Dave Weigel passes on this interesting tidbit from Pew:
Only a third of Americans (34%) correctly say the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted by the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly believe TARP was passed under President Obama. Another 19% admit they do not know which president signed the bank bailout into law. Notably, there is no partisan divide on the question.
Fortunately, according to Pew, most Americans know what Twitter is (85%). (You can take the Pew quiz yourself, here.)
This may be a symptom of what Jason Kuznicki has described as ‘managed ignorance’:
Ignorance has become a feature where it used to be a bug. Formerly it was the job of the media to correct ignorance, insofar as it was possible (and, truthfully, it wasn’t very possible). Now though it’s increasingly the job of the media to manage ignorance. To make a space for the ignorant, and to ensure that those kept in managed ignorance get just enough news, and never more than they need to remain exactly where they are.
We were probably due for some measure of managed ignorance, what with the already stupefying mix of rational ignorance, the cable news cycle, cognitive dissonance, and in-group loyalty that shapes public opinion today. But still, consider: We found WMD in Iraq. We only tortured really, really bad people, we did it only in non-fatal ways, and they provided us worthwhile information. Same-sex marriage is going to force churches to do things they don’t believe in. There will be death panels deciding your grandma’s fate. Climategate destroyed global warming science forever.
All are untrue, but there are those who believe every one of them, and these people’s opinions about where to go from here don’t count any less just because they’re based on untruth. Those who propagate such beliefs know them to be untrue, and they know it’s not worth the average person’s time, cognitive investment, and loss of group loyalty to discover otherwise.
Yes, these examples all show conservatives as the beneficiaries of managed ignorance. I’ve tried hard to resist the conclusion, but conservatives seem to bank on it a lot more than liberals. More than anything else, it’s this style of politics that turns me away from the Republicans. I’d pick “well-informed on basic facts but ideologically divergent” over “mis-informed on basic facts and ideologically divergent” every single time. Not that I’d enjoy the choice. But what other alternatives are there?
This is one reason why I’m not a Republican either, and why I’ve stated quite explicitly that left-leaning libertarians (or progressive conservatives even) would be better off working with Democrats than Republicans in most instances. This doesn’t mean I’m particularly fond of the Democratic party but at least it seems to care about governance. That may not always be the case of course. Managed ignorance can happen in the other direction, too. Any ideological camp can succumb to the rust of groupthink.
Update.
There’s been some comments here and in other threads which basically boil down to ‘pick a side!’ or which suggest that because I find flaws with both sides or arguments from both sides, that I’m somehow taking the easy middle road. This is not entirely true.
Two points – first, picking a side can actually be quite a lot easier. People who pick a team get all the perks of belonging to a team. When you don’t, you get hell from all sides. Second, I’m really just a lot more concerned with ideas than with ideology. I’m not trying to be pretentious either. I just think there are a lot of really good ideas floating around between all the bad ones. It’s more interesting to me to go searching for those ideas than to cheer on the Republicans or the Democrats or what have you.
Some people have said in the comments “You’re obviously a Democrat why don’t you just own up to it.” Others have written me off as a rabid right-winger. Look – I don’t know what I am. I’m not really worried about it. I voted for Obama in 2008. In fact, I have never voted for a Republican. I think there are major problems with the Democratic party, but that doesn’t mean I trust the GOP to do any better. I don’t know who I’ll vote for in 2012. Probably not a Republican, because as you are all so fond of pointing out – the Republican Party is not a very serious or honest or reliable or trustworthy party at the moment. I think there are some very smart conservatives out there, and some very reasonable conservative positions as well, but few of these belong to the GOP. If anything, my politics probably align better with the UK’s Liberal Democrats or maybe some Christian Democratic parties in Europe than with anything even remotely like the GOP. Eventually, I hope the ‘conservative’ party here in the United States is a lot more like the Lib-Dem/Tory coalition in the UK (which has brought the best out in the Tories and which looks a lot more like a Lib-Dem government than a Tory one thanks to Cameron and Clegg’s remarkable similarity).
But it’s not. It’s not even anywhere close. When it comes down to it, I always ‘pick a side’ when I cast my vote. In between those times I try to learn more and I try to traffic in ideas and argumentation. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong. If you think that’s bullshit for whatever reason, that’s fine, too. But increasingly I think this is the way many, many Americans feel and I think that’s a good thing. This whole Republican/Democrat duopoly may be inevitable but it’s not unshakeable.
Update 2.
JGabriel makes a fair critique and points to this excellent Orwell essay, Politics and the English Language, which I will try my best to take to heart. Here’s JGabriel:
I don’t think it’s bullshit at all, but I do think that you’re not trafficking in argumentation when you repeatedly come down on both sides (right and center*) of an issue in your conclusion. That’s just centrism as practiced on the Washington Post editorial page, or “High Broderism” if you prefer the lefty derogatory characterization. And it’s turning into a cliché.
I don’t know if you’re shooting for some sort of Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure, or looking for solutions through some sort of balancing between a Manichean duopoly of left and right, but it’s getting predictable.
Perhaps instead of “pick a side”, I should have said, “Just state your conclusions plainly and forcefully instead of cushioning them between strawman perceptions of left and right ideologies.”
A couple things. Yes, I can see how this could become predictable, or could be seen as ‘high Broderism’. I think partly this is because I’m new here, I’m trying to explain where I’m coming from, etc. I’m learning how to navigate a largely new readership, finding my shaky feet, trying to show where I think consensus can occur – I’m not trying to have it both ways. Part of the reason this occurs, I think, is this false taxonomy of ‘right’ and ‘left’.
Or else it’s a symptom of not having made up my mind entirely and of working that out, to some degree, in real time. But I take the point. (On things I care passionately about, I think I do write quite forcefully. Like torture or immigration. Or magic. Certain things I have made up my mind on. But on many questions, I remain uncertain…)
beltane
But I am sure the media did a splendid job of explaining the travails of Lindsay Lohan. Why wasn’t Americans’ knowledge of this important subject polled?
flukebucket
That is what sealed the deal for me.
QuaintIrene
Shit, I got them all right. Thought for sure I messed up the Chief Justice.
I credit the blogo-sphere.
BR
The inaccurate discussion in the media on the timeline of the bailout has long pissed me off.
So many pundits, so-called journalists, and their kin will say something like “Obama is struggling to regain credibility with voters who didn’t like the bank bailout.” And I think – great, you’re reinforcing the myth that the bank bailout was Obama’s doing.
It happens in print all the time, not to mention on cable.
Sigh.
Tecumseh
Whenever I see a poll like this I always wonder what the news reporters, especially the Village Media types think. Do they go “oh well, we did what we could– it’s just that the Republicans have better messaging” or do they look into the deepest shadows of their souls and think “Jesus, we really suck.”
My guess it’s probably the former rather than the later.
bozack
Agreed 100%, including that bit at the end. Some day, the left could be the side of the spectrum preoccupied with group loyalty and indifferent to fact. But that’s just not the universe we’re living in right now.
The GOP/Tea Party has abandoned any effort to formulate coherent views on policy in exchange for a series of tribal resentments.
JWeidner
How many more years before we look back on Mike Judge’s Idiocracy and find it to be oddly prescient?
John S.
@bozack:
Seconded. Whencthe day comes that Democrats succumb to the evils that Reupblicans have, it’s a salient point. Until then, it’s just a concern-troll’s strawman.
Dave
In all seriousness…is there one topic on which the GOP speaks truthfully? They lie about taxes, the health plan, financial reform…is there any topic in the past 18 months where the GOP, as a party, has engaged in a legitimate debate based on facts? For the life of me, I cannot think of a single one.
El Cid
The ignorant deserve representation in government too, and they get it in droves.
John Cole
And bingo was his name-o.
I honestly think I hate Democrats more now than I did when I was a Republican, but I can’t imagine ever voting for a Republican ever again. They’re just crazy.
It really is odd. The more I move to the left the more I hate the people I agree with. Guess it is like family. I love them, but really need a break after a few hours with them. Because they make me so GOD DAMNED MAD.
Poopyman
This is why I hate the phrase “Reality has a liberal bias.” It wildly understates the case. The “management” of “ignorance” used to be called propaganda. Propaganda is not just the propagation of misinformation, but the suppression of the facts, both of which I take to be elements of this “managed ignorance”.
Liberals rarely fall deeply into managed ignorance just because we can’t agree on any single goddammed thing.
matoko_chan
It isn’t “managed” ignorance……..it is evolved ignorance.
The direct result of 50 years of memetic selection for highly religious xenophobes that despise science, education and intellectuals.
It is managed information.
Sentient Puddle
Oh man, linking that quiz might have been a mistake…now everybody’s going to do it and post their results!
Perfect score for me, but I would have missed the Prime Minister question if the other three options weren’t so god-awful absurd.
El Cid
@Dave:
That they hate black and brown people and most all foreigners and think it’s cool to bomb the shit out of any of those types they want; and that they want the super-rich to run this society and any others into the shit-hole and vacuum it of every last resource and squeeze of useful labor. They’re pretty up front about those things, just in different phrasing.
Sir Nose'D
@Dave:
How about their plan to impeach Obama should they gain control of the House this fall.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Dave: If they told the truth, they’d speed into oblivion faster then they already are.
The Bearded Blogger
@Dave:
They may hit upon truth occasionally, but their M.O is different…. truth is whatever serves the ideological purpose of the GOP, see Schalfly, A.
@El Cid:
I know you snark, but: people’s interests need to be represent, not their prejudices or fantasies
LarsThorwald
THE SITE IS ENGAGING IN WORD WRAP AGAIN. HOW DO I FIX THIS? IT IS QUITE ANNOYANCESOME. LIKE ALL CAPS.
Poopyman
@John Cole:
It’s like a love story. After all, hate isn’t the worst feeling you can have for an old lover, it’s indifference.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Sentient Puddle: I got 100%, but then I am good like that.
Dave
@El Cid:
I don’t disagree with a word you said. But they achieve those ends using managed ignorance. Hating on brown people is “anchor babies”, bombing the shit out of countries is the “war on terror” and so forth. They make up shit and lie through their teeth to try and get their agenda passed.
I guess my question is has there been one time in 18 months, or even since 2001, where the GOP has been upfront and truthful in a debate, using facts instead of bullshit? I am hard-pressed to think of even one instance.
El Cid
@The Bearded Blogger: I do snark. I’m assuming that the people on here won’t read that and go, “Yeah, we need more ignoramuses in the government because that would be more truly representative!”
Tecumseh
@BR: Plus, well, Bush/Obama kinda did the right thing there to bail out the banks, as odious as it may seem. You can quibble about how they did it and whether they should have nationalized the banks or what have you but there’s never much in the way of a discussion as to what the whole point was, not necessarily because a bunch of greedy assholes went bankrupt and needed money again, but because those greedy assholes went bankrupt and were about to take down the entire economic system of the civilized down with it. Context is everything and context doesn’t ever exist in today’s news media.
cleek
mmm… i dunno. media’s job has always been to sell ad space or to advocate for the publisher’s pet causes. and newspapers have always tried to outdo each other with sensationalism. see, for example, Yellow Journalism and the Spanish American War.
the idea that the media is an objective purveyor of Truth is a fairly recent delusion.
Kryptik
This here is the problem. Such managed ignorance doesn’t make a person’s opinion less valid or count less because its based on untruth. That’s our current reality.
But they should count less. Or at least be taken less seriously, rather than given equal credence to the flat out truth, for the sake of ‘fairness and balance’.
And yes, what the fuck is up with the term ‘managed ignorance’? Call it what it is: Propaganda, pain and simple. All this bullshit that is used to keep people ignorant and wrongly informed (I wont’ say uninformed, because that implies that they’re making these opinions out of lack of information, rather than disinformation) is all propaganda, textbook.
El Cid
@Dave: I’m not sure there has been one time in about 40-plus years that the GOP has been honest, decent, and upfront.
Fuck, remember, Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war, but according to released evidence had traveled to the South Vietnamese government before the election to get them to delay peace negotiations. And then lying about bombing Cambodia? And the Southern strategy of race baiting?
matoko_chan
@El Cid: but see….they can’t switch off the racism even tho it is hurts them. and they simply aren’t bright enough to see they are being scammed into voting against their own economic interests…..it is selection for stupid.
Its why Douthat wants to swap out Jeffersonian meritocratic values for something conservatives can compete at.
Douthat, Sully and Beinart want to do IQ-bussing so intelligence challenged redstate heartland kids can go to Harvard.
Affirmative action for IQ.
lawl.
El Tiburon
@John Cole:
I know This has jumped the shark, so…That!
Quite a pickle we are in when we have no choice but to vote for the limp-dicks just to prevent crazy-ass Unkle Cooter from fucking up the country.
AARGGAHHH! I’m about to go all Clark Griswold on Wally-World’s ass.
fasteddie9318
@JWeidner:
I’m already spraying Brawndo on my plants, because it’s got what they crave.
ItAintEazy
In my opinion, the TARP program is just as much Obama’s baby as it was Bush. Back during the intial crisis, Obama actually took time off campaigning and peronally lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus to support the program. The result was that he turned around a 21-18 CBC vote against the bailout to a 31-8 vote supporting it. So me may not have been president when the bill passed, but he certainly wanted it very bad.
kwAwk
Jebus. After years of reading wingnuts I got a little dizzy reading a conservative say that the right intentionally manages the ignorance of their followers.
I’m now in the camp that says we need to get rid of E. D. Kain. I’d hate for us to have to try to wrestle with the conclusion that not all conservatives are batshit insane. We might tear a synapse or something.
DougJ
That is *really* interesting. Personally, I view TARP as a big success. I’d change a few things (settle AIG deals on 60 cents on the dollar, say), but other than that, it worked well.
Anya
I am part of the 5% of the public who got all the questions correct.
I just don’t get why both the right and the left hate TARP. It was a necessary evil. THe government had not other choice and it turned out to be a success!
Sentient Puddle
OK, more on point now that I’ve read the post, the media aspect is probably the thing that irritates me the most. cleek is right that there is a long history of media playing fast and loose with the truth, but it seems to me that at least in the ideal sense (ha), the media should be doing their best to make sure they’re reporting the truth. And I’m not looking at commentators or analysis or whatever for the moment, I’m just talking about cold hard facts.
Case in point: the Islamic community center. Reporting it as the “Ground Zero Mosque” is wrong, as in the media has no business referring to it as such (except to say “this term is wrong”). And yet they did. Then they got a little better and started saying that it’s located near Ground Zero, but they still keep calling it a mosque. But that’s still wrong, and they still have no business referring to it as such.
And really, this shouldn’t be that high a bar to clear.
Quiddity
I aced the quiz. Now where’s my prize?
matoko_chan
@Kain
lawl, of course you’re a republican.
how do you vote?
Republican voters == superset {movement conservatives, socons, cafeteria libertarians, teabaggers, paultards, WECs, Birchers, Alex Jones fans, Klansmen, the Hutaree, christofascists, pre-trib fundamentalists, and pretty the entire set of much older conservative christian non-hispanic caucs}
Mike in NC
“Managed Ignorance” isn’t quite as catchy a motto as “Fair and Balanced”
Hugin & Munin
Honesty compels me to admit that I found this post to interesting and informative, and I have no desire to tell Kain to DIAF. Bravo, sir, bravo.
Poopyman
@Quiddity:
You’re soaking in it.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@John Cole:
Was what kept me from engaging in politics for decades being always left orientated . Luckily, medical science invented some kick ass BP meds. So it’s game on mofo’s.
The new guy is breaking in dandy now. First few days were rough, but what you gonna do.
NonyNony
@John Cole:
I think this is the mark that you’re actually, factually a Democrat. When you’re a Republican you think that Republicans hate Democratic politicians but it’s an empty hatred based on caricatures of liberalism. Once I started my drift to the left I discovered what it really mean to hate a Democratic politician (though I have to say right now for the first time in my life I’m fairly happy with by the Democrats that represent me in Congress – neither of them are complete tools for a change. Maybe my standards have lowered, or maybe anyone would look good next to Voinivich.)
It’s interesting. The one underlying strand of ideology that defines the Democratic party these days is summed up by Kain in the post:
That’s the thing that unites all Democrats – from Ben Nelson to Al Franken. The belief that the government is capable of governing and should be doing it. From there you get a wide variety of beliefs – from hawkish to dovish, from socialist to free marketer, etc. but you never get Democrats denouncing the idea that a government is necessary (if a necessary evil) and it should actually function. That’s the ideology that really seems to separate Democrats from Republicans these days.
cleek
someone at Newsweek’s been eating his Wheaties:
Republicans’ Intellectual Dishonesty Regarding Bush Tax Cuts:
fasteddie9318
@ItAintEazy:
Why would Obama own TARP any more than any other high-profile member of Congress who lobbied his or her colleagues to vote yes?
matoko_chan
@Hugin & Munin: i still want him to DIAF.
NAOW.
Corpsicle
@John Cole: But the make up sex is awesome!
Omnes Omnibus
@Anya: @Quiddity: As did I. My guess is that the vast majority of people posting and commenting on this blog missed at most one question, so I am not sure who we are impressing with our massive scores.
Violet
@John Cole:
Yep. Not unless they seriously change who they are.
This issue is part of the reason why there are Blue Dog Democrats. In other times they’d be Republicans. But Republicans are crazy, so the less-crazy types don’t really want to join that group. Not the whole reason, but part of it.
Tom Q
I think people hate TARP, despite its apparent success (in, you know, staving off worldwide depression) , because it can be reduced to “The banks got a ton of money and all I got is this crappy recession”. As the Obama folk have found, no one much wants to hear how much worse things would have been without such moves.
Okay, so I took the quiz and got all 11 (though I didn’t truly “know” the ocean depth question — just, 500 seemed too shallow and the other end way too deep). But I was shocked to find only 5% got all correct. And this is an Internet audience, presumably more educated, as well as a self-selected group (you’re not going to take a quiz on which you expect to do horribly). Does anyone know what the percentage was for 10 right? I’d like to think there’s a big jump, as people with just one small gap in their knowledge is preferable to a whole bunch of morons.
It really has come to the point where the media represent a serious part of the difficulties this country is dealing with. A few months before the election, some Republicans were privately saying, Obviously the Bush folk will never do a thing about climate change, but it’s a serious problem and there’ll be major action once the new administration’s installed. Instead, thanks to lying propaganda and media complicity, we’ve moved about ten steps backward — suddenly global warming is a debatable concept again. It’s hard to fully blame Congress for punting on cap and trade when they have to deal with that context.
bemused
More days than not, I am very frustrated with Dems but there are at least still some that walk the talk. The R’s are just greedy, venal sociopaths.
YellowJournalism
@Sentient Puddle:
Took the poll. 100 percent, bitchez!
Oops. Sorry.
Hypocrite. (I would have missed it if not for a news report last night that mentioned him.)
Violet
@Sentient Puddle:
Exactly. All too often the media allows others to describe the situation, then debates the merits of the issue using an incorrect starting point. It’s like Colbert’s “George Bush, great President or greatest President?” Well, neither. But that’s not a choice. The media falls into the same thing over and over again, after people like Limbaugh, Palin and the teabaggers have labeled something. They don’t correct it with facts, just they say, “Ground Zero Mosque,” “Death Panels,” and so forth.
catclub
@Anya:
“I just don’t get why both the right and the left hate TARP. It was a necessary evil. THe government had not other choice and it turned out to be a success! ”
Um, something had to be done. I agree with that.
The specific thing that was done – paying out to AIG’s creditors (ha!) at 100 cents on the dollar – they had some choices there. Not coming down like a ton of bricks on banker bonuses to anyone who accepted TARP money, they had choices there.
It wasn’t simply a case of that particular TARP or nothing.
Hugin & Munin
matoko_chan: yes, but on balance, you are a fool.
cckids
@ItAintEazy: Not just the CBC, lots of people at the time were impressed by Obama’s demeanor & grasp of the facts of the situation, compared to Bush’s “hands-off” dimness & McCain’s inability to take charge. It seemed to me that Bush stepped back deliberately to let the candidates seem to run things–I think he thought he was throwing things to McCain, given all the take-charge talking Johnny was doing. Then they had the big meeting & he sat around, asked no questions, while Obama was engaged & intelligent.
Rick Massimo
Evidently this is a Bush family tradition. Ask “which president got us involved in Somalia?” and the number of people who will say “Clinton” will make you facepalm. (Actually, so will the number of people who will say “What’s Somalia?”)
JGabriel
E.D. Kain @ Top, Last Paragraph:
E.D.Kain @ Last Post, Last Paragraph:
E.D. Kain, Post Before That, Last Paragraph:
Oh for Pete’s sake, Erik, will you please, please, please, pick a fucking side already? This whole final paragraph balancing act, “this … but that”, is turning into a real cliche, dude.
Going back to the top:
Yes, exactly. That’s half the reason I’m a Democrat. The other half being that at least the Dems don’t make it an active part of their platform to lie to, manipulate, and screw over everyone in the bottom 95% of income and assets.
Perhaps, but currently it doesn’t, which makes this kind of equivocation pointless.
.
Tonal Crow
The GOP have been toiling for decades to cozen the public into managed idiocy, because managed idiots will support the GOP no matter what they do. And yes, managed ignorance is managed idiocy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet:
I have a friend who majored in English as an undergrad and subsequently went to med school; according to the way things currently get discussed, I could dismiss his medical opinions as coming from an English major. What fun.
patroclus
@Dave:
No. Lying and smearing is what Republicans do.
There is not a single subject about which they will not lie and smear.
It is ingrained. It is second-nature to them.
If called on it, they usually double down on the lying and smearing.
TARP, gays, Hispanics, Muslims, African Americans, taxes, spending, regulation, Katrina, the oil spill – it simply does not matter.
Corpsicle
Took the quiz, got them all, but the end was depressing.
“You got all 11 questions correct, along with 5% of the public”
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Why do I not have permission to edit my comment?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I was nodding (okay, I am a little sleepy, so not all of the nods were for your post) until I got to this.
Are you saying that Democrats employ what we are calling, here, “managed ignorance” in order to further their aims? Not casual, accidental oversight or misdirected focus on A instead of B, but deliberate noisemaking, obfuscation, conflation, and bald faced lies, whose purpose is to keep voters in the dark and confused about what the realities are?
Surely you can see that the GOP has crossed that line, and not just crossed it, but moved past it, and then reached back to rub out the line so we can’t see it, and then draw a new line, and then cross that, and so forth, until their entire public face is nothing but a tapestry of bullshit and lies …. so, we are not going to sit here and pretend that “both sides do it.” Because, they don’t. One does it, and we know which one.
Eh?
Daddy-O
@BR: One important detail is forgotten when placing SOME of the blame for the banksters’ bailouts on Obama:
He hasn’t rescinded those laws; he refused to force them to pay a windfall tax; Obama negotiated with the banksters over financial reform just this year in almost an identical fashion as he negotiated with the GOP on health care reform–from a position of WEAKNESS when he HELD THE WINNING HAND from the start…
Sorry, but Obama deserves much criticism of his handling of progressive issues. He’s asked for the criticism. Now, he’s probably sick of it, because his policies are watered-down and include built-in obsolescence. As Atrios has noted, years ago: If you pass a law that changes something big, but the law is a shitty law, you increase your chances of that change being seen as a BAD change.
Davis X. Machina
Hell, yeah. It’s lower wattage, because it doesn’t have one 100th the bucks or the megaphone that the other side has, but that’s lack of opportunity, not virtue.
PonB
Just took the quiz, and aced it like many others here. Screwing up the bell curve again…
@TomQ – the “10 correct” group was around 10%…the distribution looked like a pretty normal bell curve.
I have a theory as to why ignorance is “managed” – I think the Right is taking advantage of the “self-esteem” movement of the last few decades that they are usually so upset about. People are reticent to call out incorrect things to avoid hurting people’s feelings, and in the media’s case, they bend over backwards to give both sides, even if one side is obviously wrong (the “Earth is round – opinions differ” syndrome). So, they can spew all sorts of nonsense, confident in the fact that they won’t be called on it.
My two pennies, FWIW…
– PonB
sven
I think the interesting question is why this has become a particular problem in the United States? The British media is both highly partisan and tabloid fueled and yet their discourse has not degenerated to the same extent.
I’m totally ignorant of Italian media but I sense they put up with similar nonsense and have a questionably functioning government. (If anyone is knowledgeable about Italy, please let me know!)
It’s clear the market for nonsense isn’t self-correcting but I’m at a loss as to how we fix the problem. (I like the idea of self-funded media but how do we make the right people consume it?)
mclaren
The liberals on the left have their massive examples of managed ignorance:
[1] Obama is a genius. (Not an inexperienced gullible vacillating dupe.) And he’s accomplished truly deeply amazingly astounding reforms, it’s just that nobody realizes it. Truly. For real. Cross my heart and hope to die.
[2] The recent HCR bill has cut medical costs and put us on the road to fixing our broken medical-industrial system.
[3] The only real problem with America’s broken health care system was high overhead costs in health insurers, and fortunately that’s fixed now.
[4] America is going to pull its troops out of Iraq “real soon now.” And out of Afghanistan by July 2012. Clap hard. Harder. You have to believe!
[5] Obama has curtailed the war on drugs and ended DEA raids of state-licensed marijuana dispensaries.
[6] Obama is better than the previous maladministration because he doesn’t torture prisoners and doesn’t order the arbitrary kidnapping and assassination of American citizens.
[7] Obama hasn’t prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other previous presidents put together.
[8] Peak OIl is a serious issue, but we don’t have to worry about it right now. We have years and years to deal with it.
[9] Global warming won’t affect america’s farmland and certainly won’t turn our verdant croplands into a giant Dust Bowl.
[10] California and other oil-addicted freeway car culture citadels of air conditioning and pumped-in water can keep on going the way they are for the foreseeable future. No worries! The Colorado River will continue to supply all the water the American Southwest needs, even though rainfall and snowpack is plummeting due to global warming and temperatures in the Southwest are skyrocketing (199 degrees on 23 June 2006 in Los Angeles).
[11] Conservatives are stupid and ignorant and they spout gibberish so we don’t have to worry about them any more…after all, the American people would never vote for an ignorant fool who spews non-stop nonsense, like Ronald Reagan. So things may not be lookin’ great this November for Democrats, but at least we needn’t look forward to any serious problems with governance, like Republicans shutting down the entire govenrment with endless investigations into Obama’s birth certificate, ACORN, ad nauseam. Giggle, giggle, snicker, snicker, insert more snide jokes about how stupid and ignorant the Republicans are.
[12] Free markets and capitalism and globalized free trade are here to stay. Because there’s no alternative! (Pay no attention to Wikipedia and linux…they don’t exist…)
[13] Sarah Palin doesn’t have a chance of winning in 2012.
[14] …and the biggest example of spectacular ignorance of the left.. (drumroll please!) …the president and congress have come to their sense at long last and now they’re really going to cut the military budget. Truly! This time is different! REALLY!
Allison W.
And according to a TIME poll, 61% of Americans STILL blame bush for our fucked up economy.
twiffer
hmmm. i got one wrong. oh well. i do not watch or read the news (except for box scores for the sox game). i’d go so far as to say the balloon juice is my primary source of politics related information. so, good job in getting the truth out guys.
as an aside, i disagree with the “correct” answer for the “what is twitter?” question: “An information sharing network” my ass. i suppose they just have a loose definition of information.
roshan
Why do you protest so much? We know you are not a democrat. And we also know that you are not a republican. You have told us that many times. I guess you want to be known as an unicorn. So be it.
Tonal Crow
@matoko_chan: Actually the idea has been to selectively breed managed idiots such that they become self-reproducing. And it’s succeeded. The GOP now have idiots actively spreading the idiotic memes that their masters devise. And not only spreading them, but enhancing their virulence.
drew42
Woo! Got ’em all right!
Strange thing, the one question I kind of waffled on was the children of illegal immigrants, which happened to be the one more people got right than any other question (not counting the Twitter gimme question).
What made me pause was the word “automatically” — seems like a loaded word. I’m still thinking there must be a situation where it wouldn’t automatically happen…?
In either case, it’s pretty sad that I did better than 95% of the participants.
Joel
I think it’s worth revisiting this article on the subject.
Teaser:
Davis X. Machina
@PonB: Try teaching, or even worse, coaching and judging high school debate in a world where the intensity of of the person proposing something is the best measure of its being true.
“But Mr. Machina, I really, really believed that tempus, temporis was masculine!”
AB
twitter is an “information sharing network”? My choice was “narcissism management system”.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cleek:
Counter-signed.
The problem is, our news media model right now is neither fish nor fowl. We don’t have anything even remotely resembling an objective news media, but neither do we have rabidly partisan media on both sides, to thrash it out. What we have is half rabid-partisan news media, and the other half pretending to be objective while mostly standing for nothing but Jr. high school mean girlz cliquishness, abject cowardice, personal opportunism/greed, and institutional rent seeking.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tonal Crow: Don’t encourage her.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I’m sorry, do you have other language to describe a coalition that caters to people who think the earth is 6000 years old, is in the End Times, was created by an Intelligent Designer, in a history where men and dinosaurs walked the earth together, where tax cuts “pay for themselves” so that, theoretically, I guess, we could lower all taxes to zero and just go on some kind of celestial cruise control ….. where Iraq caused 911, Iraq had WMDs, where “deregulation” is okay because even though it leads to collossal trainwreck fuckups of life as we know it, it has a few good points that we need to keep in mind …. you know, the whole crazy, sociopathic, delusional mountain of shit and lies …..
What would you like to call them? Concerned? People of faith?
Call them what they are: Stupid, ignorant and lying motherfuckers who will say anything to further their aims.
Right?
J sub D
Easy quiz though I will admit to having to think whether the toxic sausage known as thre Affordable Health Care Act was passed before or after the new year.
Yeah people are stupid but the line can not be drawn between the left and right (whatever those terms mean).
Government can determine what new technologies and business models will succeed. Marijuana is a gateway drug. One hit of crack can turn you into an addict. Gay marriage threatens traditional matrimony. Shall issue concealed carry laws will increase gun related crimes. The War on Poverty was a success. The New Deal ended the Great Depression. The Civil War was not primarily about slavery.
And on, and on, and on …
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Omnes Omnibus:
Your time probably expired while you were editing. You get five minutes to complete the edit, from posting time.
That is the usual reason that I can see. All under the heading of FYWP. Which is the most profound understatement in the history of the Intertubes. WP is the product of managed ignorance.
cleek
@mclaren:
1 more and you could field a strawwoman football team!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@mclaren: I’m gonna start with the ones I can easily answer:
1: He probably is a genius. So were a lot of people. He has done a lot of things. Neither of them make him a god, just a hard worker.
8-10: I think you have your parties mixed up.
11: Actually we wonder why people are still voting for them.
12: Personally, I believe these will collapse in on themselves unless some decent regulatory structure keeps them working.
mclaren
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
If conservatives are so stupid and ignorant, why do they keep winning elections?
Why do people with advanced degrees have to work so hard to unravel all the disinformation the conservatives put out?
Why are liberals always playing catch-up and getting caught flat-footed (like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter) if conservatives are so dumb?
Time for liberals to admit that these far-right motherfuckers are smart.
Omnes Omnibus
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: Call them what I am sure Republican leaders call them behind closed doors, meat.*
*See, Bull Durham
fasteddie9318
@mclaren:
Um, these are all criticisms of Obama from the left, which would suggest that the left does not, in fact, hold those positions to be true. But whatever, carry on.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: conservatives have lower IQ and higher xenophobia. conservatives denigrate science, university educations, and jeffersonian meritocratic values, like telling the truth or excelling in science or academe.
Notice something? all those are conservative memes.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I got 100% on the quiz, which was not that hard.
But quizzes like this are fun to take and will help keep us sharp, so your job, ED, is to furnish a new quiz or game every week.
Thanks.
fasteddie9318
@mclaren:
Nobody is saying that the puppet masters who manage the ignorance aren’t smart. It’s the people who believe their bullshit who are the morans.
Larry Signor
Like I said, it’s a tough crowd over here, Erik. We’ll learn to
loveunderstandtolerate, well you know, maybe stop calling you names. Leave it to Dave to stir in shit. An informed electorate is what we have. An accurately informed electorate is an oxymoron. See cleek @ 25.Svlad Jelly
After I did that quiz, it gave me a graph of overall scores that showed 2% of test takers got zero questions right. That seems impossible. Completely. If you picked at random, which is what you’d be doing really if you didn’t know the answers, it’s better than one in a million odds that you miss every single one.
Who is so dumb that they can’t be right by accident? Either some people are being stupid on purpose, or a bunch of people are stupid beyond all probability.
Well, I guess “improbably stupid” does seem like a fitting description for some people we all know and love to hate.
Elie
@El Cid:
Actually, not a few Democrats probably also have the same views — just sneakier about it… I have heard some of the most amazing things pop out of friends mouths who I thought were as liberal as they come..
We are in a bad place and as Stephen Hawkings the astronomer states, humans have way too many genes for violence and tribalism to do anything but expect the wort and manage to that expectation…
sven
@matoko_chan: Do you think human beings were less intelligent 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? 10000 years ago?
Librarian
I got all 11 quiz questions right, but I considered deliberately giving a wrong answer to the twitter one just to be a contrary fucker, because it was such a fucking stupid and ridiculous question, and the alternatives were so stupid, and I actually felt like an idiot getting it right.
Omnes Omnibus
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: I still had four minutes. I believe it was simply FYWP and my question was more an expression of existential angst than anything else.
JGabriel
@mclaren: Almost all of that list is a perfect example of conservative managed ignorance, in that it substitutes a bunch of strawman arguments for what liberals/progressives actually believe and argue about.
.
Tonal Crow
@mclaren: The masters (e.g., Rove) are smart as a whip. The followers are mostly raving idiots.
And it’s always easier to destroy than it is to create.
In particular it’s always easier to argue from lies than to argue from the truth, because lies are trivial to devise to order in any quantity needed, whereas the truth is singular and often difficult to argue because it can’t honestly be fit into the all-good v. all evil archetype that humans find so appealing.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
If you are so smart, how come (a) you aren’t rich and (b) you think this is a valid question?
How many presidential elections starting with 1992 have resulted in the Republican candidate getting the most votes?
Answer: 1 of 5. The popular vote winners were Clinton, Clinton, Gore, Bush, Obama.
What elections are you talking about?
Okay, let’s go back to 1976,
Carter, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Gore, Bush, Obama.
Answer: 4 of 9. Against three pretty weak candidates, Carter, kerry, and Gore, they can’t even muster half of the elections.
Cain
@NonyNony:
I love my representatives. They’ve voted the way I wanted to every time. Which makes me angry at everyone else in the other 49 states. We have real democrats in Oregon. Geeky, policy wonks that use technology for real benefit (they call you for a phone meeting with them.. phone surveys while in the meeting, just artfully done.. even republicans in the meeting were impressed)
cain
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Omnes Omnibus:
AFAIC most of the aggravations in my life now are due to FYWP.
Somehow, the stupid has metastasized from WP out into the world at large.
F.Y.W.P. FOREVER
Corpsicle
I get a little tired of people misusing the word genius, particularly in a post where they seem to have a high opinion of their own intelligence. Genius has a specific definition, someone who scores over 130 on an IQ test. Technically Obama is almost certainly a genius. It doesn’t mean all that much, I’m one too and also a huge fuckup.
So when you say “those people think Obama’s a genius, what a bunch of morons!”, guess who is actually the stupid one?
matoko_chan
@mclaren:
because of the bell curve of IQ. :)
there are hella lot more people within 1std of the mean than in the upper tail.
and they aren’t goin to win for much longer.
the demographic timer goes tick…tick….tick…
Conservatives self-select for lower IQ. Its called rubberband theory in gaming. the game designer levels the game skillarchylwith free skillups to make it more fun to play.
Conservatives get social capital for “commonsense” and religiosity, not for intellectualism and college educations.
Conservatism has become social leveling for IQ and education.
fasteddie9318
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
Only three? Their four popular vote wins came against Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry, a Loser’s Gallery if there ever was one.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@matoko_chan:
You’re just fucking with us now, right?
Davis X. Machina
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: Dedicated, cohesive minorities roll apathetic, divided majorities all the time in politics.
“Stupid” and “ignorant” doesn’t translate automatically into electoral defeats.
“Apathetic” and “divided” do. Ask President Dole.
sven
@matoko_chan: you do realize this is precisely the argument Steve Sailer makes; just sayin’…
Morbo
@JGabriel: Contrarianism today, contrarianism tomorrow, contrarianism forever!
Tonal Crow
@Svlad Jelly:
No. The probability of missing a single question when choosing answers uniformly randomly is 0.75. Thus, the probability of missing all 11 questions when choosing answers uniformly randomly is 0.75^11 = 0.0422, or about 1 out of 24.
wilfred
Huh? That’s just silly.
matoko_chan
@sven: i haven’t thought much about that…..ill consult dr.cochran.
:)
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@fasteddie9318:
I forgot what a dufus Dukakis was. Somehow my self-protective brain process blocked him out. I always think of Bush One as being a Reagan Afterglow thing. Between the tank, the rape question, and Willie Horton, Do-Cock-Us never had a chance, though. Bush One got a courtesy win.
But even after getting a free pass to the White House, and raising taxes, heh, he managed to preside over more job creation in four years than his idiot son did in eight.
According to WSJ, that liberal rag, adjusted for population growth, Bush2’s jobs record was the worst in history.
Anyway, the original question should have been “How do the conservatives manage to win any elections at all?”
Answer: Shit happens.
matoko_chan
@sven: yes….but won’t it be mad fun when he has to deconstruct it to protect the sensitive fee fees of his fellow travelers?
white supremacists are entirely conservative, IMHO.
Davis X. Machina
@fasteddie9318:
Mondale did about as well as could have been expected under the circumstances, actually a little ahead of expectations. Ditto Gore.
See Bartels and Zaller, (2001) Presidential Vote Models, A Recount. (PDF).
Xecky Gilchrist
Only a third of Americans (34%) correctly say the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted by the Bush administration.
How many people still think Saddam Hussein planned the 9/11 attacks?
Marmot
@El Tiburon:
Goddamn. Is it 1998 again already?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Davis X. Machina:
My brain really cannot process Mondale. But I don’t think it would have mattered who the Dems ran in 84. Reagan was unbeatable. Which is pretty good for a senile second rate actor. Really.
Okay, third rate actor. He never played anyone but himself, really. But he did that well enough.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Xecky Gilchrist:
He didn’t?
Josh James
Holy crap, I agree with the majority of what he wrote … maybe there’s hope for me, yet.
Of course, I’m also not-a-Democrat and especially not-a-Republican and absolutely not-a-conservative … so maybe I’m the target demographic.
matoko_chan
@mclaren:
wrong. Lets thought experiment this.
Congress passes the israel defense bill and then Palin gets the repub nom. Netayahnu launches on Iran dragging us (it is the law if that bill passes) into WWIII during the runup to the election.
Palin and Romney team up to save noble israel and real murrikka from the Moozlem Threat.
cakewalk.
fasteddie9318
@Davis X. Machina:
Be that as it may, he was still a sacrificial candidate who was no real threat to win regardless of the circumstances. He was 1996 Bob Dole before BobDole was 1996 Bob Dole.
matoko_chan
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: nope. Game theory is one of my verry favorite things.
So is statistical analysis.
Here is something my non-parametrics proff taught me. Eyeball it. He called that the Farmer Method, after how the Farmers Almanac is always very predictive just with forecasting based on observation.
empirically…..
94% of scientists are not-republican.
Palin and Bush are demonstrably intelligence challenged.
70% of post-baccs vote democratic and the curve goes up.
Paris
“To make a space for the ignorant”
see Palin, Sarah
fasteddie9318
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
Saddam and Osama dreamed up 9/11 on their Maldives honeymoon after they got gay married and received word that their Kenyan Commie Muslim sleeper agent was preparing to make the big jump from IL state senate to US senate and from there to the White House.
matoko_chan
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
i allus mess with the cudlips.
BC
This is not new – remember, Ruby Ridge happened during the first Bush presidency (Augusts 1992), but it gets conflated with David Koresh in Waco, so everyone (especially conservatives) think that Clinton first ordered the shootings at Ruby Ridge, then the fire at Waco. In another 10 years, Obama is going to be blamed for the economic meltdown and the Republicans will take credit for the robust auto manufacturing. If nothing else, the Republicans have learned to rewrite history.
brantl
Sure if they are an ideological camp that values ideology more than paying attention to the facts. But, once again, that describes the current Republicans. If the current Democrats were anywhere near that ideologically strictured they would have thrown Lieberman and Lincoln out, at the very least.
Gina
@Corpsicle: I wonder what percentage of Balloon-Juice readers got all 11 correct.
Amir_Khalid
I have always believed that Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election because his cousin Olympia won an Oscar that year, thus hogging all the luck in the family. That, and because of the picture of him sitting in a tank — you know, where he was wearing a helmet that made him look like Snoopy?
fasteddie9318
@BC:
Not unlike…The Communist Party in the USSR. Ruh-roh.
Robert Waldmann
Boy do I feel silly. I have been arguing in comments that you E.D. Kain are a Democrat and don’t know it. All I mean is that, if forced to choose, you prefer Democrats to Republicans. Now I learn you know it and have written it.
kwAwk
@John Cole:
No offense but I’m not sure you’re really a Democrat as opposed to an ex-patriot Republican, a homeless conservative really, who is simply siding with Democrats because conservatives at this juncture in history are bat shit insane.
You like Obama so much simply because he truly is a conservative. Olberman hinted at a good point last night, that Robert Gibb’s crying about the professional left seems to be an admission by the administration that they themselves, the ‘leaders of the Democratic Party’ do not consider themselves to be part of the left.
fasteddie9318
@Amir_Khalid:
Which turned out to be only the second dumbest thing a Democratic presidential candidate ever put on, after the blue condom suit Kerry wore while he was touring Kennedy Space Center.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
I don’t think the TARP misinformation is a very good example of the point being made here. While Americans may not remember exactly when the law was signed that’s not particularly important since it was a bipartisan effort. More important is that voters overwhelmingly blamed Bush and the Republicans for the general economic picture two years ago. Recent polling shows Obama getting about equal blame, but that’s to be expected.
Some of the items mentioned in passing in the Jason Kuznicki excerpt are better examples.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@kwAwk:
Gee, Keith finally figured that out? We were saying it two years ago. Obama ran as a centrist.
One more thing before I have to go back to work:
I assume that Managed Ignorance becomes a new tag at BJ?
It applies to so many things, how can we do without it?
In fact, it also needs to be on the revolving marquee.
NonyNony
From the Update:
What you’ve just described is what we in the US call the “Democratic Party” post-Clinton. Seriously – find a Tory position that would outrage the centrist folks in the Democratic Party. You won’t find it – hell some of the Tory positions might just be too far to the left for certain individuals in the Democratic coalition.
I too would love to see a “conservative” party that was more like the Lib-Dem/Tory coalition. Because if that were the right-most limit of mainstream conservatism in the US today we’d probably be a healthier country overall.
Chuck Butcher
EDK,
One problem I get from you is that your ‘conservatism’ is based on some ideas that are a mishmash of opinion and ideas of personal fairness. There certainly is waste and corruption in government and would be in any government. There are large causes of this and there are pissant causes. You get your panties in a wad about civil service workers in CA getting wages and pensions that have to do with their area of CA and not shit to do with yours. In the aggregate they amount to a hill of spit. On the other hand the subsidization of large business, real wealth, and cronyism leave great gaping holes in the revenue stream all made up by the bottom 70% of income.
Issues of fairness abound in convervatism, like say a 60 or much higher tax rate on the top 1%. Conservatives will personalize that rate to themselves as though they have no idea how the tax code works. If you took 80% of all my income I’d scream to high heaven, if you take 80% of the last $1.00 I’d care less. If you make it damned unattractive to take that last gazillion dollars it stays in the pool, if you make it cost very little it gets taken leaving less in the pool. Exactly what we have now and the resulting outcomes. That idea of individualising fairness leads to a skewed idea of fair because it ignores all the issues leading to it and the general outcomes and instead in favor of the isolated case of what the tax form looks like for someone.
I’m about completely baffled as to the logical underpinnings of your conservatism and what definition it actually has. You don’t make the Christianista cut very well and you don’t seem to make the “drown government” cut either. But you repeat GOP talking points as though they have evidentiary basis and that leaves me saying WTF?
The huge gaping holes in the Federal budget aren’t due to keeping some kind of social safety net and paying employees – there are a couple wars going on and everyone else is subsidizing the plutocrats’ accumulation of wealth. You do know this and yet…
You need to take a look at just how skewed the State and Federal tax and fee policies are toward the further accumulation of wealth and penalization of work. Just to tweak your nose, sales taxes are the most regressive of all taxes and provide such a large shelter to the greatest beneficiaries of State infrastructure and you talk about public service workers’ wages… Most of the population has to pay the damn things on huge percentages of their income – right up to actual wealth so they’re a stable income source and unfair as hell.
Goddam son, you talk about the media and ignorance right after using talking points and inaccurate data provided by the same machinery and wonder why there are so many blanket “you’re an asshole” reactions. Both sides DON’T do it and there are good reasons that is so beyond a handful of idjits on the left who get shit for traction.
LanceThruster
Noam Chomsky: Suppose I get on “Nightline”. I’m given two minutes and I say Quaddafi is a terrorist or Khomeini is a murderer… I don’t need any evidence, everybody just nods. On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn’t regurgitating conventional pieties… Suppose you say
[clips of Noam from other interviews]
Noam Chomsky: “The biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that are run out of Washington”, or suppose, you say “What happened in the 1980s is the US government was driven underground”, suppose I say “The US is invading South Vietnam,” as it was, or “The best political leaders are the ones that are lazy and corrupt”, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war american president would have been hanged.”, “The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in the total canon.”, “Education is a system of imposed ignorance”, “There is no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, then there was at the time of Genghis Khan…”
[Back to speech]
Noam Chomsky: People will, quite reasonably, expect to know what you mean. Why did you say that ?… You’d better have a lot of evidence… But you can’t give evidence if you’re stuck with concision. That’s the genius of this structural constraint. And in my view, people from Nightline and so on, if they were smarter, if they were better propagandists, they would let dissidents on, let them on more in fact. The reason is, that they would sound like they’re from Neptune.
from: Memorable quotes for “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104810/quotes
Elie
..Man, I gotta say, readin these comments without a right margin is just making me crazee
les
@mclaren:
Duh. Because lying is easier, as you so readily demonstrate. Cf. “Gish Gallop.”
LanceThruster
@Elie:
I don’t know if it will help but I get far better results in Firefox than I do in IE.
AZmando
Another juicer gets 100%.
Republicans win elections because they are not afraid to lie and because they are more than willing to use dishonest propaganda. Like Cole, I don’t particularly like the Dems, but they rarely flat out lie to win.
Nellcote
@mclaren:
As opposed to the liberals on the right?
Elie
@LanceThruster:
Sorry — can’t make that software change on this baby…
I will just have to suffer.
Makes for some interesting approaches. Sometimes I just read the main body of the comment and guess what is in the tails. Other times I have to use the scroll bar but it really slows down the impact of the comment and the more complex comments really suffer…Other times I just lose interest and go back to work : )
Marmot
Huh. Is this the right place to go: “All 11 questions correct, bitchez!”?
Midnight Marauder
There’s something quite bothersome about this notion that artificial neutrality is somehow more preferred than actually having the courage of your convictions. This is the same kind of thinking that led to Traditional Media outlets calling torture “enhanced interrogation techniques” when the United States did it. You think that by somehow abstaining from “picking a side,” you are in a better position to evaluate things and enhance the credibility of your analysis. Unfortunately, what people adopting this mindset fail to realize is that by not taking a side in a battle of this nature, you are, in effect, taking a side.
If there is a struggle going on between a group of people who are proven, notorious liars and a group of people, despite their faults, are focused on “doing the right thing,” by opting to propagate this false equivalence between the positions of the two sides, you are only serving to enable the liars and frauds by not explicitly calling out their behavior.
Chuck Butcher
@Elie:
You might also wonder why a proffesional site builder can’t manage to work within the most common browser? That would be kind of like me saying I can’t build a house that stands up with wood…
Mike in NC
@LanceThruster:
Switching to Firefox made the right-hand margin problem go away, and it installed in under a minute. Internet Explorer is still messed up.
Marmot
@Chuck Butcher:
Your house stands up with wood? Heh.
Yeah, so. On what John said:
Do you hate the Democrats more, knowing as you do that they’ll never ever run a campaign commercial saying, “Seriously, the Republicans are proven crazy liars — see Saddam and 911, death panels, birtherism, etc.! Vote for the people who actually care about real things — us!”
I certainly do. I’ve hated the Dems for this reason for like 15 years now.
Chuck Butcher
RE: EDK’s Update,
What I can get of your ‘conservative’ philosophy amounts to regurgitation of talking points and an apparent complete disregard of the consequences of their implementation from St Ronnie onward. The increasing disparity and concentration of wealth in this country from RR on ought to give you some clue. What you’ve presented as your conservatism amounts to the conventional wisdom from RR onward. The damned data is easily available even if it is spread around a lot. I’ll not do your goddam work for you if you want to just play at talking points and since you think you’re competent to be BJ front pager I can’t think of any reason to tell you what sources to go to – a hint, the government itself provides the data.
I’m a partisan Democrat and I’ve plowed ridiculous amounts of time, money, and energy/effort into nudging the Party toward my ideas. You poke sticks at liberals, big fucking deal. You’re above it all. Excuse me while I laugh my ass off while you take a look at the OR delegation. Yeah, we do have Greg Walden (R-OR2) and I tried real hard to do something about that, he’s kind of the exception that proves the rule.
LanceThruster
@Mike in NC:
Glad it worked. I got so frustrated with the IE probs, I actually listened to my IT guys and use Firefox for almost all except those applications that require Internet Explorer.
Maybe this is how to handle Bill Gates – http://www.flamingmailbox.com/maccomedy/movies/southparkgates.html
LanceThruster
It actually seems that the willfully ignorant are pretty much unmanageable.
Nazgul35
Stop making sense damn you!
matoko_chan
Look E.D. you have already chosen a side.
you just arent honest.
You dont get to change the rules in a democratic meritocracy just because you are about to start losing forever.
You say, well liberal ideas are good but what about this conservative idea?
There are no good conservative ideas anymore.
they have all failed.
You come here and say, heya, my base has some bad crazy but this is why, and n/e ways both sides do it.
But both sides are not the same. For 50 years your side has been spectactularily uninterested in educating your base….you just cared about the win. you gutted your base of intelligence and tolerance and compassion and honesty.
worked great for a while, huh?
We are not interested in your apologia for your base.
We don’t care.
We don’t want to “understand” them.
We are not interested in helping you reform your base, like Douthat and McMegan wanting us liberals to help strike down Roe so asshole terrorist xian RTL warriors don’t shoot abortion doctors, or Weigel and Boenner scolding the NAACP about confronting TPM racism instead of helping to reform the tea party.
You see, E.D. IT AINT OUR FUCKING JOB TO EDUCATE YOUR BASE.
its your job.
if you want my respect, go do it.
do work son.
and you and fucking daniel league of the south larison can both start right here.
JGabriel
As the first, and possibly only, person who actually said “pick a side” in this thread, I’ll assume the update is a response, at least in part, to my post.
E.D. Kain @ Top:
Fair enough.
I don’t think it’s bullshit at all, but I do think that you’re not trafficking in argumentation when you repeatedly come down on both sides (right and center*) of an issue in your conclusion. That’s just centrism as practiced on the Washington Post editorial page, or “High Broderism” if you prefer the lefty derogatory characterization. And it’s turning into a cliche.
I don’t know if you’re shooting for some sort of Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure, or looking for solutions through some sort of balancing between a Manichean duopoly of left and right, but it’s getting predictable.
Perhaps instead of “pick a side”, I should have said, “Just state your conclusions plainly and forcefully instead of cushioning them between strawman perceptions of left and right ideologies.”
In a way, this is less a critique of your conclusions, than it is a critique of the style in which you’re expressing them, and, maybe, the process that engenders that style. Read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, again if you’ve read it before, but read it as a style guide, not a political essay.
(*I’m only being slightly facetious. No one here is advocating truly leftist positions like communism, anarcho-syndicalism, or kibbutzes, but free-market extremism is regularly advocated by libertarians and conservatives. So the range of solutions, the search space, ends up being between right and center, not the full spectrum between right and left.)
.
les
@JGabriel:
Nice.
62across
@Chuck Butcher:
can you provide links to any research on “sales taxes are the most regressive of all taxes and provide such a large shelter to the greatest beneficiaries of State infrastructure and you talk about public service workers’ wages…”
I don’t doubt it, I’d just like to see some data.
Elie
@Chuck Butcher:
LOL! I do.
62across
Can’t argue with the idea of “managed ignorance”, but I’d like to know what the folks here think there is to do about it.
Seeing that effective management of ignorance could lead to the Democrats losing one or both chambers of Congress this November, does anyone have a strategy for countering it.
matoko_chan
@62across: the system is WAI.
it is self-correcting already.
2010 is the last gasp of conservatism.
sure, conservatives won a long time, but inorder to do so they bred out or drove every last vestige of Jeffersonian talent and virtue they had.
conservatism is bankrupt.
have faith in the founders.
;)
Xanthippas
Good Lord, no it’s not. Faux balance is not the same thing as neutrality, or even centrism. There are actually people in the world who don’t come down strongly on either side of the fence, even if reading a blog convinces you that everyone in the world is or ought to be like that.
Sheila
Though I don’t always agree with you, I am enjoying your posts, E. D. Kain. They are thoughtful and well-reasoned. We would probably all be better off if none of us picked sides as life is filled with nuances and picking a side can often close them off from us.
Bill Murray
@Marmot: when I have wood, I can’t build anything else that stands up — especially in the morning
Bill Murray
I still think you are missing the essence JGabriel’s point (at least too me) which is the use of strawman/conventional wisdom caricatures of others’ arguments. IIRC all of your posts traffic in that pretty heavily. I doubt you can ever properly make the kind of choices you say you want to make (and are in the process of making) until you put your Scarecrow phase behind you.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I tried to read the update on the top post. I got to the point where I was feeling dizzy and throwing up into my sinuses and gave up.
I know why you are here. You are here because you think we will be interested in your endless fwapping at your internal struggle between your little angel and your little fucking sociopathic devil, the endless conversation you have with yourself about it.
Okay, I am ready to vote: No. I am not interested. You fucking make me sick. The world is not that hard to figure out and we do not have to sit around picking at navel lint all fucking day to understand it.
The current American right is toxic, dishonest, dangerous, ignorant, and harmful. Period. There is no middle ground. That doesn’t mean that the people not in that class of people are all angels and good . IT JUST MEANS THAT WE OPPOSE THE POLITICAL RIGHT AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE, because it is willfully wrong and bad. Period. We can argue about what to do after we make that decision, but for most of us, the decision was made long ago (for an example, you can use John Cole, okay? You know, you have heard of him?)
So you go ahead and work it out in your pointy little head until your dick falls off. I already worked it out in my head a long long time ago and I have no interest in watching you agonize over it now.
Go away and leave me alone, please. I mean it.
matoko_chan
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: total agreement.
Kain, we already know how to be humans.
go teach your fucking base.
just quit agonizing over it….switch sides or go full frontal wingnut, no cares.
just stop endlessly digging through the Mt.Crumpet of reeking shit that is conservative ideology looking for a few a few nanoparticles of good.
ill tell you naow, there aint any.
matoko_chan
AND!
i fucking hate your music.
this made me want to cut myself and im not even emo.
break out the ear bleach.
JGabriel
Thanks for the response, Erik.
BTW, you’ve got a link fail on the word torture in the last paragraph of the second update. The link should be to:
http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/05/torture-and-terror/
.
mclaren
It’s fascinating to observe a horde of liberals responding to my point that liberals have deep contempt for the electorate by claiming that I’m stupid and ignorant, and that’s why I say these crazy things.
Protip: responding to criticism that you disdain everyone by disdaining the person who makes the criticism is not an effective rebuttal. In fact, it proves the criticism.
How, exactly, do Democrats think they’re going to win elections when they have such profound contempt for the electorate?
“VOTE FOR US — WE THINK YOU’RE SHIT.” What kind of slogan is that?
matoko_chan
@mclaren: What kind of slogan is that?
waaay better than the conservative slogan….
VOTE FOR US! YOU’RE TOO STUPID TO KNOW ANY BETTER!
i got banned from LoOG because I kept axin’ why E.D. was pandering to the base and not even trying to educate them.
Why would he do that?
the answer is, conservative elites have a gobsmacking contempt for their base — they think the base is too stupid to learn.
E.D. Kain
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: I don’t believe you. You’re under no obligation to either read or comment on my posts. So why bother if it’s so painful? I’d ask matoko the same question, but she’s lost it so there’s really no point.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: and we are going to win because of the demographic timer, and because of conservative selection for stupid.
and because survival of the fittest works for memes too.
matoko_chan
@E.D. Kain: because you don’t get to come here and pretend.
stand and defend!
draw your blade and defend being a conservative!
or DIAF.
E.D. Kain
@JGabriel: Thanks – and thanks to everyone for a really great discussion. Lots to chew on. Lots of excellent points that I hope to respond to in more depth later.
And thanks for the Orwell link. Excellent advice. Seriously.
matoko_chan
and now for your exit polling of the night, ladies and gentlemen..
Why DID freddie deboer leave the LoOG?
a. because E.D.Kain is McMegan with a Y chromosome
b. because he got tired of carrying water for endless conservative failmemes.
c. because LoOG is a crack house for conservative crackheads that think that they can change the rules to get back in the game.
d. all of the above.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@E.D. Kain:
Nah, why don’t you save us a lot of trouble and just stop writing the posts? Wouldn’t that solve the problem faster and easier for everybody?
What’s next on your plate, a post that asks if we should really go back onto the gold standard, because, you know, that Federal Reserve isn’t really all it was cracked up to be?
Fuck me with a sharp stick. I don’t know how much navelgazing this place can bear. But with you here, I know we will find out the answer to that one.
E.D. Kain
@matoko_chan: He got tired of blogging about politics, actually.
And matoko, your bitterness is really starting to show through. You got banned from my other blog. The only person we ever banned. You should be proud of that, not hold such a deep-seeded grudge.
E.D. Kain
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: Seriously, you’re only wasting your own time here. If you have better things to do, nobody’s stopping you. And no, not every conservative is for the gold standard whether or not there are real problems with the federal reserve.
E.D. Kain
@Midnight Marauder:
I’ve called out liars plenty of times. You don’t see me mince words on torture, immigration, or many other issues. I’m not practicing artificial neutrality. I think both sides have deep failures. I think there’s room for some fusionist politics, honest politics, and I think there’s room to debate. I’m persuadable. I’m not interested in being strictly partisan. I’m making no pretense about some false equivalence. I think conservatives are right on some things but they’ve run into a quagmire of dishonesty and incompetence that makes whatever good ideas they have impossible to implement. Democrats have a different set of problems but good governance doesn’t tend to be one of them. These are not the same problems. I don’t mean to cancel the one out with the other. I can see how you might see it this way but that’s not my intention.
matoko_chan
liar. :)
you never call out liars in your base.
what about the fetus=slave guy and the racist teabaggers?
you are just McMegan with a dick, and Douthat without the protective layer of sterile latex that protects him from touching icky grrl parts.
these guys will figure it out.
and…..
you told me why you banned meh, in email, membah?
did you forget?
:)
matoko_chan
You got banned from my other blog.
wallah.
this is your blog now?
Larry Signor
@E.D. Kain:
Erik,
You argue with fence posts. It’s easier to misspell insulting ad hominem attacks than to posit potentially unifying ideas. Just more of that good old American
inclusionsectarian hatred.E.D. Kain
@Larry Signor: Yes indeed, Larry. Yes indeed.