Rein In Blood

Dear Bernie Sanders campaign staff:

You generally do a good job of letting anything embarrassing or pants-on-head go out on your email blasts. But please, for the love of Kang and Kodos, watch out for well-known usage errors:

"Rein in" is a horse metaphor, not a king metaphor.

Today in pissy racism

A quick note for those keeping score at home: Kevin Williamson is still a race-baiting piece of shit:

[National Review] decided to send roving correspondent Kevin Williamson, who has some strong revisionist views on American racial politics, to East St. Louis, Illinois, to take in the local scene, and … oh, no:

East St. Louis, Ill. — "Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”

The scene ends with an interminable sentence Williamson probably regards as “literary":

... my terminus in East St. Louis, where instead of meeting my Kurtz I get yelled at by a racially aggrieved tyke with more carefully coiffed hair than your average Miss America contestant.

There are a few lines in here that a good editor would cut but could be waved off as unwitting bad judgment — the Heart of Darkness reference, three fifths, making fun of the hair. But when the writer also decides the best comparison for a young black kid’s behavior is a monkey and to gratuitously question his parentage, there’s really not much question, is there?

Today in [racially segregated] straw armies...

So Kevin Williamson, whom friends of the blog have met before, was tapped by noted white-supremacist rag National Review to deliver the [g]libertarian response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' address on the state of our racial union. Get an umbrella, folks, it's gonna get pissy in here.

We begin in the very first paragraph:

Mr. Coates’s beautifully written monograph is intelligent and sometimes moving, and the moral and political case he makes is not to be discounted lightly, but it is not a persuasive case for converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment.

Now, if you're like me, you might be scratching your head what the everloving fuck Williamson is talking about. Is he referring to the actual justice system -- a system that in its colorblindness just happens to imprison black men an order of magnitude more frequently than white ones? Or is he referring to some more inchoate tradition of justice, like the one which greeted the returning veterans from World War II with flowers if they were black and federally subsidized mortgages if they were white?

You cannot read Coates' essay and not realize that the Anglo-American tradition has been one of racial apportionment since the 1600s. This is the entire point. Goods of great and lasting value have been apportioned, through private and market-oriented means as well as through public policy, in a racially lopsided way. Now, of course not every lopsided apportionment of goods is a crime, but Williamson can't even seem to get this far.

A little further on, Williamson dances with an actual insight before losing the beat:

The most valuable aspect of Mr. Coates’s essay is as a corrective to the tendency to treat the systematic political and economic repression of black Americans as though it were a matter of distant history and a question that had been for the most part settled at Gettysburg, with a few necessary legislative reforms in the following century. The process of extirpating effective racism did not end in 1868 or in 1964; even assuming a zero racial handicap on a forward-going basis, we would expect it to take decades before the average economic differences between blacks and whites were to disappear. (If, indeed, we should expect them to disappear at all.)

Now, let's take a suggestion from that BBC piece about toilets and go through the thought-experiment of how this works in detail.

Under what conditions would we expect the economic distribution of whites and blacks to converge to each other, assuming that they have formal equality of access? One of the drivers of continued inequality is inherited wealth: if I am wealthy, then on average my children and grandchildren will be wealthy as well. Now, if I am white, what is the expectation that my children and grandchildren will be white? Here is where I think the models underlying Williamson's expectations might not match up with mine. Williamson, I suspect, models U.S. society going forward as a place of heavy racial intermixing, so that between those descendants of today's black people who benefit from hard work and entrepreneurship and those who marry into previously white money, the boundaries between the races blur and the overlapping distributions will coalesce.

I'm less optimistic. While I do see plenty of glorious miscegenation taking place, the drivers of de facto segregation in the U.S. are not gone even if everyone has formal access to the same suite of financial tools. And segregation -- in schools, in neighborhoods, in all these places -- is a countervailing force against this commingling of the descendants.

If segregation remains as powerful a fact as it is today, then we would expect the wealth distributions of white and black people not to converge, but precisely the opposite.

There is probably a vicious circle at work here: Even controlling for income, blacks are financially risk-averse compared with whites, which probably has something to do with the history that Mr. Coates cites; but this risk aversion has the long-term effect of leaving them worse off as they forgo higher returns on their savings

Worse off than what? Higher-return investment strategies are by definition higher-risk -- what Williamson is saying here is a direct denial of even weak forms of the efficient markets hypothesis. Unless he thinks that black people's risk-aversion takes the form of saving in the First People's Bank of Mattress, any approach to personal finance which beats inflation is either just as good as any other or improperly priced.

Hey, wait a minute. It couldn't possibly be the case that the personal-finance game is rigged against people with lower assets, could it?

Blacks probably should extend that skepticism, or even transfer it, to the welfare state. Mr. Coates does not spare the New Dealers, who enacted a raft of progressive policies that were in many cases designed to exclude or disadvantage African Americans. Contrary to the convenient myth related by our contemporary liberals, there was no substantial conflict between Democratic liberals and Democratic segregationists on most of the progressive agenda — the  progressives and the segregationists were, in the main, the same people, and the so-called conservative Democrats in the South were very enthusiastic about federal regulation of businesses, the minimum wage, social insurance, and welfare programs, so long as they could be structured in a way that would not benefit blacks very much. But Mr. Coates does not give much consideration to the possibility that a similar dynamic still is at work among our 21st-century progressives — not in the sense that white progressives see their own interests being in direct competition with those of black Americans, but in the sense that programs run for the theoretical benefit of the poor, who are disproportionately black, are in fact run for the benefit of the largely white upper-middle-class bureaucrats who are employed by them.

I smell piss. Piss, everywhere.

Listen, Kevin. We've been over this. It is impossible to be both a progressive and a segregationist, at least in the sense(s) the word "progressive" has been used in the post-Civil-War political context. Yes, the New Deal was a pretty raw deal for black people. The rising tide eventually lifted some nonwhite boats, but it's quite true that in order to get the damn thing on the books and in force, FDR needed the votes of his southern Democratic caucus.

But I can't figure why you are making this bait-and-switch to talk about how conservative Dems in the 1930s didn't hew close to the shibboleths of the modern conservative movement. Federal regulation of business, minimum wage, social insurance, and welfare programs can be net positives for a state economy. Now, conservatives love to accuse the latter three of these of impoverishing their nominal beneficiaries, but that case falls apart every time. (Hence the fallback position of "well, it inculcates a culture of poverty", which is both false and paternalistic bullshit. When there are jobs to be worked which pay better than welfare, people work them if they can get them.) But that's not even the case you're making here, since you pivot to "bureaucrats" without even the courtesy of telling us which programs you're imagining the bureaucrats are occupying, sucking up our precious bodily fluids.

Well, that's not quite true. Right after the last excerpt, you mention teachers' unions and how they're fighting school reform. Now, it's not clear what teachers' unions and bureaucrats have to do with each other, and it's very very unclear that turning the Washington D.C. school system over to Michelle Rhee was in the interests of anybody except Michelle Rhee and a whole bunch of fly-by-night charter schools. But seriously: what the hell point are you trying to make here? It's an incoherent mess.

We're almost done:

Blacks are disproportionately poor, and policies that encourage economic growth and robust employment, which is the only meaningful long-term anti-poverty program, should benefit blacks with roughly the same disproportion.

This is just simple mathematics: absent any structural amelioration of the reasons that some discrete subgroup of the population is disadvantaged, just growing the economy preserves disadvantage. A color-blind approach like this is both naive and counterproductive.

And this is, again, the whole case being made: that the assaults against black people in the U.S. have been public, sustained, and not racially neutral. It defies logic to think that a racially-neutral response could possibly work to counter this history.

Introducing the Matt Walsh Project

I have conservative friends. This should not be a surprise, but it can be anyway -- it's one of the ways that the Internet imitates modern life, that we are able to sequester ourselves into little enclaves (more on this in the next post). And it's also true that the overlap between self-identified conservatives and horrible (racist, sexist/gay-bashing/trans*-bashing, nativist, warmongering, etc.) people is nontrivial. When people in my life cross those lines too far or too often, they don't stay in my life, but simply self-identifying as conservative doesn't cut you off on its own. (Neither does being an idiot -- I'm dumb plenty often myself, and even more often don't have the relevant facts at my disposal.)

All of which is to say, that I have some conservative friends, despite the fact that I'm about as far away from being a conservative as one can be and still have real representation in the American political system. And many of those friends are on Facebook. And they share things.

Frequently, very stupid things. (Conservative imagememes are... well, they're embarrassingly dumb.)

Occasionally, less stupid things.

Very occasionally, things that are wrong, but deserve an answer.

And I've noticed one blog that people link to, that has an abnormally high incidence of the last category. And, oddly enough, this is a blog that doesn't seem to get picked up by (for example) Memeorandum, or to be on the radar of the liberal blogosphere, even though clearly conservatives share it around.

(It's really not all that odd that Walsh doesn't get much Memeorandum love -- Memeorandum's algorithm values people glomming onto existing stories, and it doesn't look like that's how he blogs. I'm not sure, since I don't have his RSS in my feedly or anything, and it's not relevant.) I'm not even really sure who Walsh is, aside from a blogger; his site banner has a picture of him in a radio studio, but his bio doesn't link to any radio show. Regardless: his words speak for themselves, and who he is in real life isn't really my problem.

Anyway: I'm setting myself the project of writing responses to Walsh's posts, when (a) they float across my own social networks (I'm not going to go looking for them), and (b) they've got enough wrong in them to warrant my time.

(NB: my time fluctuates in value. This month, it ain't worth much, so marginal wrong might get my time.)

I've got two to start with. One is a bit old, but the wrong factor is high, and it's on a topic that I have strong feelings about. The other got posted this week, and its level of wrong is actually pretty low; it was just enough to get my lazy ass writing about it.

All are hereby instructed to refer to Chris Christie...

... as Taft.0.

POTUS' head talks

SOTU:

Yay for deficit reduction! Except the sequester... That's the BAD kind of deficit reduction.

"Our government must not make promises it cannot keep; but we must keep the promises we've already made."

How does Obama plan to put real money into "smart investment in our future" without adding to the deficit?

And it's more of this "add nothing to the deficit" bullshit. FUCK. EVERYTHING.

Strong words on climate change. Bonus points for indicting Boehner for his chickening out in the face of the carbon lobby.

I spoke too soon. More gas permits? Yeah, that'll help.

I like this bridges idea. I liked it when I heard it in 2008 too.

Universal pre-k? I like it! Sounds like a way to boost education and spend lots of sweet, sweet stimulative dollars.

"Let's redesign the american high school." I agree. Let's start by trashing standardized tests.

"A path to earned citizenship... Back of the line..." So tell me again what is the incentive for an undocumented immigrant to initiate that process, if the line is as dysfunctional (and long) as it currently is?

No comment on the endorsement of stereotypical gender roles.

"The group that attacked us on 9/11 is a shadow of its former self"... but you'll still have to take your shoes off at the airport.

North Korea? Come on, Mr President, don't feed the troll.

Obama has more credibility on supporting democracy than any president in my lifetime... I mean, in Egypt, we let them get away with electing the wrong people. I'm glad that the messiness of democracy gets a nod here.

I do like how MSNBC cuts to SCOTUS when the topic of voting comes up.

"Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote..." Is Obama talking to Mitch, or to Harry Reid?

Binary thinking is abortive

From Slacktivist: What do the purple people want in PRRI’s abortion poll?

Think you can't be both pro-choice and pro-life? You've been listening to the anti-choice crowd for too long. Turns out 43% of Americans self-describe with both labels. Follow the link for a chart and everything.

Now, the survey doesn't have the space to dig down into what all those respondents took each term to mean (whether they adopt either term about themselves or not); like many on the port side of the political spectrum, I greatly resent the expropriation involved in fencing off "pro-life" to refer to the unborn, and I recall plenty of conversations with people who resent this more than I do, who are tilting at that particular windmill trying to take back that dirty word.

So the next time someone tries to set you up the argument that more than half the country is pro-life, feel free to remind them that even if that's true (by whatever definition of "pro-life"), it doesn't change the fact that two-thirds of the country wants abortion to stay legal.

Zero Dark Thirty and rape culture

I let Zero Dark Thirty (hereinafter 0D30) simmer through yesterday. Partially this was because I spent the afternoon with the brew club (side note: Turtle Anarchy, gracious hosts of the meeting, have an experimental Curry Porter on tap. Run, do not walk, run there and get yourself a pint), and spent the evening relaxing in front of a DVD with Ms Heel-filcher; partially also, because it's good to let a film you didn't like have some time to make its case.

The post after the fold contains spoilers. Oh, and Harry bin Laden dies at the end.

Shorter Zero Dark Thirty

0D30, Act 1: You, the torturee, are responsible for any harm which befalls you.

0D30, Act 2: None of this conjecture can be confirmed because we aren't allowed to torture any more.

0D30, Act 3: What convinced you that Bin Laden is there? Her unshakeable faith, that's what.

Latte-sipping Beltway consensus

You know what would be really helpful, Howard Schultz?

Starbucks is getting into the debate over the looming “fiscal cliff.” CEO Howard Schultz has posted a letter online explaining that for the rest of the week, employees in the megachain’s Washington, D.C., stores will write “Come Together” on customers’ coffee cups.

1. Not confusing the Fiscal Slightly-Downward-Angling-Slope with a debt crisis:

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the Starbucks tradition of bringing people together, we have a unique opportunity to unite and take action on an incredibly important topic. As many of you know, our elected officials in Washington D.C. have been unable to come together and compromise to solve the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt. You can learn more about this impending crisis at www.fixthedebt.org.

2. Not propagating the false narrative that old people with an entitlement complex, rather than two off-balance-sheet wars, double-digit unemployment, and a medical cost system which Obamacare is only praying to bring under control, is driving our current unsustainable economic/fiscal course.

3. Prioritizing good policy over Beltway split-the-difference pseudo-moderation by having what your employees write on cups be good policy, like, say, protecting Social Security (which is not relevant to the Fiscal Slightly-Downward-Angling-Slope and does not contribute to the deficit in any way), instead of useless platitudes like "Come Together".

The problem here isn't that politicians are unwilling and unable to come together. The problem is that what the GOP is willing to offer (to the extent that we can tell any specifics of what the GOP is offering) is well across the Democrats' red line, and that the Democrats' red line is well past what their constituents -- hell, well across what the GOP's constituents -- want.

Look, Howard, let's everyone admit it: the Republican Party is bad for business. If we had a sane opposition party, a bipartisan plan investing in the country's infrastructure and getting Americans back to work would have sailed through both houses, financed by money borrowed at negative interest rates. Instead, you're trying to sell coffee to people who are struggling to make ends meet because it takes more than four months to find a job.

So if you're going to make a gesture, don't make one which pushes for what's worse for your employees -- and for yourself.

Epic win at Brad Delong's blog

Cosma Shalizi, in comments: "More elaborately: our gracious host would really like to be just a little bit to the left of a technocratic center, and to debate those just a little bit to his right about optimal policies within a shared objective function, and pretending that it is a technical and not a political discussion. But because shit is fucked up and bullshit, and because everyone at all on the right has spent forty years (at least) doing their damndest to make sure shit is is fucked up and bullshit, even the smallest gesture in that direction is not so much reconciliation as collaboration. And so our host has sads. (So, for that matter, did Uncle Paul, before he learned to relish their hatred.) The realization that this applies to economists --- that much of the discipline is not a branch of science or even of dialectic, but merely of rhetoric (and not in an inspirational, D. McCloskey way either) --- cannot come too soon. Whether someone who still assigns Free to Choose to callow freshmen, in 2012, is really in a position to complain about the absurdities of Casey Mulligan is a nice question; but recognizing that half your erstwhile colleagues were always mere ideologists is a step in the right direction."

Brad DeLong : DeLong Smackdown Watch: Cosma Shalizi

Grepped from Facebook

On my Facebook wall (in response to a post about the Republican record on job creation):
Joe: Just tired of Democrats taking credit for everything good that has ever happened since the beginning of recorded history and blaming everything bad on those rascally republicans.

Me: As I've said many times before, one-party rule is no democracy's friend; the role of the loyal opposition is critical in modulating the ability of a power-bloc or party to implement its will. (Checks and balances don't spring into action on their own: they are the result of someone in power standing athwart and shouting "stop!".)

Of course, since I am of a progressive bent, I favor the political ascendency of party/ies close to my own vision of how to solve the country's problems; and will start from a skeptically pessimistic position about the outlook of a proposed solution beginning from premises as different as those held by many conservatives... but there are plenty of instances of "conservative" proposals which end up improving on whatever the status quo was, or even solving the problem entirely. Alternatively, there are plenty of examples of places where conservatives negotiated a provision into a solution, which may have weakened the solution slightly but enabled the solution to move forward under the endorsement of all the major powerholders -- thus making it much less likely for the program to come under partisan fire in the near future.

[Note that the inverse is also true: bad solutions with strong bipartisan support, such as a lot of the privacy violations of the War On Terror, are almost impossible to dislodge.]

So let's think historically for a moment. From the New Deal realignment of the parties until Gingrich, the Republican party was constructive when in the minority and, when in power, allowed the Democrats room for constructive contribution. Consequently, shit got done. The shit that got done under Republican majorities tended, in my view, not to work as well, but it was not nothing.

Then Gingrich happened, and by "Gingrich" I refer to a wholesale revision of the Republican party's strategy for participation in government: when in the minority, use every procedural method available to block all progress; when in the majority, deny the minority any say in the construction of solutions.

And for that alone -- even leaving aside the dehumanization of their opponents, their embrace of white male Christian supremacism, their reckless fiscal irresponsibility, and their rejection of fact-based inquiry -- I say, for just the offense of undermining the concept of "loyal opposition" in American public life, the Republican party must be stopped, and until such time as the party is willing to return to the table willing to cooperate with the rest of the country, no American has any business voting for them.

On becoming the monster

So the 'verse is all a'twitter because Mitt Romney was caught on a hot mike saying this when he thought only friends were in the room:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Now, for sure, part of this is rock-solid political truth: each of the two major parties has a core of base support that the other campaign isn't even shooting to win over. The exact numbers ebb and flow -- I haven't heard anything remotely close to 47% for the Democrats from a source I trust with numbers -- but the principle is sound.

What's outrageous here is the conflation of a few demographics here:
(1) the Democratic Party's base;
(2) the fraction of the adult U.S. population who paid no federal income tax last year; and
(3) the fraction who are "dependent" on the government for their livelihood (that is, those who benefit from social insurance and safety-net provisions, which the Right has successfully renamed "entitlements").

These three groups are very, very distinct, though certain sectors of the Right-Wing Sound and Fury Machine have been pushing the conflation for a while now. I think Brad Delong has a very important point here:

The most fascinating thing about Romney is that he has fallen for a fake statistic created by the Wall Street Journal editorial page as what they call "boob bait for the bubbas"--something that they hope low-information voters will hear, get outraged about, and vote Republican.

What's critical here isn't merely that the statistic Romney's using doesn't say what he thinks it says... that happens to everyone sometimes. It's that the Right-Wing narrative frame was supposed to be about snookering the median voter into voting for the guy who values what they value and the party which takes away everything they value and replaces it with cheap Chinese crap.[1]

Look, there's the Religious Right wing of the GOP, and the leaders of that wing are mostly true believers, if sometimes also hypocrites who enjoy the company of rentboys. And then there's the "foreign policy" wing, which means followers of Leo Strauss, the purveyors of the Noble Lie in the service of getting all the rest of us in line. The basis of this foreign (and domestic) policy is, of course, the enrichment of the American or not-inarguably-foreign business classes at the expense of the 99% at home and of any vestige of self-determination abroad.

But the biggest story in the American political scene, the story of the current generation of big-C-Conservatives, is that they have forgotten that the Noble Lie is a lie. They have forgotten that while the dude on the street is supposed to think of the federal budged like a household budget, the ones who actually get power are supposed to know better. They have forgotten that while we're supposed to think Russia is the enemy and the Wolverines are the heroes, the guys and gals in power are supposed to be ruthlessly out for US interests, and that means putting pressure on our "friends" (read: clients) and not just on nations we don't even have formal diplomatic relations with. They've forgotten that while the kids in schools are supposed to be creationists and Exxon is supposed to be able to do whatever they want wherever they want, the halls of power need to be also preparing for the day when the atmospheric CO2 is 450ppm, the Maldives no longer exist, and the ocean's salinity has dropped far enough to disrupt the flow of tuna to the heartland.

And they're supposed to know that the WSJ's class internecine warfare is just divide-and-conquer rhetoric -- and have people on hand to talk a Presidential candidate out of the carefully crafted bullshit. Or, you know, only nominate people skilled enough in parsing media narratives to have read that play straight from the huddle.

Instead, we have Mitt Romney, and a Congress whose largest single bloc, regardless of which party has the majority of each house, will almost certainly be straight-up-consumers of narratives designed solely to obfuscate reality and ensure the impotence of American self-governance.

[1] This is not entirely fair. The Democrats are, in the main, also fans of economic policies that result in cheap Chinese crap. However, the Democrats have put some real policies in place in the last four years resulting in Americans being employed in the making of both cheap crap and durable worthwhile investments.