Have a Blessed Charles Krauthammer Day

Like the whole thing didn’t have credibility=0 from t=0…

I think it’s mean to kick Krauthammer when he’s down, having been fired from every print and media outlet in the US and reduced to sitting by the Metro stop at Dupont Circle holding a sign, “will pontificate for food.” He’s been utterly banished from public life and political debate, just like Negro bank managers were in the fifties. I just hope you’re all happy now.

@4: Did the Post dump Chuckles? I missed that. But if Theissen was his replacement, that’s not exactly an improvement.

Uh-oh — perhaps my irony detector fried a circuit in #6. We are all too ready to believe good news.

It surely means something, though not clear what, that Sally Quinn got run out of the print pages of the Post before Krauthammer.

Well Michael I’m sure your pals at Dissent will be happy to hire Krauthammer should he ever be in trouble. He’d fit in well with Alan “not the footballer or minister” Johnson and his crew, not to mention Michael “Gazans deserve to die” Walzer.

Do not any of you realize:

1) The Iraq War was never about WMDs. Only liberals thought it was about WMDs.

2) Bush never said there were WMDs. Only liberals thought he said that.

3) Bush said there were WMDs, but Bush was really a liberal, and so that has nothing to do with me.

4) Liberals are the real fascists.

Charles K.

Michael,
thanks so much for the report from the “rational” alternate universe; it does lift one’s spirits to know that somewhere in this big, whacky multiverse, there are some small morsels of justice.

How are the war-crimes trials of Bush, Cheney et al coming along? Please post gifs of the hangings, if you can.

we will have a credibility problem

However, I seem to recall that Bush got re-elected again, something about not wanting to change horses in the middle of stream or war, whatever. Krauthammer didn’t have too much to worry about as Bush/Cheney pretty much got away with murder.

But only a secret and deeply private agreement, right, a? Not one we could read about at Krauthammer’s day job?

Dear A, the post was not about whether or nor kraut hammer admitted later to a credibility problem or not.its about being stupid and about people dying.you will see that neither the original poster nor any of the commenters mention the credibilty issue. Your welcome.

We don’t need Sarah Palin to remind us that there is no penalty for pig-ignorance, yet Sarah Palin is still all over the news to remind us that not only can you always get what you don’t want, but you can also always get what you don’t need.

Could there be anything more addictive than the thought “I was right to be wrong and you were wrong to be right”? It’s the gateway to transcending reality-based thinking.

Stuart, why would I want to know something about somebody that was obviously wrong – or do you sincerely believe that a bunch of posts on US-centric figures of the third stage (yes, even a Belgian can use wikipedia! and read stuff in English) is the pressing thing to do?

(and I don’t begrudge you the fun of it but I just would like to have from time to time something that is not about the navel of US – apparently would-be – intelligentsia)

Blimey, JoB, you can be tiresome sometimes. Shove off and find yourself a new government, or something, can’t you?

24- no can do, not that it is any more interesting than Krauthammer or fresh cabbage or indeed your wit.

a 04.23.10 at 5:08 am

“I’m sure that Krauthammer would agree that the failure to find stockpiles led to a credibility problem.”

I’m sure that you would be sure, but much more sure that Krauthammer would not agree with that, and far more sure that Krauthammer doesn’t give a flying f*ck, because he’s a paid liar, and [right-wing] lies won’t cause him to lose his job.

But every once in a while, someone has to interrupt the ritual “your-pals-at-Dissent” chant by pointing out that Walzer, whatever his other faults, opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Yes, but on the other hand, Alan Johnson, which is a tiny bit more on-target than Walzer, no?

Though on the gripping hand, I didn’t realize that one automatically became pals with everyone else writing for the same magazine. Where are all my PNAS homies?

And on the hand attached to a prosthetic arm grafted on to restore bilateral symmetry, I’ll confess that I still think Paterson Joseph (who plays Alan Johnson in Peep Show) would have been an interesting casting choice for the Doctor. And I say that as someone who has been reassured by Matt Smith’s performance to date.

Oh, and insert something pertinent to Belgium here.

Imagine a fresh head of cabbage, crisp and delicious, being crushed by an oily sledge. Forever.

Nothing to add to this, really. It just seemed to deserve repeating.

Nobody, absolutely nobody could have predicted that the Liberals would be right and the Conservatives would be wrong.

Nobody absolutely nobody was saying that the people opposed to the war were anything but deluded.

Nobody absolutely nobody was taking Atrios seriously when he blogged about the coming sub-prime meltdown for four years before it happened. And nobody, absolutely nobody imagined that Paul Krugman was right when he suggested people take note of the warnings being given.

Nobody absolutely nobody was saying these things that liberals were saying.

pity poor, blogless Belgium. And poor, politically incorrect liberals.

@39: I think you must have mis-read that: he wrote “Assyria”, meaning that the infamous Muslim Time Korps was secretly sending the WMD stockpiles back to Hammurabi’s vast storage ziggurats, from which they would be retrieved when the Liberals had cravenly forced the manly and heroic Republican Army of the Fatherland to withdraw from Iraq and allowed S. Hussein to return from his Secret Spider Hole Lair of Doom and Menace The World once again.
Maybe his editor changed it.

Maybe he meant we’re counting in dog years? Like — we’ve had 7 years to look but that really only equates to one year, and never mind if my logic or English don’t make sense ’cause I know what I’m talking about and you don’t and…wait…what WERE we talking about?

there are less and less posts that are of interest beyond the circle of die-hard hate fans of third rate right wingers here.

JoB has a bit of a point here, no? It’s always striking to me how firmly CT’s collective gaze is directed to its right.

With the possible exception of one or two by Berube, I’m not sure I can recall a single post engaging, disagreeing, or even acknowledging someone clearly identified to the poster’s left. OK, John Quiggin wrote one post a couple years ago about why he isn’t heterodox, and more recently one about how he hasn’t read any Marxist analyses of the economic crisis. (Lots of people pointed him to some; I don’t know if he looked at them.) Admiration for Doug Henwood is occasionally expressed here, but you’d never know he has a blog. Monthly Review? New Left Review? There’s plenty of room for productive arguments with folks like that, you’d think, but it never happens. On the other hand, there’s always room for another post on Jonah Goldberg or Bryan Caplan. Strange.

JoB, you may not believe it, but people like Krauthammer have influence on the political discourse here, as opposed the center of the multiverse that is Belgium. As an American, this is very interesting to me. To a Belgian, probably not so much. But why you would criticize Americans for having an interest in American affairs is beyond me. Is there some premise about Crooked Timber that says, “CT deals only with important international issues.” *checks masthead* Don’t see one.
For my part, if a post seems to pay undue attention to what is, to me, an irrelevant matter, I either don’t read or think about it further, or I find out why the poster and commenters think it’s important.
Someone who keeps commenting after telling everyone the post is worthless seems to have some cognitive dissonance going on. Or likes to read his or her own writing.

So, Krauthammer should also agree that Bush took 8 years to destroy the country and Obama has had only 18 months to fix it…come back in 6 and1/2 years and if he hasn’t fixed it…

Further to # 41, 44, and 47: Isn’t this all more a question of parading the idea that you’re sort of on the correct side of things and sort of feisty to boot, but without having to say anything actually controversial? There’s a niche there. “We’re tenured, but contrary to appearances, we’re not a group of temporizing greaseballs”–I think that’s the credo.

There’s plenty of room for productive arguments with folks like that, you’d think, but it never happens.

I can understand why the folks at CT (or wherever really) might naturally want to pay more attention to the folks who are currently controlling, or who have in the past decade dominated, public discourse (in the U.S. and elsewhere).

Maybe it’s best to say that greater engagement with left thinkers is clearly welcomed and desired by CT readers including me… but all the same, the current rightward-looking asymmetry is quite explicable and reasonable and so forth. (shrug)

“With the possible exception of one or two by Berube, I’m not sure I can recall a single post engaging, disagreeing, or even acknowledging someone clearly identified to the poster’s left.”

Well, I think the main problem here is that the left-right axis is revealed as an inadequate oversimplification when you look at it too closely. There’s lots of other people that are vaguely on the left somewhere that get discussed plenty. “Clearly to the poster’s left” is a nearly impossible standard given where the posters are starting from and the difficulty of coming up with a clear judgment on which of two leftists is to the left of the other.

What use would a leftier-than-thou contest be anyway?

Hey, Walzer may support the massacre of hundreds of defenseless people with nowhere to run – but at least he opposed the Iraq war so it’s okay. What could there possibly be to criticize?

I would like to blog more on the intersection between a certain kind of economic thinking (e.g. Sam Bowles etc) and the left over the next year or two

Yes, please!

castorp @13–

“I showed him a donut from the Krispy Kream and said he could have it if the oration did not contain the words “Munich,” “Chamberlain,” or “Hitler.” ”

yeah, i did the same thing, and he kept on whining “aber ich wollte ein berliner!”

When the Democratic Socialist Party, USA actually, you know, exists, then I’m sure our friendly Timberites will have at them intellectually. Whichever ones haven’t been whisked away by a hoard of winged pigs, that is.

Henry, fair enough, just expressing my 2 cents, your site. It wasn’t so much this item as the absence of other items. By the way, just saw Green Zone, that’s possible too on your side of the pond.

Henry, my point here is that the predilection for easy targets of the Krauthammer/McArdle variety is something that gives the appearance of having a well-thought-out position without having to do any actual thinking. I think you’re being a little premature if you think that automatically makes you a phony. It is, however, as I said, a niche.

As for the earlier point which you have referred back to (I didn’t read your blue-rinse rebuttal with the screaming caps, because I had stopped reading by that time), my point was merely this: You coded blogs by left and right, and concluded that blog-readers are “carniverous” and enclosed in “cocoons of cognitive consonance” or some such expressions. As the title of your paper indicated, you connected that with “self-segregation” as opposed to “deliberation”. My point, which may have escaped you, was and is that deliberation often occurs when people learn new information, for example when a reader of a left blog reads information about events in the Middle East generally available from other entities that would be also coded as left. Nothing to do with your right-left “self-segregation/deliberation” theme.

My two points are related: What too often happens here is that a superficial juxtaposition of “right” and “left” takes the place of actual thinking, something you can’t code, really. And this can cover a multitude of sins.

Oh, God, is Henry still trying to retcon that old post into a win for him? The “science” that showed that people on “the left” showed a remarkable homogeneity of opinion with regards to the Moon landings not being faked or Elvis really being dead, in blatant contrast to their counterparts on the right “who held a more diverse set of opinions” on those subjects? The post where he kept on insisting people were saying one thing when they said specifically said otherwise . . . and pointed it out :

Henry, I quoted myself, giving an explicit definition. More than once. You ignored it. More than once. End of story. Y0u got no leg to stand on here. Nor does what you quote back up your claim that I’m using more than one definition; I certainly don’t see how ‘Thinking that global warming is a real phenomena does not make one a liberal.’ is using another definition when in fact, the majority of the populace do indeed think global warming is a real phenomena. (I’ll also not that – gasp – having a ‘reasonable’ opinion and having the opinion of the majority agree with don’t necessarily conflict. Strange, I know, but true.) So you can’t claim that you were confused by definitions that were at cross-purposes.

Give it a rest Henry. The only way to make any progress on this one is just to admit that you were wrong then. You’re certainly not going to get people to believe otherwise.

Uh, Henry? You were the one getting offended. Keep it straight. I was merely irritated that you couldn’t accept the fact that I was using the same definition of moderate as you were, even after I told you so explicitly on at least three different occasions. And my objection has just been stated – again – right above. Do you really think it says anything interesting about “liberals” that they are far more likely to homogeneously agree that, yes, Elvis is Dead, and no the Moon landings were not faked? Even though this is both moderate in the sense of mainstream opinion and in the sense of reasonable supposition (and, hey, the two might just be related!) Or maybe it just says there are a lot fewer ways to be right rather than wrong? Could one even speculate that people on the right are just plain more contrarian and that while you couldn’t find even one person on “the left” who would claim the Earth is really shaped like a Mobius strip, you might possibly find a few dozen or a few hundred on the right who would say exactly that?

Just because A implies B doesn’t mean that B implies A you know, and while “the left” being more homogeneous would certainly lead to your results, the converse most certainly does not hold.

Not hard stuff.

The difference between my statement that:

I think you are arguing something like the following. On most of these issues, there is a non-crazy position and a crazy position. People answering these questions, and ending up on the left on our scale, are really all just taking the non-crazy position, while the batshit right wingers over there are taking the crazy one. Therefore, all we can say is that the people who appear to be on the far left pole are non-crazy, not that they are genuinely left wing or ideologically coherent

which was what started you getting upset about how I was misrepresenting your opinion &c &c and your current arguments about how it is uninteresting to say that people on the left don’t believe that the Moon landing was faked continues to elude me.

Sigh. And there you go again – do you really want me to back and quote your little tantrum? I wasn’t the one getting upset, you were.

Further: there is a moderate position – used in the way you defined it, rather than the way you wanted me to define it as a strawman – that, for example, the Moon landings were not faked and Elvis is really dead. Are you really surprised that most Americans believe this? Or that there are contrarians – mostly on the right – who don’t? Perhaps your confusion stems from the fact that these are mainstream positions supported by the majority of the American public because, yes, they are reasonable. However, that is not what I said. Moderate, mainstream majority opinion holds that, for example, Peak Oil is coming, and coming within our lifetimes if not sooner. Moderate, mainstream majority opinion holds that global warming is a real phenomenon. Probably – as I said before – because this is what the science says (and again: possibly that’s what confused you.) So your conclusions are of the “it does not follow” sort of fallacies.

Yes, I know, you want me to have said the “liberals” are in agreement because what they are agreeing on is only reasonable, right, and proper. But that is most certainly not what I said.

The underlying logic of ideological scaling is pretty straightforward – that someone who is opposed to abortion and doesn’t believe in global warming and thinks the Iraq war was a good thing is more right wing than someone who is opposed to abortion and doesn’t believe in global warming but was against the Iraq war, who in turn is more right wing than someone who is anti abortion but believes in global warming and was opposed to the Iraq war.

This could be fun – let’s try this instead: Let’s look at self-described “liberals” and “conservatives” and ask three questions. Were the Moon landings faked? Is Elvis still alive? Are Alien abductions for real? Answering no to all three is considered far left while answering yes to all three puts you as far to the right as you can be.

Would anyone be surprised that most Americans would answer no to all three questions, that “liberals” would do the same, and that there would be more of a spread of answers amongst those on the right? Does anyone want to claim this is some sort of purity test for ideological homogeneity or that it says anything relevant along those lines?

Henry, my point here is that the predilection for easy targets of the Krauthammer/McArdle variety is something that gives the appearance of having a well-thought-out position without having to do any actual thinking.

It is not, on its face, absurd or debasing to confront the absurdities uttered by intellectuals who are influential in the U.S.

Non-Americans may find it hard to believe, but Krauthammer and McArdle really are the sort of persons who pass for a public intellectuals in this country, and their opinions matter.

Exactly so. Give us a higher-quality influential public intellectual who takes up the cudgels for conservatism and we’ll engage them. In the meantime, as we say on this side of the pond to those “intellectuals” of the Krauthammer/McArdle variety, “facts have a liberal bias.”

If you want to quote my “little tantrum,” as you describe it, go right ahead, and I’ll happily quote yours in return.

Chuckle. You’re the one who made the accusation about me being “upset”. Given that you refuse to quote the relevant passages, I’ll take that as the closest you can come to a retraction.

For the rest, if “you can’t see it”, well, maybe you shouldn’t have published your paper in the first place; anyone who wants to claim that not believing that the Moon landings were faked, Elvis is alive or alien abductions are real is some sort of indicator for ideological homogeneity really shouldn’t be trying to get in the journals anyway.

Heck, I’ll even quote what Henry claims not to understand now:

Sigh. Henry, I think you’ve jumped the shark. You originally said this:

But – and this is key – this ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t measure absolutes – they are relative terms. It plausibly makes sense to say that someone who is pro-choice anti-Iraq war and was against Bush’s tax cuts is more ‘leftwing’ than someone who is pro choice and anti-war, but favored the tax cuts, and that this person is more leftwing than someone who is anti-choice, pro-war, and liked the cuts. So you can make useful relative judgments. But you can’t and shouldn’t simply map these relative judgments onto absolute notions of whether someone is ‘far left’ or ‘far right. Furthermore, these relative notions of ‘left,’ ‘right’ and ‘center’ have no systematic relationship whatsoever with sensible moderation of the kind that ScentOfViolets is interested in.

And I have told you – what? – three or four or five times now that when I say ‘moderate’, I mean what the majority of the population thinks on a given issue. Not what you keep attributing to me. Like this:

I call myself a moderate for the good and sufficient reason that my opinions on a number of subjects match the opinions of the general public. So it seems that my definition agrees yours when it comes to relative placements along a left/right axis.

or this:

Let me elaborate on what I mean by ‘moderate’ – it’s the median or majority opinion of the electorate over time on a variety of actions and issues.

And yet, you say:

And I think that a lot of the confusion springs from a confusion between two different uses of the term moderate. You would like moderate to mean something like ‘sensible, prepared to accept valid evidence and change their views accordingly.’ And that is a common language use of the term which is perfectly fine. But it shouldn’t be confused with another common language use of the term – people who are moderate in the sense that they are close to the median.

When I encounter this level of refusal to read what is clearly stated multiple times, I’ve got to wonder just how wedded the individual is to an idea. And I just had an entire post about what I’ve bolded, with cites.

Gee, looking at the bolded part, you look as if you understood just fine. I wonder what has happened in the meantime that could cause this loss of understanding? Couldn’t be that you realized after the fact just how far wrong you really were, right? ‘Course not.

ScentOfViolets – I’m not going to be tempted back. Anyone who wants to read the comment thread in question, and draw their own conclusions as to whether there was a “there” there in your arguments is invited to do so (and if they can figure out the connections which draw it all together, they’re furthermore invited to explain them to me).

Yeah, you’re done, you’re only continuing to reply because I’m “tempting” you. Nothing to do with having the last word, right? Especially after having simple quotes displayed for all to see that make you look like such a ponce. “I don’t understand” indeed.

So just keep your word and shut the hell up, m’kay?

I will note for the benefit of bystanders that the guff about how my research involved fake Moon landings, Elvis being alive and alien abductions is a product of ScentOfViolet’s own rather vivid imagination.

Sigh. My point – assuming that you really don’t get it and are really just this thick as opposed to merely simulating it – is that I’ve just constructed a set of questions which gets exactly the same results as yours. No one thinks they have anything to do with testing for ideological homogeneity. It follows that your “test” is exactly as worthwhile.

Now, you at long last keep your word and not reply? You know, like you promised? Or is this now where you go into “You’re not the boss of me” me mode so you can continue to not talk but still say something? Sheesh.

ScentofViolets:
So just to be clear on the disagreement between you and Harry is you are arguing that how someone responds to the questions of choice, tax rates and the iraq war have nothing to do with how left or right wing they are? I must not be understanding this right because that sounds pretty silly.

FWIW I am tired of “McArdle/Goldberg/xyz is an idiot” posts as well and also think that the voices of these people are unduly amplified by such “engagement” with them – all publicity is good publicity.

I think this probably strikes you very differently if you are American and hear such people on the news or whatever than if you are not and only hear about them on sites like CT. I wouldn’t expect anyone to care, but as a matter of personal taste I agree with JoB, McGoldkrammer is boring, boring, boring…

Engels, if you know where these respectable conservative public intellectuals are sounding off rather than the likes of McGoldkrammer, let us know. I certainly haven’t seen or heard such a beast in long, long time.

Let me see if I can clarify the problem that I think ScentOfViolets has with Henry Farrell’s conclusions about political partisanship among blog readers.

Farrell observed that the distibution of self-reported ideology among respondents to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) differs from their distibution on an “ideological issue scale” based on their responses to political “hot-button” issues. He concluded that “self-identification here is misleading” and therefore that “readers of left wing blogs are much more liberal than they identify themselves as being”.

ScentOfViolets pointed out that there’s an alternative possibility, namely that it’s the “ideological issue scale” that’s misleading.

Farrell et al. don’t explain in detail how this scale is calculated, saying only, “The ideology scale is a simple additive scale based on questions asking respondents whether they would support a ban on “partial-birth” abortions, funding for stem cell research, withdrawing troops from Iraq, raising the minimum wage, and extending capital gains tax cuts.”

However, these five survey questions (qs 28–30 and 32–33) were all simple yes/no/don’t-know questions where, according to ScentOfViolets, the majority answer agrees with the left/liberal answer. So these kinds of questions cannot distinguish left/liberals from centrists. To do that you’d need to include questions where left/liberals differed from centrists. So when self-reported ideology differs from ideology as computed on this scale, you ought to take the former more seriously than the latter.

This seems a pretty straightforward criticism to me, but I’m not sure that Farrell really ever got to grips with it. (However, the thread was rather long and I may have missed it.)

That’s pretty close, Gareth, except that I’d add the proviso that the extra questions where left/liberals would differ from centrists would have to measuredifferences of ideology. Look at the beginnings of the invasion of Iraq. At that time, centrists were pretty much behind Bush, left/liberals were not. But this was not a difference in ideology, this was a difference in the available information. Would these left/liberal types have been more receptive to attacking Iraq if in fact Saddam had (or would soon have) nuclear weapons? I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d say, “In a New York minute”. Of course, this wasn’t the case, and of course, when it became widely known that there were no WMD’s and the case for them was manufactured out of whole cloth, public support plummeted. Thus, depending on when it is asked, this particular question is not one of pure ideology, but one that has a strong knowledge component as well.

Iow, Henry has committed a basic, basic error here: yes, if left/liberals really were marching in lockstep (this seems to be something of a hobbyhorse with him, so I’m not surprised he’s, er, resistant), then this clustering would be exactly what you would expect. But the converse is not true: clustering in the fashion that Henry describes does not imply that there’s some sort of groupthink going on here. This is an elementary error that I’m surprised any academic would make, unless they were – dare I say it – blinded by ideology.

The problem with the McArdle/Goldberg/etc. posts isn’t any benefit it gives tot he targets. It’s the harm it does do Crooked Timber. You get smarter by arguing with your smartest opponents. You get dumber by arguing with your dumbest ones.

Henry, your triumphalism is premature – the search for the Missing WMDTM is still in its final throes.

I don’t begrudge anyone their laughs, it’s just I’d like to have some too.

Well, just for you, I’ve been trying to think of something funny involving Old King Leopold and miniature cabbages, but I’m afraid I’ve got nothing . . .

David Lloyd-Jones addressed this problem in 2004. Since his analysis seems to have disappeared from the web, I reproduce it here:

The fact that Rumsfeld’s Raiders have not yet found Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction suggests that they have been looking in the wrong places and using the wrong strategies.

Eleven years ago, when last the evil Saddam bestrode the Highways Of Evil ™, his typical WMD was a Scud missile, a large metal beast which could be carried on a one-ton truck.

Now Moore’s Law suggests that advanced technologies — which clearly includes Weapons of Mass Destruction — shrink by half every 18 months. This means that Saddam’s WMD’s could have undergone 7.333 shrinkings in the past eleven years. Since a halving done 7.3333 times leaves something only 1/161.27ths — a mere 0.0062008 — of it’s previous length, it is clear that a Scud which was, say, ten feet long in 1992 would be only 0.00516 inches long today.

I don’t think Saddam has sent his WMD’s to Iran, or any such clumsy old fashioned trick. It seems much more likely that he has simply tied them to the backs of mice, and sent them off to hide in their holes.

This is bad enough to consider, but things may turn out even worse: if Mouse Carried Weapons (MCW’s) are not found, this will be evidence of even more nefarious work by the Evil Saddam Regime.

What if he had started his Weapons Shrinking Program earlier, say in 1988. That would mean fifteen years of halving things every 18 months. A ten foot long missile would then be 0.0008138 inches long. Ant Carried Weapons of Mass Destruction!

Clearly if we cannot find the missiles tied to mice, it will be evidence that they have been attached to ants, and these ACWMD’s must be rooted out promptly.

I refer you to the bottom of p 16 and the top of p 17 of your “Conclusions”, where you make the point about the cloistered cocoons of cognitive consonance, and you go on to say that “few readers avail themselves” of the possibilities the internet offers for increasing their knowledge, going on to indicate that what you have in mind is the lack of left-right contact. It is true you did not in that paper measure left-right contact via cross-links, as I mistakenly said you did, but no matter how you measure it your point, simply put, was that lefties hang with lefties and vice-versa in their cloistered cocoons. And furthermore that the possibilties for “deliberation” that were being lost were precisely left-right contacts. My point at that time, and my point yesterday, today and tomorrow, is the utterly banal one that information can also be gathered and processed within the confines of what you and your co-authors sneeringly referred to as these “cocoons”. I did not spell it out, because it was, is and will be, very obvious. And it is also obvious that the reason you did not take account of this in the paper is that you were unable to easily put numbers to the gathering of new information as such, as opposed to the much easier task of measuring left-right contacts.

It was the thread at that time (Kerr vs Greenwald) that called this to mind, because in some sense, to me at least, it illustrated the futility and waste involved in left-right “deliberation” (in your “scientific” sense). As opposed to the kind of productive presentation and discussion of new facts and ideas available also and primarily within the left blogosphere, which in your science would fall under “self-segregation”.

It is true that my recollection of the paper at that time was wrong as to your coding left-right links, and perhaps other details as well, that didn’t and does not affect the main point, as outlined above.

Finally, you again refer to “what I have publicly argued” in your later paper where you praised the vitality of left-blogs. This is interesting.

Science Henry’s co-authored paper highlights left-right contacts, the scientifically measurable, and in particular “deliberation” (the scientific term of art for that), and contrasts it with self-segregation on the two sides, left and right. Left-blogger Henry’s paper highlights left-blog vitality (ordinary-language), as personal opinion, without the science.

One might raise the question, if both of these positions are right, how it can be that left blogs with their “self-segregation” can foster this “vitality”. What kind of thing thrives on in-breeding? But another approach is to see this merely as a problem in academic sociology. Henry wants to be a scientist, hence the science, but he also wants to have a flavor of leftism about him, hence the paean to left-blog vitality as his personal view. This is fair enough. But it seems unreasonable, to say the least, for him to castigate someone criticizing his “science” for failing to suitably meld these two different points of view to his satisfaction.

104- if you can’t come up with anything funny about Belgium you will be twice as boring soon. (I assume there’s a good chance that you won’t get that in which case I apologize for a belittling of my already not too big country for the sake of demonstrating something to somebody who’s under the impression that repeating ‘cabbage’ often enough will automatically make it a running gag – or as we say here: GFY).

Funnily enough, I have Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms open on my desk right now. Short answer: Henry’s right.

And can you quote anywhere where I said that?

I apologize, I either misread you or mis-attributed something that someone else wrote to you. Rereading just your comments, I see that you consistently insist that if there are 5 majority non-right positions, then the median person will hold all 5 of those majority non-right positions. The survey results in Hanry’s study do not support this. Since you are an expert in this field can you point me to the studies that demonstrate that Henry’s survey results are wrong and that Kos readers’ position (holding all 5 of the majority positions) is indeed the median American position? (And yes, if you wish to assert that the results of Henry’s survey are wrong and have neutral readers (e.g. me) believe that we should reject Henry’s published results, the burden of proof is on you).

Incidentally, could you also point me to the surveys that shows that opposition to a “partial birth” abortion ban (yes, using that right wing slanted language) is a majority position? A quick google finds an ABC poll that found 70% support for a “partial birth” abortion ban, so I’m not seeing how opposition to a partial birth abortion ban can be the moderate position at all.

I actually doubt that “Is Elvis dead?” would line up with any sort of right-left continuum at all (I’ve known plenty of crackpots who were generally left wing), but I do agree that a survey composed of the questions: “Should the South rise again? Should gays and lesbians be allowed to be school teachers? Should the department of education be abolished? Should we return to the Gold Standard? Are the massive bonuses of Goldman Sacks employees justified?” would show near complete agreement from the median American leftward, and would have all the problems you attribute to Henry’s question set. I just don’t see any evidence that the questions Henry was using match that description.

And actually bothering to do a bit of the research myself, I find that another paper using the CCES (Abromowitz, 2007) finds that a similar (but less extreme) phenomenon occurs with voters and non-voters, where non-voters hold the (11 in that case) opinions more or less at random, so the median non-voter certainly holds 5 out of 11 right wing positions and only a tiny minority hold all of the right wing positions or all of the left wing positions, while among voters the distribution is bimodal, with the median democratic voter holding most of the left wing positions and the median republican voter holding most of the right wing positions (similar to the Fox viewer and NPR listener in Henry’s paper), so Henry’s result that people who are engaged with partisan blogs have even more ideologically aligned positions on the issues than voters do seems relatively unsurprising. Kos readers are partisan Democrats, so they hold the partisan Democrat views.

I’m not sure how a simple high information – low information distinction would produce similar results. I think you need a high (good) information – low good information – no information – low bad information (e.g. FOX News) – high bad information (lots of FOX or Redstate) situation. Tellingly, Henry’s results do support this interpretation, since only FOX viewers (of the major media consumers) swing towards the right end of the spectrum, and FOX viewers have been demonstrated in other surveys to hold more factually wrong beliefs than viewers of other major media.

However, it is certainly the case that Henry’s results show that readers of partisan Democratic blogs hold the Democratic political opinions much more coherently than most Democratic voters or any non-voters.

And could you please acknowledge that I am in point of fact using moderate and median to mean majority opinion – and that you were wrong to insist otherwise?

I absolutely never insisted otherwise. I said that the only part of your argument that I could make clear sense of was that you were using a majority definition (same as Henry) not a normative definition. I did not dispute your claim.

As to the other point, you have now objected to my mistaken belief that you were arguing that the median American would hold a mix of opinions on the questions Henry’s study used and you have objected to my correction of that you were arguing that the median American would hold all of the majority positions. Just to save me the trouble of re-reading through all your posts again, could you explain to me how I am wrong to think that you claim A and also wrong to think that you claim not-A, when A and not-A are at the core of the dispute?

I had thought that the entire point of your is Elvis dead line of argument was that these were questions in which the right-wing position was so far out of the main stream that it would be impossible to distinguish the median (definitionally moderate) American from a left wing American on these questions, because the two people would have the same answers. If the median American holds some of the crazy beliefs that you gave as examples, but the left wing American does not hold any of those crazy beliefs, can’t we use the crazy belief survey to distinguish the left wing from the median American? If the right wing American holds more of the crazy beliefs than the median American, doesn’t the crazy beliefs test serve as a usable instrument for defining where people surveyed lie along the political spectrum, even though the crazy beliefs are nominally apolitical?

And tone down the hostility – I outrank you, and I’m not going to tolerate that sort of behaviour.

ScentOfViolets – I’m not sure what is behind this very odd claim to authority – but please be advised that you’re not the person who decides which kinds of behaviour are, and are not, tolerated on this comment thread. For better or for worse, I am. And you’re starting to push it a bit.

No, Henry, I said nothing about what comments are not to be tolerated on this thread – much as you would like to believe this, apparently. But I will not be hectored, bullied, or talked down merely on the strength of the person attempting to do so being, for example, a “political scientist”. Trying to pull that sort of crap will merely make me note that I am a mathematician (and further, one who has done some statistical work in the past for people like the CDC.) So in the intellectual hierarchy, I’m at the top; “political scientists” aren’t worth bupkas, coming in somewhere behind biologists, chemists, and physicists, in that order[1].

Don’t try to pull any sort of authority with me, or resort to credentialism, or any sortof hectoring about statistical data merely because it happens to be statistical data concerning political attitudes. That is what I meant, and nothing more.

[1]Not to pick on the social sciences, whose practicing members seem collectively to have an abysmal notion of what statistical entails. The harder sciences are equally bad, in my experience. But social scientists settle for extremely high alphas and p-values; particle physicists use values that go down to 0.0001, so their statistical ignorance is not nearly so damaging to their conclusions. Come to think of it, this site first came to my attention because of some posts here about the nature and limitations of statistical inference. Possibly by Dsquared, but I don’t remember.

if you’re presenting the paper the burden of proof is upon you to show that these questions correlate only with ideological inclinations. Not on me or on anyone else to show that they don’t.

1) I’m not presenting the paper, I’m trying to understand your arguments.

2) One of the papers (Abromowitz, I think) presents a variety of different methods (some of which I am familiar with and some of which I’m not) that show that the questions correlate extremely strongly with ideological inclinations. So, unless you have strong evidence refuting their strong evidence, I have no choice but to consider the question settled for the time being.

As I said before, I do not think that the CCES questions could distinguish an actual left-winger (which probably represent only a few percent of the American populace, sadly) from a partisan Democrat, but based on the published evidence and on my own experience I think they can distinguish both of those from a moderate Democratic voter and from a moderate American. Do you disagree?

“But I will not be hectored, bullied, or talked down merely on the strength of the person attempting to do so being, for example, a “political scientist”. Trying to pull that sort of crap will merely make me note that I am a mathematician (and further, one who has done some statistical work in the past for people like the CDC.) So in the intellectual hierarchy, I’m at the top; “political scientists” aren’t worth bupkas, coming in somewhere behind biologists, chemists, and physicists, in that order.”

Oh, fantastic: More of the sophomoric disciplinary dick comparison that afflicts my fellow grad students,* who should have outgrown it in — well, sophomore year. Since you’ve done “statistical work,” doesn’t that make you a grubby statistician, far removed from the dizzying heights of Theory?

* and Larry Summers, I suppose.

ScentOfViolets – you don’t outrank anyone here. That’s not the way it works. Hectoring people and claiming that you are at the “top” of the heap, while simultaneously threatening “Don’t try to pull any sort of authority with me, or resort to credentialism” is a poor way to convince people in argument. It’s stupid and offensive.

Sigh. That is not what I said and you damn well know it.

I said, quite clearly, that if you attempt to do so, then I will note that in the intellectual scheme of things, political science people and such like are pretty far down on the intellectual totem pole.

Note that this is a conditional, what we in the biz call an if-then statement (and I have a very hard time believing you misread what I said that badly.) So . . . as long as you don’t try to talk down to me, or bully or hector me, I won’t bring up our relative rankings. This strikes me as fair and eminently reasonable. In fact, the only way this could seem unfair or unreasonable is if some relatively low-ranking sort wanted the freedom to bully without fear of reprisal.

Oh, and if you have problems with interpreting what people are saying, it’s considered the polite thing to ask for clarification before going on about what other people have supposedly said. I see that a number of people have this problem with you.

As a mathematician myself let me just say that people who somehow think that because they’re mathematicians they must be good at everything else, too, are one of the more annoying features of our discipline.</blockquote

Oh, I agree completely. Fortunately, that's not what I'm doing; I'm criticizing an experimental setup on the basis of elementary statistical procedures – not on any knowledge specific to the field. This is something that happens a lot to statisticians (the guy who said “It ain’t what you don’t know, it’s what you do know that ain’t so”? Probably a statistician); one social scientist theorized that black males don’t do as well on homework because they face criticism of their peers who will ultimately shun them for “acting white”. They then claimed ironclad evidence (to the limits of the data) that proved this theory: on a survey they conducted, black males who were academic high achievers did indeed report having fewer social contacts and fewer friends than black males who did not do so well.

Huh? I don’t have to know much about sociology to criticize this sort of finding on methodological grounds: A implies B certainly does not carry the automatic implication that B implies A. Pointing out that what you need to do with this sort of procedure is to test for the contrapositive,[1] that if black males are not shunned by their peers then they are not, statistically speaking, performing well academically tends to get blank looks(it certainly did in this case), even from supposedly well-educated people who should know better.

[1]That is, A implies B does carry the automatic implication that not-B implies not-A, and it is very often much easier to work with this reformulation rather than the original problem.

ScentOfViolets, please meet item response theory. You’ll get along like a house on fire. (I do hope that I am of sufficient rank to say this.)

ScentOfViolets, please meet item response theory. You’ll get along like a house on fire. (I do hope that I am of sufficient rank to say this.)

I’ve scanned it; seems like fairly standard stuff. What’s the point you’re trying to make or the connection you want me to see? Do you understand my objection(s) now?

I find your argument unconvincing, but thank you for explaining it to me.

I find your argument unconvincing, but thank you for explaining it to me.

But this isn’t an argument, this is raising easy objections to a very sloppily researched paper. So properly speaking, all you can say is that you are convinced by Henry’s paper; Imost definitely am not. There is another confusing point here, so maybe I should deal with it right here: I am not saying that Henry is necessarily wrong in his conclusions. For all I know he is dead-on right. But that conclusion is not supported by this paper.

I congratulate you on your perseverance, ScentofViolets. For my part, I found comments #96 and #98 above particularly enlightening.

Well, Gareth talks prettier than I do :-) I’ve never been all that good at summarizing, particularly on the fly and this does lead to mis-communication and misunderstandings which are my fault. But Gareth does a good job of capturing the essentials in just a few lines – a valuable skill.