Annals of Derp: Brooks Stabs at an Answer, Answer Fights Back

 Independence Day 2017, reposted

The new Brooks backyard.

Happy Independence Day! Here's former New York Times columnist David Brooks to celebrate by swallowing 50 hot dogs' worth of American history in ten minutes, without once mentioning any of the things we traditionally think about on the Fourth of July, like self-evident truths, or letting facts be submitted to a candid world, or fireworks.  Instead he wants to know, "What's the Matter with Republicans?", in the context of the fact that as Trump and the Republican Party work to take away benefits from the American working class, Trump's base of 40% or so remains faithful to him and Republican candidates win special elections in Kansas, Montana, Georgia, and South Carolina:

What’s going on? Why do working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests?

Let's see, how can we think about this question without addressing any of the discussion that has taken place since Thomas Frank asked it 13 years ago? I know! Put it down to the good old frontier ethos!

For the Record: Song of Ben Shapiro

 

Wheee! 445 new infections per million in the US and headed for the sky, while France (which reached peak at 840 on Monday) is down to 340 (unfortunately not yet on the map). World in Data.

For heaven's sake people, it's not just his "little feelings". He's got criminal liability and no money. He wants a deal. https://t.co/U5u2DZlMnN

— Yas We Can #BidenHarris2020 (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2020

And here's Ben:

Rice and Fall: Postscript

Guatemala, last year, photo by Moises Castillo/AP via Washington Post. You may have missed the story, as I did. Ivan Velásquez is a Colombian human rights and anti-corruption activist who has served since 2013 as head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, and this is a demonstrator protesting against it on behalf of President Jimmy Morales, who, like many presidents, dislikes being investigated, and announced in August that he was canceling the commission's mandate, while "surrounded by soldiers and police, a powerful image in a country that endured four decades of brutal military governments before transitioning to democracy in 1997. Meanwhile, a column of Jeeps — some with roof-mounted machine guns — rolled through the city, pausing at the CICIG and passing the U.S. Embassy and homes of human rights activists, according to news reports and videos". Supported by people like the demonstrator in the photo and celebratory firecrackers. The Trump administration responded by sending the Guatemalan defense ministry 38 more J-8 Jeeps, which disturbed Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), then ranking member and now chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee: "It is difficult to understand how such a transfer would be made without a resolution of the threatening action by the Guatemalan government against U.S. personnel on Aug. 31." While people who run away from Guatemala because President Morales refuses to protect them are treated as criminals by CBP at the Mexico-US border. And the president of the US who indulges Guatemalan corruption this way isn't so indulgent to the population and cuts off humanitarian aid because he's having a temper tantrum. 

A little more of that colloquy I posted earlier: what led up to the "white nationalist" debacle, on the issue of hate speech:

If you stereotype a group of people this way--they think there's nothing wrong with rape, murder, etc. as long as they're safe from it--I would think that's pretty dehumanizing. If I was a member of such a group I'd feel threatened.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

But I don't know if I'd report it unless it was clearly e.g. aimed at Jews or the like. If you mean Democrats, I'd probably just laugh at you and write a blogpost about it.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

He didn't mean Jews or Democrats. And he's consciously dehumanizing, like it's moral choice he's proud of, which shocks me a little, and I'm pushing back:

Literary Corner: Mr. President, tear down those hotels!

A year ago, Ishaan Tharoor at Washington Post was using the most famous windmills in European literature as a metaphor for Mexico (I think that's the Mexican flag in upper left, though the color process has made the green bar awfully blue), and our president's other fantasy enemies, but no, he's really got a serious issue with literal windmills!

Which goes back at least in part, as is well known, to his long war with the Scottish government over his golf course and resort near the village of Balmedie in Aberdeenshire, which he bought in 2006 under what he believed or claimed to believe were assurances from then chief minister Alex Salmond that no wind farm was going to be constructed within sight of the course (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds opposed both the proposed wind farm and the golf course, but Salmond helped Trump out with the permitting for the latter, I assume in the name of job creation). But by the time the course was ready to open in 2012, the wind farm had been more or less decided on, and Trump was threatening to back out of his own commitment (Salmond would be "known for centuries" as "the man who destroyed Scotland", he threatened, and when RSPB withdrew its objection to the energy project, since the number of birds killed by wind turbines is minuscule compared to the vast numbers that die or are never born because of the effects of fossil-fuel energy production, he said it should change its name to "Royal Society for the Killing of Birds"). But the threat was empty, like most of his threats, and he opened the place anyway, and lost his last appeal, during the presidential transition, as it happened, in December 2016.

So we know he never forgives or abandons his hope for revenge at all costs against those who give him a defeat, whether it's the NFL thwarting his longing to own a team or Mrs. Clinton not inviting him to her daughter's wedding, and that ought to be enough to explain his feelings about wind power, but I can't help feeling it's somehow more than that, that windmills truly creep him out in some irrational way, as you could hear in the tone of his remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday, where the tone mounted to the macabre, with a childlike hardness, a little Christina Rossetti:

Annals of Derp: It's also Cognitive Dissonance

Image via Ghoul Friday.

A sighting of the old zombie study proving on the basis of a completely factitious approach to some very dubious data that 5.7 million "illegal aliens"--more than half the total undocumented population--came out to vote in 2008:

This isn’t surprising to those of us who are being honest about the corruption in our political system. https://t.co/p2tc835TB6

— Defend Trump (@Defend_Trump) August 27, 2018

It shouldn't be too surprising, given that the story came out 14 months ago.

But it was always a meaningless extrapolation from unreliable data and it still is. pic.twitter.com/WndyOtTobO

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2018

Annals of Derp: Our Terrifying Math

Golden Section gif by astrophysicsstudent.

RT comedian Lee Camp passing on a story from Forbes Retirement columnist Laurence Kotlikoff claiming Pentagon spent an unauthorized $21 trillion without noticing it from 1998 to 2015. (That's six times the amount printed by the Quantitative Easing program 2009-15). It's false. https://t.co/4VqdkBEIJg

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

What's going on was explained by Mick West of Metabunk in May https://t.co/Z2twroXaKQ The number totals all the accounting errors--not even errors, "unsubstantiated adjustments", in all the Pentagon's accounts--not only what they've spent, but what they owe and what they own.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

But those numbers--"adjustments" in spending, AND debts and assets, repeated year after year for the same pension and the same ship--don't add up to anything real. The amount they spend in a given year is pretty much the $600 billion they say they spent.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

If I owe you $10 and I mistakenly think it's $15 and write it down that way while my accountant has the right figure, that's going to be an unsubstantiated adjustment of $5 in the audit (in my favor: I'm in less debt than I thought I was). And if I don't pay you for 15 years, and keep getting it wrong, it's another $5 unsubstantiated adjustment every year. Then if somebody like Professor Kotlikoff comes around trying to figure out what I'm up to he's going to claim that I secretly spent $75, although in fact I merely saved $5 I thought I was going to have to spend.

Anyway I'm not defending military, I'm defending math. The $21 trillion figure is nuts, and the way it was calculated is worse. Attack the military all you want, they deserve it, but don't use bogus arguments like this, because they're making us stupid.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

AOC v. VDH

Giovanni de Min. Spartan women wrestling, fresco, 1835-36. Villa Patt, Sedico, via .scclub.  

Victor Davis Hanson denounces the educated classes for the enjoyment and edificaton of the unlettered readership of the National Review:
T

rumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council on Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.

But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?

You can tell by his plain, colloquial language that he's a hardscrabble man of the people himself, at ease with chainsaws.

For the Record: The Derp Penalty

Everybody else was out saying you wouldn't even have Christianity without capital punishment, and I appreciate that, but doesn't that imply that it's already served its purpose? If Christians don't need to avoid pork or shellfish or sex with women during their periods because their Redeemer has redeemed them from all that, why would they have to put up with executions, of all things? Ilya Repin, Golgotha, 1869, via Varvara. 

Disappointed that young Monsignor Ross Douthat hasn't come out formally to protest against Pope Francis's announcement that the death penalty is "inadmissible", though he has produced a pretty subtle Twitter thread where he wonders if the Pope has gone even further with this than he did when he suggested it might be OK to let divorced people take Communion sometimes, and how dangerous could that be for the future survival of the Holy Mother Church, though he's pretty sure the death penalty issue is less serious than the divorce one—

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 2, 2018

—it's one of his technical pieces, written to assure 12 or 13 of his readers that he's really as intellectual as he looks, and he's pretty careful not to have any feelings about it other than your "concerned kitten is concerned" frowny face, and not adjure to anything controversial like having his own beliefs about right and wrong.

Gun and Done

Drawing by Rob Tornoe, 2015.

Can the Left let the families grieve for even 24 hours before they push their anti-gun and anti-gunowner agenda? My goodness. This isn't about a gun it's about another lunatic. #FloridaShooting

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) February 15, 2018

I don't see how anything I say is going to interfere with the grieving of anybody's family—I doubt any of the Broward County families whose children, brothers and sisters, and friends and teachers were murdered yesterday are hanging on Twitter waiting to see what Tomi Lahren or I have to say about it. If they are and they'd like us to stop, they're welcome to let me know, but that's not the impression I'm getting from Steph, or Glenn Greenwald's niece, who seem to need to talk, right now:

Never in a million years would I think that I had to run over dead bodies in the same hallway I once walked happily with my friends. Never in a million years would I think I had to mentally prepare myself for the worst because the gunshots were getting louder and closer. Never.

— Steph (@ohstephany_) February 15, 2018

My niece goes to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where the shooting occurred. She wasn't there at the time, but just heard from my brother many horror stories of parents still without information about their kids, others who texted as their kids hid in closets.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 14, 2018

Ben Shapiro at the Direly Wail claims that

Annals of Derp: Jordan Peterson, Clinical Psychologist

£7.99 from Mugtopia UK.

Following up on the previous post, here's Conor Friedersdorf complaining about the journalistic tactics used by UK Channel 4 News on the innocent and unsuspecting Jordan Peterson, in that interview:

Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

And of course we've seen David Brooks getting upset over this too.

So I ran across a transcript of the the thing (from an all-trite blogger called Katana17, the Daily Stormer also has one), helpfully red-lettering all the spots where Newman seems to be trying to restate Peterson's statement, and I'm going to, sort of, dispute that, first in a segment Friedersdorf doesn't look at, where Peterson is explaining how he never said that trans activists are the same as Mao Zedong. He merely said that they're the same in every important respect:

Newman: I mean there’s no comparison between Mao and a trans activist, is there?

Peterson: Why not?

Newman: Because trans activists aren’t killing millions of people!

Peterson: The philosophy that’s guiding their utterances is the same philosophy.

Newman: The consequences are, …

Peterson: Not yet!

[25:00]

Annals of Derp: The Gallup Most Admired

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gypsy girl with Basque drum. Via Enigm-Art.

You know who's really the most admired woman in the United States? Somebody you've never heard of. I'm not even kidding: that was the answer 13% of the respondents in Gallup's 2017 survey, "friend/relative". The most frequent answer, given by 27%, was "don't know". Hillary Clinton only came in third, at 9%. Or maybe she was more like 13%, or 5%, because there's a four-point margin of error.

Puttting it another way, this is a really dumb survey, and always has been. It may tell you how many Americans say they admire Hillary the most of all women, around nine in a hundred, or around 94 of their 1,049 respondents (the given number is some manipulation of the raw numbers of those who named her as first and as second choice both). It doesn't tell you who America admires the most—that would take a different kind of poll, maybe taking the top 50 names on these lists and asking a second sample to rank them all.

It doesn't signify nothing. There is some kind of meaning to the suggestion that Barack Obama is more admired than Donald Trump (though only 17% to 14%, well within the margin of error), or that Hillary Clnton is still definitively on the women's list (9% to 7% for Michelle Obama). But it isn't much.

And down below the scale, where Condoleezza Rice and Melania Trump are tied for seventh place at 1% each, about the same as Bernie Sanders (7th place) and Bill Gates (8th place) on the men's list, it's really meaningless. It's comical and a little pathetic when the Free Beacon calls attention to the prime minister of Israel:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is America's most admired foreign democratically elected male leader, according to an annual Gallup survey.

Netanyahu was ninth overall on the list of most admired men by Americans, with about 1 percent of respondents naming him. He is currently the second-longest serving prime minister in Israel's history after David Ben-Gurion.

The Dalai Lama was 11th on the list.

Fewer than one in a hundred think of naming Netanyahu, and fewer still of the Dalai Lama (who's actually tied for 10th place, with Mike Pence and Jeff Bezos). What differentiates him from Justin Trudeau at 13, Theresa May (14 on the women's list), Aung San Suu Kyi (much further down), Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela and Benazir Bhutto, the last two not even alive though the questionnaire specified that they had to be, is pretty much random error.

It's fun to talk about these numbers, but you should avoid thinking you learned anything from them,

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

For the Record: The Week in Shapiro

American Tory. Russell Kirk with his ancestral home, Piety Hill, in the background. He would be startled to learn that Ben Shapiro thinks his views are anti-conservative. Via The Imaginative Conservative.

This was funny, from an outraged Ben Shapiro who knows more about conservatism than his elders:

This, from @davidfrum, is nonsensical. It reduces philosophy and ideology to nothingness. It's a thoroughly anti-conservative sentiment, actually. pic.twitter.com/Ipwe6wc6As

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 20, 2017

Uh, no, with all due disrespect to old Axis of Evil David Frum:

Actually no, it's pretty much Russell Kirk. Frum's read quite a bit more than you have, I expect. pic.twitter.com/SaPy1Tt6yZ

— Yulstreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 20, 2017

Annals of Derp: Man to Mann

Image by shooteradolf/deviantart.

David Brooks, in spite of his faith in "the glory of democracy" ("The Glory of Democracy"), fears that democracy is on its way out:

Tribalism and authoritarianism are now on the march while the number of democracies declines. Far worse has been the degradation of democracies, especially in our own country. The Congress barely functions. We have a president who ignores facts and violates basic decency. On college campuses, according to a Brookings/UCLA survey, 50 percent of students believe that “offensive” speech should be shouted down and 20 percent believe it should be violently crushed.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that 50% of college students believe "offensive" speech should be shouted down and 20% that it should be violently crushed?

Answer: In principle, yes, but (according to Lois Beckett's report at the Guardian, which it took Dr. Google less than two minutes to locate)

Turnout turnout turnout

Judge Moore heading into the sunset on a horse that clearly doesn't like him very much, via Deadspin.

My favorite statistic from yesterday's Alabama Senate election is this, as reported in the Washington Post:

 “These swings can be seen in counties majority white and black, Republican and Democrat. And that means it couldn’t have just been a surge in African American turnout, or just rural Trump voters staying home, or just Republicans crossing over to vote for Jones. Jones’ campaign was able to achieve a combination of the three that drove him to victory. Despite it being an off-year special election in December, Jones got 92 percent of Hillary Clinton’s vote total. Moore just got 49 percent of Trump’s.” 

The authorities were expecting a 25% turnout, meaning really big for an out-of-season race, and instead they got 40%, but that unexpected crowd was not symmetrical. Half of Trump's voters couldn't bring themselves to vote for Moore, but nearly all of Clinton's voters came out for Jones.

Socialism of the right?

Postmodern mariachis att Turnberry, June 2015 in The National.

Wrong. The Nazis were far RIGHT, always have been, always will be. By the way, the Democrats and Republicans essentially switched platforms during the mid 60s after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so the entire basis of that book you mentioned really IS "The Big Lie".

— Jim Salomon (@JimSalomon) November 26, 2017

Cite for that Goebbels quote please?

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2017

I'm sure Dinesh has a better one, but this took me 2 seconds on Google.
Goebbels: "The NSDAP [Nazi Party] is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism." (Der Angriff, Dec 6th, 1931)

— Janey Mack (@JaneyMackWriter) November 26, 2017

I spent a ridiculously large part of the afternoon looking for a decent and adequately contextualized source for that quote, which originates from an especially poorly made and poorly documented WikiQuotes page), and ran along the way into a good deal of stuff that might be interesting beyond the usual spectacle of me throwing a pie in Dinesh's face, on the issue of what we're to do with these awful old terms of "right" and "left" and "fascist", especially relevant in the age of Trump.

The best source was a chapter, "Von der amerikanischen Sklaverei zum bundesdeutschen Kampf gegen Rechts: Metamorphosen des Rassismus " (From American Slavery to the Federal German Struggle Against the Right: Metamorphoses of Racism), from a 2008 book by Joseph Schüsslburner, quoting in turn from a 1987 book by the journalist Wolfgang Venohr, Stauffenberg: Symbol des Widerstands ("Stauffenberg: Symbol of Resistance", on the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler):

Annals of derp: Have mercy on me!

Update below

It was FDR, not @realDonaldTrump , who cut deals with virulent racists & courted Italian Fascism while in the White House #TheBigLie pic.twitter.com/ucOxylOf7V

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 18, 2017

I guess it's perfectly true that Trump has not courted Italian fascism—yet. I mean, there's not as much Italian fascism kicking around for him to deal with. Other fascisms, from Britain to the Philippines, are another matter, as is Stephen Bannon's apparent interest in the "radically anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal, anti-democratic" writings of Baron Evola, but I think it's a more lively question whether Silvio Berlusconi, currently making some kind of comeback, is courting American fascism with his frequent praise of the most Berlusconian of US politicians. Anyhow where was I?

By the way, was Winston Churchill a leftist? Is that why he admired Mussolini so much? https://t.co/v0PoValcB7 pic.twitter.com/3LOH8Je3Ks

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 19, 2017

So somebody shows up with an ambiguous message. Not sure what it meant, but thought it might be a teachable moment:

Annals of Derp: President Don and Sec of State Rex had a great time

So Prime Minister Lee, prime minister of Singapore since 2004, and the son of Lee Kuan Yew who was prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and "senior minister" and "mentor minister" after that, is visiting the White House, and nobody in the State Department or the White House seems to have been able to find out what his name was (Hsien Loong is his given name, and "Loong" on its own is something his mother might call him) until after they'd humiliated themselves by publishing it in the wrong format everywhere in sight:

The Unbearable Epiphenomenality of Firearms

Genteel Victorian elite, via Petticoats and Pistols.

Shorter David Brooks, "Guns and the Soul of America":

Well, so according to fellow Canadian and fellow David David Frum, whenever there's one of these grotesque mass shootings, America's state legislatures jump into action to start passing gun laws, only not the way you might imagine. Instead of passing laws to make mass shootings less likely, they start passing laws to make guns easier to get, or easier to carry around. 

In fact Luca, Malhotra, and Poliquin 2016 found that a single mass shooting in a given state raises the number of firearms bills that will be introduced in that state's legislature that year by 15%, and the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions instead of tightening them will be 75% higher, if it's a Republican-controlled state, though not a Democrat-controlled one.

Which really blew my mind, because how are you going to explain this result other than by saying that the Republican party and the National Rifle Association exploit every such shooting as an opportunity to poison the population with fear and the irrational sense that they'll be safer if they just own more guns, and bring them to more different places, like schools, bars, and churches? 

Which is obviously ridiculous, I mean, what could the Republican party and the National Rifle Association have to do with that?

So I think the first thing has to be that it's not about guns at all. Guns are merely an epiphenomenon. The reason Republican state legislatures pass so many more bills loosening gun restrictions after a horrifying gun tragedy must be postindustrialization. The more we keep postindustrializing, the more the voters will demand more restriction-loosening gun laws. That just stands to reason.

And what can we do about this situation? What I've been telling you forever, moar narrativium! We need a new story on the postindustrialization/populism front, like Theodore Roosevelt's new American nationalism, but like different. And I want mine with extra mayo, don't disappoint me.

I know you all hate Frum, but let's just say The Atlantic has much better editors than the Bush administration did and his work is a lot better than it was in the Axis of Evil days. I may disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say he did his homework, if I think he did, which I do at least in this case.

Which I can't, as usual, say about David F. Brooks:

Annals of Derp: Does the NRA buy influence?

Marco Rubio chomps on a moneyburger, as Mr. Adelson and Mr. Koch look on benignly, via Cuban Insider.

According to Mr. Bret Stephens:

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

That's funny, Bret, because according to OpenSecrets.org, writing last November, the NRA spent $3.2 million on Marco Rubio's 2016 Senate race alone:

For the Record: Interpretive dance in Kentucky, and much ado about voting.

Good idea. Nobody's done that shit for years. Dance times have changed. (Illustration from 1949 https://t.co/d1Jzv9FEES) pic.twitter.com/RfVqosP5jq

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 16, 2017

As I suspected, U Kentucky doesn't offer an interpretive dance major at all. https://t.co/uud7Bu75wq Governor can stop worrying about it.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 16, 2017

And in some possibly more serious news that almost got interesting for a few minutes,