What James Fallows Says
Posted October 6, 2008 by TomCategories: McCain, Obama, Palin, Politics, Stupidity, political follies
Tags: A Great Country, Hooters, McCain, Obama, Palin, Political Folly, Politics, Stupidity
If John McCain has a better set of plans to deal with the immediate crisis, and the medium-term real-economy fallout, and the real global problems of the era — fine, let him win on those. But it is beneath the dignity he had as a Naval officer to wallow in this mindless BS. I will say nothing about the dignity of a candidate who repeatedly winks at the public, Hooters-waitress style.
Read the whole post here…then read the rest of his blog. He doesn’t post as much as some, but as Spencer (Tracy dammit, not Ackerman) said in a different context, “what’s there is choice.”
A Little Weekend Palin/Physics Snark
Posted October 5, 2008 by TomCategories: Palin, Snark, physics, political follies
Tags: Beyond the Standard Model, Palin, physics, Snark
A few of us were sitting around the dinner table last night, including one very smart physicist (who shall remain nameless to protect all and sundry). After a little obligatory LHC conversation, in which phrases like Kaluza-Klein particles were bandied about recklessly, we started talking on the campaign.
Contemplating the honorless, joyless slog that has become the McCain campaign, not to mention what seemed like its surprising seemingly foolish decisions of the last few weeks, I wondered if there were a fundamental unit, a quantum of stupidity.
Why yes, of course — the answer came to several of us in a flash.
The quantum of folly is the palon.
Moving on from there, I began to think. The supersymmetric partner to the palon would, by convention be called the Spalon — but I wonder if a more descriptive name wouldn’t be the McCain Bozo-n.
And of course, the particle emitted in a collision between a palon and the hard nub of reality — think of the crash between faith in abstinence education and the actual practice of teenagers — would have to be a palino.
Don’tcha think?
Image: El Greco, “Allegory of a boy lighting a candle in the company of an ape and a fool,” 1589-92. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Dog Bites Man (Woman): Palin is Lying Again/Basic Arithmetic edition
Posted October 4, 2008 by TomCategories: Arithmetic, Palin, Politics, Republican follies, Republican knavery, Stupidity, journalism, numbers, political follies, ridicule
Tags: Politics, Republican knavery, Palin, deceit, newspapers, Fox News, Numeracy, Numerical literacy
Amazingly enough, when Sarah Palin got her Couric do-over in the friendly confines of Fox News, all of sudden she remembered some stuff she “forgot” when talking to someone who actually asked follow up questions.
Her court case nonesense is probably better eviscerated by someone who actually knows something of the law, but I want to take a whack at her claim that, oh yes, she does read the newspapers…or as she put it:
CAMERON: Well, what do you read?
PALIN: I read the same things that other people across the country read, including the “New York Times†and the “Wall Street Journal†and “The Economist†and some of these publications that we’ve recently even been interviewed through up there in Alaska.
Oh yeah?
Think Progress has already questioned the probability of Palin reading The Economist. But the idiocy goes deeper than the mere likelihood that Palin was simply parroting a list of approved elite-friendly titles a leader of the free world would be expected to read.
Think about this with an eye toward real life. In Palin you have a governor of a state who also happens to have five children still at home. She is a moderately busy person.
She also has a certain media list she needs to monitor. She has a direct political and governance interest in reading local newspapers, especially that or those of record for her state; she would also, being a skilled thoroughly modern politician, have her eye and ear on local political TV and radio.
She is also a human animal, subject to the same physical constraints that anyone with this basic biology must face. In this context, that means she is subject to the same limits on reading speed that anyone faces. The reading speed for comprehension has a range of 200-400 words per minute; skimming can be accomplished at rates as fast as 700 words per minute.
So let’s confront The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. What follows is a mix of real data and inferences; the idea is to get a broad sense of the scale of the task Palin has set herself without spending half a day on the analysis. It’s a first order “does this make sense” pass, nothing more.
On average the Journal is 96 pages long. A single broadsheet page of a newspaper, even in its modern, slightly shrunken form, can deliver roughly 3,000 words (actually more — the page used for this number is the Times’ op-ed, which typically runs three - four pieces c. 800 word pieces with some art). Â Clearly art (in the newspaper sense) and advertising cut into the news hole available for words — and lets be conservative here too; say only one quarter of the average issue actually contains words to be read.
That would leave someone reading the WSJ cover to cover with something like 24*3000= 72,000 words to take in. Give it another hair cut to acknowledge the ongoing constraints of print journalism. So two national newspapers today could offer a dedicated reader 100,000 words (and quite possibly much more). At 400 words per minute — fast for comprehension, slow for skimming, that many words would occupy someone for 250 minutes, or just over four hours every day.
Give it another haircut. Throw out half the paper. Sarah Palin does not need to read the company news pages of the Journal or the New York Region report in the Times. We’re still talking two hours (and we haven’t even touched the drag on the day that The Economist hits her in-tray.
In other words…all this is nonsense. Palin does not read these papers in any meaningful way. Nor should she, in fact.
She’s the governor of Alaska, not of New York. She needs to read her local stuff, and her staff should be flagging what she needs to get from the national media; certainly it would make sense if someone in Juneau prepared a digest of stories relevant to state-state issues and those national ones that impinge on her decision-space.
Palin could have said something like this during the Couric interview; she could have made this basic point to Fox — that she stays up on the information most relevant to her job, and relies on her staff to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. The moment would have passed unnoticed.
Instead, she committed herself to an impossibility; that she as governor and mother still finds the time to read the papers for several hours per day.
Two last points: First: Once again we see in Palin someone willing to lie at any moment to reinforce the image she or her handlers think she needs to display. I know that what you have just read is overkill — but there is something about the contempt in which Palin and her keepers hold their audience that makes me want to stomp each moment of stupidity until its cries “uncle.”
Second: The running scream of this blog is that simple quantification exercises are essential for making sense of the world around us. Journalists and everyone need to count. I know that Fox News is not a journalistic enterprise; it’s Pravda with better graphics. But as I hope the above back of the envelope exercise suggests, it would help the rest of us a great deal if we turned the niggling feeling, “but-does-it-make-sense,” into a reflex animated by a habit of quantification, approximation and inquiry. Here the lesson endeth.
Image: Johnny Automatic Children Reading Newspaper. Source: Clker.com.
It’s All Been Down Hill Since…
Posted October 4, 2008 by TomCategories: Cool Tech, History, History of Science, Politics, media
Tags: History, History of Technology, Mass Media, Politics, Recording, Thomas Edison, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan
1908, when the first wax cylinder recordings were made of the two nominees in a Presidential election.
Via Sean at Cosmic Variance, I came across Ron Cowen’s story at the Science News website and learned that William Jennings Bryan used his time in the Edison recording room to advocate insurance for individual bank depositors and William Howard Taft devoted his three minutes or so to an analysis of the “Rights and Progress of the Negro.”
As Sean said, it’s a delight to realize that both of those topics are of purely historical interest.
That was epochal then. No more secretely hired flacks to spread scandal, a la Jefferson and Adams (Good thing we don’t do that sort of stuff anymore). Now, of course, there is an entire industry devoted to using sound and image to permit the candidates to connect to an electorate with the (too intimate?)* illusion of direct one-one contact between individuals who never meet.
But what is so sweet about this story is that we can look back to a specific, single moment when it all began; if nothing else, the fact of such a sharply defined point of origin can help sharpen our thinking about what has happened since, for good and ill, at the intersection of mass media and politics.
Beyond that historical piety, there’s just one thing I’d like to add to Sean’s thought: Taft’s and Bryan’s excellent adventure in audio is simply a reminder of how swiftly what we now take as almost immutable practice evolved from these humble beginnings. It’s in the range of personal memory, of experience that reaches right into the present.
That is: My youngest great uncle lived into the 1980s — I had a chance to speak with him into my own twenties. He was born in 1900 — so soon before the census taker came to my great-grandparents’ house that he is listed on that year’s census form as Baby Levenson.
He was eight when Bryan and Taft and Edison between them made it possible to connect voice to ear, emotional pitch to voter’s limbic system, at a distance of both space and time.
My Uncle Moe and I talked about these recordings, of course — if we had I would hope I would have had the wit to write the story up myself — but we did reach back into that history. He could tell me what it was like to see cars appear; to experience the end of World War I, to go to college and be the first in his Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family to go to college and be able to major in something as not-obviously-useful as French literature.
The larger point here is that the conventional division of time into generations misses the way historical memory actually works.
If your grandfather is alive, he can tell you what his great aunt told to him. On my mother’s side, that means my grandfather, a career British army officer, would have known senior officers in his mess old enough to have observed the American Civil War, with all the lessons that did not sink in about what happens when you apply industrial methods to infantry tactics. On my father’s side, my grandparents were able to reach back into personal memory and immediate family experience of the life of Jews under Tsarist Russian rule.
This is personal memory — one or two links of conversation at most. 1908 is even closer. In my own adulthood, I reach back with just one conversation to the lived experience of the moment American politicians’ voices first broke out of the constraints of time and place.
All of which to say is that hearing Taft speak as if it were a century ago today should remind us that the transformation of modern politics into one dominated by modern media tactics is not an inevitable by-product of human nature, a required feature of democratic self governance in the 21st century.
It is a very recent technological manipulation that turns, to be sure, on close observation of the ways people receive and interpret information and experience. But the 30 second hate spot is not some required response to a few million years of evolution from savanna to Savannah.
*One of the repeated little pleasures of this election is watching conservative lip-flappers self-immolate. Rich Lowry, however, exceeds expectations (even accounting for the soft bigotry of low expectations), and the quote linked above has to rank with at the top of the OMG-Did-I-Just-Hit-’Publish’ scale.
Image: Francis Barraud painted what became an iconic image of his brother’s dog Nipper listening to the horn of an early phonograph during the winter of 1898. Victor Talking Machine Company began using the symbol in 1900. Source: Wikimedia Commons. This may be a cliche (it is–Ed.) but it’s too good to pass up here.
Nod’s As Good As A Wink To A Blind Bat, Guv’nor: Sarah Palin Edition
Posted October 3, 2008 by TomCategories: Palin, Politics, Stupidity, political follies
Tags: Debate, gender, Palin, Pole Dancing, Politics, Seduction, Stupidity
Just to add one data point to Hilzoy’s argument about Palin as flirt.
Several in the blogosphere — Sullivan and Benen, for two who shared Hilzoy’s disgust — have noted with disbelief Rich Lowry’s transports of delight at the virtual pole dance he seems to have witnessed while watching Governor Palin debate.
Hilzoy went one step deeper into the morass and did a little dissection of the electoral implications of Palin’s tease technique:
I’m sure I’m not the only female in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, rolled her eyes and thought: oh, dear God. We have all seen just that wink deployed at guys like Rich Lowry. We have all watched in amazement as it actually works, despite its transparent manipulativeness. What, we all wonder, could those guys possibly be thinking?
I’m sure she’s right — though absent some real research, “sure” only to a certain value of certitude. But there is this: each time Palin winked, at least three in all, my wife howled in disbelief and rage.
So now we’ve doubled our sample. If we can now just get the exponent on this sample size to ten, we might know something.
I will say this on my gender’s behalf:Â one of the few good things of making it into the neighborhood of 50 is that it gets easier even for those of us down one X to see through this kind of thing.
So, just as a working hypothesis, Palin’s numbers continue to tank with women, this may one big reason why.
As a bonus…here’s the Monty Python sketch that inspired the title of this post. Remember, when asked, say that “She’s from Purley”…from whence I am sure she could see Russia….
Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue,” 1891. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I Have Seen The Light: A Revelation on Reading David Brooks This Morning
Posted October 3, 2008 by TomCategories: Biden, Journalism and its discontents, McCain, Politics, Stupidity, bad writing, political follies
Tags: bad writing, David Brooks, Debate, Joseph Biden, journalism, McCain, New York Times, Paul Krugman, Sarah Palin
David Brooks is Sarah Palin.
You can see what I mean in five minutes with today’s Times op-ed page. On the one hand, this, from Brooks. On the other, this from Paul Krugman.
I have to admit to a certain weariness of spirit everytime I pick up Brooks’ “work” (sic — ed.) these days. How often must one say the same thing in a slightly different context: that Brooks is a glib hack, too lazy to do even the minimal work required to flesh out his preconceptions with even the most fragile of veneers of fact or experience? I complained here that he wasn’t even trying anymore, and nothing in today’s effort suggests otherwise.
Of course, given the reach of the pulpit he possesses from which to bully the rest of us, he needs to be stomped as often as he rises on his hind legs. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance (as Sarah Palin reminded us last night explaining why she wants to kill Medicare).*
So here goes. Today, Brooks argues (a) that because Palin spoke in complete sentences, she met the “survival” test; (b) she was just folks, and though such casual style won’t wash in the elevated circles in which Brooks travels, it could do very well out there in flyover country.
By the way: I’m not kidding about the disdain for his alledged fellow GOP supporters Brooks displays these days. Here’s the same notion in his words:
To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms and her constant invocations of the accoutrements of everyday life will seem cloying. But in the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine.
Memo to all those casual parts of the country. Now y’all know what Serious ™ conservatives think of you.
Last, Brooks alleged that Palin had reached debate parity with Biden; that she was a radical alternative to Washington insiders; and that, while no game-changer, her performance was an unexpected, “vibrant and tactically clever” tour de force.
There are of course, problems with this interpretation. Two big ones. The first is that the column as a whole is a list of nicely constructed platitudes presented with no clear connection to what actually happened.
In fact, much — really most — of the piece could have and may well have been written before 9 p.m. last night. Except for the fact of Palin’s black suit, and the fact that she can pronounce the name of the president of Iran, more than half is Brooks waffling on about terrified GOPers hiding behind sofas and the grand significance of casual Fridays to the great scheme of things.
Such airy generalization is the trick that bored college students use to flesh out the last three hundred words of an eight hundred word assignment. As I’ve said before, if I were surnamed Ochs or Sulzberger, I’d want a refund.
But this same laziness - or worse — caused Brooks to miss the key story he thought he was covering. The question the post-debate polls asked was simple and obvious: Did Palin do what was necessary in the debate? Did the debate persuade the uncertain that Palin was ready for the job she seeks?
Brooks can’t answer that question. He couldn’t even ask it, because unlike musings on politics as performance, this one could be answered in ways he still does not wish to accept.
And it was:Â within the statistical limits of the polls, the answer was no; her numbers on this question were effectively unchanged, at least as a first reaction to the debate.
That fact leads to the conclusion that Brooks is struggling to avoid: The fact that Americans by a notable majority in the context of such a divided electorate see her as unqualified reflects not on her, but on the man with whom those polled disagree:Â John McCain.
This blog exists as a defense of empiricism and the use of the analytical methods of science to interpret the raw data of experience. There are, of course, lots of pundit/hacks who daily commit sins as bad as those of Brooks — willed ignorance, cherrypicking of data, ignoring contrary facts, howling intellectual solecisms and all the duplicitous arsenal of the ideologically blinded right.
But I have to confess that Brooks gets my goat more than most precisely because of his pretention to scientific respectability — his musings on neuroscience, his assertion of soft-science knowledge and authority. It’s BS — a facade and a fraud. Today’s offering is the latest of a “what I thought while seated in the smallest room of the house” tossed off little number.
We deserve better from the New York Times. Hell — the Right deserves better from somone supposedly representing the view from that side of the debate in the most visible of positions.
And of that David as Sarah reference: Compare Brooks’ offering today with Krugman’s. Now, whatever you think of Krugman, he is, like Biden, expert in his area, aware of the ground of experience, deeply knowlegable. His column today, not about the debate, focuses instead on the financial crisis and its broader economic implications.
It’s not a particularly data-dense column — but it makes reference to facts, it suggests reasonable inferences from those facts; it provides a framework for pursuing some of the top level claims more deeply (and Krugman does, in fact, get you the latest awful numbers for you in his first blog post of today) and so on.
Again — while I’m a Krugman fan, others surely disagree. But when they do they are forced to engage him on the ground of the data and his argument.
Brooks exerts no such compulsion. He has his talking points; he is glib and plausible. Pushed even a little, it becomes painfully obvious that there is no there there.
Isn’t in time the Times had mercy on this out-of-his-depth man and sent him back to the Weekly Standard wading pool in which he can’t hurt himself so easily?
Image:Â Artist unknown, “The Swaddled Twins” dated 7 April 1617. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Priorities, Priorities (or, perhaps, a juxtaposition by design.
Posted October 2, 2008 by TomCategories: Palin, Politics, Snark, Stupidity, political follies
Tags: Debate analysis, Palin, Snark, Stupidity, Survivor
Just surfing over to CBS.com to see if their nattering nabobs had anything to say when I was pleased to see the priorities of the Murrow’s network:
Across the top third of the page — banner, image and the text link: Weekly Survivor Fantasy Video Recap.
Below, in a one line text link — CBS News Coverage of the Vice Presidential Debate
Which feature starred Sarah Palin, I wonder?
Consider this the limit of the unnecessary verbiage that I will add to the compost heap of post-debate “analysis” (sic).
Domestic Dialogue: Palin Commentary Edition (All Words 100% Truly Uttered Or Your Money Back).
Posted October 2, 2008 by TomCategories: McCain, Palin, Politics, Stupidity, political follies
Tags: Debate, Palin, This is a Vice President?
Spouse:Â “She looks ditzy.”
Me:Â “You’re a committed partisan.”
Spouse:Â “I just don’t like stupid women.”
For the record: IMHO, Palin is not stupid, not even close. Other adjectives come to mind — but the Alaskan political tundra is littered with folks who made that mistake.
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