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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Two bays in one 
| | Heading up to San Francisco. (For the Labor Day weekend show. I've got my hushpuppies on. Guess I never was meant for glitter blog and roll.) Then to Supernova in Santa Clara. Then to Boston for the ISACA. See ya'll in none or more of those places. |
| | My task list has over 300 items in it right now. All of them must be completed this summer. Have to work smarter and harder. Could really use a winning lotto ticket. |
He told you so
| | Christopher Hitchens goes way beyond that. He tells Moore to step outside: |
| | Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation. |
| | However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers — get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of. |
Not including Goblogumine
| | pacifism, or more exactly non-action, is the better idea for all cases unless you're really really really sure. |
Questions
George knows best
| | If your only objective is to demolish some advice that isn't peer-reviewed about the merits of spanking, it suffices to note that "'Firm enforcement' and 'sanctions' do not include painful corporal punishment." Fine, if you're writing a polemic. But "mature behavior" does not preclude expecting children -- per corollary, citizens -- to at some point be capable of standing on their own feet, and "independence and individuality" sounds positively entrepreneurial. |
| | Professor Lakoff also notes, |
| | [Professor] Lewis also shows that, if the "firm enforcement" part of the model is simply omitted from the pattern of behaviors studied, the results are essentially the same. This indicates that "firm enforcement" does not add anything to the model. |
| | Not quite. I know just enough about model building to be dangerous, and I picked up the 90 Psychological Bulletin 547 (1981) and read Professor Lewis's article, which is a survey of previous results, not quite a full literature review and not a meta-analysis. As such, there is no "showing" to be appealed to. Furthermore, as "expectation for mature behavior" and "firm enforcement of rules and standards" are not orthogonal, and not well-specified (by the standards of economic modeling, other disciplines have other conventions) the possibility remains that either "expectations" or "enforcement" might perform equally well alone as explanatory variables. |
| | Perhaps we ought to have more than two systems of belief in play at any time. Perhaps having better-posed models of those belief systems would also help. |
| | I think Ray is onto something here. I've always found George's political thinking to be highly useful, though not always agreeable. For example, in Moral Politics, George says a libertarian is "an extremely pragmatic conservative whose moral focus is on noninterference by the government." He adds, |
| | There is, after all, a reason why the scholars at the libertarian Cato Institute seem largely to be writingin support of conservative rather than liberal positions. Nonetheless, there is no objective answer here. They are far enough away to think of themselves as a separate category and close enough for others to think of them as conservatives. |
| | Nowhere, in the three pages George devotes to libertarians (or, for that matter, to the hundreds he devotes to conservatives, in Moral Politics and elsewhere) does he give any credence to libertarians' rational arguments against big government — especially of the well-intentioned but often failure-prone sort that the nurturant thinking and rhetoric of the left tends to produce and justify. |
| | There is much subtle stuff in the right's respect for the rule of law on the one hand and disdain for big government on the other, and it is not all produced (no matter how easily rationalized) by strict-fatherist moral thinking. To me, anyway. |
| | John Ray's Lakoff "Deconstructed" hits a lot harder than Stehpen Karlson's piece, but, like Karlson, Ray atttacks weaknesses in George's politics, but not in George's science. Ray snarks, |
| | George Lakoff is a Leftist linguistics professor whose linguistic theories seem now to have fallen out of favour but who seems to think he knows all about the psychology of politics. |
| | I've spent half an hour (admittedly, far from enough) looking for evidence that Lakoffian (or any other brand of) cognitive science, or cognitive linguistics, has "fallen out of favour," and can't find it. |
| | I wish George offered a more comfortable niche for my own nurturant libertarianism than what he calls "one variation" in a "radial category" of conservatism. But I still find his linguistic tools of enormous help, not only for understanding the politics of democracy, but for understanding the politics of technology as well. |
| | Bonus link: Meet George Lakoff, at CBSNews.com, from January 15 of this year, when Howard Dean was still (at least perceived as) the Democratic frontrunner. |
| | One haunting line from the piece: |
| | To beat Bush, Lakoff believes, a Democratic candidate will have to establish a set of ideas, develop a language to represent them, then speak and repeat. |
| | That's a big uh oh for John Kerry. Ever since I saw Kerry in the first of the Democratic primary debates, I have marveled at his ability to say nothing, but with great emphasis. (The man is nearly as quoteproof as Bill Clinton, which, judging by the latter's successes, may not be the worst thing.) By contrast, George W. Bush has the ability to speak with great conviction, and often with empathy — in spite of frequent rhetorical fumbles. |
Bulletin: they actually WANT it to suck
| | The strategy of stuffing commercial radio full of ads has backfired, as a handful of investment banks predicted slower growth, downgrading six key radio stocks -- Clear Channel, Emmis, Cox Radio, Entercom, Citadel and Westwood One -- and the sector as a whole. |
| | Thanks to Steve for the pointer. |
It all gets shorter from here
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