Comments on: Adventures in Anti-Semitic Implicature

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 30 May 2009 09:59:29 +0000

178:I have no idea who you think you are quoting but it isn’t me.

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 30 May 2009 07:24:07 +0000

Bob Mcmanus seems to think that making assumptions about motives = “exactly an insult”. He then backpedals furiously from the ‘John Holbo intends to defend the democrats by insinuating they are anti-semitic’ to the much more rational ‘John Holbo is a catspaw of the vast conspiracy to defend the democrats by insinuating that they are anti-semitic’.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 30 May 2009 05:36:54 +0000

176:Nope, that was based on the facts. Giving him credit, I presumed Holbo read and understood what he linked. He provided no real critique of the substance. He explicitly tried to limit the range of discussion. And in any case, saying Holbo knows what he is doing is not exactly an insult.

Try to imagine not knowing the author of the post, or imagining this exact post & link on the Corner or Red State and see if you would react differently.

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 30 May 2009 05:22:20 +0000

Bob Mcmanus wrote:

“Aw hell, Holbo, I think you know what you are doing” (@7)

and
“I am not the one making assumptions about his motives.” (@ 175).

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:02:54 +0000

174:You should have stopped at the first long sentence. There are claims above that Holbo didn’t know what he was doing . I am not the one making assumptions about his motives.

Barney Frank is writing legislation for the Gov’t to guarantee Municipal Bonds h/t Ian Welsh. VRDOs, variable rate demand obligations (VRDOs) specifically, Welsh compares them to CDOs’

The direct aid to states and municipalities was removed from the stimulus package. This move is more about protecting, once again, creditors and banks than helping municipalities provide services. It may help munis borrow, get further into debt. Meanwhile the taxpayers gain new obligations.

Yeah, I’m crazy with rage, at finance and our captured government. I think this current catastrophe is still a work in progress, closer to the beginning than the end. This is gonna get a lot nastier, perhaps even with a military distraction. Holbo can enjoy the abstractions of methodology while the rest of us back home are trying to find a roof and a breadline.

It is at very best incredibly irresponsible to link to the Malhotra piece.

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:05:24 +0000

Let’s see. Holbo is trying to immunize the current democratic administration against criticism by insinuating that criticism is anti-semitic. His strategy is to argue that democrats are anti-semitic. With that level of deviousness, he just must be jewish. The whole is an Islamo-fascist anti-semitic jewish conspiracy, run by a consortium of bankers and Osama bin Laden, in the service of promoting the protocols of the elders of zion. Either that or Mcmanus and Slack are crazy.

By: arc

arc — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:52:49 +0000

Maholta’s comment ‘anonymous internet mode’ was not actually referring to the methodology, anyway, but attempting to give an explanation as to why people seem more candid with their opinions on this survey than on others. They’re in ‘anonymous internet mode’ where they feel they can say any crazy thing they like without any kind of meangingful social reprisals (or rewards), rather than in ‘talking to another actual human being’ mode where they might fear the person on the other end of the line might start thinking they are, personally, an antisemite and a horrible person.

By: John Holbo

John Holbo — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:45:23 +0000

I’ve posted a follow-up containing a lengthy response the researchers themselves sent me, addressing methodological concerns, and other concerns. So I think we might profitably relocate this discussion to that thread, from this point on.

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/30/response-by-malhotra-and-margalit-to-their-critics/

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:00:12 +0000

Holbo’s accurate and right to suggest the absurdity of blaming “the Jews”, or really by extension blaming anyone at all for the insipid banality of modern “entertainment” like movies and TV shows. Despite the fact they’re now essentially raising their fourth generation of Americans.
“They” being whoever’s making all that crap and shoving it down the increasingly passive and accepting throats of the citizenry/entertainment-consumeracy.
Impossible to tabulate the hydra-slither of ancient irrational hatred and canard.
Woe increases.
Light gets murky.
If only there were more Jews prominent in the auto industry, we could point there and say, “See. No bailout for Big Auto! Fair’s fair! It’s not about that it’s about the economy! Now stop that nonsense!”
But we can’t, because there aren’t hardly any, sadly enough. The legacy of mid-Western US industrial anti-Semitism. See viz i.e. Henry Ford, prominent early 20th c. auto-magnate anti-Semite.
Thank heaven Obama sat Seder this year prominently and publicly.
Otherwise it would look really ugly, that anti-Semitism thing I mean. Rising the way it is.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:10:30 +0000

Since it looks like no one else is going to bring it up, I feel obliged to point out that Malhotra has previously held positions at Goldman, Sachs & Co., Citigroup, and A.T. Kearney.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:35:12 +0000

…Just to explicate, above comments are premised on the fact that the whole article was written (or authored anyway) by the two guys from Stanford, with no distinction made between results and discussion or anything else, and not a single caveat in the whole thing. I don’t have any very strong preconceptions about the subject matter, but I do have a lot of criticisms of the article, none of which conflict with yours unless they are allowed to displace them thus implicitly suggesting that they are the only or best ones.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:08:40 +0000

I’m sure my remarks haven’t distressed you, so I guess that isn’t aimed at me, but just in case: I’m not ‘blowing off’ (snigger), I’m criticising an article published in the lay press, and in particular pointing out that it falls far short of the standard of an academic article, which is pretty much how it will be treated by those citing it.

If you want to point out some more bits of the article that go wrong, geah head (one bit your concerns suggest you would want to address is the second poll/experiment). Then at least some substantial criticism will exist on the record somewhere, to which those asually citing the piece for the purposes you outline could be referred(or rather their audience could). And without getting into the realms of postmodernology, what you call the results already incorporate a fair bit of interpretation – so unless you advocate waiting for them to be cited then crying ‘ad hominem’, it would be better to lay out a counterargumnet.

Not that it’s for me to say; I’m just saying…

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:28:55 +0000

I don’t think we should be blowing this off in this manner and am distressed to see a lot of the tropes of Steven “Devastating Critiques” Milloy being used here. It really does look to me that a stylised fact (that latent anti-Semitic prejudices are really quite common, much more so than one might think) has been established here. I think any sensible critique of this work has to rest on the uses to which this result has been put, not the results themselves. After all, even if 30% of Democrat voters had specifically said to a pollster’s face something like “Yes, I blame the awful Jews, who I hate, for this financial crisis”, that still wouldn’t change a single fact about what actually happened, and the ad hominem arguments about taxation of the financial sector would be just as invalid as they in fact are.

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:21:49 +0000

Well, if most of us are agreed that the study and its given interpretation is highly questionable on its face and that further information, such as what items may have served as “priming”, is needed, what do we do next? I guarantee that if this article goes without serious challenge, we will before long have the likes of Charles Gibson treating its conclusions as established fact. After all, the Boston Review article directly admonishes the media to “bear these findings in mind” in its coverage of the financial crisis. It’s not like attributing a political objective to this article is some outrageous accusation.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:18:59 +0000

#164 Sadly I suppose you may be right – though I did leave implicit some pretty strong qualifiers, namely, mainly, it must be a (not dis-)reputable peer-reviewed academic journal in the relevant field. After all it has already been published in exactly this form. And this guy (and his silent partner) has a reputation to think of, especially at this stage of his career. Why he thinks that publishing this thing won’t adversely affect his professional rep to any significant degree is a somewhat interesting question though, especially if he’s right (in all the lemmas).