CapitalistImperialistPig

The right having entered one of its periodic spasms of anti-intellectualism, I suppose that it's only fitting that The New York Times' David Brooks should be the most prominent conservative intellectual scribbler.  Brooks is a thinker with an even-handed disdain for facts and logic, which I suppose is handy when your job is making a case for the policies advocated by somebody like Paul Ryan. Brad DeLong disinters an epic takedown by Sasha Issenberg: Boo-Boos in Paradise: Brooks is operating in a long tradition of public intellectualism.... Whyte, who was an editor for Fortune in the 1950s, observed how people lived, inferred trends, considered what they meant, and then came up with grand conclusions about the direction of the country. When, in 1954, he wanted to find out which consumers were trend-setters, he went into Overbrook Park and surveyed 4,948 homes.... Brooks, by way of contrast, draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures...

Watching the parade of buffoons, nutbags, sacred fools, ordinary fools and child Buddhas at the CPAC makes it more than a little difficult to imagine how this bunch ruled the country for thirty years. They didn't, of course, or rather, they were just the schlock troops or comic relief for the real controllers - the moneyed oligarchy and the network of stink tanks they created and congressmen, editors, columnists, professors and preachers they had purchased. We ought to bear that in mind before we celebrate the buffoonery too heartily.

Brad DeLong: Shorter CPAC Conference... I'LL GET YOU, MY PRETTY!! AND YOUR LITTLE PORTUGUESE WATER DOG TOO!!

What's the percentage in being a contrarian? Well, if you are pretty sure that the herd is stampeding off the cliff, it makes Darwinian sense to try to get out of the flow. Skepticism about the perceived wisdom is the intellectual equivalent of a biological mutation - the odds are very heavily against it, but when it pays off, it can win big. Contrarians don't necessarily lack the herd instinct, of course. They like to think that they are part of their own crowd. Thus the high school goths all congregate under the same tree, just as the jocks, nerds, and beautiful people each have their own territory. Thus it is also with climate skeptics. Via Brad DeLong , Ryan Avent wonders about the link with political conservatism. My question is why conservatives think it advances their purpose to continue this demonstrably wrong adherence to climate change denialism. This isn’t like, say, evolution. Scientific evidence of evolution is quite strong and will only continue to get stron...

Sean Carroll notes John McCain's strategy for getting the stupidity vote . Shorter strategy capsule: make fun of science and scientists.

David Mamet is an acute dramatist, but political analyst, not so much. He has this article in the Village Voice (the web site of which appears to run on a 20 MHz PC AT), in which he describes his conversion from "brain dead" liberal to merely brain dead - or as I guess he calls it, conservative. He traces his epiphany to an auto trip: I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart. These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?"...

Not too new, but Andrew Sullivan gives us a good example of why the Republican right is immune to satire: Jonah Goldberg's party might be dragging citizens off the street, incarcerating them without charges for four years and torturing them (if you haven't heard of Jose Padilla, you've been reading too much NRO), they might have suspended habeas corpus indefinitely, they might be wire-tapping your phone without warrants, they may be claiming presidential authority to ignore laws and treaties ... but the real fascism can be found in: a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. Be afraid. No matter how outrageous the satire you think up, you can't match the absurdity of what these people actually think and say.

The LA Times has an article on a new study comparing the way liberal and conservative brains process information. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that liberals are more open to new experiences and more flexible in their thinking. OK, that's not quite the same as "smarter," but I'll take it. The current experiment compared what happened when students were presented with a very simple task: recognizing the letter M vs. W. Subjects were conditioned to expect a higher frequency of one letter than of the other, and when the frequency changed, conservatives made more mistakes and learned the new pattern more slowly. It certainly seems to fit a lot of conservatives I know - once they get an idea they become more or less impervious to fact.

Scott Horton : There are times in the last six years when I've felt like I was trapped in one of those science fiction movies from the fifties. A focal character has discovered a group of ruthless aliens out to destroy the world, disguised as human beings and accepted in the fold of the community. He could go denounce them in a wild-eyed way to his friends and neighbors - but who would ever believe him? I got an early, very deep look into the heart of the Bush Administration. I was shocked at what I saw and at first didn't trust my own eyes and ears. That disinclination to believe what we directly observe is almost always a mistake, sometimes a serious mistake. And yet for years it's been a steep uphill struggle to get the American public to see and understand what is in front of them, and the danger it presents to our nation and the world. The Bush team are not strange monsters from outer space; in fact they are human. All too human. Their failings are the sort that common...

The Guardian reports: Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment. The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have ...

Before Pasteur there was a common belief in spontaneous generation. The tendency of any undisturbed organic matter to erupt in teeming microscopic (and larger) creatures had convinced many that life was a spontaneously arising phenomenon. Pasteur disproved this, showing that life arose only from life and that insects and microscopic animals bred as true as larger lifeforms. Brad DeLong has discovered a sort of similar principle for The National Review Digging deep into the slime pit of the National Review archives, he unearths the slimy ancestors of today's National Review mold: The soberly-dressed "clerky" little man... seemed oddly unsuited to his unmentioned but implicit role of propagandist.... Let me say at once, for the benefit of the wicked, fearful South, that Martin Luther King wil never rouse a rabble; in fact, I doubt very much if he could keep a rabble awake... past its bedtime... lecture... delivered with all the force and fervor of the five-year-old who...