The Toolitzers

“If readers want to simply nominate books, they may do so by simply leaving a comment to this post,”

Chasing Rainbows.

“describing the book”

The solution to climate change is a globalised market economy plus a carbon tax.

“and making a brief statement about its merits for the award. ”

It’s by Tim Worstall. Nominated by acclamation I think?

I nominate Goldberg’s response to this post, as soon as it comes out.

A limit of 600 pages? What a lamentable capitulation to the decay of proper scholarship in recent centuries.

Reminds me of the Nobel-nominated doctor from the Schiavo case.

Jonah got a great review from the New York Journal of Books so there.

How about this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Watermelons-Environmentalists-Destroying-Stealing-Childrens/dp/1849542171/ref=pd_sim_b_19

It wouldn’t be hard to write a responding book, taking conservative platitudes and pointing out their logical and factual errors. Wouldn’t even have to play the reductio card, at least not as absurdly as Goldberg apparently does. Call it Cliches Of Tyranny….

Jonah got a great review from the New York Journal of Books so there.

That review’s pretty precious itself (shockingly).

Let’s say you are especially annoyed by Bob in HR who goes on constantly about how diversity makes us stronger. You would immediately turn to Mr. Goldberg’s Chapter 7, Diversity, that begins with an admiring quote from Thomas Sowell, reigning dean of black conservatives, “The next time someone tells you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in the sociology department.”

Oh, snap.

> … You quickly leaf past the author’s hilarious likening of Barbra Streisand to Bluto in Animal House before reaching the core of his argument

…Goldberg triggered a firestorm of controversy derision…”

Fixed that for them.

“how many Republicans there are in the sociology department”

As compared to how many Republicans major in sociology? A discipline which by its very name betrays its worship of the unwashed masses Atlas shrugged off

tomslee: the website listing for each Nobel lists those qualified to nominate — here’s the entry forthe Peace Prize. Lots of room for symbolic nominations, and there’s no shortlist, so it’s not comparable to “Academy Award Nominee”.

The National Review book writer is the Jew of Factchecking Fascism.

I hereby nominate JP Stormcrow for *all* the Nobels. We may be too late for 2012, but I’m hoping for a sweep in 2013.

#12 It’s an intellectual tradition, dontcha know:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/beck-corporate-shill-proclaim-climat

Also, of course, this guy: http://books.google.com/books?id=TYYuYxZD2DMC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=roberto+d'aubuisson+watermelon&source=bl&ots=XtUjntqxsu&sig=wjUhBL5G5o-yUZED_WhaYH03wXc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jSWrT-ClC6qE6AG8gti3BA&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=roberto%20d'aubuisson%20watermelon&f=false

Thanks, Colin. And yeah, 2012 is going to be a tough year to sweep what with Madagascar 3 due to come out.

Sorry, christian_h, that will not be possible. According to the reviews there, a) Bawer is often cited in Breivik’s manifesto, and b) his critics pointed this out with possibly unseemly glee, such that c) this is his bilious response. But this is the first I’ve heard of that – I’m just telling you what it says there.

Before this book even comes out, it’s clear it should be a nominee. Jonah’s fellow NRer Stanley Kurtz:

This is what I’ve been up to these past months, as I’ve been working on a book about Obama that will appear in early August. Among other things, my book will show that the differences between ways of criticizing Obama aren’t as clearly drawn as they now appear to be.

There are many aspects of Obama’s current policies that the public knows little or nothing about, and seemingly familiar things that are still poorly understood. When you put the total picture together, the links between Obama’s present and past can be drawn much more convincingly than many now imagine. At any rate, that is what I’ll be arguing in August.

I believe that many of the things I’ve dug up, along with the dots I’ve connected about Obama’s transformative ambitions–past and present alike–will be genuinely disturbing to voters far beyond the Republican base, including moderates and independents. Sweeping judgements about how best to criticize Obama are premature.

in fairness to Jonah, it was probably one of those years they just weren’t giving out Pulitzers

From Substance’s metalinked ‘fun review’ in the ‘New York Journal of Books’:

The usual reasons to read Jonah Goldberg are either because you love him or hate him. With his latest book, a potential third reason emerges: To insure that you are the first in your carpool, chatroom, or coffee klatch to fire his latest barrage of un-PC commentary at unsuspecting do-gooders.

cf a recent long-winded comment on the Economist thread:

The Sun basically operates by providing ready-made opinions for people to pick up at lunchtime and repeat to each other down the pub so they can all seem knowledgeable. These opinions have to be delievered as ‘fit memes’: simple, cohering with various prejudices including some which it has previously promoted, and generally sounding hard-headed and commonsensical

So, as well as openly offering party-line talking points (as in JPS’s quote @16), the ‘NYJB’ adopts the Sun’s agnotogenic strategy. It takes contempt for consumers to another level, though, actually telling the berks what is being done to them. They are told quite clearly that they are being fed opinions to repeat (and thus reinforce), and that they are expected to do so not on the basis either of having assessed them or wanting to prmulgate them for partisan purposes, but solely to shore up their egos and fulfil their need for predigested conversation which will help them in the competition to sound clever or witty.

Some of the more psychically violent advertisers like to do this kind of thing too, no doubt sniggering to each other in true nihilistic Jonatton Yeah? style about just how blatantly the morons can be manipulated. With a generous lashing of post-modern irony to forestall anything so gauche as scruples. (Of course the one thing that tends not to be amenable to the ironic/nihilistic stance, or not all the way down, is profit.)

—–

Praisegod Barebones – Don’t be so sure: Yeats’ Time “always plays with loaded dice”.

In any case, since when is (secret) voting intention, party allegiance or political philosophy/ideology regarded as a suitable focus for concern about diversity? What other opinions does Goldberg think would have to be addressed, if anything at all is to be, by diversity concerns?

I don’t get it, why would progressivism be in the ‘PC prison yard’? Surely it should be ‘Jonah Goldberg has just shivved the warden (progressivism)’
I’m not sure Brad Thor thought his blurb through

Also, is it just me, or is anyone else beginning to find Jonah Goldberg irresistibly sexy?

praisegod barebones,
F. A. Hayek offered a partial explanation for academic political bias in his essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism” based on the opportunities available to people of varying talents.

Intelligent people who favour the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success in the business or professional world.

Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career

The critical attitude of the intellectual arises, says Schumpeter, “no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker — in most cases also as an outsider — than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value.

The old quote is the difference between economics and sociology is economics is about how people choose and sociology is about how people have no choice

the quote is serious and dates from 1960. his name is something like Dewsbury or druesbury

I’d like to nominate Ted Nugent’s God, Guns & Rock’N’Roll.

The merits of the book include the rousing reviews it has spawned on Amazon, which include the precis: “Nuge believes that we have the right to pursue happiness. And he does. Stalks it, pops it with a broadhead, tracks it, and consumes all of it, all the way down to sucking the marrow from the bones.”

and sage advice like: “If you don’t see the need for America to return to the foundation in which it was created, please move your overheated carcass to Europe. Don’t make this Great Country into another euro liberal stench pot.”

Also, the author is not pictured on the dust jacket in a loincloth, which is a plus.

Friedman argued that people agree on most social objectives

That might be true in a universe in which right-wingers were not generally crazy, stupid, and/or evil, but…

I just like saying “Euro Liberal Stench Pot”

As Windom Earle said:
These evil sorcerers, dugpas, they call them, cultivate evil for the sake of evil and nothing else. They express themselves in darkness for darkness, without leavening motive. This ardent purity has allowed them to access a secret place of great power, where the cultivation of evil proceeds in exponential fashion. And with it, the furtherance of evil’s resulting power. These are not fairy tales, or myths. This place of power is tangible, and as such, can be found, entered, and perhaps, utilized in some fashion. The dugpas have many names for it, but chief among them is the Black Lodge… But you don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m mad. Overworked. Go away.

Menie, Aberdeenshire.

NomadUK,
take care not to change your views too much. If you do, you will take up views that you in the past thought to be ignorant or steeped in moral turpitude, preferably both.

As you may recall, some of us were keen on Ross Douthat as the up-and-coming wanker of the future, and here he has a new book for us so that we may see how he weighs up, so to speak, against the Pantload. Rod Dreher says it’s “nothing short of prophetic”! Some other guy over there deploys the Chesterton thing about believing in anything! Check it out!

To follow Tim Worstal in a way, I’ll nominate (1) the Garnaut Climate Change Review 2011, by economist Ross Garnaut.

I’ve only read part of it (guilty, your Honour) but it seems to be an economist’s justification for a sovereign Australian market economic response to climate change.

(2) The Commonwealth of Australia’s Clean Energy Future Act 2012

Fault: Andrew Charlton, former economic advisor to Prime Minister Rudd, wrote a Quarterly Essay titled Progress or the Planet. In this he pointed out Treasury’s modellingnshowing Australia’s emissions would increase by 2020 with the Act (carbon tax to market trading) and that in end user terms in Europe emissions made under their trading system resulted in a nearly 50 percent increase in GHG emissions.

If you take hardship into account, I should be able to provide evidence of a $100 payment to Students of Sustainability by 4th July.

@#34 & #36 – Yes, but the ratio of Republican undergraduates who are willing to objectively study sociology to those who don’t need no stinking social statistics to tell them what they already know is 1:44.

people agree on most social objectives

This is baldly false even at the level of rhetoric, even at the most general and indeterminate level of platitude: pretty much anything more contentful than ‘good is good’ is contested. When a properly critical stance is taken to ideological statements, it’s ver clear that even stated (or strategically unrepudiated) social objectives are often being paid only lip service.

Positions involving economic welfare, distributive justice are obviously not agreed at any level, but even terms currently bearing extremely ‘thick’ normative, and vanishingly thin descriptive, content are apt to be rejected when the speaker gets a bit carried away. Liberty (security takes precedence in this new age); Democracy (these people are not ready for it); Human Rights (rights have to be earned); even possibly, that thickest of political concepts, Justice (terrorists don’t deserve justice), though that one is apt to be qualified with a token ‘so-called’ or at least ‘obsession with’.

Indeed, there is a fairly recent trend for people – people, in fact, exactly like Goldberg – to ‘say the unsayable’, or shake off the ‘Tyranny’ (consensus) of ‘Cliché’ (platitude). This is done partly under the quasi-ironic cover of columnist’s licence and the need to be ‘arresting’ and ‘bold’ (cf. Hitchens, C.), but actually relies on the infantilised attitude of consumers, who do not clearly distinguish entertainment from analysis. The saying of it establishes the sayability of it, and monkey say, monkey do.

—–

Also, this:
Intelligent people who favour the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success in the business or professional world. Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career

Or just as well say: people who seek self-enrichment tend to find opportunities for financial success in business. Those who are intelligent but not greedy are more likely to put their intellect to good use in the academy.

Intelligent people who favour the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success in the business or professional world.

Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career

If this is the cause of bias, the obvious solution would be to pay academics a lot more money.

However, it seems like this thinking would also apply to other institutions that one might think attract people who are uncomfortable with markets. In particular, the military and the clergy. I doubt that those have the same D/R ratios as academia.

Tim, how much of political disagrement is driven by different predictions of how competing political systems and particular policies work?

a nice case against the notion of the ignorance and moral turpitude of your opponents see http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/11/we_are_live_at_.html for an obitury by De Long for Friedman which was as good as any written saying:

“His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick.

You tangled with him at your peril. And you left not necessarily convinced, but well aware of the weak points in your own argument”
AND
“Milton Friedman’s thought is, I believe, best seen as the fusion of two strongly American currents: libertarianism and pragmatism.

For right-of-center American libertarian economists, Milton Friedman was a powerful leader. For left-of-center American liberal economists, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary. We are all the stronger for his work. We will miss him.”

Regarding Jim Rose, DNFTT is applicable (he’s one of my personal trolls, who’s followed me here to CT).

In the light of JQs 70, I’m not particularly surprised that Jim Rose didn’t spot the satirical intent of my ‘pipeline problem’ remark at 42; but I’m a bit disappointed that Tim Wilkinson and Eli Rabbett took it seriously enough to argue against.

a firestorm of controversy
This phrase returns 666,000 Googlehits. Does it qualify as a cliche?

praisegod barebones @72 – I don’t think a rather tenuous Yeats reference (gag?) in response to a typo counts as argument or as taking it seriously. Other arguments were against Goldberg and (apparently) Friedman – admittedly you might well be disappointed that I wasted time on those too. To deflate you further (and apologies for feeding, but I was directly addressed):

Jim Rose: NB ‘might as well say’ – cf. the third law of psychobabble, developed in response to the rampant bullshit talked about Consp Thys (a pet subject of mine).

For every bit of bull there is an equal and opposite bit of shit. It’s a good positive test for superficially appealing crap in general: if a more or less diametrically opposed version appears at least as plausible (in the instant case, it’s more so, I’d say, not that anything rests on that), then you are talking bollocks.

The same goes for Nozick’s passive-aggressive speculation in that magazine article too. (Nozick on politics is another pet subject.) As so often with this kind of talking point (cf two-step of terrific triviality, correctio/metanoia, the ‘bottom drawer’) the caveats and tone of tentative conjecture are actually just false modesty and calculatedly forgettable, so people – like you – recite such drivel as authoritative assertion. (Not that Nozick – or Friedman, etc., etc. – is any kind of authority on social psychology in any case.)