Boneheaded Stupidity

I discussed the ‘no statistically significant warming since 1995’ talking point on my blog recently This talking point has been around the delusionist blogosphere for some time, though with a lower profile than ‘global warming stopped in 1998’, and was put as question to Phil Jones of UEA in a BBC interview. Jones answered honestly, if a bit clumsily, that the data period since 1995 is marginally too short to derive a statistically significant trend, a response which was headlined by the Daily Mail as “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995?” and became the talking point of the day. As has been widely noted, confusing not statistically significant’ with ‘not significant; in the ordinary sense indicates either deliberate dishonesty or ignorance of a point covered in excruciating detail in every introductory stats course.

But where did this silliness come from? I’d seen Janet Albrechtsen quote Lord Monckton on the point, and it seemed about right for him, an innumerate debating point that would take a fair while to refute, during which time he could move on to the next one.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the point being made (and apparently originated) by Richard Lindzen of MIT who is (or ought to be) by far the most credible figure on the delusionist side. In a piece published on “Watts Up With That” Lindzen says ‘There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995’. Lindzen illustrates this claim with a graph he appears to have made up for the occasion, complete with unexplained error bars (I’ve appended a NASA graph with error bars for annual estimates).

In this piece for Quadrant he gives a variation, saying “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years” and “the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged” . Note the slide from “has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years ” to “warming has ceased”, committing the basic newbie error against which all budding stats students are warned.

Lindzen has published a couple of hundred papers in climatology, so I think we can assume he knows that the statement “there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995” means nothing more than “given the variability in the data, we need at least 15 observations to reject the null hypothesis at 95 per cent confidence”, a fact so trite as not to be worth mentioning.

It is sad to see a respected scientist reduced to this kind of thing. And as far as I can tell, all this is simply to avoid admitting that he backed the wrong horse back in 1990, when he bet that he was smarter than the majority of climate scientists who thought humans were (probably) causing global warming. The data since then has supported the majority view, but instead of revising his position, Lindzen has resorted to dishonest statistical trickery.

To quote The Economist, with respect to the Daily Mail

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie.

But at least the Daily Mail headline writer could plead ignorance. Lindzen has no such excuse.

Update: More on this from Deep Climate

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The Washington Post “runs an editorial”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803429.html on the topic of the financial data privacy controversy that I “blogged”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/16/in-praise-of-the-european-parliament/ about a couple of weeks ago. Predictably, it’s an ill-informed harrumph.

bq. THE PROGRAM has been credited with helping to capture the mastermind of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people, including some 50 Europeans. … Yet almost 400 members of the European Parliament want nothing to do with it and have effectively and indefensibly shut it down. … The tool in question is the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the United States created shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in hopes of using financial transactions to trace the whereabouts of suspects. … The European Commission hashed out an interim deal to allow the United States to continue operations, but the European Parliament objected, largely on the basis of bogus privacy concerns. … The Obama administration should work with E.U. leaders to push for reconsideration. If need be, additional oversight should be considered. But the administration must not go too far. Gutting a legal and effective program for the sake of imagined privacy gains would be as unwise and potentially dangerous as having no program at all.

I know that when the _WP_ editorial team sees the words ‘tracking terrorism,’ it responds with precisely that degree of judicious consideration which you apply when the doctor whacks your funny bone with a pointy rubber hammer. But the noxious guff about “bogus privacy concerns” and “imagined privacy gains” is just that – noxious guff. The program that the Washington Post is so fond of was implemented in blatant violation of EU law for years before the NYT had the guts to reveal its existence (despite strong pressure from the Bush administration not to do so). Nor are the European Parliament’s privacy concerns ‘bogus.’ The current administration has consistently refused to provide any guarantees whatsoever about how this data might, or might not, be shared with third countries. Given that many of our soi-disant allies in the war on terror have a distinctly robust attitude to the treatment and detention of possible terrorists, Europeans may very reasonably worry that any data they provide will be used to imprison and torture people, some innocent. I’ve talked about these issues with MEPs a lot over the last several years. Their memories of extraordinary rendition and the use of shared information (between the US and Canada in this instance) in the “Maher Arar case”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar left a very bad taste in their mouth. Nor is the US willing to talk about real redress or compensation for people unjustly targeted via this data.

In any event, like it or not, the editorial writers of the _Washington Post_ are going to have to learn to live with a transatlantic relationship where an actor which cares about privacy can veto security arrangements. Abe Newman and I recently wrote a “piece”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/26/europes_parliament_takes_a_stand?page=full on Foreign Policy‘s website that talks to this.

bq. To build support for counterterrorism cooperation, the United States must explicitly accept that the European Parliament will play a key role in future negotiations. … The U.S. administration must treat the Parliament as a true negotiating partner, along with the EU member states, on information sharing and domestic security. The U.S. administration can also address the Parliament’s substantive worries by creating its own privacy oversight structures and extending its protection to European citizens…. If the United States wants to rebuild the transatlantic relationship and promote its own security interests, it must stop treating the European Parliament as an irrelevant afterthought.

I’m adding a little section to each of the chapters in my Zombie Economics book called “Reanimation”, about the attempts that are already under way to revive economic ideas killed (at least according to the standard rules of hypothesis refutation) by the global crisis. I wasn’t surprised to find plenty of examples for the efficient markets hypothesis (easy to render immune from any kind of refutation by an appropriate formulation) or for policy ideas that yield big benefits to the rich and powerful, such as privatisation and trickle-down economics. But I was surprised a little while ago to see the crisis described as a transitory blip in the continuing Great Moderation. Still that pales into insignificance compared to this piece by Casey Mulligan of Chicago (h/t commenter Daniel ), in which (I swear this is true!) the crisis is the result of financial markets correctly anticipating the adverse labour market impacts of possible legislation under Obama, such as a health plan that might include means tests.

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Via a CT reader, this “rather horrifying attempt to hold an academic journal criminally responsible”:http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/20/4/1952.pdf (PDF) for publishing a negative book review and then refusing to suppress it. As Joseph Weiler, the editor of the _European Journal of International Law_ describes the culmination of his saga:

… on 26 September 2008 I received a Subpoena to appear before a French Examining Judge in connection with an investigation of alleged criminal libel based on a complaint made by Dr Calvo-Goller essentially replicating the complaints in her first letter to me. … in libel cases, all investigations of the merits of the case are exclusively reserved for the Criminal Court itself and, therefore, as a direct consequence of the complaint being filed, it was necessary that I be referred to the Court for trial. The date for the trial has now been set for 25 June 2010.

The review (in the _European Journal of International Law_ ) is “decidedly pungent”:http://www.globallawbooks.org/reviews/detail.asp?id=298, but (without commenting on the legal aspects,which I know nothing about) it seems to my eyes to be well within the usual norms of academic book reviewing (where a general tendency towards back-slapping congeniality is leavened by occasional fits of vigorous criticism). Weiler asks that academics who are upset at Dr. Calvo-Goller’s novel approach to managing the fallout from negative book-reviews send letters of “indignation/support” by email attachment (preferably with letterhead and affiliation) to EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.com, especially if they are editors or book review editors for other journals. He also asks that people send scanned or digital copies of other caustic book reviews to this address, so as to demonstrate that Dr. Calvo-Goller’s unhappy experience at the hands of a critic is nothing unusual. As an occasional author of “uncomplimentary book reviews”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410105 myself, I encourage people both (a) to send such reviews in and (b) to link them in comments, especially if they are well written. I do wonder whether Dr. Calvo-Goller appreciated the notoriety that she would accrue through her actions; The _Chronicle_ already “has a piece”:http://chronicle.com/article/NYU-Professor-Faces-Libel/64370/ on this, _Inside Higher Ed_ won’t be far behind, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised at all if this story breaks out into the mainstream press.

“Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/feldsteins-euro-holiday/, like “others before him”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/02/still-all-quiet-on-the-western-front/, fails to do justice to Martin Feldstein’s perspicacity.

Today, Martin Feldstein suggests that Greece make a temporary return to the drachma, so as to regain cost competitiveness. In terms of the macroeconomics, this actually does make sense. But it’s also impossible; Feldstein needs to read Barry Eichengreen.

What he doesn’t realise is that Feldstein is playing a much deeper game here, and that his fundamental objections to the euro “have nothing to do with macroeconomic theory”:http://www.nber.org/feldstein/fa1197.html

War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion. Germany’s assertion that it needs to be contained in a larger European political entity is itself a warning. Would such a structure contain Germany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonic leadership?

A critical feature of the EU in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw. This is a marriage made in heaven that must last forever. But if countries discover that the shift to a single currency is hurting their economies and that the new political arrangements also are not to their liking, some of them will want to leave. The majority may not look kindly on secession, either out of economic self-interest or a more general concern about the stability of the entire union. The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.

Obviously, Feldstein can’t write about this in public; Germans have, after all, been known to “read the Financial Times”:http://www.ftd.de/. But perhaps if Greece extricates itself very, very carefully from EMU, and promises (however disingenuously) that it _really, really will_ return to the eurozone just as soon as it can, Angela Merkel will stand down the Panzertruppen she has amassed at the Greek border …

Update: “see also Colm McCarthy”:http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/02/17/a-bonzer-wheeze-by-martin-feldstein/.

<a href=”http://www.examiner.com/x-1417-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2010m2d13-Huntsville-shooting-another-gun-free-zone-failure”>The point that must not go unacknowledged</a> is that there is no way University of Alabama- Huntsville students can feel safe on campus until professors are permitted to bring guns to faculty meetings.  Apparently, <a href=”http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/123281.html”>David Beito agrees.</a>

Well, thank goodness somebody’s finally thinking about the children.

In reality, the question of whether professors should bring their .45s and glock nines to faculty meetings has very little bearing on student safety.  But it would definitely raise the stakes for the discussion of whether to revise the Literature Before 1800 requirement of the English major.

<a href=”http://ahistoricality.blogspot.com/”>h/t</a>.

UPDATE:   via <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/93802/”>Instapundit</a>:  <a href=”http://www.mnuspreadslies.com/post.php?id=360″>Reader Christopher Johnson writes</a>: “I’m guessing the ‘she’s a human’ part won’t get talked about much in the MSM. But if she had been a District 9 alien it’d lead every evening news cast for two months.”

Now that the main charges of scientific misconduct arising from the hacking of the University of East Anglia email system have been proven false, it’s possible to get a reasonably clear idea of what actually happened here. For once the widely used “X-gate” terminology is appropriate. As with Watergate, the central incident was a “third-rate burglary” conducted as part of a campaign of overt and covert harassment directed against political opponents and rewarded (at least in the short run) with political success.

The core of the campaign is a network of professional lobbyists, rightwing activists and politicians, tame journalists and a handful of scientists (including some at the University of East Anglia itself) who present themselves as independent seekers after truth, but are actually in regular contact to co-ordinate their actions and talking points. The main mechanism of harassment was the misuse of Freedom of Information requests in an effort to disrupt the work of scientists, trap them into failures of compliance, and extract information that could be misrepresented as evidence of scientific misconduct. This is a long-standing tactic in the rightwing War on Science, reflected in such Orwellian pieces of legislation as the US “Data Quality Act”.

The hacking was almost certainly done by someone within the campaign, but in a way that maintained (in Watergate terminology) “plausible deniability” for the principals. Regardless of what they knew (and when they knew it) about the actual theft, the leading figures in the campaign worked together to maximize the impact of the stolen emails, and to co-ordinate the bogus claims of scientific misconduct based on the sinister interpretations placed on such phrases as “trick” and “hide the decline”.

The final group of actors in all this were the mass audience of self-described “sceptics”. With few exceptions (in fact, none of whom I am aware), members of this group have lost their moral bearings sufficiently that they were not worried at all by the crime of dishonesty involved in the hacking attack. Equally importantly, they have lost their intellectual bearings to the point where they did not reflect that the kind of person who would mount such an attack, or seek to benefit from it, would not scruple to deceive a gullible audience as to the content of the material they had stolen. The members of this group swallowed and regurgitated the claims of fraud centred on words like “trick”. By the time the imposture was exposed, they had moved on to the next spurious talking point fed to them by the rightwing spin machine.

To keep all this short and comprehensible, I haven’t given lots of links. Most of the points above are have been on the public record for some time (there’s a timeline here), but a few have only come to light more recently. These Guardian story brings us up to date, and names quite a few of the key players (see also here). For the role of allegedly independent journalists in all this, see Tim Lambert’s Deltoid site (search for “Rosegate” and “Leakegate”).

Update I should have mentioned that much the same team had their first outing in the controversy over the Mann et al “hockey stick” graph. All the same elements were there – supposedly disinterested citizen researchers who were in fact paid rightwing operatives, misuse of accountability procedures, and exceptional gullibility on the part of the “sceptical” mass audience. Details are here (h/t John Mashey).

Most of our readers who are philosophers will likely be aware of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s ongoing _contretemps._ As the Irish Times “summarizes the affair:”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0210/1224264114285.html

bq. In his latest title, Lévy launches a scathing attack on the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”. In framing his case, Lévy – BHL to the Parisian cognoscenti – drew on the writings of the little-known 20th century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul – author of The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant , and a man Lévy has cited in lectures. The problem? Botul never existed. He was invented by a journalist from the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné 10 years ago as an elaborate joke. And since the hoax was revealed, BHL has become a laughing stock.

Scott McLemee, recently accused in these here comments sections of disgusting anti-French-playboy-philosopher-bias for his previous writings on BHL, has the lowdown on this sublime and funky work of scholarship “here”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee276.

bq. A friend who has read _La vie sexuelle_ tells me that the author’s tongue is very conspicuously in his cheek. That BHL cited it as a serious work of scholarship would strongly suggest that he has an employee or two toiling in the erudition mines for him. If so, it is an interesting question whether the person who actually read Botul misunderstood the nature of the book — or passed along the citation as an act of sabotage. Either way, it seems like a fireable offense. (Of course, nothing like that ever happens in the academic world.)

I wondered the same thing myself when I first read about this. When we see BHL’s name on a book, are we to understand it as a brand, rather like Damien Hirst’s signature on ‘his’ spot paintings? Perhaps we can expect an authentication committee “with all the accompanying controversy”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23153 to begin its work after his eventual demise? Or did he indeed write all or most of it himself? There’s much entertaining speculation to be had. Readers should also betake themselves to Scott’s earlier pieces for “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee73 and “The Nation”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mclemee (the _Nation_ piece is a small masterpiece of the ‘the victim pinned and struggling on the wall’ genre; the IHE article has some very astute judgments from Arthur Goldhammer).

One hesitates to refer to the rational kernel in any statement coming from Pat Robertson, of course. But his recent venture into explaining the earthquake in Haiti does contain a small, heavily distorted, yet recognizable fragment of historical reality.

That kernel has passed through his system without giving him any nourishment, but I’ll try to pluck it out of all the batshit craziness.
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A book publicist’s email in my inbox today:

I am the publicist representing White House aide, businessman and author Grady Means, who has drawn on his previous, best-selling books on economics and management (MetaCapitalism and Wisdom of the CEO) to write his latest book, The New Enlightenment (http://thenewenlightenmentbook.com/). It is a study of the toxic relationship between contemporary global politics and religion, something I though would interest you after reading some of your insightful, timely and convicted posts on Crooked Timber. Here’s a little more on the book:
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As “Clive Davis”:http://www.clivedavisconfab.com/2010/01/how-some-people-see-europe/ notes, “Charles Murray”:http://blog.american.com/?p=8616 “is disconcerted by the number of black and brown faces he sees around him” during three days that he recently spent stranded in Paris.

I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French (which probably added in a few Brits and other Europeans) versus everyone else. I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists. Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.

The term “looked like native French” is an interesting euphemism, given that a quite substantial percentage (and, I suspect, a large majority) of the people whom Murray worried about during his peregrinations were citizens of France. I rather think that the word that Murray was looking for here is “white.” Meanwhile, Clive also links to this “very good Foreign Policy article”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/eurabian_follies?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full on the whole disgraceful Eurabia genre. Strongly recommended.

I’m a bit hesitant to link to this (as I’m not an elderly right wing economist, I’m worried I might be accused of “belittling the other”), but it’s super-duper awesome! Charles Rowley, familiar to long time CT readers for his “ruminations”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/20/worldly-philosophers/ on the corruption of the profession of political science (we’re all in hock to the federal government) and his “bizarre attack”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/28/anger-and-greif/ on Avner Greif (see “here”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/e4477g1412453627/ for Greif’s reply), “now has his own blog”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/. It’s everything that one might possibly hope for. My favorite so far is the bit telling us that:

bq. the massive fist of free market ideas once again will smash through the false consciousness of Keynesian dreams, and voters will rush to elect leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

‘cos it’s a level of rhetorical styling that I haven’t seen since I used to pick up the newsletter of the Maoist International Movement (the title is a bit of a misnomer; the cadres all seem to hang out in Ann Arbor, Michigan) when I was a graduate student in statistics boot camp. But the Obama=Sykes, Larry Summers=Fagin “post”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/youve-gotta-pick-a-pocket-or-two-boys/ runs a very close second:

bq. The question that remains to be answered is whether the futures of Larry and Barack will mirror those of Fagin and Sykes. Will some fortuitous Oliver chance across the paths of these shady characters before they can fulfill their dreams while destroying the market system that created the wealth that they covet? Will both meet the dreaded drop in 2012, if not before? Or will pocket-picking accelerate to the point at which Atlas Shrugs and the wealth-creators remove themselves from the economy, leaving those who cannot create wealth to share in the economic collapse of a negative-sum game as the United States begins a long decline into economic mediocrity?

This is a man who was surely born to blog. Update your bookmarks.

Update: “The Fun Continues”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/a-great-deal-of-ruin-in-a-nation/

bq. As private investment is increasingly crowded out by government expenditures, and as entrepreneurship is dashed by national socialist policies – as indeed was the case in the US throughout the the first two administrations of FDR – the once-powerful engine of the US economy will sputter and then die. Unlike in 1945, in 2019 the United States will not bestride a shattered world economy like some hegemonic Colossus. Rather its _state capitalist,_ [HF: emphasis in original] social market economy will struggle just to maintain existing living standards, while newly-emergent, vibrant market economies demonstrate to a former master the awesome power of laissez-faire capitalism.

If Tyler Cowen hadn’t confirmed that this blog was the genuine article, I’d suspect it of being a clever fraud perpetrated by an old-school lefty – the ‘Staatsmonopolistischer Kapitalismus=Nationalsozialismus’ identity has fallen out of fashion since the collapse of the GDR, and it is rather odd to see it being revived as a defense of free markets.

I know that there is some competition, but David Kopel’s “explanation”:http://volokh.com/2009/11/30/swiss-vote-to-ban-minarets/ of the minaret vote as perhaps the only plausible response that solid Swiss burghers could make to secret conspiracies and sweetheart deals between their government and the “Islamonazis of Tehran” surely ranks as the most flat-out insane Volokh Conspiracy post ever. If I were one of the saner Volokh conspiracy contributors (there are several), I would be considering as rapid and public an exit as possible to avoid reputational contamination.

“Ilya Somin at the Volokhs”:http://volokh.com/2009/11/24/in-limited-praise-of-right-wing-populism/

I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today. … True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories.

I don’t agree with Somin on much of anything at all, but usually find him an interesting writer. This post, however, seems at best badly out of touch with reality. Somin is immediately challenged by one of his readers on the death panels slur and responds:

It is a badly flawed and unfair argument. But I think it’s actually just an extreme version of a genuine point against government control of health care: that government would have to ration care and make decisions denying life-saving treatment to many people — as actually happens in socialized medicine systems.

And as happens in free market medicine systems too – the rationing merely takes a different form as has been frequently pointed out on this blog. But more to the point – would Somin be similarly generous in allowing, say, that 9/11 Truthers were arguing “an extreme version of” the “genuine point” that the Bush administration could have and should have done more to prevent it? I doubt it – perhaps I’m wrong.

I’m not averse to a little populism, and I can sort-of understand how American libertarian intellectuals – who have never had a mass movement to call their own – might get a bit wobbly-kneed at the sight of marching teabaggers. But to suggest that Tea Party rhetoric is somewhat overheated and unfair, but based on a fundamentally sound view of government – wtf? And that’s not even to get into Glenn Beck’s defence of the “white culture” that Obama apparently hates so much …

Update: Somin responds in an update to his original post, to suggest that Beck’s claim that Obama hated ‘white culture’ was “stupid” but was an aberration. Personally, I would choose rather stronger terms than “stupid” to describe this statement, such as e.g. ‘viciously attempting to stir up race hatred’ – perhaps we have different levels of sensitivity to this kind of language. More generally, Somin seems to be sticking to his claim that there is “relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories” among rightwing populists, and that the examples that people are coming up with (e.g. Beck’s continued ‘investigations’ into purported concentration camps that the Obama administration is building to house dissidents) are old tropes and are not a ‘major part’ of the right wing reaction to the Obama presidency. This claim is, frankly, completely baffling. When Glenn Beck (whom Somin himself specifically namechecks in his original post as an exemplar of what he is talking about) repeatedly suggests that America is moving towards a totalitarian state, subordinated to a world government run by Maoists and Marxists, where dissidents are likely to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps, it is quite safe to say that “strange crackpot ideas” and “weird conspiracy theories” are close to the heart of the right wing populism that Somin likes. To believe otherwise seems to me either to reflect an absence of actual knowledge of what Glenn Beck regularly says, or to be labouring under the influence of a particularly dangerous form of delusion and denial. Somin also “responds”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/24/im-with-stupid/#comment-296208 in comments here to suggest that the cases of 9/11 Truthers and death panels are not comparable – Harry “responds”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/24/im-with-stupid/#comment-296290 better than I can. Finally, I note in passing that I at least think it good practice for a blogger responding to a criticism on another blog to link back to that blog in his or her response so that his or her readers can evaluate for themselves whether or not that criticism sticks.