No, I don’t mean: arguing fair. I think it should be ab homine. A moving (irrationally) away from the man. It’s a fallacy.

Here’s the context. Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait have a diavlog in the course of which Chait takes the scrupulous high-road position that, when it comes to charges of racism, you really have to be slow to accuse. He rolls out the standard fair-play-in-debate considerations: if the person is saying something wrong, but not explicitly racist, you can just point out the wrongness, without speculating, additionally, that they said the wrong thing out of racism. There is, he implies, no real loss in not being able to delve into dark motive.

But here’s the problem with that. In an environment in which creative and speculative accusations of bad motives are, otherwise, flying back and forth in free and easy style, a social norm against accusing people of one sin in particular is actively misleading. It inevitably generates the strong impression that this bad motive – out of the whole colorful range of diseases and infirmities of the mind and spirit – is an especially unlikely motive. Which, in the sorts of cases Chait and Yglesias happened to be discussing, is not true. So, contra Chait, an inconsistent semi-norm against ad hominem arguments encourages an ab homine error that may be less angry (that’s not nothing) but is significantly more confused that what excessive – but even-handedly excessive! – hermeneutics of suspicion would produce.

Yglesias makes this point, mostly by saying that you have to ‘tell narratives’, and the narratives have to attribute motives. But I think ab homine is snappier.

UPDATE: On reflection, ab homuncule might be still better. The aversion of the gaze from one possibly semi-autonomous, agent-like module of the overall man, conjoined with cheerful willingness to shed light on every other part of the man, motive-wise.

Congratulations Matt McIrvin, you are the author of Crooked Timber’s Two Hundred and Fifty Thousandth Comment! And I’m not even counting all the spam we deleted. I believe the term of art these days is that these quarter of a million comments — do you mind if I say that again? These quarter of a million comments — are “curated”. Gently managed. Lovingly tended. Hosed down twice a day. It’s kind of like you are all in a big museum, or possibly zoo. Of the future. We’ve come a long way from the very beginning. Eventually there will be a grad student and a thesis, I am sure. In the meantime, for his good fortune Matt wins, em, well anyway we thank you sincerely for your many contributions. And of course we thank you, as well. And you. And especially you. But certainly not you, you troll. You are banned.

If you are one of the people who hasn’t yet read “Ian Jack’s piece”:http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ian-jack/5-boys on the photo that symbolizes the British class system then you should. (h/t “The Online Photographer”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html .)

I’ve seen The Hurt Locker and Green Zone within a few days of one another. Purely as a piece of cinema, The Hurt Locker is probably the better film, but politically it is nowhere, and indeed it suffers from the same syndrome as many Hollywood Vietnam pictures – they are all about Americans and how they feel, and the poor natives appear as mere ciphers. Not so Green Zone, where the Iraqis appear as persons in their own right, with interests, feelings, grudges, agendas. Green Zone is, in some ways, a pretty crude film, and there’s a striking disconnect between the late-Bourneish style and the anti-war substance. Still, if that gets a broader audience remembering and thinking about what happened, and what went wrong, and why, that’s no bad thing. In the credits at the end, I was surprised to see “Based on _Imperial Life in the Emerald City_ by Rajiv Chandrasekaran”. I’m not sure what the necessary and sufficient conditions for the “based on” relation are, but this is not that distant from saying that the latest Bond movie is “based on” the official history of MI5 (although to be fair, the account of the pathologies of the CPA is recognizably, though distortedly from _Emerald City_). One thing that both book and movie reminded me of is this: that the cheerleaders for the war (be they neocon or “decent left”) didn’t just applaud the invasion. The awfulness of Saddam was such that being pro-war in 2003 was wrong but perhaps forgiveable and — as some of the barely repentant cheerleaders keep reminding us — was sometimes motivated by moral motives. They also applauded or excused the really bad post-invasion fuck-ups: the failure to control looting, deBaathification, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, etc. So thanks to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon for keeping a light shining on that.

Seen on campus this morning:

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Understandably, Cornyn doesn’t want to touch the most popular element of Obamacare, the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But unless it’s modified substantially, the individual mandate has to stay too — and therefore so do the subsidies and the minimum-benefits regs. Without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.

This is the problem the Dems faced (well, one of them), just in reverse: namely, what you want is uncontroversial and small-seeming. But in order to ask for that one thing, you have to ask for all this other heavy-duty stuff. Now, in reverse, the Reps can’t object to the heavy-duty stuff without getting pinned to the charge that they want to do really gratuitously, pettily awful stuff.

I predict that Cornyn is ahead of the curve. Soon it will have been the common wisdom all along. Basically for the reasons Ponnuru outlines. There will never be a moment when any large number of Republicans announce they’ve changed their minds, of course. (In 1994 and even until 2006 the individual mandate was moderate – then in 2009 and especially in early 2010 it was radical from the get-go – then in late 2010 it continued on, moderate as ever.)

I hereby lay my bet as to when the flip will take place: immediately after 2010 primary season. During the primaries, Republicans will be strongly and vocally in favor of total repeal, a unified front against being primaried from the right. Then, after the primaries, all that will fade, like a dream upon waking. Blogs and the conservative commentariat will be slightly slower but will catch up before the 2010 general. By 2012 the apocalyptic rhetoric will have faded so far from memory that Mitt Romney will be able to run as a Republican, without having to run from himself. Of course someone will point this out, but it won’t matter that much. Heat of the moment stuff. Ancient history.

Of course I could be wrong. What do you think?

I find myself disagreeing with Paul Krugman, though not about anything important.

” I’m reading Gary Gorton’s Slapped by the Invisible Hand, which tells us that there were bank panics — systemic crises — in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1896, 1907, and 1914.

The problem, as Gorton makes clear, is that the Quiet Period reflected a combination of deposit insurance and strong regulation — undermined by the rise of shadow banking.

I don’t think this is right. If we’re going to include things like the First Baring Crisis and the Panic of 1893 (which were big news at the time, but by no means earth-shattering), then I can give you a list. Even using a selective criterion of only crises with significant US involvement (ruling out the Nordic, French, Spanish and Japanese banking crises), we have the following list …

2007 – current crisis
2002 – Enron/Worldcom/Global Crossing crises
2000 – dot com bust
1998 – Asia/Russia/LTCM crisis
1994 – Tequila crisis
1991 – commercial real estate crisis
1987 – Black Wednesday
1985 – Savings & Loans crisis
1982 – LDC debt crisis
1975 – New York City bankruptcy
1971 – Collapse of Bretton Woods
1970 – Penn Central commercial paper crisis

As far as I can see, things were pretty stable between 1934 and 1970 (give or take the odd war), but that in the era of floating exchange rates it’s been very unusual to go seven years without a crisis and the modal gap looks closer to three years than four.

Tyler Cowen “tosses in an aside about Italy”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/rising-economics-departments-and-skills.html in a post on changes in economics department rankings.

bq. The big change in the former has been the rise of economics departments around the world in virtually all developed countries (though not Italy). It’s now quite easy to encounter a place you have heard of — yet never really thought of — and find they have a bunch of young faculty with articles in tier one journals.

Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi “make the argument”:http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/documents/working-papers/2009/2009-08.pdf (“previewed”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/26/incompetence-as-a-signalling-device/ in this post last year) that people in Italian academia (and in Italy more generally) may not have much incentive to deviate from an equilibrium in which genial incompetence is rewarded with genial incompetence. Roughly speaking – if everyone promises high quality goods or services to each other, but everyone actually delivers low quality services to each other, this may work out to everyone’s advantage because no-body expects too much of anyone else. They provide a fictional example: [click to continue…]

In which it is revealed that John Q. has been hiding his light under a bushel – I hadn’t realized that he had recently been described in an “editorial”:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/open-issues-need-open-debate/story-e6frg71x-1225839757440 by the _Australian_ as a green activist with a totalitarian mindset. I obviously need to keep up a little better with his “personal blog”:http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2010/03/13/science-the-victim-of-dishonest-attacks/#more-8427.

Jonah Goldberg:

But on another level, this legislation is a superconducting super collider of culture-war conflagrations. It will throw off new and unforeseen cultural spectacles for years to come (if it is not repealed). The grinding debate over the Stupak amendment was just a foretaste. The government has surged over the breakwater and is now going to flood the nooks and crannies of American life. Americans will now fight over what tax dollars should cover and not cover. Debates over “subsidizing” this “lifestyle” or that “personal choice” will erupt. And when conservatives complain, liberals will blame them for perpetuating the culture war.

One of the most striking features of the health care reform was that it was passed over the unanimous opposition of the Republican Party. This has all sorts of implications, not yet fully understood by anyone (certainly not me). To start with, it’s now clear that talk of bipartisanship, distinctions between moderate and hardline Republicans and so on, has ceased to have any meaning. If their failure to stop the health bill works against them, we may see occasional Republican votes for popular legislation that is going to get through in any case. Obama’s Employment Bill got only 6 Rep votes in the House, but passed the Senate 68-29 (or maybe 70-28) in what the NYT correctly called a rare bipartisan vote. At least the reporter on this piece, Carl Hulse, has caught up with reality, unlike the general run of Beltway pundits who still think that Obama should be pursuing bipartisanship.

In many countries, a party-line vote like this (at least on one side) would be nothing surprising. In Australia, for example, crossing the floor even once earns automatic expulsion from the Labor party and guarantees political death on the other side. But the US has never had a really tight party system, largely because, until recently,the Democrats (and before them, the Whigs) were always split on racial issues.

One problem arising from this is that the US system is more vulnerable than most to the kinds of crises that arise when one party is determined to prevent the other from governing. Passing a budget requires a majority in both Houses of Congress, and the signature of the President. If the Republicans win a majority in either House in November, it’s hard to see this happening. A repetition of the 1995 shutdown seems highly likely, and, with the financial system still very fragile, the consequences could be disastrous. The 1995 shutdown didn’t turn out too well for Newt Gingrich, but it doesn’t seem to have pushed him in the direction of moderation, and the current crop of Republicans make Newt look like a RINO.

[click to continue…]

is “profiled”:http://alumni.berkeley.edu/news/california-magazine/spring-2010-searchlight-gray-areas/tenure-tracts along with other academic bloggers (DeLong, Drezner, Shalizi) in Berkeley’s alumni magazine. Some discussion of CT, and changes in academic blogging included as part of the cover price. Two quotes:

Like DeLong, Holbo thrives on that public sparring. He finds the virtual salon a perfect antidote to the insulation of the ivory tower and the glacial pace of conventional scholarship. “I have a split intellectual life: these ant-like projects that evolve over months and years, and then this by-the-moment blogging life,” he says. “Blog posts take an hour, while an academic paper can take four years.” Yet even though the blogs reach a huge and influential audience compared to that of scholarly journals, the blogs are not recognized as scholarly publication and don’t count toward tenure.

Holbo admits he and his fellow pioneers have lost the “revolutionary fervor” of blogging’s early days. “I’m fortunate to be at the top of the food chain, to have these bully pulpits where I can stand up and know thousands of people will hear me,” he says. “But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.”

…

If there’s one thing Shalizi can’t stand, it’s misinformation bandied about in the name of science. “A lot of the time, when I’m motivated enough to post something, it’s because I think someone is ‘being wrong on the Internet,’ as the saying goes—and this cannot stand,” Shalizi says. “It’s usually something I’ve read more than once and it seems such a pack of lies, or utter misunderstandings, that I feel like writing something. I wish I wasn’t so destructively motivated, but I am.”

When asked how much time and effort that takes, he says, “Quite a bit, to be honest. Part of that is the fact that I’m way over trained as an academic, and part is also wanting to leave people no excuse or way out,” Shalizi says. “If I can show that they’re just totally wrong, thoroughly wrong, then I will try to do that.”

If anyone reading knows Randall Munroe (I’m pretty sure one regular CT reader at least does), he or she is hereby requested to get a new version of the famous cartoon commissioned; this time with the guy at the computer depicted with a “Leon Trotsky beard”:http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/ …

This “one”:http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/the-future-after-health-care/37799/ from Megan McArdle, is a _very_ special example. It’s the blogospheric version of one of those avant-garde mechanical sculptures that starts to tear itself apart as soon as the clockwork key is turned. It’s worth quoting _in extenso_ so that you too can marvel at the beauty and ingenuity of the escapements.
[click to continue…]

Good job, House Dems!

K. Lo’s reaction. “Congratulations, Democrats. Beginning now, you own the health-care system in America. Every hiccup. Every complaint. Every long line. All yours.”

I think this does serve as a nice expression of the Republican case against health care reform. Hic! Damn you, Nancy Pelosi! Hic! Damn you, Nancy Pelosi!

In other health care reform news, I have been enjoying Awesome Hospital rather muchly. “Back off, Dr. Space Baby!” On the other hand, our girls have been getting sick at a rate of 1.2 medical emergencies a day, for a week. And Belle is traveling, so I’m a bit worn to a frazzle of a nubbin of myself. I think we should have a Frequent Faller card from our local hospital. Get 2 tests and the 3rd is free! Get 20 stitches and the next 5 are free! Baffle the diagnostician 3 times and the 4th bafflement comes at no extra charge! (Thankfully, we haven’t had to get stitches this week.)