Shorter <a href=”http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2011/07/breitbart_thinks_back_on_his_c.html”>Mark Bauerlein</a>: The leftist books Andrew Breitbart didn’t read in college eventually inspired him to slander Shirley Sherrod.
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I’ve received the ultimate accolade from News Corporation, graduating from snarky asides and dark mutterings in which I’m identified only indirectly to a full-length hit piece in our only national (general) newspaper, The Australian. This worked out pretty well for me, giving my friends the opportunity to say nice things in my defence, and even the Oz comments thread was mostly favorable. I was even, briefly, a trending topic on Twitter! Perhaps the spell of Murdoch is starting to fade?

Some remarkable logic on display in the Washington Post ombudsman’s defense of Jennifer Rubin’s notorious jihadism in Norway post.

bq. There are other reasons I got so many e-mails on Rubin; they have much less to do with terrorism and tragedy and more to do with modern technology and partisan politics. Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere. The liberal blogosphere, propelled by tweets, picked up Rubin’s piece and spread it around rapidly, helped by a trifecta of posts from theatlantic.com. … This brings us back to the shootings in Norway, an act committed by a disturbed man who drew some of his inspiration from extremist Web sites. A blogosphere given to vitriol and hasty judgments ought to consider the possible consequences of its own online attacks.

If I understand the logic of this column correctly, the ombudsman, one Patrick Pexton, thinks something like the following.

(a) Bloggers are partisan and don’t usually engage with people on the other side. In this sense, they are rage-filled extremists.
(b) Breivik was partly inspired by rage-filled, extremist websites.
(c) _Therefore,_ rage-filled extremist leftwing bloggers ought to consider their own culpability, and shut the hell up about Jennifer Rubin.

I can’t remember the term for this logical fallacy (it’s of the ‘all cats have fur – all dogs have fur – therefore all cats are dogs’ variety). No doubt someone who, unlike me, took Philosophy 101, will inform me in comments within moments of publication. But an awful lot of work is being done by the elasticity of the notion of rage-stoking extremism here. And this is not to mention the intimation that James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates are rage-filled hatebloggers …

However, there is a serious point to be extracted from this muddle. Which is that discussions of online extremism often tend to confuse two, quite different forms of extremism (here, I think Cass Sunstein’s work has had quite some problematic consequences). One is not really extremism at all – it is common or garden partisanship. That is, it is plausible that online interactions makes vigorous partisanship (in which you perceive yourself as in competition with the other side, perceive little value in direct intellectual exchange with them etc) more prominent, either because it makes it easier for partisans to find each other and organize, makes people’s partisanship stronger through mutual reinforcement, or both. Here, though, there is a crucial moderating influence. Partisans are engaged in political contention through _electoral competition._ This (as Nancy Rosenblum argues) has a substantial moderating effect – in the end, they need to win votes by influencing people if they want to succeed. This also leads to all kinds of indirect learning. The second is _actual_ extremism, where people are potentially willing to abandon democratic politics and pursue violent means to achieve political ends. Here, there is no such moderating influence.

There is _no necessary reason_ to believe that the former necessarily leads to the latter. In the US case, the online forces that push towards partisanship on the left tend overwhelmingly push against the other kind of extremism. There is no effective contact between e.g. MoveOn or the Daily Kos on the one hand, and the various subgroups and splinters who are more enthusiastic about violence on the other. When the latter try to influence the former, they get mobbed and repelled. The right is a quite different matter – there are dense social ties between online partisans and anti-Muslim bigots and crazies claiming that universal dhimmidom is right around the corner.

Pexton’s suggestion that leftwing bloggers need to think carefully about whether they too will inspire the mass-murder of scores of teenagers doesn’t deserve a serious response in itself. But it is worth looking at as a specific manifestation of a more pervasive intellectual confusion between two different forms of ‘extremism,’ one of which is not in fact a form of extremism at all.

Responding to the Mordor-inspired debt ceiling deal, I thought it was time for yet another Lord of the Rings post

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I’m teaching “Philosophy and Literature” this semester. For one unit – Well Wrought Urns and Stuffed Owls, or somesuch subtitle – we’re going to read the really strong stuff. Like Irene Iddesleigh, Chapter 1 (not the whole book). But also more genuinely enjoyable incompetence: The Young Visiters. And Crippled Detectives. See this Village Voice piece for some – rather sad – background on the latter. Maybe a bit from A Nest of Ninnies. Who knows? Maybe even Ulysses? I’ve always thought of that book as basically The Young Visiters writ old. Bloom is Mr. Salteena, all grown up, but still a child at heart. [click to continue…]

My last post, arguing that the share of US income going to the top 1 per cent of households is now so great that any effective policy must be financed by reducing or more effectively taxing the income of this group produced a range of interesting (and some not so interesting responses). First up, it elicited what appears to be new variants on a couple of standard rightwing talking points. More interesting to me is a response from Matt Yglesias arguing (as I read him) that, even if there is no serious prospect of reversing the shift of income to the top 1 per cent[1], there is still plenty of capacity for progressive political actions based on a broadly neoliberal (US sense) agenda.
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Prompted by a passing thought about TextMate, I thought I’d make a comprehensive, accurate, unbiased, and irrefutable survey of text editors by way of comparison to locations in The Lord of the Rings.

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I’ve been thinking about what, if anything, to write about the events in Norway. Obviously one’s first thoughts are with the victims of what was an especially horrible crime. I was in Oslo in April, and it really is hard for me to imagine an event such as this taking place there. Really dreadful and heartbreaking, especially since so many of the victims were young, committed, people who looked likely to make an important contribution to the life of their country.

I’m going to limit myself to a few thoughts on its wider significance. Obviously the killer is in some sense crazy, though whether that is technically true is a matter for the professionals. He was imbued with some version of an ideology which is widespread on the internet and to some extent in Western societies: nativism, extreme anxiety about Islam, hatred for liberal multiculturalist “enablers” of this, and so on. Ideas to be found on thousands of blogs, in the writings of wingnut columnists and neocons, in the shared beliefs of Tea Partiers and birthers, among the rabble of the English Defence League, and among the further fringes of extreme supporters of Israel. Is this fascist? I don’t think arguments about definitions are particularly useful. Some of this current predates 9/11, but in its current form it is a product of the US and global reaction to the attacks on the Word Trade Center. Plain and simple racist movements existed before 9/11, but this focus on a particular religion and its adherents coupled with the adoption of extreme pro-Zionism by the formerly anti-semitic right is something new. (This isn’t a single movement though, it is a spectrum, and elements of it have even been given cover, credibility and respectability by people who think of themselves as being on the left but who backed the Iraq war, strongly supported Israel over Lebanon and Gaza and who disseminate propaganda attacking those who take a different line to them on the Middle East as antisemitic racists.)

Following the Norway massacre many of the elite scribblers of this spectrum — many of whom have played the guilt-by-association game to the max over the last decade — are disclaiming all responsibility. Well, of course, they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did. We may be, now, in the world that Cass Sunstein worried about, a world where people select themselves into groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths” (about Islam, or Obama’s birth certificate, or whatever) and shutting out falsifying information. Put an unstable person or a person with a serious personality disorder into an environment like that and you have a formula for something very nasty happening somewhere, sooner or later. Horribly, that somewhere was Norway last Friday.

I’ve been largely on the sidelines of the debate about neoliberalism and political theory. That’s mainly because, observing the US political and economic situation, I have a very clear view on what policies could, in principle, sustain a progressive political movement, but (given my distance from the scene and the absence of anything substantial enough to force its attention on the mass media) no real idea about how such a movement might develop.

My analysis is quite simple and follows the apocryphal statement attributed to Willie Sutton. The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious policy program must begin by clawing it back.[1]

If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.

In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010. By contrast, in a society like that of the 1950s and 1960s, where most people could plausibly regard themselves as middle class and where middle class incomes were steadily rising, the big questions could be put in terms of the mix of public goods and private income that was best for the representative middle class citizen. The question of how much (more) to tax the very rich was secondary – their share of national income was already at an all time low.

The problem is that most policy analysts and commentators grew up in the world of the 1950s and 1960s, or at least in the mental world created by that era. So, we are busy fighting about tax expenditures, barber licensing and teachers unions, and the implications of these things for a hypothetical working class mobilisation. Meanwhile, most of the anger created by the collapse of middle class America is being directed not at the rich but at those who don’t look, sound or pray like Americans of the vanished golden age.

One thing the Tea Party has shown is that, in the current dire state of the US, there are few penalties for abandoning moderation. What the US needs at this point is someone willing to advocate a return to the economic institutions that made America great – 90 per cent top marginal tax rates, strong trade unions, weak banks and imprisonment for malefactors of great wealth.

It seems to me that a good place to start would be a primary challenge to Obama (Bernie Sanders suggested this, and he’d be a good candidate I think). It would be impossible for the media to ignore completely, and might get enough votes to shift the Overton window. Whether such a challenge could form the basis of a mass movement, I don’t really know, but it seems to be worth a try.

fn1. When I was at the American Economic Association meetings in January I went to a session where a group of Very Serious Economists (Holtz-Eakin, Elmendorf and others) discussed the US budget problem, which comes down to the fact that on a structural basis US public expenditure exceeds revenue by something like 7 per cent of national income. I made the comment that this gap was almost exactly equal to the increase in the share of income going to the top 1 per cent of households over the last decade or so. The Very Serious Guys declined to respond, and waited for a serious question. I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t impressed either.

A number of people (including Matthew Yglesias) suggested that they didn’t really understand my arguments about the deficiencies of left neo-liberalism, because they were too abstract. I’ve spent the weekend reading an Advance Reading Copy of Suzanne Mettler’s “The Submerged State”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226521656/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0226521656, which in addition to being a fantastic little book in its own right (and excellent value!), has a number of relevant – and quite concrete – points. Mettler wrote up a broad summary of her arguments “last month”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2011/features/20000_leagues_under_the_state030498.php for the _Washington Monthly._ But in the book, she goes into much more detail about the sources of the pattern of policy making that she argues against – the provision of welfare state benefits through semi-invisible tax breaks and forms of private provision rather than directly. [click to continue…]

I’m a fan of the artist and illustrator “Ian Miller”:http://www.ian-miller.org/, much of whose work combines very fine ink drawing with watercolor and collage, and among my most precious possessions are a couple of the illustrations from his graphic novel collaboration with M. John. Harrison, “The Luck in the Head”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1878574469/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20. He’s been working together with a couple of other people on a short animated film, which provides a good sampling of his combination of the sinister and the jolly. Work in progress is “here”:http://www.behance.net/gallery/Jacobs-Lament/1355483 for those who are interested.

I am someone focused on trying to figure out what the right answer is. You are a skeptical aggressor. He, on the other hand, is an asshole.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s “new authority”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/27/why-is-ireland-such-a-bastion-of-anti-israel-feeling/ on the depths of anti-Israel hatred in Ireland, expands on the topic “in some interesting ways”:http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-theres-never-been-a-safer-time-for-children-2824766.html.

bq. Now in the toxic Post-Catholic Politically-Correct Pseudo-Consensual culture that has emerged in PC3 Ireland, one may be as loudly anti-Semitic as one likes about Israel, even as one makes a great posturing display show of not being “anti-Semitic” in domestic politics. This is Phoney Liberalism at its most unprincipled. Fear of unjustified allegations of anti-Semitism should not prevent us considering some difficult — that is to say, adult — issues that will probably violate all the dogmas of PC3ness.

bq. Here goes. It is now very possible that a state law governing private Catholic sacramental practices will be introduced by a Jewish Minister for Justice. This raises the question of whether it is ever prudent for a member of any minority to introduce laws affecting the private religious practices of the majority. Moreover, is it acceptable to have a rigorously-enforced state law over children and Catholic priests, but not one concerning Jewish babies and rabbis? How, otherwise, would the rabbinical removal of a baby boy’s foreskin, a deed that by definition involves a non-consensual and irreversible injury and which results in a permanent reduction of the sexual-sensitivity of the glans, be allowed under the proposed new child-protection laws? You no doubt find these questions uncomfortable; well, believe me, not nearly as uncomfortable as I do in asking them.

The pivot, in successive paragraphs, from the claim that (a) that everyone else in Ireland is anti-Semitic (b) that only he is willing and able to ask the uncomfortable questions about whether Jews should govern Catholics (and did he mention by the way that the law doesn’t stop them from mutilating baby boys’ todgers?) is remarkable. And this isn’t to mention Myer’s earlier stuff about permanently tumescent African layabouts who have too many children (one senses that Mr. Myers has a thing about penises). I really think that Jeffrey Goldberg needs to publicly reconsider his stated reliance on this particular source. It doesn’t do any favors to his reputation, or that of the magazine he works for.

Update: It turns out that Jeffrey Goldberg “did apologize”:https://twitter.com/#!/Goldberg3000/status/85433001403613185 (but still wants to “stick to his main claim”:https://twitter.com/#!/Goldberg3000/status/86060718855684096_ )via Twitter after seeing the Myers Africa rant.

Update 2: via Paddy in comments, this really quite revolting Myer “meditation”:http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/why-drought-in-somalia-is-not-our-problem-2821058.html from last week on how feeding starving African babies is a bad thing – after all, one day they may turn into Islamist terrorists.

bq. There is another question here — the difficult one, the painful kind that gets people into trouble. It is this: what is the rationale for keeping a particular demographic group alive when the main result is the maintenance of an implacable enmity towards the rescuers? It is that existential argument — not the one that the UN admits to, of aid-material falling into the hands of the Islamists — that we should be discussing.

bq. It’s not easy, to be sure. For immediately we must face a fourth question: who can look at the photograph of a tiny, fading child, with flies supping the last juices from its desiccating eyes, and decide to let her die? And likewise, hundreds of thousands of other such children?

bq. … A Somali you save today is unlikely to turn into a sort of grateful Nilotic-Dane in 20 years. No, indeed: the chances are he will remain a proud and resentful Somali Islamist, and even if he comes to the West — as hundreds of thousands already have — he will probably despise us as backward savages, who are too lazy even to circumcise our little girls the wholesome radical way, as they should be, with rusty blades and no anaesthetic.

Embattled Psychology Professor Marc D. Hauser, who has been investigated for falsifying scientific data, will resign from the University, effective August 1, Harvard Spokesperson Jeff Neal said in a statement Tuesday.