Shibboleths

Ignorance turned out to be a major result of specialization. Decision makers give up their knowledge of the whole as they seek full and complete knowledge of their particular piece of the whole. But ignorance is not only a correlative of specialization. It is almost a condition for peaceful coexistence among specialists.

Ignorance tends to be meaningfully distributed throughout the heierarchies. There was more ignorance at the center than at the periphery…..This brings our particular concern into focus. Ignorance at the scale that we observed could not have occurred by chance alone. Ignorance at this scale involving scientists — that is, men dedicated to knowledge above all else — had to be deliberate.

— Poliscide, Theodore Lowi et. al., Macmillan, 1976, p. 282.

The Democrats are currently an ideologically broader lot, so to look for real shibboleths of this sort you have to go to sub-factions. Most of the ones professed by Democrats who are prominent on a national scale are softly right-wing shibboleths professed as markers of centrism, e.g. “we have to cut the budget now to shrink the deficit”.

“a potential Democratic shibboleth?”

Capital exploits labour?

Markets inevitably mean a race to the bottom?

Isn’t high speed rail a great idea in a very large and sparsely populated country?

But of course manicurists need to be State regulated!

(Those last two tend to turn up at Yglesias’ all the time, the first in the posts, the second in the comments, after Matt has argued against the proposition).

Capital exploits labour?

You don’t know a hell of a lot about the Democratic Party, obviously. The notion that Marxist ideas are in any way current in it is every bit as stupid as birtherism. The party as it exists today is well to the right of Richard Nixon, for chrissakes.

“to look for real shibboleths of this sort you have to go to [Democratic Party] sub-faction[s]”

Agreed. How about great concern about the risks of genetically-modified organisms?

On this subject, have you seen the paper Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation by Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein? The main point is:
“The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting their public responses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance. Availability entrepreneurs– activists who manipulate the content of public discourse– strive to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their agendas.”

Hey, a bit of zealotry never hurt any movement.

“to look for real shibboleths of this sort you have to go to [Democratic Party] sub-faction[s]”

That said, what you treat as a sub-faction is is a matter of perception. My right wing friends tend to react as if it an unfair rhetorical blow on my part to mention Palin, creationism, and so on. They have in mind a mental distance from wing-nuts that preserves the idea of an intellectually serious conservative movement.

Here’s a low-stakes one that persists relatively widely among liberals: “We all need to switch to using the Peters Projection world map, for social justice.” An episode of “The West Wing” gave it a lot of exposure.

In that case it may just be that the initial argument sounds superficially reasonable, and the issue is low-bandwidth enough that the somewhat technical debunking (there are other, better, widely-used equal-area maps, and Peters’ has many undesirable properties) doesn’t get much penetration.

There are also the issues where there are legit arguments in favor, and legit arguments against, but the balance is out of whack for tribal reasons, bad arguments abound and in practice it functions more as a shibboleth. Opposition to nuclear power and GMOs probably falls under that to some degree.

(Careful, though; a popular corporate obfuscatory tactic is to muddy the waters so that things that are really quite clear-cut–secondhand smoke, AGW–seem to fall under this last heading. So I’m not entirely sure about my own categorizations there.)

@7: I think that’s a bit harsh. Capital *does* exploit labor, but it also generates more wealth that can be (although it isn’t always) used to benefit everyone, so it can be useful to have capital around anyway, although it has to be carefully watched. I don’t think that view is out of the Democratic mainstream.

Similarly, markets often mean a race to the bottom, but not necessarily — again, if they are carefully watched.

The US is sparsely populated *on average*, but its population density is extremely variable and HSR proposals are concentrated on linking major cities. Nobody (that I know of) is suggesting building a HSR line across Montana (still less Alaska, whose massive area is included in the denominator of the average-density calculation when it’s calculated for the purpose of showing how rural the US supposedly is — indeed, the belief that rural areas with low density are the “real US” practically qualifies as a right-wing shibboleth itself).

But Democrats aren’t real big on conformity (or on oversimplified slogans, as my above revisions of Tim’s strawmen demonstrate) so IMO they don’t have any “shibboleths” in the sense it’s being used here. And demanding that they must is nothing more than Broderism. Of course we shouldn’t *assume* that the Republicans are the only ones to have shibboleths, but if the evidence turns out to point that way, or to say that they have more of them and value them more highly, then we shouldn’t refuse to accept it either.

Having said all that, I’ll propose one anyway: a death from unsafe working conditions is just as tragic, and should be just as much a matter of public concern, as a death from terrorism. (Do normative statements even count for this? Come to think of it, 3/4 of Tim’s proposed examples are normative too.)

“Tim: the fact that those are the best examples”

Well, no, they’re a random selection I scribbled down in a blog comment after a minute or two of thought (as you all know, a quite excessive amount of such for myself).

I will admit to a certain sympathy for birtherism: I did have to go and check that Obama was indeed born two years after Hawaii became a State :-)

Creationism and some of the others are quite barking of course. But I’m equally certain that, for exactly the reasons that John Q gives (as a tribal marker, identification of belonging) we could find similar for all political persuasions, not just Reps or Dems. Indeed, I find the American insistence that all politicians must believe in some flavour of the Sky Fairy entirely mystifying.

Like most of the others, it’s factional rather than partisan.

An excellent post, with the least interesting parts the Republican-bashing. Really, the only other big blogger I could remember working on this level of generality recently was Steve Randy Waldmann.

Endogenize Ideology

“However, many of Krugman’s professional colleagues really do treat ideology or “political constraints” as given, and perform the exercise that economists perform reflexively, starting with their first grad school exam: constrained optimization.” ..SRW

Everybody has, and must have, “shibboleths.”

It is laudably high-minded, I guess, not to mention “fear of black people” as a major ingredient of the tribal identity under discussion.

Why do we end up talking about bullshit false equivalence whenever the reality-challenged nature of the Republican party is raised?

Double-think is very difficult, and people will start to act on the basis of their beliefs. If those beliefs are ludicrously false, trouble is likely to follow.

I think the Birther beliefs are rationalized so much that this problem will not happen to many people. I agree that birther folks mostly know that Obama was really born in Hawaii, but they see it in a cultural framework that values blood and breeding more than address. It matters a lot more to them who your people are than where your momma happened to be living when you were born. From that perspective, Obama doesn’t have the proper roots, and his people are his father’s people, regardless of the fact that he only met his father a few times. Bill Clinton was a lesser example of this — they knew who his people were, and his people were white trash. (Which explains the Clintons’ great popularity among less affluent white Democrats in a swath of the country stretching from Arkansas through Appalachia, even while the affluent Republicans of this region keep a special hatred for the Clintons. I suspect some of these Clinton Democrats are also birthers, because, you know.)

The other problem — more and more sane people are driven from the Rs — has been happening for around ten years. It’s definitely a hopeful sign.

I think rm’s analysis is dead on, as applied to the South. But birtherism is not solely a regional phenomenon.

Another conservative shibboleth:

“Liberals do it too.”

No matter what you accuse a conservative of, it can be asserted without proof that liberals do the same thing. Liberals are the real racists, atheists are the real fundamentalists, and on and on.

“Bush is a war criminal” is not an apt comparison at all to “Obama is a X” (where X= Socialist, Muslim, Foreigner, etc. ) Bush clearly id something wrong during his presidency and may have violated a few international laws. Whether or not he is guilty of war crimes would be for an international court to decide. It’s an accusation that at worst is hyperbolic, but may actually have some basis in reality, unlike “Obama is a socialist”, which is, as you say, a tribal marker rather than a real accusation based on reality.

You can’t be a liberal unless you believe in Fairness to the Other. The shibboleth is that Fairness to the Other is not only morally correct but, in the long run at least, self-interested.

I had a fun time this morning describing some of our tribal conflicts here to out of town guests: creation and expansion of wilderness areas, shutdown of the timber industry (logging and then milling), introduction of the wolf, judicial rejection of Administrative short-cuts to manage the wolf specifically and the forests generally. Hikers v. Mountain Bikers v. ATVers. We didn’t even get to our local equality ordinance, currently under attack by a preacher-legislator from out on the plains. It sometimes seems like every one of us is on the front lines in the Culture war: it’s a small town, and most of us are directly and consciously affected in one way or another by how it’s all playing out.

Fortunately we mostly wear uniforms, and a local version of the Geneva Conventions is usually observed.

Martin James – actually, the existence of free will and choice are some of the most supported beliefs we have. It’s clear that some actions are externally compelled, but that most others are internally determined. The only thing unscientific about the belief (or perhaps even anti-scientific) is a belief that free will and choice would require a suspension of the laws of physics, which is apparently widely enough held that you seem to agree with it too!

As for morality, I’ll leave it to someone from the Michigan philosophy department to try to explain why that’s either scientific, or at least compatible with science.

For the record, this is why atheists and fundamentalists are so similar.

A shibboleth of the Moron tribe.

I was an undergraduate in the Michigan philosophy department, and I’d be astonished if someone there claimed that morality is or could be scientific. “Incommensurable,” would be the word they’d use. Mind you, that was a while ago.

Whenever I see the term “agnotology”, I wish it had been derived from “Agnew”.

what’s most amazing to me is that someone could write such a piece and not mention the race of the sufferers of agnotology, the race of the person they don’t/can’t believe, racism, white supremacy or any of those relevant facts and lenses. the second most impressive thing is that it took 27 comments for someone to mention racism.

even people who talk about white denialism suffer from it.

Tim Worstall 02.17.11 at 1:42 pm
Who alas demonstrates some of the symptoms of agnatology. In this case gross oversimplification and misprepresentation of entirely sensible beliefs. For example: because it makes sense to regulate the financial or oil industries this doesn’t imply a similar belief in the regulation of manicurists. Or because high speed rail makes sense for linking major urban centers (New York and Washington) hardly suggests liberals want to see high speed links between Fargo ND and Billings MT.

â– First, people have noticed that Republicans have a problem with reality. That perception, which undermines the rationale for all sorts of thinking about policy, will take a while to sink in, but it will also be hard to erase once it is generally accepted. In the long run, this has to turn off a fair number of Republican-leaning independents and any remaining Republicans with a capacity for embarrassment.
Well, in the long-run all Germans became good democrats. The short run road was quite rough though…

Don’t overthink this.

A large % of Rs believe that Obama might not actually have been born in the US, despite the massive conspiracy this would require among all sorts of elites in the US, including his political rivals bot D and R, because it simply is quite credible that elites in the US would engage in a massive conspiracy of inaction against a fellow member in good standing of the elite.

“Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”, Matt Taibbi asks. Well, because of a massive conspiracy of inaction on the part of elites in the US, who should and would, if the system actually policed itself, be willing and eager to start the investigations that would probably put key Wall Street figures in jail for fraud. This is not some Left shiboleth. People believe it because it’s reasonable.

It is quite true that the birther idea is not reasonable. But if you’re not paying careful attention, if you don’t study the patterns of delicate interplay between kabuki competition and the extension of professional courtesy, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the system let Obama take office despite a basic disability for that office simply out of the same professional courtesy that has Obama “looking forward, not backward” when it comes to the official crimes of his predecessors in office.

The real problem here is the lack of trust, a fully justified lack of trust, by the electorate in the institutions of governance in the US, not some tribal identity dynamics. Well, the lack of trust may soon mean that government in this country gives way to warring tribes, but it’s the lack of trust that is logically prior.

The right-wingers contributions are as always amusing. How many people have ever heard of the Peters map, and how many among those who think it is useful (that would include me) have ever claimed that it is the only useful one? And witness how influential the Peters map cult is within the Democratic party. Remember all those primary challenges mounted against candidates that failed to endorse the Peters map?

Worstall’s examples are just meaningless. I’m genuinely disappointed because Worstall can and sometimes does better than that. High-Speed rail is only proposed in dense parts of the country. The Northeastern Megalopolis is a huge land area about as densely populated as Europe. There is nothing that a priori would speak against European-style rail service for that area. Worstall knows that. It’s not that this hasn’t been discussed before. Is that even you, Tim?

A left wing shibboleth would be that all corporations are evil, or immoral entities, when in fact the corporation itself is amoral, and, as it is driven by humans, may be directed in more or less moral directions by its leadership.

Nuclear = bad is another.
GMO = bad is quite a common shibboleth of the left.
Natural = good is another popular lefty shibboleth.

There are certainly some hot buttons on which proud lefties lose their ability to objectively evaluate a situation, but I think that, objectively speaking (or as objectively as I can speak, as a progressive myself), the right falls prey to them more often.

What we are debating here is a very important issue and I don’t think we have gotten very far at even describing the phenomenon adequately let alone explaining it. What is so unnerving about the intellectual closedmindedness, the resistance to empirical reality that characterizes not just the fringe but a large part of the contemporaneous right-wing movement in the US is that it shares these symptoms with earlier fascist movements.

@53
Actually I think the NE US is more densely populated than Europe, which is exactly why high-speed rail is an impossibility in some of the most heavily used parts of the system. It isn’t possible to have the trains run fast enough because of requirements imposed by the lines’ running through existing towns.

one Democratic shibboleth is that all opposition to Obama is, at heart, racism.

The left equivalent of the birther movement is ‘Bush Knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.’ The Rosie O’Donnell liberals.

High speed rail is not currently possible in the US due to external costs associated with getting permission to build and obtaining ownership of the land. The local city and county governments have a lot of power over local zoning. NIMBY lawsuits are frequent even when it is a project that the residents would normally support. This would need to be streamlined to make some regional high speed rail service cost effective.

The idea that Bush is a war criminal. The affective reach of the ICC does not include any country on the permanent UN security council unless that country allows it. It’s really a non-issue what the ICC thinks. The US Government thinks war crimes are what the US Government (or US Supreme Court) defines as war crimes and any other entity can go… Currently the US Government does not believe US Presidents can commit war crimes.

The “Bush is a War Criminal” mantra on the left isn’t necessarily a shibboleth. There is a case to be made that President Bush did illegal things in the prosecution of his nation’s military operations. But then there are similar cases to be made for declaring LBJ and FDR war criminals, yet we hear little about that. It’s not a question of whether or not Bush violated the law, but rather it’s the fixation on Bush specifically which is the shibboleth. Another way of saying it would be that, the belief that pursuing George W. Bush for war crimes isn’t a completely pointless waste of effort, as well as being politically stupid… is a liberal shibboleth.

Many commenters have made the point about false equivocation. Well it isn’t really false. The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that their respective ideological bases are not the same in size. Nearly 70% of the base (in terms of actual voters) of the GOP are movement conservatives. Less than half of the Democratic base are liberals. In fact conservatives outnumber liberals by about 2 to 1 in the US population. The Democrats remain competive by receiving the support of nearly all of the black vote and increasingly large majorites of the hispanic vote. These voting blocks aren’t necessarily that much more socially or fiscally liberal than the genreal population, but they form much of the Democrat’s base.

This is significant. Because liberals are not the majority in the Democratic Party, they have less influence. There is less peer pressure on non-liberals to embrace liberal shibboleths. This makes liberals who do hold them less aggressive in pushing them. If the situation was reversed, all sorts of ridiculous liberal shibboleths would stand unchallenged amoung Democrats. Some examples…

9/11 was in inside job. People still believe this, which is remarkable. A few years ago it was common for liberals to at least openly question the findings of the 9/11 Commision Report.

Iran have free and fair elections. This one persisted for awhile even after the obviously rigged elections in 2009.

40% of women in the US are raped. A difficult subject, to be sure. But more than a few left wing academics have advanced this one using research based on cooked numbers, and it is considered at best rude to call bullshit on this one. A specific example of this would be how quick folk on the left (and elsewhere) were to believe the accusations made against the 3 Duke Lacrosse players a few years back. Indeed, if you check the comments of prominent feminist blogs you will find that members of that tribe refuse to accept that virtually everything that was brought against them was either verifiably false or taken out of context.

The above bleeds into a narrative that women in the US are oppressed, and there are many manifestations of this. Now to be clear, women have been disadvantaged in many ways in the past. But it has been projected that women will own a majority of the wealth in the UK as soon as 2025. Women are doing better than men in school. Misandry is now the norm in the media. Let’s not even get into Family Court. However liberals insist that western societies are sexist against women, not men.

Israel is more unjust than it’s adversaries. Note that I didn’t say that Israel is perfect or that her policies are beyond reproach. I am merely noting that it is absurd to say that Israeli society is anywhere near as brutal and repressive as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran or Syria. Yet many liberals believe Israel (and by extension the US) are actually the villians in this conflict. An extension of this is the belief that when Arabs do things which are beyond defending, it’s somehow the fault of the US/Israel. I saw an example of this on Daily Kos, recently. When someone advanced the theory that the horrific rape of Lara Logan was carried out by Mubarak’s thugs, ostensibly guys who only exist due to US finanbial support of the ousted regime. This act is not represenative, the writer argued, of the way men in Egypt generally treat women.

The rich deliberately tanked the US economy as part of some sort of world domination plot.

The US military killed millions of Iraqis. An extension of this would be the resistence to the idea that the US military is in fact the best trained, most disciplined military in the world… as opposed to a bunch of murderous thugs. Try to compare and contrast the behavior of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with the behavior of Russian forces in Chechnya. Alot of liberals will claim that there is no distinction, or that the US is actually worse.

Wikileaks. No real need to get into this one.

In closing, I must stress that I do not equivocate any of the above with birtherism, creationism or any of the rest of right wing shibboleths. They aren’t anywhere near as widespread. But that’s because there are enough moderates in the Democratic Party to prevent these ideas from really taking hold. You are much more likely to read this stuff in online left wing echo chambers than you would be to hear it said in public. Alot of this stuff does get challenged and is therefore muted. The same thing would happen on the right if there were more moderates in the equation.

The right-wingers contributions are as always amusing.

It’s true, I’m a Republican troll.

The Peters map thing, obviously, is incredibly minor. As I said, I’m not trying to demonstrate any equivalence here; rather, the asymmetry is apparent if you have to stretch that far.

The same people saying Bush Knew seem to manage to give President Clinton a pass.

No credible offer, no credible evidence. Try again: you might get through the entire playbook of zombie lies by Easter.

Currently the US Government does not believe US Presidents can commit war crimes.

You have a cite for that? I’m genuinely interested.

#54: you have to be careful about how you word such questions. For example, I think that Bush was *warned* about the danger of attacks *like* the 9/11 event and ignored them. I think it’s ludicrous to think that he engineered them. But you could easily see how a large fraction of people could interpret the question in a manner where a reasonable answer (Bush was negligent) could be interpreted as a conspiracy theory.

The discouraging thing about the republican party today is that the ignorance remains when the questions are well-designed. Things which are factually wrong, for example Obama not being an American citizen, are specifically and incorrectly believed by large groups of people.

#8, The idea that one’s leaders “lack spine” is not a shibboleth–which must serve to distinguish members of an in-group–but rather a common belief of all partisans.

Check out the RedState comment section sometime.

“Unless in Europe the trains don’t have to slow down when they run through the middle of towns or across heavily used roads,”

In Europe the rail tracks are fenced off – and yes trains run at 150mph through the middle of towns and across barrier controlled road junctions

Aulus Gellius @50:
Could there, by chance, be several different atheists in the world, and might these atheists, conceivably, not all have exactly the same attitude toward religion?

Sure, but none that I know of follow the Fundie shibboleth that atheism is a religion. We may not agree on anything else but every atheist starts from the proposition that religion is not their bag. And the false equivalency between outspoken atheists and fundamentalists of all religions is another of those lopsided “they do it too!” arguments. I like Richard Dawkins, but he’s not the Pope of me.

John,

Fair enough. On the question of Sudan turning over Bin Ladin, Fact Checked changed their stance from YES to NO with additional information provided by the 9/11 report. I can do the same. Unfortunately President Clinton is not completely cleared in regards to his actions.

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/dec/05/opinion/oe-scheuer5
“I do not profess a broad expertise in international affairs, but between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden — either by capture or by U.S. military attack.”

“…Because of classification issues, I argued this point only obliquely in my book “Imperial Hubris,” but it is a fact — and fortunately, no American has to depend on my word alone. The 9/11 commission report documents most of the occasions on which senior U.S. bureaucrats and policymakers had the chance to attack Bin Laden in 1998-1999 (my emphasis).”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer

I’d have thought the big thing that left-wingers in the US agree on is the idea that the very rich (top 1% by income is a typical definition) have become parasitic on the rest of society and have hijacked a large part of the political system to siphon more and more money into their pockets, having more or less complete control over the Republicans and a lot of influence over the Democrats. Whether you think this has a big following in Congress seems to depend on how much you think Democratic politicians have also been ‘bought’ by big business. The basic difference between this and the ‘liberal elite’ right-wing version is that the liberal elite is assumed to have some deranged ideology, whereas the business elite is often simply assumed to consist of amoral hoarders of wealth. (There are versions of this story where the religious right plays a bigger role, though.)

A left-wing conspiracy theory would be along the lines that the US wages wars as an excuse to give taxpayers’ money to the already rich owners/CEOs of arms companies, or to manipulate the price of raw materials (especially oil) in some nefarious way that benefits the oligarchs.

“Agnatology” itself would be an example of a liberal shibboleth: The belief that the people who disagree with you are somehow mentally compromised. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That disagreement with liberalism can’t, just can’t, be a result of reason. Opponents have to be insincere, or mental, or the victims of diabolical corporate mind control rays…

Now, if there’s a shibboleth concerning war crimes, it’s not that Bush is a war criminal. It’s that Bush is a war criminal, and Obama somehow isn’t…

Colin Reid@80:

So what you’re saying is, Left Wing conspiracy theories are plausible while Right Wing conspiracy theories are blatant hogwash.

“Conspiracy theories”, classically, serve two functions. One is that they allow simplified narratives, with personal intention and purpose, without having to marshal a lot of evidence or to deploy an understanding of complex mechanisms of social action. The other function is far more subtle: conspiracy theories serve as psychological defenses against an undesired awareness, undesired perhaps because of the emotions entailed. A realistic description of the state of affairs might be “dismissed” as a conspiracy theory, because “conspiracy theories” can be assumed to be, by definition, delusional. Alternatively, a psychologically troubled person might adopt a delusion to block his own awareness.

The set of Left beliefs described by Colin Reed at 80 are summarized in Kevin Philips’ American Theocracy and Bad Money, lengthy books by a non-liberal, which employ fairly sophisticated analyses of political and institutional action and marshal lots of evidence. So, they don’t really qualify either as peculiarly liberal or as conspiracy theories, per se.

Calling them conspiracy theories, however, might serve the second function, of denying awareness, to avoid uncomfortable emotions and awareness.

It seems to me possible that something of the functional psychology of “conspiracy theories” may apply to the Tea Party.

First, the typical Tea Party follower — as opposed to its shadowy leaders and financiers — appears to be a political unsophisticate, in the extreme, ill-equipped with factual knowledge or an understanding of how the political world works. That millions might regard Glenn Beck as a trustworthy professor and educator says something about their state of prior knowledge, does it not?

Second, the Kevin Phillips’ view is, necessarily, a fairly pessimistic one. It implies that the powerful in American politics and society really are out to get the little people, and drain them dry. If you are one of the little people, you have few effective defenses in reality; maybe, having one in delusion is an improvement. It is not unlike a child, who has to avoid the full realization that a parent is evil and untrustworthy, just to maintain a psychological equilibrium outside of a state of permanent panic.

This is a kind of a retro issue, but consider this shibboleth: it’s a good idea to put medicine in the public water supply (“flouridation”). Nobody ever really thought it was a good idea, but you had to support it, because otherwise you would be marked as an uncouth right-wing conspiracy theorist.

The Sudan government offered to turn over Bin Laden during the Clinton Presidency. The same people saying Bush Knew seem to manage to give President Clinton a pass.

This is weird. Even if the first statement is true – and of course, as most people know, it’s not – the second sentence makes absolutely no sense as a followup. AFAICT, there is zero logical connection between the two declarations.

“Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”, Matt Taibbi asks. Well, because of a massive conspiracy of inaction on the part of elites in the US, who should and would, if the system actually policed itself, be willing and eager to start the investigations that would probably put key Wall Street figures in jail for fraud. This is not some Left shiboleth. People believe it because it’s reasonable.

There’s that problem again. This is a moderate opinion as I define it, namely, what beliefs most people express on the subject. And if this is an opinion held by the majority of the American people, how could anyone claim this is some sort of “left” shibboleth?

To claim that this is so a “leftist” shibboleth because in point of fact a lot of people at that end of the spectrum believe this would lead one to conclude that the sky is blue is also a leftist belief/shibboleth/what have you. Yet, somehow, I don’t hear anyone making this distinction also opine that the belief that the sky is blue is leftist cant ;-)

Oops:

And then he promoted his rediscovery of the Gall cylindrical projection as the only sensible alternative, when actually it was a pretty poor alternative and better ones that had the same desirable property of displaying areas correctly were long known and used in thematic maps. And he managed to get exposure for this through political means, painting it as himself versus the ethnocentric cartographers who were pushing the Mercator projection, and it led to a few NGOs and such officially adopting a suboptimal map.

Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and I guess the whole controversy was a lot more obscure than it seems from my nerdly perspective, but it did happen. The last bit was what reminded me of the “shibboleth” business.

Well, actually, you and I and a few others posting here could probably get into a lively debate about whether or not mapping the Earth to the projective plane was a better representation than mapping it to the complex line plus a point at infinity :-)

There’s a great Stewart Lee stand-up routine where he talks about challenging the racist opinion of a cab driver, who responds with (and he claims in his book this is a rare case of not having to make the truth any funnier/more tragic) – “You can prove anything with facts”. Which has to be the trump card of any argument – I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not going to respond to facts or rationalism.

“Worstall’s examples are just meaningless. I’m genuinely disappointed because Worstall can and sometimes does better than that. High-Speed rail is only proposed in dense parts of the country. The Northeastern Megalopolis is a huge land area about as densely populated as Europe. There is nothing that a priori would speak against European-style rail service for that area. Worstall knows that. It’s not that this hasn’t been discussed before. Is that even you, Tim?”

Piglet, apologies for quoting from my own blog but:

“So, California is going to build it’s first high speed rail line…..It’s going to go from Borden (so small it’s not even incorporated, doesn’t seem to actually have a population in Wikipedia), through Corcoran (pop 25,000, of whom half are prisoners and thus not likely to be frequent travellers) to Bakersfield (population 340,000 or so).

And they’re going to spend $5.5 billion on this.”

Having lived near there for a few years I’ll agree that the general perception of the Central Valley is that it is dense: but not densely populated, which is rather what is needed for high speed rail.

“But it has been projected that women will own a majority of the wealth in the UK as soon as 2025.”

I thought this was already true: widows and women generally living longer?

@Keith #84: It’s difficult to think of anything that a) represents a clean break with reality and b) is believed by a large proportion of the left. (It seems that most of those further to the left just believe a more extreme version of the same story: the current US political system is as oligarchic as any before in the history of civilisation, slavery and colonialism continue in all but name and have expanded to include everyone outside the elite, nobody with real power is actually religious, they just use religion to brainwash their goons…) But then I’m saying this as someone who thinks the ‘centre ground’ in the US is already way to the right, certainly relative to the economic interests of the average American, so those who want to pull it leftwards mostly consist of people who ought to be considered moderates. Describing CEOs and owners of large companies as parasitic may not be an absurd proposition, but it’s still a controversial one and puts you to the left of the ‘mainstream’ discourse as framed in the media and by the political parties.

Alex #104, he was TRYING to say that, but it’s not what came out of his mouth. As Yogi Berra would say, you could look it up.

“Steve LaBonne 02.18.11 at 2:10 am

Uh, no, Brett. Agnotolgy is about deliberate, self-inflicted ignorance.”

I know what agnotology is: It’s a legitimate, but minor discipline, which is popular among a certain set of liberals because you really dislike admitting that substantial numbers of people disagree with you for legitimate reasons. It’s not a discipline you’d look to for an explaination of, say, why liberals so commonly think windmills a superior source of baseline electricity to nuclear plants, or are convinced gun control is an effective crime control measure. Because everything YOU believe you reasoned your way into based on valid premises, it’s not like anybody misled you into some of your beliefs.

‘I’d have thought the big thing that left-wingers in the US agree on is the idea that the very rich (top 1% by income is a typical definition) have become parasitic on the rest of society and have hijacked a large part of the political system to siphon more and more money into their pockets, having more or less complete control over the Republicans and a lot of influence over the Democrats.’

I think Colin Reid would benefit from checking out Emmanuel Saez’s neat chart here:
http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/pages/interactive#/?start=2002&end=2008

This left-wing Shibboleth might be wrong of course, but I think zero income growth for the bottom 90% is an interesting observable implication.

No, to be a shibboleth it would have to be somehow symbolic rather than substantive. I think you do need to go to subgroups because the American left has relatively little by way of unifying rhetoric. For the feminist left for instance, one might be the use of the word ‘anti-choice’ in an abortion debate, with the implication that anti-abortion groups are primarily motivated by a desire to oppress women; another, a blanket use of the word ‘patriarchy’ (or the more extreme ‘kyriarchy’) in situations that don’t obviously revolve around male power. But I don’t know how common these shibboleths actually are.

It would seem to me that the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the decline in party identification. Shouldn’t it stand to reason that, as the numbers of real, as in officially affiliated Republicans declines the concentration of ideologically hardcore members might go up? I would love to see a study looking into whether there is a correlation between declining party identification, closed primaries (which presumably would protect the radical element from being diluted) and the success of radical conservative ideology.

I guess the broadly liberal slant of most of the posters here would make hard for us to detect our shibboleths if they existed, but there’s not much getting around the fact that the strong religious and nationalistic traditions of most forms of conservatism make it that bit easier to mobilize around symbolic, identifying myths.

I don’t see most people here as having a broadly liberal slant. But in keeping with my previous comment, the shibboleths (as defined in this discussion) of some subgroups should be relatively easy to observe by other subgroups of this broad coalition of “The Left”. So we should be seeing at least a few examples come up that are worth seriously entertaining. So far, I haven’t seen any.

To argue that capital, or shareholders, capitalists, should pay more taxes is just fine, but to argue that corporations should is a very dangerous shibboleth indeed, for it’s ignoring who it is that is bearing that economic burden at present.

Why is it I get the impression that most of Worstall says here is just something thrown up to see if it will stick?

“The economic efficiency of recycling is an example of agnotology on the Left because those studies which reach this conclusion don’t take into account the opportunity costs of the five minutes a week the extra effort costs.”

“Capital exploits labour.”

“Markets inevitably mean a race to the bottom.”

“High speed rail is a great idea in a very large and sparsely populated country.”

“Manicurists should be regulated by the State.”

And the last four I mentioned are not only not demonstrably true, several of them aren’t even shibboleths even if the assertions themselves were correct!

And you can see the smirk behind the words ;-)

“zero income growth for the bottom 90% is an interesting observable implication.”

Interesting, but not something that signifies without interpretation. Is taxable income an appropriate measure? What if high payroll taxes were used to fund a gold-plated single-payer health care system? The bottom 90% would arguably be much better off, but their taxable incomes would not go up.

Actually, the Riemann mapping to the projective plane is the polar stereographic projection, often used for maps of the polar regions. Like the Mercator, it’s conformal rather than equal-area.

Aha! So you do think this a better representation than a mapping to the complex line plus a point at infinity! You’re obviously a Philistine as well as having no sense of aesthetics to boot, so there! :-)

On a more serious note, the always engaging Martin Gardner had a piece on usual and unusual maps in his SciAm column, which you can read here, starting at about page 194. This was actually what prompted my posting; I was wondering if Gardner was cognizant of Peterson’s obsession when he wrote this, given his well-known interest in scientific cranks and their hobby-horses. I’m betting that he did; Gardner didn’t need no stinking internet to Know Stuff.

Colin Reid@111:
…But then I’m saying this as someone who thinks the ‘centre ground’ in the US is already way to the right, certainly relative to the economic interests of the average American, so those who want to pull it leftwards mostly consist of people who ought to be considered moderates. Describing CEOs and owners of large companies as parasitic may not be an absurd proposition, but it’s still a controversial one and puts you to the left of the ‘mainstream’ discourse as framed in the media and by the political parties.

So does this mean that shibboleths are tribal identity markers that lay just outside the Overton Window (or on either side, if we want to use the Right/Left cartography of American politics)? If so, do they become something else when they fall inside the window? Conventional Wisdom, perhaps?

It would have been amusing if we’d all switched to the metric system and to base 12 simultaneously.

@ 132: You would think that the original (Italian) Futurists would have made the word radioactive by signing up for Fascism as soon as it went on the market, but in fact a search reveals an active publication called “The Futurist.” It is published by something called the World Future Society. Its political leanings seem to be techie rather than leftist. Ray Kurzweil is a prominent member.

If you’re President of the United States, being a war criminal is part of the job description. It’s thus necessary to have measures within that that can distinguish greater and lesser culpability.