Earf bit, which is jus' us DJs' way o' sayin' dat de time come roun' again fo' gittin' de matchin' socks an' hankies an' turnin' our thoughts to de loved ones wot sendin' dis sort o' junk, can't even be bothered gittin' de size right; jus' as a example, an' showin' dat even de top heads o' state human bein's like anyone else, de fust present I got dis year comin' f'om de Finance Minister an' it takin' de form o' de barf salts, an' wot I'd like to say is, it interestin' to learn he doan like de way I smellin' an' he got to de end o' de broadcast to clear out de desk an' git hisself down de car-park where he takin' up de noo duties, an' damn lucky it Yuletide, else he gittin' de head shrunk on top of it.

Turnin' now to de international scene, wot de hell happenin' to de Queen's Xmas card? I sendin' her de pussonal home-made job, wot I doin' wid de little bits o' sticky coloured paper, an' a damn fiddlin' job, too. If I ain't gittin' de recipperocation by de nex' post, de dipperlomatic representative o' HM Gumment gonna find hisself on de inside lookin' out.

Dis natcherly bringin' me to everyone spendin' Xmas in clink: it de time when we got to think o' those less fortunate than ourselves, so all you in chokey start thinkin' about de ones wot buried in quicklime in de prison yard, still plenty o' room out there fo' de slackers, an' I gittin' de word where a lotta shoddy mailbags bin appearin' lately, an' dis de last time I mentionin' it.

De way I seein' it, Xmas is a time fo' de fambly, an' I lookin' upon de whole word as a fambly, i.e. anyone steppin' out o' line gittin' de head smacked, especially if Julius Nyerere lissenin', altho' I ain't namin' no names, also any o' de Asian brudders wot givin' me lip, all ex-colonial rubbish wot still hangin' about de place, any memmers o' de Ugandan judiciary wot still on de lam, an' any subberjecks goin' roun' mumblin' under their bref.

Wow, lisseners, I jus' catchin' sight o' de studio sundial, an' it 3.10 already, so I signin' off now an' gittin' back to de puddin'. I mean, I'm fo' de peace an' de goodwill stuff as much as de nex' man, but enuff is enuff!

Patrick Appel: Minding The Store The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Minding The Store: As always, it a pleasure to step in while Andrew gets some much needed rest. Guest-blogging is not all that different than my day-to-day activities on the Dish – 24 of the 50 posts currently on the front page were written by me. All the substantive posts are Andrew's work, but it's my and Chris's job to read through the blogosphere and pick out the choicest bits. Andrew edits, approves, and spins what we find, but the illusion of an all-reading blogger is maintained by employing two extra sets of eyes...

Ezra Klein on the Immoral Idiocy that Is Chuck Lane and Joe Lieberman - Venomous responsibility

Ezra Klein - Venomous responsibility: My colleague Chuck Lane accuses me of a "venomous smear" against Joe Lieberman today, which is fair enough. He's hardly the first to see it that way. What is surprising is that Lane, well, agrees with my venomous smear. "I understand that [Lieberman] seems to bear a grudge against the Democratic liberals who tried to unseat him in 2006 because of his vote for the war in Iraq," writes Lane, "and that he might be engaged in a little pay back right now."

That's pretty much the ballgame, then. There are two component parts to my argument about Lieberman. The first is that the defeat of health-care reform will cost hundreds of thousands of lives. That's not a particularly controversial statement. It relies on data from the Institute of Medicine and the Urban Institute, both of which are credible sources who've been used, I'd wager, by Lieberman and The Washington Post editorial page in the past. The second is that Lieberman is being driven in part by pique, an assertion that I lay out the reasoning for here, and that Lane explicitly supports in his post.

Lane squares this circle, or attempts to, by saying that "Joe Lieberman does not oppose insuring everyone." True enough, but he's willing to destroy the effort if it includes a Medicare buy-in, which he supported in 2000? A policy, in fact, that he supported as recently as three months ago? And why? Because, as Lane says, he wants "a little pay back?" That, again, is exactly my point: It's morally irresponsible to imperil this effort in return for "a little pay back," just as it's been irresponsible for some on the left to suggest that the bill should be killed if it lacks a public option.

We have a very sterile policy debate in this country. We talk about things in terms of costs, not lives. It's the equivalent of conducting wars from the air: You hide the damage. That might be helpful, in some cases. Too much passion can impede clear thinking. But we run the danger of forgetting the implications of our actions. It's fine to speak in terms of costs so long as we do not forget to think in terms of lives.

Joe Lieberman is insured. Chuck Lane is insured. I am insured. If we get sick, we can go to the doctor. Studies show that our risk of death is substantially lower than those who are uninsured, as is our risk of medical bankruptcy, and chronic pain or impairment. Health-care reform, with or without the public option and the Medicare buy-in, will extend coverage to more than 30 million people. It will improve the coverage of tens of millions more.

The debate over this policy is whether it cuts the deficit, but the point of this policy is that it saves lives. Making that clear using numbers derived from the best empirical evidence we've had is not venomous. It's responsible. Threatening to sink the effort because you don't like a small corner of it is morally irresponsible. And we columnists should not grow so accustomed to the forced courtesies of Washington that we forget how to say so.

Not too long ago, Lieberman agreed that these lives were far too important to be sacrificed due to political pique. “Every campaign, as President Clinton reminded us, is about the future," Lieberman said in a 2006 debate against Ned Lamont. "And what I'm saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance."

If this is doing more, I'd hate to see doing less.

Matthew Yglesias on Tom Friedman: Time to Play This Video Again I Guess