I pose a hermeneutic riddle of sorts. Consider the anecdote in the linked post:

At the end of his presentation, he allowed questions. The first supplicant approached the microphone and hopefully inquired, “Mr. Buckley, what do you think about Rush Limbaugh?” This was during the time when Rush was still something of a rising star. His rhetoric was bombastic, hard-edged, and wickedly funny. Members of the audience shifted forward in their seats expectantly as Buckley answered by telling the following story.

There were two Spaniards sitting in a bar. One asked the other, “What do you think about General Franco?” Instead of answering, the man gestured for his friend to follow him outside. Once on the sidewalk, he motioned for the friend to follow him to his car. They got in the car and drove to a forest. Deep in the woods, he parked the car and beckoned the friend to hike with him down to a lake. At the edge of the lake, he pointed to a boat which they boarded. He grabbed the oars and rowed to the center of the lake. Finally, he sat still, looked his friend in the eyes and paused for a moment. “I like him.” Buckley told the story so brilliantly and created so much suspense, the denouement brought the house down amid gales of laughter and happy applause.

I have to admit it’s funny. But I don’t actually get it. Why does the Spaniard have to drag the guy all the way out into the lake? I guess it’s supposed to be a ‘the leftist made me do it’ thing. But the joke seems to be at pains to refute that reading. Since, after all, how could a leftist force you to like someone?

I just watched Pan’s Labyrinth. I liked it. Belle and I debated whether it had a happy or a sad ending. I think it had a happy ending. But I find it hard to believe that, if you asked someone whether it had a happy or sad ending, they would haul you out into the middle of a damn lake and tell you it had a sad ending because [PLOT SPOILER] [click to continue…]

You are really not helping your case for massively preferential taxation here, hedge fund guy:

Private-equity executives say they never dreamed that the tax status of their payouts would be questioned. “I don’t think that anybody felt it would ever be challenged,” said Scott M. Sperling, managing director of Thomas H. Lee Partners, a private-equity firm. Managers’ earnings are “capital gains in every technical and spiritual sense.”

That guy is so far at the front of the line that he may be up against the wall right this minute, absent any revolution whatsoever.

Dean Barnett, after digging up ranty stuff in a Kos comment box, then noting the post itself was mild-mannered:

With the Yearly Kos about to convene, I think it’s important to note what the Daily Kos is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. Markos Moulitsas and his front-pagers had nothing to do with these comments. He and they have grown much too smart to engage in such public displays of idiocy. But Markos doesn’t lead the Daily Kos; he sits atop it.

An interesting standard: blogs are to be judged exclusively by their comment boxes.

This seems like a useful snippet for someone to have, for talking points purposes, if they are getting interviewed about the whole ‘Kos Hate Site’ thing. Prominent right-wing blogger admits Kos postings are, on the whole, even-keeled – as befits the site’s prominence. After all, surely right-wing blogs generate their share of angry comment box froth? Barnett is judicious, possibly to a fault:

the right has its sliver of kooks and misfits who jam every event into a one-size-fits-all-events ideological prism

Ahem.

One of the reasons I was so amused by my Soft Boys YouTube discovery is that it’s funny to see a young Kimberley Rew banging his head so furiously, alongside Robyn Hitchcock. He can really play guitar. His more recent song-writing/performing accomplishments are, to my ear, less convincingly rocking.

In other news, I was discussing TV and film with a student and it emerged that, since he hadn’t been born yet when The Simpsons started running, naturally he thinks of The Simpsons as a thing that has just always been there. A comedy equivalent of electricity and hot running water, if you will. Curious. (By the by, Amazon has seasons 1-10marked down 55%. If you are like me, you snap that sort of thing up.)

In other news, I see Keith Richards is writing his autobiography.

From a friend of Scott’s (update — and, now I know who it is, of mine!), this. All our friends (mine and Scott’s) who suffered at Barnes’s hands, spit now.

The British pro-war “left” and its hangers-on (such as the crypto-neocon Oliver Kamm) are busy screaming abuse at traitors to the cause in the aftermath of “apostate-from-decency” Johann Hari’s _Dissent_ review of Nick Cohen (see Chris Brooke for links ). The contrast between the current scene and the “heroic” early phase of “decency” (the early days of the Iraq war) reminds me of some lines from Auden’s _Letter to Lord Byron_:

bq. Today, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.

Conor Foley will no doubt add to their discomfort with his own brilliant dissection of Cohen . The highlight of Foley’s piece is a hilarious quote from Nick Cohen himself in which he characterizes his opponents:

bq. Rather than accepting the psychological consequences of confessing error, people lose their bearings. They talk only to friends. They imagine conspiracies as they seek the worst possible motives for their critics. They retreat into coteries and speak in code … To cut a long story short, they go a little mad.

I’m a big fan of the Lifehacker site, especially for their software tips, but when you read them every day you get to see that their lifestyle advice is pretty much all over the place. Yesterday’s roundup includes a link back to a May entry on body language:

bq. Slow down a bit – this goes for many things. Walking slower not only makes you seem more calm and confident, it will also make you feel less stressed. If someone addresses you, don’t snap you’re neck in their direction, turn it a bit more slowly instead.

But as recently as last Sunday, they treated us to Improve Your Self-Confidence, which linked to Ten Ways to Instantly Build Self-Confidence :

bq. One of the easiest ways to tell how a person feels about herself is to examine her walk. Is it slow? tired? painful? Or is it energetic and purposeful? People with confidence walk quickly. They have places to go, people to see, and important work to do. Even if you aren’t in a hurry, you can increase your self confidence by putting some pep in your step. Walking 25% faster will make to you look and feel more important.

I think I’ll just sit where I am for now.

Via John Gruber I see Anil Dash wondering about the trend toward “square blocks of color … being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart.” Like this.

I’d seen the one on the left — from a New York Times story about beliefs in the afterlife, and wondered about it, too. The white block in the middle of the Times graphic presumably represents “Don’t Knows” but it is not labeled. This is especially odd in the context of belief in the afterlife, as agnosticism is a recognized point of view and so not equivalent to “Don’t know” answers on other survey questions.

The main problem with this style of presentation is that it uses two dimensions to display unidimensional data. As the graphic on the right, especially, makes clear, the layout of the subcomponents of the graph is arbitrary. Maybe laying out responses on a line is impractical in a newspaper column. This is one reason pie charts are popular, but their problems are well known. (Word to the wise: don’t use them.)

Mosaic plots superficially resemble the ones pictured here, and they are sometimes used to very good effect. But the whole point of a mosaic plot is that it visually represents several categorical variables at once. It’s a picture of an n x n table, in other words, where the sizes of the blocks reflect the cell values in the table. Here's an example. Even here you have to be careful interpreting the results. But the boxes above take this kind of picture but use it with only one variable, which doesn’t make any sense at all.

This is a pretty weird post from Ross Douthat.

Ezra writes that it’s “very unfair” to apply the word “eugenics” to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down’s Syndrome by selective abortion, because “traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch.” First of all, Down’s Syndrome is not a “medically disastrous” genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term “disastrous.” Second, while the means of “traditional eugenics” were obviously very different from what’s emerging now – involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion – the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process.

Does Ross _seriously_ believe that people who have abortions because their foetus appears likely to have Tay-Sachs syndrome or Downs syndrome are doing so because their “end” is “the genetic improvement of the human species?” Can he even realistically contend that the genetic improvement of the human species crosses most people’s minds when they are making this kind of decision?? This claim seems to me to be ridiculous on its face, regardless of your underlying position on whether abortion is a good or bad thing.

What’s going on here, as best as I understand it, is something like the following. There’s a long-standing label in US politics called “progressive,” which used to mean something like “social democrat or non-revolutionary socialist.” As vaguely-left Democrats have increasingly become disenchanted with the term ‘liberal’ and its milksop connotations, they too have begun to embrace the term “progressive.” However, for them, it doesn’t mean ‘social democratic, but instead something like ‘vaguely pro-union liberal with balls’ (or ovaries depending … you get my drift). This in turn has led critics on the right to start harking back to some of the old-style socialist progressives’ sins, and to try to hang them around the necks of Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and company.

Here, Ross has been trying to assert in a series of posts that there is some sort of continuity between ‘old’ progressives’ views on eugenics, and ‘new’ progressives’ views on abortion. Which is kinda nonsensical. The modern liberal position on abortion isn’t rooted in the imperative towards genetic improvement of the species, or anything like it. It’s rooted in a particular notion of individual rights. That’s why they call it ‘choice’ rather than ’embrace your genetic duty by destroying imperfect foetuses for the benefit of mankind.’ The old-style eugenics of H.G. Wells, Swedish social democrats, Anglo-American family planners etc has _nothing to do_ with modern liberalism, or with liberals who have started to call themselves progressives. Instead, if it’s an embarrassment for anyone, it’s an embarrassment for social democrats like myself, who have some real continuities with that older tradition (although hopefully not with that particular part of it).

In 1980. The Soft Boys, of course. The Only Band That Mattered.

Or possibly, Elvis Costello, “Peace, Love and Understanding”.

In other, less consequential 1980 news: XTC, “We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel”; Boomtown Rats, “I don’t like Mondays”. Pretenders, “Brass In Pocket”. Devo, “Whip It”. Talking Heads, “Once In A Lifetime”; The Cure, “A Forest”.

UPDATE: by popular request, The Young Marble Giants, “Collasal Y”.

(I just felt like my claptrapese joke had spent enough time at the top of the page.)

Josh Marshall: “The whole letter is written in a hyper-specific sort of pseudo-constitutional claptrapese to disguise the fact that what’s being said is complete nonsense.”

I think we should save that neologism for later use. It should be pronounced to emphasize etymologic ambiguity, as one might sing:

“It flew through the air with the greatest of ease/The daring young meme in the fine claptrapese.”

Tyler Cowen has a “secret” blog and he made a deal with his readers: pre-order my book and I’ll send you the URL. Don’t link to it, and don’t tell anyone. Inevitably, now, we have this request from this guy:

bq. DO YOU KNOW THE URL OF TYLER COWEN’S SECRET BLOG?? IF YES, PLEASE, SEND ITS URL TO CHRIS MASSE. ANONYMITY GUARANTEED. AND I PROMISE I WON’T PUBLISH IT.

YES I KNOW HE’S SHOUTING. I haven’t pre-ordered Tyler’s book, because pre-ordering things is for suckers. Nor have I been in touch with Tyler. So he didn’t send me the link. But I read Tyler’s secret blog, because it is trivially easy to find it using Google. It took me about 90 seconds when I looked for it. So now I have an interesting dilemma.

[click to continue…]

Good news readers! I’ve gone mad! I don’t know what it was that tipped me over the edge but I’m now a signed up 27%er and I’ve decided to start applying my new grasp of the scientific method! After all, our scientific institutions are being destroyed by the leftist politicised science of global warming and the Lancet study, and that’s just not on. Luckily my cheerful attitude and can-do approach to statistics survived my trip to the dark side so I’ve been hard at work all morning applying the sort of tenacious scientific critique that my new status as a crazy person allows me to carry out with no qualifications whatever.

I started with the UK Census. I’ve always thought that there were maybe a few more, or possibly less, ethnic minorities in Camden than the census said, so I phoned them up and asked for the data. The woman on the end of the line pointed me toward their website and noted that there was quite a lot of county-level data there which might be helpful. I explained that no, I wanted the data, by which I meant the actual census forms. They won’t release the data! Really! I shouted that this was a fundamental building block of the scientific method, and that her sinister refusal to hand over the forms to any random person who asked was the equivalent of the Catholic Church burning Galileo[1]. While she was on the line, I asked for the last month’s death figures for Central London – after all, since she’s the central registering authority for births and deaths, she ought to have them at her fingertips as they must magically update every time a hospital morgue writes a certificate. I think she was in tears by the time she slammed the phone down, so Advantage: Blogosphere!

Next on to the Dow Jones Industrial Average people. Did you know that there are three entire missing days from their figures, which suspiciously enough[2] just “happen” to be September 12-15, 2001???????Q? I suppose we are meant to assume that this “missing cluster” was selected at RANDOM!!!!11! Some chance. Clearly the leftist MSMs of Dow Jones International censored these numbers, because they would have added so much to the variance of the DJIA that we could no longer be sure that it wasn’t 36,000! Perfidy! Wal-Mart are releasing their Q2 earnings numbers next week, or at least I should say “releasing” their “numbers”, because as I found out, when you go down to Bentonville demanding a look at the till rolls, you don’t even get let into the car park. Scientific method, my ASS!

Stay tuned for more science, readers, because until this case of Red Bull runs out, I am going to be a blogoscientific force of nature!

[1] Galileo was not actually burned, but I am now a right wing crazy person, so this kind of factul nitpicking no longer bothers me.

[2] The fonts are a lot more fun on this side of the political divide too.

The rightwing blogosphere, with assistance from the usual MSM types like Howard Kurtz has spent the last week or two trying to discredit a soldier, Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a “Baghdad Diary” for The New Republic, which included various examples of casually callous behavior on the part of US soldiers (nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib or other proven cases).

For the wingers, this is a continuous pattern. Before this, there was a flap about a report that failures by contractors were resulting in troops in the field not getting adequate food. Before that, it was the Jamil Hussein case, a months-long brawl with AP arising from a report by a stringer about attacks on mosques. Before that, it was reports from Lebanon of ambulances being hit by Israeli fire. And so on.[fn1] There’s too much of this to try and give comprehensive coverage, and I’m not interested in debating the details, but a search on Instapundit will usually get you started.

The Beauchamp case fits the general pattern pretty well. First, the wingers claimed that the Diary was a fabrication and that “Scott Thomas” was the creation of a writer who’d never been near Iraq. Then, when it became evident he was a real person, they rolled out the slime machine to discredit him. Then they engaged in amateur forensics to discredit particular items in his account (acres of screen space have been devoted to the question of whether the driver of a Bradley fighting vehicle can run over a dog). Then they got to the central point – true or false, material like this is bad for the cause and shouldn’t be printed.

All of this, of course, is an attempt to replicate the one undoubted triumph of the blogospheric right, Rathergate. For those who somehow missed it, Dan Rather and CBS fooled by a bogus memo purportedly from Bush’s National Guard commander, and Rather eventually lost his job as a result.

As I said, I’m not interested in, and won’t debate, the details of these stories. The main question is: How anyone could imagine that this kind of exercise can have any value?

[click to continue…]