Not a Category of Problems I'm Concerned With

I humbly submit for your consideration a new texting acronym: NCPICW (Not a Category of Problems I’m Concerned With); typically used as a sarcastic, grossly understated indication of a lack of sympathy for a matter brought up by one of the parties to a conversation.

Sample usage:

Party 1: Dude, we should so go protest Joe Paterno’s firing.

Party 2: NCPICW.

Party 1: Oh.

Alleged Christian

An Open Letter to the NPR Ombudsman,

This piece says of Governor Rick Perry:

“He is open about his deep Christian faith.”

NPR needs to be much more careful about how it presents such information in order to eliminate its obvious liberal, lamestream-media, bias. Recently, Fox commentator Bill O’ Reilly in discussing Breivik’s acts of terrorism in Norway and their obvious precedents, Mussolini’s dictatorship and Nidal Hasan’s bloody mayhem, clearly articulated that the standards of whether someone is reported by the media as affiliated with any particular faith should be both ad hoc and post hoc using a “no true Scotsman” analysis in combination with assessment of business card content.

To avoid maligning Christianity in accordance with these standards, the media including NPR must prepare its reports so that anyone, including of course Gov. Perry, can at any future time be credibly identified as unequivocally not-Christian, if some act(s) of his or hers eventually falls afoul of the criteria that Mr. O’Reilly and his fellow faith affiliation arbiters apply ad hoc and post hoc. Unqualified declarations of the faith affiliation of individuals in the media such as the one I have pointed out here can be used subsequent to such determinations to associate not-Christians as representative of the faith and thus those media outlets become, at a minimum, unwitting participants in what O’Reilly has identified as the “movement in the American media to diminish and marginalize the Christian philosophy.”

In keeping with this principle I urge NPR to revise its journalistic standards immediately to reflect that statements such as the one I quoted above shall be written as:

“He is open about his ALLEGEDLY deep Christian faith.”

‘Allegedly’ is written in caps in my example only to call your attention to its addition to the sentence in question. It can, of course, be in lower case in actual reports based on NPR’s usual capitalization standards.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter,

J@ne Futzinfarb,

Alleged Agnostic

America, It Was A Good Run Wasn't It?

They have learned well from our wealthy elite. What the Tea Party has completed is a straightforward leveraged buyout of America. Using the minimal capital of their role as a minority fringe in one party in one house of congress, they have exploited their opponents’ weaknesses - basic decency, moderate expectations, acting in the common interest, compromise - and aggressively leveraged the many-fold larger full faith and credit of the U.S. government to force themselves into a controlling management position, intent on profit, political and otherwise. In this position, and in order to realize their profits through a devastated national economy that will be blamed on their political opposition, they now require the U.S. to enact their management model, austerity. And if the subject of the buyout, the U.S., goes bankrupt, is destroyed, well too bad, their game isn’t for the weak, it’s all in the ideologically pure spirit of creative destruction. It’s a model that has worked wonderfully for our private sector economy, delivering the developed world’s greatest income inequality over the past four decades, why not simply implement it on a national scale? America, we had a pretty good run there for a couple hundred years, didn’t we?

Rentiers

This seems to me yet more evidence of the inexorable decline and increasing hollowness of our current economic model – our biggest rewards, obscene compensation, seem directed almost exclusively to those who are siphoning wildly inequitable rewards through mere structure, simply by virtue of their proximity to, intimate connections with, and greedy manipulation of massive resource flows: CEO’s of patent troll “enterprises” as in the linked piece but also hedge fund managers, CEO’s of health insurance companies, media magnates who pervert and undermine journalism, predatory lenders, corporations that find “clever” ways of avoiding their responsibilities for taxes, to workers and to their communities, CEO’s who actively undermine confidence in government while – often corruptly - profiting from privatization of its functions, and the suites upon suites of lawyers and lobbyists and sinecured legislators undergirding and enabling all this. It’s obviously an unsustainable model, and when it collapses it will mean real pain and suffering for all (or at least most). It’s cliché but also unfortunately rings true: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” These people are compensated so obscenely for not understanding, that the rest of us need to find some way to save us and to save them from themselves. Good luck with that.

Libertarian Summer Camp

Here is something that shines a bright contextual light on much of the current simmering libertarian delusion. The piece describes a libertarian summer camp that reminds us of nothing so much as one of those “Renaissance Faire”[s], where everyone gets to imagine that they are the lords and the ladies and the white knights. In both cases, their reimagining is explicitly designed to simply ignore the infrastructural ugly realities: the stench of raw sewage, the bloodletting, the suffering of the many for the temporary benefit of the few, the institutionalized inequities, the ignorance and the disease and the privation and the famine. So yes libertarians, by all means go play dress-up at your summer camp, but please stop trying to inflict on the rest of us the grim dystopia that would result from the realization of your adolescent willful fantasy.

In Which I Apologize to Lumbering, Oblivious, Slack-Jawed Troglodytes Everywhere for Insulting Them

Hey NOMA warriors. Yes, all you brave little NOMA warriors so disgusted that Richard Dawkins critiques religion without having committed decades of his life to theological exegesis; so offended that Sam Harris paints all religions with the broad brush of fundamentalist willful ignorance without having worshipped with your eminently reasonable clergy and congregation; so hurt that someone, anyone, from the reason/science magisterium has had the temerity to glance across your beloved magisterial divide only to register and point out the gaping hollowness on the other side. Where, NOMA warriors, is your critique of, your outrage for, your bitter invective directed at this troglodyte who has lumbered, oblivious and slack-jawed, willfully ignorant of reason and science and apparently even compassion, from the faith side of the magisterial divide, and bent on wreaking untold damage:

A lot of what Beard knows he learned in church. One Congressman, talking about global warming, recently said that God wouldn't allow man to do anything to destroy the planet. Beard told me, "It is the height of hubris to think we could." I asked him about nuclear war. He said: "How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible," he said, "But, can we recover? Of course we can."…Beard believes that "God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything."

Where is your opprobrium for inappropriately wandering across the magisterial divide now, now where it really matters because life as we know it on this planet hangs in the balance? Where are your calls to GTFOOTMYS? I thought not. Your silence belies the utter shallowness of your concerns.

The Flaw in "The Flaw"

I strongly recommend you listen to RadioWest’s interesting and informative interview with David Sington, the filmmaker of the documentary “The Flaw” (thank you RadioWest for podcasts), and I am enthusiastic to view the film. The one truly misleading and unfortunate aspect I found in the interview was the dismissive response that Sington gave when the subject of blame for the financial disaster arose. His (admittedly brief, and so perhaps not completely nuanced) interpretation seemed to be that the bankers and financiers and executives were as blameless as everyone else in this economic cataclysm, that they, too, were just helpless cogs in a system run amok.

That is simply not so. For decades some of us have been arguing that this is exactly the outcome to expect from deliberately engineered economic policies that seek to monetize everything principally for short term returns and in which no other values play a role, that place blind faith in the efficiency of free markets and their ability to magically transform unbridled greed into social welfare without recognition of the significant limitations of that model, that use circular and hypocritical reasoning to justify obscene compensation schemes and the greatest transfer of wealth to the wealthy in history, that privatize profits and socialize losses.

The “blameless meme” seems to me a way to rewrite history, really a way to silence dissent on economic policies and pretend there are absolutely no other voices than those of our current crop of economic elite. It suggests that literally everyone was swept up in the fiction of these economic policies; it is a very thinly disguised version of the increasingly popular (among the elite) “no one could have foreseen” escape clause.

But the blameless meme is just not true: Alan Greenspan (for whose quote before congress I suppose the film is named), in spite of his revisionist claim, didn’t discover “the flaw”. He was merely forced to finally admit that his many critics who already clearly understood it were right.

And similarly, those bankers and financiers and executives (and their confederates in government, academe, and media) willfully chose to ignore all the contradicting data and analysis and all their critics, elected to believe that “this time would be different” and that they were truly the masters of the universe. They willfully believed, advocated for, designed, participated in, and benefitted from the system that ran amok and those transparent fictions. It was, indeed, the banality of evil, and for this they are well and truly blameworthy.

In Which T. A. Frank Super-Glues Both Eyes Shut, Covers Them With Hands, And Encounters "Trouble" Seeing

Someone is suffering from a crippling inability to discriminate the relative plausibility of two different arguments. I think I can help. From T. A. Frank in TNR discussing speculation about whether right-wing rhetoric shares some culpability for the Jared Lee Loughner shooting:

There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction. Seven years after the massacre at Columbine High School—in which two senior students shot and killed twelve students and a teacher—CBS News invited Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Dan, to explain why he thought the shootings had happened. “The public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” Rohrbough said. “And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” Most liberals (myself included) would disagree with Rohrbough’s explanation for the shooting, but they’d have trouble explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive than explanations blaming Jared Loughner on rightwing hysteria.

Consider the title of this course “Explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive” 101: because there is not a single instance of a pro-choice advocate or biology teacher suggesting that high school shootings might be resorted to as a resolution of their concerns or expression of their principles in contrast with, oh, let’s take an example “Well it's [the second amendment] to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”

Not plausible. Plausible. Really, no trouble at all.