Highbrow nihilism

Image via bmxmuseum.

"Highbrow nihilism" is subtype B of the fourth type of contributors to Trumpism, in the Trumpological taxonomy espoused by Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who spends today implicitly walking back last Sunday's theory that Trumpism is caused by Obama in favor of a new theory, that it's caused as it were by all of us sinners, himself not excluded, since he seems to be one of the highbrow nihilists.

At least a "little bit". You see, type 4 in the taxonomy are the "inevitabilists", who did not support Trump but enabled him

by acting and talking as if the support of 35 percent of the primary electorate means Trump Cannot Be Stopped.

Of these, subtype 4A are the intoxicated:

Cheap shots: The Detroit debate

No offense to gorillas meant. I really, really love gorillas. I just don't think their behavior is appropriate for humans to emulate. Image via Gorillas344.

Hard as it may be to believe, it wasn't all Trump's penis, big as that is, or may conceivably be. Some of my favorite big lies of the evening follow.

Trump math

TRUMP: Let me explain something. Because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies — because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are not mandated to bid properly, they have hundreds of billions of dollars in waste.

We don’t bid properly. We don’t have proper bidding procedures. The reason we don’t is because they take care of all of the senators, all of the congressman, and they don’t bid. They don’t go out to bid. WALLACE: Mr. Trump...

TRUMP: Take a look — excuse me. You are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars...

WALLACE: No, you are not.

TRUMP: ... if we went out to the proper bid. Of course you are.

WALLACE: No, you’re not, sir. Let’s put up full screen number 2.

You say that Medicare could save $300 billion a year negotiating lower drug prices. But Medicare total only spends $78 billion a year on drugs. Sir, that’s the facts. You are talking about saving more money on Medicare prescription drugs...

Marching through Trumpia

Alexander Hay Ritchie, 1867, Sherman's March to the Sea. Via Wikipedia.

Even David Brooks is out with the penis references:

Now, at long last, the big guns are being brought to bear.

Nah, I kid, it's just a military analogy:

Now, at long last, some major Republicans like Mitt Romney are speaking up to lay waste to Donald Trump.

Before it was just the minor Republicans or little guns like Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich. It's a pretty weird analogy, though, to envisage Trump as a kind of terrain, dotted with forests and small farms, and General Romney taking his troops across it burning and pillaging.

Cheap shot: Kristol Blue Persuasions

Idea of a Cheney-Cotton ticket picks up momentum! http://t.co/lZv731hypA

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) September 16, 2015

Oh Bill, you never fail, do you? I'm literally crying.

It's the Oz ticket: a heartless tin droid and a brainless scarecrow.

All you need now is a coward (Republicans have plenty of those) for Secretary of Defense and a little girl at State who only wants to get back to Kansas.

Comeback of stupid shit?

Roman temple tombs at Ghirza, Libya. Photo by Esther Kofod.

So, SuperTuesday, huh. Everybody from Corey Robin to Ross Douthat is out with a venture into some of that contrarian horserace panditry as if that's something cool, or adult (gee, Dad, I sure wish I could be like Mark Halperin when I grow up!), the professor working out Bernie's demographic path to unexpected victory (he got 41% of the non-white Democratic vote in Massachusetts!) while the Monsignor games out the chances of a contested convention (credit where credit is due, he uses the correct expression instead of the idiotic "brokered convention", and while his scenario is equally idiotic, or worse, this is a year where that is no bar to becoming reality).

Imma say Hillary over the Donald in November with a record low turnout, and the usual awful performances by the Democratic senatorial and congressional committees leaving Congress more or less as it is. No I'm not. I will leave that to others.

I am feeling kind of distressed, amid the SuperTuesday celebrations and laments, by something else that happened virtually in the middle of it, the huge report by Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the Times that came out Sunday and Monday on the US role in Libyan military operations of 2011-12 and the part played by Secretary of State Clinton; not so much in the intervention itself as in her apparent failure to learn anything from it:

Brawling Alone

Thanks for the shout-out, Tengrain!

Une Excursion Incohérente (The Panicky Picnic) by Camille de Morlhon Segundo de Chomón, 1909, via SilentOlogy.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Movement Mentality", New York Times, March 1 2016:

What America needs now is more Trotskyists. And Birchers, Objectivists, Larouchists, Lovestonites, Burkeans, Mugwumps and Muggletonians, Socialist Workers, Socialist Laborites and laborist socialites, Social Creditists, Diggers and Levelers, leaflets and magazines, and meetings in college lunchroom alcoves, and admiring girls watching me win debates against my hapless opponents. It's the American way! You educate yourself by joining a cult! Not with that so-called "critical thinking".

I'm pretty sure he's not plagiarizing at all today but working from memory, though not his own:

Zombie rhetoric: A facet of the fact

Marion Davies in King Vidor's Show People (1928).

Speaking of Ross Douthat and the rhetorical strategy of "I'm not saying—just saying", here's cand. doc. Fredrik De Boer, literally a student of rhetoric, with an elegant variation: "I don't say it, I've never in my life said it, but some of my friends say it, and evidence shows that they are right":

I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.

Douthat's not saying. Just saying.

Oddly enough, George W. Bush does resemble Cato the Younger, a bit. Image via Barry Strauss. But as far as imperialism goes, there's a reason Mr. Pierce named him our C-Plus Augustus.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "From Obama to Trump", New York Times, February 27 2016:

I'm not saying Trump is all Obama's fault, but I can think of about a million reasons for saying it, and they're ever so intellectual-sounding. I'm just saying.

Because he's so saddened, right, by the Democrats' unseemly glee at the Republican pickle, or fear of what might happen if the Trumpster succeeds. Think it's funny, don't you, liberals? Or inspires you with terror?

What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.

Yes, we have to ask ourselves what we have done to encourage the Donald and Donaldism. Look into your heart, libs!

Welfare as we knew it

In August 1996, as the welfare "reform" bill Bill Clinton had vetoed twice traveled to his desk once more, Even-the-Liberal-New-Republic ran this lovely image, black mom savoring a cigarette while her baby enjoys a bottle, over the headline "Sign the Welfare Bill Now". Image via SansEverything. Those were truly evil days, not that that excuses him, strictly speaking, for signing it the third time around, but it helps to explain why he ended up thinking he had to.

So far in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton definitely has an edge over Bernie Sanders on the issue of welfare, if not exactly a glorious superiority: she's promised that she'll say something about it eventually—

In the coming months she will discuss more details on her approach to addressing children and families living in poverty, including how best to support those families who rely on the safety net of welfare to temporarily keep their families afloat during the hardest of times

—and he hasn't promised a thing.

Although of course on the other hand Sanders was one of the 98 Democrats and Independents in the House of Representatives who voted against the the 1996 welfare "reform" bill (98 Democrats voted for it) which replaced the traditional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (supplied under Title IVA of the 1935 Social Security Act) with a Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to be administered through block grants to state governments which would design their own programs, including strict working requirements for the beneficiaries, and putting a cap of 60 months on an adult's ability to receive such benefits during her or his lifetime. Whereas Clinton didn't have a vote at the time, but, as is pretty well known, was married to the president who signed the thing, as she still is.

A back in his Crick

Ossi Oswalda in Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppe (The Doll), 1919. Via Fritzi.

David Brooks was feeling awful when he was typing his title last night, "The Governing Cancer of our Time", but luckily he'd forgotten about it by the time he got his index cards lined up, and the unpleasant metaphor had wandered away. I wonder, though, what the cancer was going to be a metaphor for?

We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force.

Bigness, or diversity? It's clear that he regards these as problems in need of a solution in American public life, things that have to be dealt with, perhaps by unpalatable expedients. Need to lose weight? Chop off your legs or go on a diet, the choice is yours. Need to do something about that uncontrollable diversity? I'm afraid you'll have to get some politics. It's a slightly scary procedure, but less invasive than a dictatorship, and most patients survive.

I prefer to think of diversity and politics as positive goods, and interdependent, as the great English democratic socialist political thinker Bernard Crick suggested, in his 1962 essay In Defence of Politics:

The present now will later be past. That's a promise.

Don't try this with a real bagel. Especially if you're using real water! But if you do, don't panic, you'll probably be fine. Image from Swimline Water Sports.

Corey Robin, yesterday:

There’s a certain type of person who came of age around the time that I did—or just before or not long after—whose entire political identity is shaped around the idea of being realistic, of shedding childish enthusiasm and adolescent dreams. They were anarchists or activists or God knows what in high school or college. But now they know better. They can sling phrases like “How are you going to get it past Congress?” with all the bark of a short-order cook. They’re unafraid of clichés. They’re more mood than mind. And their world is about to come to an end.

It's always nice to be beating the governor

Rollender Kopf (Rolling Head, 1982), by the German artist Ernst Kolb. Image via www.aussenseiterkunst.ch.

I Love the Poorly Educated

a poem

by Donald F. Trump

I

You know we weren’t expecting—
a couple of months ago,
we weren’t expecting to win this one,
you know that, right?
We weren’t.
Of course if you listen to the pundits,
we weren’t expected to win too much,
and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country.
And soon the country’s going to start winning, winning, winning.

So I want to thank the volunteers.
They’ve been unbelievable.
These people, they work like endlessly, endlessly.
We’re not going to forget it.

And we’ve had some great numbers coming out of Texas,
and amazing numbers coming out of Tennessee and Georgia and Arkansas
and then in a couple of weeks later Florida.
We love Florida so.
We’re going to do very well in Ohio.
We’re beating the governor.
It’s always nice to be beating the governor.

The decay you decry

Photo by mks at dubstepforum.

Concerned David Brooks is concerned about marriage inequality! Not what you're thinking: it's that apparently all the best marriage is being hogged by a happy few while the majority have to make do with what remains, and the gap between the camps is growing:

marriage is polarizing: The best marriages today are better than the best marriages of generations ago; the worst marriages now are worse; over all, the average marriage is weaker than the average marriage in days of yore.

This is a not totally inaccurate summary of some research results reported in 2014 by the social psychologist Eli Finkel in a New York Times Valentine's Day piece, "The All-or-Nothing Marriage", and as a matter of fact it's probably the most interesting thing in the column, or would be if Brooks had been capable of understanding what he was reading when he read, or looked at, that article—I'll be getting back to it shortly, as Krugman would say at this point—but Brooks himself quickly loses interest in it and moves on to his own views on what modern thought, as represented by the self-help literature in airport bookshops, has to say on the subject of marriage, which is that we have three attitudes, of course, seeing it through three distinct "lenses", psychological, romantic, and moral...

Peak David Brooks Sloth

Sloth with a lot on his plate, via Giphy.

As you may or may not know, New York Times columnists have been expected since the Information Era arrived on 42nd Street, I think sometime in 2008 (?), to keep a blog or something like that, and David Brooks has basically never done it though there's a Web page purporting to contain one:

This blog covers the intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on David Brooks's desk nearly everyday but don't always make it into his twice-weekly column or his conversations with his fellow columnist Gail Collins.

It doesn't; what it contains is 13 blog posts from spring and summer 2011 followed by 14 "Life Reports" submitted by readers, in November and December 2011, when he tried to get them to do it for him, Tom Sawyer–style, followed by a single post of June 2014 where he responded to reader comments on his idiotic theory that there are two kinds of sports, logarithmic (soccer) and exponential (baseball), and he hasn't been back since.

As for that Conversation with Gail Collins, which began in May 2008 and quickly devolved into an improvised routine in which she emailed him one-liner prompts to which he responded (I figure it took her two hours a week and him ten minutes), it seems to have come to a halt in November 2014.

Collins has now restarted it with an alternative Brooks, Arthur, of the American Enterprise Institute and rumored to be one of David Brooks's spiritual directors on his road, if he's on the road, into the bosom of the Roman Church: as she wrote in its debut,

I miss my old pal David Brooks, but David’s just got too much on his plate to pick up one more project right now. And I get another Brooks! I will refrain from making any water-related jokes.

Now she's sliding into it, in today's dialogue on old Scalia, referring to David as "the previous Brooks", like "the previous incumbent", though he remains as the present Brooks on Tuesdays and Fridays. I don't know if I can convey what it is that seems to me so funny about this; it's the thought that he's too much of an indolent hack to even manage to be wholly himself without some assistance—"Arthur, can I borrow some of your Brooksishness? I'm running a little low."

Cheap shot: Lessons in political science

The Bosses of the Senate, after Joseph Keppler, Puck, 1889. Via US Senate.

Sanders to Chuckie on why he lost in Nevada:

“As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted.

“And what I've said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout,” he added.

Well, there's the thing (in addition to its being very far from certain that Sanders won the Latino vote). The whole theory of the Sanders campaign, suggested over and over again, is that Bernie himself is the key to bringing the young people and working-class people out, because they've just been sitting there yearning for for the opportunity. They haven't been voting very reliably in recent years—what's the point, in the pervasive corruption of our political culture? But with Bernie, there's hope for changing that, and they'll respond to that resonating message (semiotically speaking, the concept of "messages" that "resonate" may be the central theme of the whole election year):

Electability or Eluctability?

Three cardinal virtues—fortitude, prudence, temperantia—in the Stanze della Signatura, Vatican. by Rafaello Sanzio. Image via Rembrandt's Room.

Well, that was a fun Saturday! Marco Rubio won by coming in second instead of winning, as originally planned, by coming in third, and Hillary Clinton didn't lose by coming in first, even though Sanders won by coming in second, because her campaign had cleverly crafted the message that she'd win if she won, just as happened with Trump, who won because he was a winner, though he sometimes wins by coming in second too. Cruz lost, crushingly, with a vote that is statistically indistinguishable from that of the winner Rubio, whereas JEB! was forced to quit with his terrible 7.8%, conceding to the better prepared and more electable Kasich, who won spectacularly with 7.6%.

JEB! won the contest of who really wants to spend more time with his family, though it is not clear whether he means his wife and children in Florida or his brother in Texas and his mom in Maine. And these people all like to make fun of us ordinary folk with our Little Leagues and chess clubs where everybody gets a trophy.

Here's a great piece by Tom Hilton, on the question of whether Bernie Sanders is electable, where I agree with more or less every single point but I'm not sure I agree with the whole argument. My disagreement is that where he says Bernie's not electable I say he is, but I just don't see how.

Correction

Image via Hora de Aventura.

Early in November, I was very startled by some research reported in a paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton find that as mortality rates have generally been dropping all over the US there is one group where they have been going up rather steeply between 1998 and 2013, that being undereducated non-Hispanic white people (high school diploma or less) between 30 and 64, from causes dominated by suicide, liver cirrhosis, and drug overdose.

Some new work is putting a somewhat new reading on the numbers, I learn from Katie Surrence over at LGM, and I also find that I made an appalling error myself in my post back then, so I have to correct that.

My error was to say that it was white non-Hispanic men whose death rates were rising, which is not what that report said. I unconsciously made it up, I guess out of the belief that suicide and intoxicants are typically guy deaths, but the fact is there was no gender breakdown at all in the Case and Deaton study.

And in fact in the new treatment by Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Auerbach, adjusted for age groups and including gender breakdown, it turns out the people whose mortality rates are rising are non-Hispanic white women, ages 45 to 54, mostly in the South but to some extent also in the Midwest. (The rates for non-Hispanic white men in the South were rising pretty sharply from 2000 through 2008, but have declined since then.)

What it means I don't really know, but it does mean my Beavis and Butt-head scenario isn't exactly right, so let the record be revised accordingly.

Yes I can—No you Kant—

Spitballer Dr. Johnson, sticking out his tongue, refutes the idealism of Bishop Berkeley. Drawing by Godescalc. Story at Frank's place (note that philosophically speaking Boswell was right and Johnson was wrong).

A seriously annoying op-ed in today's Times by Vlad Chituc and Paul Henne boasting that they have found empirical evidence that disproves an axiom from Emmanuel Kant, which is like saying you can disprove Euclid by baking a lasagna.

The axiom is the one leading up to the categorical imperative that "ought" implies "can", or:

one cannot be obligated to do something unless the thing in question is doable. For instance, there is no sense in which I am obligated to single-handedly solve global poverty, because it is not within my power to do so.

Apparently some analytical philosopher called Walter Sinnott-Armstrong contested that axiom in a celebrated paper of 1984 by the usual analytic method of combining a wild Talmudic imagination with a certain English linguistic prissiness, by constructing cases in which it would be possible to say that you are morally obliged to do something you can't do; as Chituc and Henne exemplify it,

Vatican't even

Look at all those wetbacks swarming in shamelessly from Rome! Where's the border patrol for God's sake? Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.

Trump:

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. 

Long before that, the Vatican will probably be overrun by illegal immigrants breaching that ridiculous excuse for a wall, stealing all the jobs and raping the, um, choirboys?

Rear-window party

Buster Keaton in his 1923 film Three Ages. Via thefyuzhe.

Shorter David Brooks, "A Little Reality on Immigration", New York Times, February 19 2016:

I'd like to express my dismay about the way Republican conservative orthodoxy seems to have taken on such a violently anti-immigrant stance which would have seemed extremely strange to conservatives throughout our country's history, from Reagan to George W. Bush. I will convey this by explaining carefully why immigration is a good thing and invoking the name of Donald Trump seven times without mentioning the names of any other Republican candidates.

The account of how immigration is a good thing looks like some unusually assiduous research on the part of our author and his assistants, until you look at it just a little closely: