This piece from the Onion is unsurprisingly right on point. A sample:
According to the nation's citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt "absolutely horrible" to be aware of.
Comment unnecessary.
This video pretty much sums it up. We've been there before, yet here we are again. And again.
In a very simple sense, you use a term when you employ it to mean something; you mention a term when you talk about the termness of the term, or if you quote someone using it. So for instance if you say that someone called someone an ugly name, you put that ugly name in quotes. Thus, he said "word" is mentioning; those people are words is using.
This is germane to something Jay Nordlinger of the National Review Online has recently written. In a nutshell, in a recent post he used a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants. In a follow up post, he claimed it was obvious that he was mentioning. His defense, however, is weak. Here's the original remark.
In today’s Impromptus, I have some comments on Chief Justice Roberts, including a gibe. (Columnists must gibe.) A reader writes, “I fear he has grown in office, and will keep growing.” Yes, that is a fear. For political newcomers, we’ll need a brief history lesson.
During the 1980s, Tip O’Neill and other liberals said, “We were hoping that Reagan would grow in office, but he hasn’t grown at all.” What they meant was, he had not shed his small-government principles and his hawkish views. He had not accepted the post-LBJ state, and détente. He had not learned to love Big Brother. He was still clinging to guns and religion, so to speak. He was as provincial, blinkered, and right-wing as ever.
Truth is, some conservatives lamented that he had indeed “grown” in office. He had gone out of his way to accommodate liberals and moderates, and to accommodate the Kremlin. He was raising taxes, spending like crazy, welcoming wetbacks, pursuing arms control. One common cry from the right was, “None of this would be happening if Ronald Reagan were alive.”
What has gotten knickers in a twist is that word “wetback.” What should have been clear is that I was reflecting a certain mentality: the mentality of Reagan’s critics, some of them, at that time. The angst over tax deals, amnesty deals, arms deals, etc.
I have no doubt that most readers knew what I was doing. But I guess you have to issue these little “clarifications” for the benefit of the dim.
Look: I am not a politician. I’m a writer. And if you don’t like what I write — for heaven’s sake, there are 8 billion others you can click on. I would further say to the complainers, using a phrase I’ve never liked, frankly: Get a life. Get a frickin’ life.
One more word: If people wet their pants on seeing the word “wetback,” this country is as far gone as the most pessimistic and alarmist people say it is.
Two more words: Good grief.
I find this very sad. In the first place, Nordlinger's defense fails. There is no distance between the people (not him allegedly) who use the term "wetbacks" (see, quotation marks are easy to use!) and Nordlinger. Indeed he counts himself among them. Second, he claims to be a writer, but then he whines about people who criticize what he writes. That's what people do to writers. Writers write, they get a reaction, they deal with it. Nordlinger instead goes ad hominem on the people who think his employment of this offensive term offensive. What is therefore most sad about this response is that Nordlinger bothers (like so few actually do) to address criticism of his view but then fails to learn from it or take it seriously.
Maybe this really was a failure of the use/mention distinction on Nordlinger's part. It's so easy to cop to that. He could have simply added that he should have made it clear that he was mentioning "wetbacks" and that it was a term he finds inappropriate. But he couldn't do that, because it was central to his point about how Reagan was justifiably criticized from the right.
Daniel Foster at National Review Online has a well-timed piece on political culture and bullshit. For the most part, it's a quick essay glossing Harry Frankfurt's views in his classic "On Bullshit". He's got a few examples that aren't quite right, as his Marylin Monroe case is just one of lying, not bullshitting. What's interesting, though, is Foster's extension of the bullshit point to what he calls "the politics of identity." Now, this itself isn't new, as Frankfurt even ends his essay with the observation that "authenticity is bullshit." But Foster's examples are worth a look.
The first is Elizabeth Warren and her claims to be a Native American. What Foster objects to is not the politics from the identity but the case made for her identity.
Exhibit A is Elizabeth Warren, who has been able to withstand a barrage of documentary evidence casting doubt on her claim to be part American Indian by anchoring that claim not in genealogical fact but in family lore — in other words, by answering the charge that her Cherokee identification is probably false with the tacit admission that it is definitely bulls**t.
In this case, what's weird is not that this is identity politics, but the evidential conditions for claiming identity. I think he's right about the fact that the Warren case is pretty pathetic, but I'd hardly call it identity politics. Next up is the President himself:
Exhibit B is President Obama, who did us the favor of admitting up front that his 1995 autobiography is, at least in part, bulls**t, but who has managed to escape focused interrogation on this point eight years into his public life and three-plus years into his tenure as leader of the free world.
Again, this is likely right — that the book is trumped up. But how's that identity politics? Is this a dogwhistle for the right? Sometimes, I feel, when reading stuff at NRO or on Newsmax, that there are words that mean more than I think they mean. You know… welfare=brown people, crime=brown people, poverty=brown people, undereducated=brown people. Is this another case of conservatives using a normal word as code for something else? Does it mean something different from what most people think that it means, roughly, people mobilizing political power for the interest of preserving or promoting an identity they share (racial, cultural, sexual, religious, or other)? Now Foster is right when he says that
That identity politics is as festooned with bulls**t as a cow pasture in the full ardor of spring wouldn’t be so bad if identity politics weren’t also a powerful currency.
But I'm at a loss as to what he's saying to the readers at NRO, given his examples. Is calling bullshit in some cases another case of bullshit? Really, that's my sense of it here. The "bullshit" charge was so powerfully wielded against the Bushies earlier in the 2000's, and the conservatives are looking to co-opt the charge as a weapon. But this looks exactly like a cooption, not a lesson.
We can find implicature all around us, from how we use sarcasm, to how we use innuendo. I think that some comparisons can communicate something else, too. So, say, for example, that I say:
Today's as hot as hell.
We take the second comparator as a given (exceedingly and unrelentlingly hot) and use that given to determine something about the first (that it is very, very hot). The implicature of this is that you know that hell is very, very hot, and that then gives us information about today. This works with lots of them:
She is as hot as Georgia asphalt
As strong as a bull
Drunk as a lord
I'm not as drunk as you think I am
So the lesson: our defaults are to take the second comparator as the given. You have to be committed to the obviousness of the heat of GA asphalt and the strength of bulls. Lords are drunk, and it's clear you must think I am very, very drunk. The second comparator can't be even in question for the analogy to be successfully communicative. (Or, at least, it is communicated as being taken as beyond question.) Notice how one of the two following comparisons is the funnier 'your momma' joke than the other:
Your momma is as fat as Jupiter
Jupiter is as fat as your momma
The second, because your momma's fatness is taken as the base comparator for Jupiter, not the other way around. That's funny… in a 'your momma' joke sort of way. Here's where the interpretive lesson gets weird. I bought some bargain basement cat litter at the corner market, and it had the following comparison on the back:
It reads:
For those of you who are as passionate about your pets as you are about price.
Isn't the implicature of this comparison that whoever buys this cat litter is someone who is passionate about price? Isn't this an overstatement? Shouldn't it be realistic about price? Moreover, isn't this a questionable thought? I'm not passionate about price at all, but I love my cats. So shouldn't the comparators be switched? I think it's a more obvious commitment that we're passionate about the pets. I don't buy cheap cat litter because I have a passion for saving money, but rather, I have a passion for beer, travel, nice things, cats, and so on. So I buy cheap cat litter to fit the budget. That's not price-passion. That's other-stuff-passion. Or, perhaps, I'm not the target market — I had no idea Ebenezer Scrooge was a cat-owner.
Will Oremus has reported at Slate that more people nowadays are believing in global warming, because more people have experienced extreme weather recently.
What accounts for the rebound? It isn’t the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn’t seem to be science: The percentage of respondents to the Yale survey who believe “most scientists think global warming is happening” is stuck at 35 percent, still way down from 48 percent four years ago. . . . No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather. A separate Yale survey this spring found that 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather or natural disasters in the past year.
Pat Robertson changed his mind about global warming, too, because he reported a few years back that his back yard was noticeably hotter. (Note: Robertson more recently said he's not a "disciple of global warming" because there are no SUV's on Mars, so there's that… if you hold your views on weak evidence, it's easy for other weird thoughts to influence you.) And, do you remember how the warming denialists went crazy when D.C. had that big snowstorm?
And so we see the problem with anecdotal evidence: it is certainly relevant, but it is not systematic, often not representative, regularly selective, and too often framed by how the question was asked or by the intensity of the event reported.
Jonah Goldberg has a nice piece over at National Review Online about the way the recently upheld Affordable Care Act has been received at National Public Radio. He picks out Julie Rovner's question about whether there are really any losers in the decision. She eventually concludes that there aren't any. Goldberg can't hold himself back:
It is an interesting perspective given that this is arguably the most controversial law in our lifetimes. It nearly sparked a constitutional crisis, helped cause the Democrats to lose their majority in the House, and, despite herculean efforts by the president to “sell” the law . . . And yet, according to Rovner, the law creates only winners if properly implemented. Why on earth are its opponents so stupid? For the record, there are losers under Obamacare. Here’s a short list: ….
He then goes on with your expected list (taxpayers…it's a tax, you see, Catholics who see part of the law as subsidizing condom use, and people at the bottom of the slippery slope of medication rationing). This, so far, isn't what's good about Goldberg's column. In fact, so far, it's just his usual schlocky version of what a dumb person would think a smart person would say about the issue and about the opposition. But then he surprises:
Obamacare defenders have responses to these objections, and critics have responses to those responses. Still: Serious people do believe that the law creates — or just might create — losers, a fact Rovner might have mentioned.
I don’t mean to pick on Rovner. Her views on Obamacare don’t strike me as exceptional so much as typical — typical of a liberal Washington establishment that still seems incapable of grasping what the fuss is about.
This is nice, except for his saying that he doesn't mean to 'pick on' Rovner. That, of course, is ridiculous — he's making an example of her. That's not wrong, nor is it worth making a big deal about not doing it. Rather, what's nice is that Goldberg sees that this isn't the best the other side can do in the debate, but that it's typical of what the other side does in the debate. That's a good observation, one that shows some real self-awareness and also dialectical sensitivity. You have to disabuse your audience of the bad but widely made arguments before you can get to the good but infrequently given arguments.
Former 13-year old conservative firebrand Jonathan Krohn has had a change of mind, chalks it up to philosophy. Here's his explanation:
Krohn is bucking the received wisdom that people become more conservative as they get older, a shift he attributes partly to philosophy.
“I started reflecting on a lot of what I wrote, just thinking about what I had said and what I had done and started reading a lot of other stuff, and not just political stuff,” Krohn said. “I started getting into philosophy — Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kant and lots of other German philosophers. And then into present philosophers — Saul Kripke, David Chalmers. It was really reading philosophy that didn’t have anything to do with politics that gave me a breather and made me realize that a lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn’t meaningful. It wasn’t me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it.”
My favorite line: "enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it."
Via Leiter.
Some discussion of this and the Texas GOP's crusade against critical thinking here.
Here's the title of Howard Rich's post at American Spectator.
Barack Obama: Socialist or Nouveau Fascist?
Rich argues that Socialism isn't quite right about Obama's policies, as he does let many who have done well keep their spoils. So it's fascism. But the fascism label, Rich concedes, "isn't perfect". That's why he calls it Nouveau Fascism. You see… when the term doesn't work, just call it a new version of that!
The Texas GOP has some curious things to say about education (via TPM):
Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.
Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
On the one hand, evolution and global warming are to be critically assessed, on the other, they don't want to challenge the student's fixed beliefs. Let's hope they don't believe in evolution or anthropogenic climate change.
A belief also not to be challenged, apparently:
We affirm that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle, in public policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin. Additionally, we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction or belief in traditional values.
Ah, "objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories."
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