The Friedman Singularity

Years ago, I imagine that the management of the New York Times met to work out criteria for who would write the opinion columns in the paper. They walked in with one iron-clad commitment: they believed in “balance”, you couldn’t just bring on writers of reason and evidence, because that would be unfair to the right wing. They also tut-tutted the awkwardness of strong language and vigorously supported opinions, so they needed to find a middle ground. They decided that the way to fill their quota of conservative voices was to simply hire deeply stupid people.

And this is how Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Ross Douthat got their sinecures on the pages of the prestigious (but losing its luster) New York Times.

I think David Brooks is the worst of them, but then every time I read anything by Friedman I feel like changing my mind. This doesn’t happen often, though, because Friedman makes me vomit out of my eyesockets, which is generally incompatible with being able to read further.

Matt Taibbi has a stronger constitution than I do, apparently, and reviews Friedman’s latest metastatic column, I mean “book”, Thank You for Being Late. He is very unkind. Not unkind enough, but he gets close to what we need.

We will remember Friedman for interviewing 76 percent of the world’s taxi drivers, for predicting “the next six months will be critical” on 14 occasions over two and a half years (birthing the neologism, “the Friedman unit”), and for his unmatched, God-given ability to write nonsensical metaphors, like his classic “rule of holes”: “When you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

Friedman’s great anti-gift is his ability to use many words when only a few are necessary. He became famous as a newspaper columnist for taking simple one-sentence observations like, “Wow, everyone has a cell phone these days,” and blowing them out into furious 850-word trash-fires of mismatched imagery and circular argument.

Yeah, that’s our man Tom. Terrible writer, inane pseudo-philosopher, the most predictably unimaginative source of idiotic “ideas” on the NY Times roster. I have no idea why he’s still employed. There must have been some kind of blood pact signed at the meeting I imagined, or perhaps they closed the deal with an orgy and Friedman has recordings.

Taibbi singled out one example of Friedmanesque unprofundity: this graph, intended to illustrate his claim that we’re being overwhelmed by our own technology.

badgraph1

Bad timing. I’ve been grading lab reports lately, so I’m particularly sensitive to abominations like that. Label your axes! What are the units? Are “adaptibility” and “technology” even measurable in the same way and with the same units? Hey, the ordinate is “rate of change” — do you actually intend to argue that human adaptability, for instance, is increasing? Where’s your evidence? And then I draw big red slashes through the whole thing and tell the student that this is unacceptable, you get a 0 for this assignment, go back and rewrite it.

No, really, this is disgraceful. It’s an obvious attempt to pretend that a subjective claim is factually objective by falsely casting it in the form of a quantitative measurement. You don’t get to do that.

And then it gets worse. Friedman draws a second version of the graph, with his suggestion for how we can correct this mismatch between adaptability and technology.

badgraph2

Hey, my metaphor of vomiting out of my eye sockets no longer looks so hyperbolic, does it?

So the Friedman solution for our current production of excess technology beyond our capacity to absorb (a problem that he hasn’t actually shown to exist) is to build a time machine, go into an undefined moment in the past, and make people “learn faster”. He’s written a whole book about an undemonstrated problem, illustrated it with a bogus graph, and solved it by drawing a line on the graph that shows he doesn’t understand his own illustration, and that requires multiple amazing technological feats to accomplish…in a book that complains about the rapidity of our technological advances.

I know what this means. He’s trying to get a raise from the NY Times by feeding them more of what they hired him for.

And now for the deeper dose of reality

Here’s the basic political reality right now: Hillary Clinton has the nomination. Trump is a colossal raging goon. I think the Democrats are going to have a field day romping over the Republicans.

But there is danger in that attitude, the problem of complacency and of being able to continue in the same old unsuccessful way, because the opposition is a lunatic. Matt Taibbi explains the problem brilliantly. If there’s anything we should learn from the Democratic campaign so far, it’s that there is a rising insurgency, a dissatisfaction with business as usual, and the victory of the establishment candidate means that the conservative leadership of the Democrats can heave a sigh of relief and can avoid making substantive changes in how power is administered.

[Read more…]

“Every time these people open their mouths, it’s comedy”

Matt Taibbi has assembled all of the absurdity of the Bundy militia. From weepy oath taking to begging for snacks to their delusional belief that taking over a federal building will have no consequences, it’s all there.

The Bundy militiamen are an extreme example of a type that’s become common in America. Like the Tea Partiers, they seem to not only believe that they’re the only people in history who’ve ever paid taxes, but that they’re the only people who were ever sad about it. What they call tyranny on the part of the federal government just means putting up with the same irritating bills and regulations and other crap that we all put up with, only the rest of us don’t whine about it in the front seats of our cars while posing in front of tripods.

Again, these people may be dangerous, but their boundless self-pity, their outrageous sense of entitlement and their slapstick incompetence as rebels and terrorists are absolutely ridiculous. Sure, it may not help, but how can we not laugh?

These guys have done a wonderful job of making laughing stocks of themselves.

Uh-oh — this is a bad drinking game

Matt Taibbi has announced the official Republican debate drinking game. He claims to have tuned it so it isn’t instant death to play, but looking it over, it still looks pretty lethal.

I will not be watching the debate — my brain simply cannot take it. I’ll probably go out to a movie, or charge into the lab to tinker for a few hours instead. Unfortunately, my wife is going through a phase where she’s fascinated with really bad arguments, so she’s already planning to sit through it all. Should I hide the good liquor, or just plan on coming home with a stomach pump?

#OccupyChristmas

Perhaps the Hitchens piece I just posted wasn’t curmudgeonly enough for you; seasoned Pharyngula veterans are already deeply cynical. If that’s the case, I have just the thing: Matt Taibbi has posted A Christmas Message From America's Rich, in which you can read about how corporate CEO’s are allowing you to have cake.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

What I’d like to give them for Christmas is a revolution, and a metaphorical row of pikes for their heads.

All Christian-y and bright

Matt Taibbi is giving me nightmares. Read his long political biography of Michele Bachmann, with this terrifying conclusion.

Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more “viable” boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it’s Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera’s dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.

Now watch the cartoon. Get ready…”When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

Poor Stanley and Terry

Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish get another drubbing, this time at the hands of Matt Taibbi. I’d almost feel sorry for them, except that I’m still feeling the trauma of being trapped on a plane with Eagleton’s book, so I say…sic ’em.

This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.

The mess at Interior

One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it’s safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of our government, but the bourgeoisie must not be perturbed.

If you care about the environment, you must read Dickinson’s Obama’s Sheriff. It’s nominally about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, but without saying much about him, it instead dives into the seedy, greedy world of the Interior Department of the past 8 years. Under Bush, we basically gave away our natural resources to anyone willing to chew them up and turn them into a pile of poisonous rubble and decaying trash.

Here’s a sample.

LESS WILDLIFE Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, routinely overruled the department’s biologists, limiting the amount of “critical habitat” protected from drilling and other development. Federal judges overturned several of her decisions as “arbitrary and capricious,” and among federal scientists her name became synonymous with political interference. “It became a verb for us: getting MacDonalded,” said one staffer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the inspector general reviewed 20 listings for endangered species in which MacDonald played a role, he found that she had “potentially jeopardized” 13 of them — a track record that “cast doubt on nearly every [endangered species] decision issued during her tenure.” Her decisions frequently benefited private interests, including her own: Her ruling that the Sacramento splittail fish is not an endangered species protected her family farm in California — an operation that clears as much as $1 million a year.

DECAYING PARKS By the time Bush left office, the National Park Service was stuck with a backlog of up to $14 billion in deferred maintenance. The marquee attraction at Dinosaur National Monument — a rock face of exposed Jurassic fossils — remains off-limits because the visitor center is unsafe, and inadequate storage facilities threaten to damage artifacts from the Battle of Little Big Horn. Because of the lack of funds, the government was unable to buy land surrounding Valley Forge and Zion National Park, putting the property at risk for “detrimental development.” Worst of all, the administration’s failure to create a grazing plan at Yellowstone Park to accommodate the plains buffalo — the animal that graces the Interior Department’s seal — contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 bison last year. It was the greatest buffalo slaughter since the species was driven to near extinction by hunters in the late 1800s.

Keep in mind that this is only a taste — it goes on for page after depressing page. We’ve been robbed.

And what about Salazar? He gets a couple of paragraphs at the end, giving him props for being willing to go in and shake up the tradition of corruption…but also points out that he’s from the conservative rancher tradition, and is going to continue the policies of free give-aways of our resources. So, I guess we can expect less snow-bunny sex with mining representatives and less cocaine-snorting ministers, but the destruction will continue.

Atheism is a condom for your mind

Matt Taibbi went off on a three day Christian retreat, and discovered how ridiculous they are…but he also discover the deep emotional, anti-intellectual pull of these kinds of events.

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this — once you’ve gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

Insulating yourself against the taint of all religion is a kind of psychological, informational hygiene. Abandon all rigor and requirement for reality-based evidence for one’s ideas, and you open the door wide for the kind of conditioning in dogma modern religion promotes.