So the relevance of the Occupy Wall Street movement can’t be denied, at least as a talking point. Its popularity is strong among my Facebook peers, who are totally on board when the the issue comes up. As much as some liberaltarians believe OWS is on the right track, and that they just need to be seen the light – or rather the darkness – at the center of it all, I really don’t see much by the way of fruitful engagement. OWS is a smorgasbord of demands and sentiments, of which anger at TARP is only one, and the whole anti-Fed thing seemingly exclusive to the Ron Paul contingent. According to a Forbes survey of the OWS crowd, they’re all about the following:
- 80% of those polled said that the rich should pay higher taxes and that it’s fair that approximately the top 10% of tax payers pay more than 70% of the taxes in the US and about 40% of employed people pay no income tax.
- 93% say that student loan debt should be forgiven
- 98% believe that health care should be free
- 98% believe that Insurance companies make too much money and some of their profits should be taken to pay for more healthcare for others
- 95% believe that drug prices should be controlled
- 32.5% think the government will do a bad job managing healthcare
- 44% believe that instead of spending money on ObamaCare, we should spend it on jobs today, while 30% believe that we should do both, and 27% say ObamaCare was fine use of money
- 88% agree with the statement that “The government should put some controls on CEO pay – like limited to 20x or 30x the lowest paid employee.”
- 93% believe that communications like cell phone and internet access be a right and not just reserved for the rich and we should have free internet and cell phone service as a national goal.
- 54% do not believe that the Obama stimulus program was a good idea.
- 84% said they think that if a bank decides to implement a $5 debit card fee, the government should not allow it, while 16% said let them do what they want – customers can move.
It matters that OWS reaches libertarian conclusions, when they do, only accidentally, for example in their (relative) lack of support for the stimulus. And as evidenced by everything else on this list, it’s probably only criticized for not doing anything to help the OWS folks find jobs. The above list is a shining example of runaway rights talk that is remarkable for its parochialism (really, the outlawing of 5$ debit card fees?). And if they actually believe that cell phone service and internet access is even remotely close to being in danger of becoming restricted to the rich, and, even worse, that this should be a reason for nationalizing them, then their removal from basic (and not even right-wing) economic theory and history is IMHO practically scandalous.
The Tea Party may have been hypocritical and inconsistent (which is really kind of the same thing I guess), but don’t deny it has more in common with libertarians in their “economic mode” than does OWS. And really, the economic mode just is libertarianism, seeing as how so many libertarians only come to their radical views on foreign policy through their conception of free exchange. For the OWS folks, a constellation of issues all centered around “this sucks” rules the day, with little concern for how it all ties together apart from a general lack of trust between the occupiers and big, large institutions. Especially institutions that deal in finance, something the OWS isn’t personally familiar with, judging from the characteristics of their emerging spokespersons (lots of journalists, humanities majors, and performance artist types). It’s obvious they’re far more motivated by income inequality than political inequality.
OWS may focus on many of the same targets in this politicized economy that’s given us the current state of affairs (and even then), but their misunderstanding of what leads to what – and their plans going forward, as seen above – makes me dubious about any kind of alliance. (As if I give two whits about political activism, but you know, hypothetically speaking.) Libertarians that focus on civil liberties and war will have a better time finding overlap with some in the OWS, but as this shows, good luck getting the latter to forgo occupying something, if not Afghanistan.
I see OWS as an expression of strong moral discontent with the impersonal cash nexus by people who were predisposed to act on those feelings well before the recession, and not a truly populist movement, just as the Tea Party was overwhelmingly made up of conservatives even before they all got together.
This discontent has been made more salient than ever in the wake of a shitty economy and the gains of the super wealthy, whose mere existence anger the OWS crowd in a way the as-long-as-it’s-voluntary crowd doesn’t get. You’ll notice OWS is upset with the rich per se, not just those that have benefited from crony capitalism.
* This guy apparently infiltrated OWS, got pepper sprayed, and believes he deserved it. I guess that wasn’t enough to shake him out of false capitalist consciousness, eh?
October 9, 2011 at 7:53 am
when people agitate for more of the conditions that led to their economic disenfranchisement in the first place it’s the beginning of the end.
October 9, 2011 at 8:04 am
It’s interesting to observe the role some of the liberal media and bloggers have played in their attempts to amplify and sustain OWS and spin it as much more coherent and significant and justified than it obviously is. “An important phenomenon!” Ezra Klein’s site has been particularly ridiculous in this regard, treating the absurd “99%” pretense as somehow salvageable and using OWS mostly as fodder and raw materials to recycle the typical Liberal societal complaints.
There’s a clear effort to try and resurrect the emotion and motivation of what everyone imagines the “legitimately and genuinely radical” 1960′s were like – with all this talk of “Real Revolution!” and “Time for Outrage!”, but everyone senses that this is a pathetic imitation and ersatz emotion and something fundamental is lacking which cannot be cultivated. A Potemkin movement – mimicking the old forms without the substance. Hoping that if everyone pretends and plays along long enough – the false becomes real. Nope.
It’s clear that there is some desperate hope that the “populist energy of dissatisfaction” could be harnessed and channeled politically into a “movement” of durable pressure from the Left but the entropy is too large and no one’s minds or behaviors are going to change because of this. Everyone expects it to fade out and the bloggers are trying to forestall the inevitable public (and political party) conclusion that these things are safely ignored as pointless semi-political flash-mob theater.
A month from now, when everybody moves on to whatever’s next, we’ll look back (maybe) and wonder, “What was that all about again? Bitchfest Woodstock? Random petty-grievance spoiled-whining Camp-Out?”
The other thing that strikes me about this sort of thing, and the one plausible global connection to things like the mass youth, internet-social-media fueled, public-square protest-camp stand-ins of the “Arab Spring” or the Spanish “‘los indignados” is the real frustration resulting from an increasingly common huge disconnect between the fantasy (almost Utopian) expectations of a luxurious and fulfilling life-path entire young generation and the banal disappointments of reality – which is perhaps why it all seems so petty and immature to me – a childish plea to be provided with a permanent evasionist dreamland and escapism from necessity. I observe the same corrosive phenomenon at work in undermining long-term relationships once the puppy-love phase has passed.
It really seems to be one of the key mass-psychological diseases of our time. It seems that PC contains within it a certain prohibition against “crushing silly dreams with sad-but-true hard-facts”, so we’re just going to have to evolve a new societal equilibrium where everyone develops new coping skills to deal with their inevitable overblown frustrations and disappointments.
October 9, 2011 at 5:40 pm
A more mature reality no matter how defined, is as much a dreamland, it seems to me. Slack or build, we are most likely hurtling to the same destiny. The most herculean effort isn’t going to leap across the uncertainty bars to our doom. What remains are aesthetic wars.
October 10, 2011 at 12:55 pm
I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying here, but it has my interest. Could you explain this idea with more detail?
October 10, 2011 at 4:11 pm
” a childish plea to be provided with a permanent evasionist dreamland”
-My comment was nothing deeper the surface. We’re all probably doomed. So to call the protesters “childish” is to engage in an aesthetic battle over dreamland contours, it seems to me.
October 9, 2011 at 12:12 pm
People have made comparisons to the anti-globalization protesters of the 90s and the anti-war protests before Iraq, and the comparison may well be apt. Nothing really resulted from any of that. The Tea Party had politicians to support, even if they were new faces who had to win primaries and maybe then crash and burn (not the usual case, but it showed they would take that risk). O.W.S seems more disengaged, has fewer obvious way any target of their ire could feasibly act to appease them, and the bad economy if anything will help the GOP presidential candidate.
For many people there is no larger goal in O.W.S, they say they are creating the society they want to live in. I suppose they just enjoy protests. One might say some of the Ron Paul campaigns were similar in that there was negligible chance of accomplishing anything, they just wanted to do something and be seen and heard. Paul often said that his activities are directed to be educational, and I’ve heard some relatively centrist people recommend that O.W.S be used as an opportunity to inform these people about using smaller banks or credit unions as a practical way to act against the big banks they hate. Rothbard was attracted to the New Left in the 60s/70s both as possible allies and recruits, and it wouldn’t be a stretch for those libertarians he has influenced to think the same thing today. This variety of leftism seems to be a very youthful tendency, and perhaps the kids will grow up. Although they will more likely end up more centrist liberals, as Steve Pinker did.
October 9, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Steve Pinker is a great thinker who becomes shittier whenever he tries to be liberal. I’m thinking of the recent bloggingheads, where I think John Horgan did a good job checking Prof. Pinker on bullshit to let his (if nothing else) deep and wide literacy shine.
October 10, 2011 at 7:38 pm
I watched that diavlog but I don’t recall Horgan doing much checking. All I can recall now is his citing of neo-Rousseauian antrhopologists like Brian Ferguson on the lack of violence in ancient times. And I only remember that because I watched him interview Ferguson earlier and had concluded he doesn’t know much.
Azar Gat did a comprehensive enough job in “War in Human Civilization” that I don’t know what more Pinker is going to add. I know he mentioned Randall Collins, whose “Violence: A Microsociological Theory” I found very interesting, and I can’t remember if Gat referenced his work.
October 9, 2011 at 7:20 pm
It’s not really hard to understand what OWS is about.
Libertarian rhetoric is implicated in the problems OWS is addressing (eg, financial deregulation). Whether that is the fault of actual libertarians doesn’t matter that much. Furthermore, some of the very reasonable and boring proposals being floated (eg, a financial transaction tax) are anti-libertarian.
October 9, 2011 at 9:37 pm
His summary is a nice way of wrapping up OWS into something specific and actionable related to the financial crisis, but the OWS as shown by a casual sample of the actual protestors shows discontent with inequality as such, perhipheral issues like education and even war, and at least a questionable understanding of basic econ in their penchant for wanting lots of things to be free and sympathy for regulation of minutiae like debit card fees. Maybe that’s what PJ ORourke was getting at…
If it’s just anger over the bailouts, then they’re the same as the Tea Party (except that the latter would prefer to punish those that did the bailing out, not its recipients). But both OWS and TP recognize that the other’s ideology includes far more than views on the financial crisis.
So yes this implicates alot of libertarian rhetoric, including the stuff unrelated (at least directly) to policy.
October 10, 2011 at 12:24 am
Well, what do you expect? It’s not a movement controlled by a central committee, it’s whoever feels like camping out or holding a sign. So yeah, no message discipline, but would you be happier with it if everyone was toeing a party line? I know that’s how Republican faux-populist movements work, but this is different.
Your second pgraph seems deeply confused. It’s not “just anger over the bailouts” and I’ve seen no indication that that’s the case. It’s anger over the perception (true or not) that Wall Street has wrecked the economy and instead of paying a price for that has reaped huge rewards. Government and private industry were jointly complicit in this and for the most part still are. I don’t believe that “punishment” is the main goal, either.
October 17, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Quite the opposite. The crash and subsequent recession have the fingerprints of well-meaning liberal social engineers all over them. The housing bubble was created by a huge influx of money into the market via the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GSEs were mandated by Congress beginning in 1992 to hold increasing percentages of subprime loans to borrowers with incomes below the median, and especially to borrowers with incomes at or below 60% of the median. Furthermore, down-payment requirements were cut to practically nil at the urging of politicians. No sane lender would have made such loans were it not for this government pressure, and the resultant demand for the loans on the secondary market from the Fannie/Freddie duopsony. Politicians in both parties bear the primary blame – be they liberal Democrats like Barney Frank (“roll the dice on subsidized housing”) or faux-conservative Republicans like George Bush (“the ownership society”).
Financial deregulation had much less to do with this than did politicized allocation of credit. The same political aspects led to the savings-and-loan crisis decades earlier; the S&L industry had long been favored by politicians over commercial banking, and given a more lenient regulatory treatment contingent on its support for residential housing. The fact is that there has long been favored treatment for owner-occupied housing as opposed to other types of capital investment. This favor is seen in several aspects of the tax code as well as in direct or indirect subsidy. The result has been a great misallocation of capital into housing in the United States.
Apropos of “financial transaction taxes,” there already is a significant one – the capital gains tax. All that capital gains taxes accomplish is to set barriers in the way of the flow of capital to its most efficient use. We may see the distortive effect of capital gains taxation and its selective relief in the exemption of up to $500,000 in capital gain on the sale of a principal residence. This has been an undoubted factor, as have the mortgage interest deduction and the local property tax deduction, in encouraging the flow of capital into residential real estate – though, I suspect, none of these has been as great a factor as subsidized lending via government’s creatures, Fannie and Freddie.
October 10, 2011 at 1:42 am
mtraven,
Don’t misunderstand my distancing of OWS from Grayson’s specifics as a sign of no ideological discipline whatsoever. They are as constrained in their economic viewpoints as the Tea Partiers, and about equally “populist” (i.e. not).
I don’t see them as just angry over the bailouts, but Grayson’s view would seem to suggest that is the core of the anger among OWS. So I was criticizing that perception, suggested by Grayson, that it’s primarily about bailouts.
I agree with you about their perception.
October 10, 2011 at 9:27 am
Here’s a pretty reasonable overview by Todd Gitlin of OWS culture and its roots in anarchism. (via).
October 10, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Interesting how I’ve seen both OWS and TP now described as anarchist.
October 11, 2011 at 12:54 am
Now there’s this.
According to a press release for the march, the targets were, “specifically chosen for their willingness to hoard wealth at the expense of the 99%.”
Death to the hoarders! This shit is as ancient as it is base.
October 11, 2011 at 1:09 am
Where does your aesthetic come from? On the one hand “rational” targeting of rentier elites seems astroturfy to me because the masses are too stupid to have that as a schelling point.
On the other hand, it’s comical to have a good faith pity party for people at the beneficial 1% tail of just about any distribution pattern.
I’m not a progressive because my focus isn’t on either the central tendency or the left tail of the distribution when it comes to resource control (outcomes and safety nets is a trickier question but my focus sure as hell isn’t on risking survival of the central tendency to protect welfare or egalitarian conditions for the left tail).
But the baseness claim I don’t really get. Policing against resource hoarding doesn’t seem base to me in and of itself. Then the discussion becomes technocratic.
October 11, 2011 at 2:17 pm
I say base because for me the idea that someone merely having a bunch of wealth that you don’t have, and “marching on them” for this, is so anti-intellectual in its disdain for a successful minority qua successful minority that it seems repulsive to me. Like a first world version of Africans mobbing to drive out prosperous Indian immigrants.
It’s definitely an aesthetic thing, the “repulsive” part and all.
It has as much to do with throwing a pity party for the 1% as being repulsed at the beating of a deformed kid for being ugly has to do with a pity party for the differently abled.
Whew, not sure about the above sentence structure.
October 13, 2011 at 12:13 pm
The looters are also fighting eh? Not unexpected.
The poll does confirm my suspicions about the overall alignments of this movement.
October 13, 2011 at 12:41 pm
The choice of the word “base” is extremely telling.
If you buy into the aristocratic worldview, then obviously any democratic movement is going to appear as a bunch of lowlifes.
More support for my theory that libertarians are just reactionaries with a superficial overlay of freedom rhetoric.
October 13, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Sure, but you don’t know what else I think is base too.
October 17, 2011 at 8:55 pm
It’s a big assumption, isn’t it, that OWS is a “democratic” movement? It appears to be bankrolled by the usual sources – Soros, the SEIU, and other long-time Obama supporters. And how convenient OWS comes along just as Obama has changed his strategy to rouse his left/liberal base.
Whether that base is “base” is another discussion. One doesn’t have to “buy into an aristocratic world view” to observe with some distaste the filthy behavior of many of the OWS crowd, including defecting, urinating, and fornicating in public view. I suppose that’s so much more authentically proletarian than the behavior of people at the Tea Party rallies, who began their meetings with a prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the national anthem – and who left in orderly fashion afterwards, leaving the venues cleaner than they found them.
The seeming inconsistency of some of the polling results reported for the OWS protestors does not remove their basic statist and dirigiste tendency. Indeed, the world view represented reflects the basic contradictions of leftism, as perceptively outlined by a former man of the left, Eugene Genovese:
“With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Left has suffered a political and moral Waterloo. … the principal political and ideological organs of the Left have generally suffered from the congenital disease of a utopianism based on the assumption of human goodness or of a morally neutral human nature that must be shaped by education – which often means manipulated by an elite that invokes the rhetoric of egalitarianism and anti-elitism. The Communist movement… long provided a practical antidote to Marx’s own romance with personal liberation as the natural outcome of communist social relations. Wherever the radical Left has remained in opposition, it has been able to disguise the split in its ranks between those who at bottom oppose all authority and order and those determined to impose a firmly disciplined alternate social order. Once in power, the radical Left has always reduced its theoretical commitment to personal liberation to lip-service and has settled accounts with its quasi-anarchists and personal liberationists. As everyone surely has noticed, it has settled those accounts rather disagreeably.
“The collapse of the socialist system of state ownership of the means of production has tellingly exposed the futility of the ideal of a radically egalitarian society of free and autonomous individuals. Every step of the way, the socialist experience, as well as the performance of social democracy whenever it has come to power, has generated bureaucratic forms of stratification that have dashed radical-democratic and egalitarian dogmas. However much Marxists, among others, may ridicule Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of the ‘circulation of elites,’ those elites, like the poor, we have always with us. The more they are denied in theory – the more we are inundated with anti-elitist rhetoric and compelled to proceed on radical-egalitarian premises – the greater the room for irresponsibility and unaccountability in our leaders.”
Genovese then targets the libertarian right with equal accuracy:
“What goes largely unnoticed is that, on much of the American Right, the conservative critique of modernity has largely given way to a free-market liberalism the ideal of which shares much with the radicak Left’s version of egalitarianism. The traditionalists are entitled to gloat, for they have always regarded socialism and radical democracy as the logical outcome of bourgeois liberalism. The free-market Right professes to believe in a level playing field and an attendant doctrine of equality of opportunity, despite all evidence that neither could ever be realized. The projected hopes are no less an invitation to disillusionment and despair than their counterpart in the Left’s chimera of quality of outcome and ultimate condition. And they are just as cruel. The left-wing version of egalitarianism generates the politics of envy and the degrading psychology of victimization. Those who cannot match the performance of others blame sexism, racism, and other forms of social oppression for their personal failures and shortcomings.
“The right-wing version produces similar effects, perhaps psychologically even more devastating…”
The gist of the problem he finds in Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have Conseqences.” Weaver warned, he said,
“if the ravages of what he called the ‘hysterical optimism’ of modern man, an he felt compelled to pose an unpleasant possibility: ‘Whether man any longer wants to live in society at all or is willing to accept animal relationships is a question that must be raised in all seriousness’… To raise that question in all seriousness would require a reevaluation of the limits of democracy and equality in the spirit of the republican origins of our nation, and it would require a scuttling of radical individualism and egalitarianism. Political realism, as self-defeating cynicism likes to call itself, teaches that frank talk on such matters would be politically suicidal. And Americans justifiably do refuse to defer to an irresponsible political and cultural elite that maintains a straight face while denying that it is in fact a political and cultural elite.”
Note the very last sentence. “An irresponsible political and cultural elite that maintains a straight face while denying that it is in fact a political and cultural elite” is exactly what we have. At the head of this elite, this new class, is Barack Obama – who has been president for three years, who had control of all branches of government for two of them, who refers with contempt to middle Americans as “clinging to their guns and their religion” – a man who was heavily subsidized in his campaign by the very Wall Street personages he pretends to lambaste when he invokes the rhetoric of egalitarianism and anti-elitism – and the OWS people are foolish enough to take him at face value. L’incroyable bêtise de l’humanité!
October 19, 2011 at 2:52 pm
If you want to regurgitate wingnut propaganda, feel free, but the actual background of the movement is more interesting and readily available.
October 20, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Are you describing Prof. Genovese’s analysis as “wingnut propaganda”?
As for the OWS “movement,” which one? The bowel movement left on a police car by one of the protesters? That’s about par for their course, along with the overtly communist signs and barriers carried by some of the protesters. These are the same hard-core fringe that showed up to break windows in anti-globalization protests in Seattle. It amazes me how the press can yawn at communists, despite the bloody box score of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest, which makes Hitler look like a piker.
Remember the horrified commentators who thought the Tea Party posed a threat of violence, and when the psychotic Jared Loughner shot up a crowd in Tucson at a Gabrielle Giffords rally, tried to smear the Tea Party by association? Loughner of course proved to be so incoherent that no political content could be discerned in his ravings. But one of the OWS protesters was recorded in a rant in which he said “the bourgeoisie will not go without violence.” Then the egregious Roseanne Barr shows up suggesting that bankers be guillotined. Another big yawn from the
punditocracy.
Then there are the OWS protesters who make statements like this:
“I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government… they need to be run out of the country.”
Such remarks have elicited a call from the Anti-Defamation League for OWS to condemn such “bigoted statements” among their participants. I suppose you’d say that the ADL is here engaging in “wingnut propaganda.” Pas d’ennemi au gauche, and all that, don’t you know.
October 20, 2011 at 6:45 pm
N.B. – Further to mtraven’s comment, after examining his link to David Graeber’s website, a quick check of the Wikipedia entry on David Graeber reveals:
“Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002), membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, and an early role in Occupy Wall Street.”
In other words, he is indeed part of the same hard-core fringe that broke windows at anti-globablization protests a few years ago – in his case, at New York, not Seattle. And he’s a Wobbly!
Moreover, under “Biography and Early Life”, we read:
“Graeber’s father, Kenneth Graeber, participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil War [2] and his mother, then Ruth Rubinstein, was part of the original cast of the 1930s labor stage review Pins & Needles, performed entirely by garment workers [3].”
His father fought for the commies in Spain. The son is a red-diaper baby. Surprise, surprise!
October 21, 2011 at 11:54 am
Stopped reading after “It appears to be bankrolled by the usual sources – Soros, the SEIU, and other long-time Obama supporters.” Lies, and boring lies at that.
October 21, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Here’s an apparently left-wing website claiming that Soros (through Moveon.org), the Tides Foundation (through Adbusters), etc., have funded OWS:
“Currently, groups such as the Tides Foundation and Moveon.org have been supporting OWS. Moveon.org launched a virtual march on Wall Street on October 5th and is attempting to co-opt the movement. The Tides Foundation comes in to play somewhat indirectly as they financially support Adbusters, which organized the entire movement. This is worrisome as Moveon.org is financed by George Soros who has a history of aiding in the engineering pseudo-democratic revolutions in tandem with the US government (see this as well) and the Tides Foundation itself is financed by the Ford Foundation, which has been involved in social engineering in the past.”
http://theprogressiveplaybook.com/author/devon/
As for union support, here’s another left-wing site documenting that point:
http://www.workers.org/2011/us/unions_1027/
If you are going to call these sources, which are hardly unsympathetic to OWS, liars about OWS’s sources of support, at least bother to provide proof. Your word on it inspires no trust.
October 21, 2011 at 4:09 pm
More on labor union support for OWS, this time from that organ of “wingnut propaganda,” the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/occupy-wall-street-and-labor-movement-forming-uneasy-alliance/2011/10/19/gIQAkxo80L_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics
Some excerpts follow -
“Labor groups are mobilizing to provide office space, meeting rooms, photocopying services, legal help, food and other necessities to the protesters. The support is lending some institutional heft to a movement that has prided itself on its freewheeling, non-institutional character….
“Several labor groups, including Service Employees International Union Local 1199, dispatched thousands of members to the park by 6 a.m. last Friday to help protesters stand their ground. Meanwhile, Vincent Alvarez, president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council in the city, spoke with City Hall aides to dissuade Bloomberg from removing the activists, union officials said.
“Union members and organizers have also pitched in for demonstrations in Boston, Sacramento, St. Louis and Los Angeles. Some union members have been camping out in Los Angeles, and in every location, Trumka said, union halls are being opened to protesters for meetings or respite.
“In New York, protesters are storing gear at a teachers union hall. Some of the committees that have been formed to govern the group are meeting at a union office for City University of New York faculty and staff. SEIU members, many of them health-care workers, are pitching in to provide medical support, and other union members are donating rain ponchos, T-shirts, food and water.
“SEIU plans to print an edition of the movement’s makeshift newspaper, the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
” ‘I have been shocked at how much support has come from labor,” said DiSalvo, 68, a retired English professor who helped form the Occupy Wall Street labor committee. “I think they feel this is giving their ranks some juice’.”
Is the Washington Post, too, repeating “lies, and boring lies at that”?
Proof, please, of its mendacity – or look in the mirror to find the liar.
October 22, 2011 at 3:08 pm
[...] on Hard Work vs. Good Luck” and “On OWS” (Occupy Wall…yea you got [...]
October 22, 2011 at 10:35 pm
The way I heard it, one of Soros’s organizations gave some money to one organization (Tides Foundation), which in turn gave some of it to Adbusters, a few years back. To think that equates to “bankrolling OWS” is seriously moronic.
Bullshit deconstructed here, took all of 15 seconds to find this on Google.
Glenn Beck tried to paint Soros as some kind of criminal mastermind of the left when he still was on Fox, quite overstepping the line into overt antisemitism in the process. But Beck’s shtick is clearly aimed at the feebleminded, I can’t imagine anybody with an IQ over 80 taking him seriously.
Similarly, there is nothing remotely wrong with labor unions offering support to OWS, and nobody who didn’t have a tendentious agenda would refer to it as some kind of invidious “bankrolling”.
October 23, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Labor unions extract money from their members, who must belong to unions in order to hold their jobs. The law reads that such monies can only be used for collective bargaining, and not for other purposes, without the consent of the member (under Communications Workers of America v. Beck, 487 U.S 735 [1988]), but the Obama administration and the NLRB as currently constituted have refused to enforce it. So, the fact is, unions are providing material support (bankrolling) this exercise in far-left politics, and in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Money is fungible. If Soros had not provided funding to the Tides Foundation when and in the amount he did, the moneys it spent on the red-diaper babies’ OWS protests would not have been there. That’s a fact, whatever you may argue about Soros’s intent. As for his character, he is a currency speculator convicted by a French court of illegal manipulation of markets, a verdict the French court of cassation refused to reverse despite all the money Soros spent on litigation. He depends upon chaos in markets for success in his trades, and – as the French courts found – undertakes actively to create it. That’s also a fact. One would have to have an IQ under 80 not to suspect that his motives in supporting various left-wing rabble-rousers have a self-serving element.
As for “overt anti-Semitism,” what do you think of the support given to OWS by David Duke and the American Nazi party?
October 23, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Here’s a link to David Duke saying he “cheers” OWS:
Here’s an OWS protester going on about “Jews control Wall Street” and “Jewish billionaires” at some length:
Here’s a long list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli statements by associates and supporters of OWS, including Adbusters:
http://biggovernment.com/jdunetz/2011/10/21/the-anti-semitic-and-anti-israel-organizers-of-occupywallstreet/
If Glenn Beck was guilty of “overt anti-Semitism” in his description of George Soros, how about these guys? Do your political bedfellows please you, mtraven? Some of them ought to put a brown racing stripe in your red diaper.
October 23, 2011 at 8:11 pm
A movement big enough to encompass both David Duke and George Soros sounds pretty unstoppable.
Re anti-semitism, here’s a handy guide:
- if Glenn Beck peddles anti-semitism on his show, he’s guilty of peddling anti-semitism.
- if David Duke peddles anti-semitism, he’s guilty of peddling anti-semitism.
- if person A who claims to support OWS peddles anti-semitism, person B who also claims to support OWS is not thereby guilty of peddling anti-semitism.
- if the OWS central committee existed and peddled anti-semitism, then perhaps anyone who affiliated with the movement would be guilty. However, there isn’t one and if there was, it wouldn’t be, and so they aren’t.
Not that complicated!
October 23, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Well, I suppose David Duke has some sort of sympathy with the kind of Jew who would betray his own people to the Nazis, as Soros confessed to doing in his “Sixty Minutes” interview with Steve Kroft on Dec. 20, 1998:
“KROFT: (Voiceover) You’re a Hungarian Jew…
“Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
“KROFT: (Voiceover) …who escaped the Holocaust…
(Vintage footage of women walking by train)
“Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
(Vintage footage of people getting on train)
“KROFT: (Voiceover) … by — by posing as a Christian.
“Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Right.
(Vintage footage of women helping each other get on train; train door closing with people in boxcar)
“KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
“Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.
“KROFT: In what way?
“Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and — and anticipate events and when — when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a — a very personal experience of evil.
“KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
“Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
“KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
“Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
“KROFT: I mean, that’s — that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
“Mr. SOROS: Not — not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t — you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no — no problem at all.
“KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
“Mr. SOROS: No.
“KROFT: For example that, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?
“Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c — I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would — would — would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the — whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the — I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin.
October 23, 2011 at 8:29 pm
And for the advanced student:
- criticizing Israel does not make one an anti-semite
- criticizing the American Israel lobby does not make one an anti-semite
But given the remedial nature of this class, understanding the above propositions will be optional.
October 23, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Do you think the fellow in the second You-Tube, who was present at Zuccotti Park, was just criticising Israel? He was going on about “Jewish billionaires” and Jewish control of the Federal Reserve System, Goldman Sachs, etc., just as David Duke did.
You were ready to condemn the Tea Party as “racist” on much less substantial evidence. No one at a Tea Party rally was ever found, despite all the efforts of the press to do so, who was as overtly a racist as the OWS protester in that video was an anti-Semite. Your reasoning about an OWS central committee, etc., applies also to the Tea Party, but that did not stop you from using the technique of guilt by association. So applying it to your favored cause is merely a case of turnabout being fair play. Surely given the remedial nature of this instruction, it won’t hurt to emphasize that.
You were ready, as I recall, to condemn Bill O’Reilly for inspiring the murder of an abortionist by a crank. Well, criticising an abortionist does not make one an advocate of his murder. Before attempting moral instruction of others, put your own house in order. Apply your logic to yourself. I suppose that the reason you don’t is that being a hypocrite goes along with being a commie.
October 25, 2011 at 12:57 am
You seem to spend an awful lot of time parsing my writings looking for inconsistencies. I can’t say it’s mutual; I rarely bother to read yours all the way through. I don’t trust your representations of what I may have said in the past, so you better produce quotes and links if you want me to defend them.
The attempts at smearing the thousands of OWS supporters based on a couple of antisemitic signs is pretty pathetic. And of course it isn’t even original, it’s just just the latest wingnut hackery from the usual propaganda mills.
I’m a little confused by your position, because whatever degree racism might infest the Tea Party movement, there is no doubt at all that you yourself are a pretty thoroughgoing racist, so why would you get upset at my (alleged) labeling of the teabaggers?
There’s actually an interesting question hiding in here somewhere, which I started getting at in my last post, which is about the nature of the relationship between mass movements and the people who comprise them. One guy spouting antisemtisim says nothing about all the other supporters of OWS. If 10% of OWS had such opinions (obviously, that’s nowhere near the case) would that implicate the other 90%? Maybe. Are leaderless movements different than top-down movements in this regard? How does one defend a “brand” from distortion and dilution when nobody owns it and nobody is in charge?
October 25, 2011 at 9:18 am
I’m obviously pretty successful at “getting your goat,” otherwise you would not reply to me at such length. If I can get you to spend time doing so, it is that much less time you spend subverting the social order – a small benefit indeed, but nonetheless a benefit to tradition, family, and property. It makes me feel as if I have done my good deed for the day.
In what respect am I a “racist”? I do not hate people because of their race. I do dislike, and criticize, lower-class behavior such as criminality, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity leading to bastardy, etc. This is – is it not? – judging people “by the content of their character.” I cannot help it if these behaviors do not happen to be evenly represented amongst all ethnicities. If finding fault with them is to be called “racist” because it applies to one or another of them with disproportionate impact, that serves only to demonstrate the emptiness of the characterization. As Brimelow observed, a “racist” is nowadays no more than someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.
October 25, 2011 at 10:55 am
Spending time arguing with wingnuts like you is my small way of subverting the social order. I’m sure you won’t be persuaded, but others reading might, and it helps me clarify my thinking.
You attempt to turn every post on my blog into a diatribe about race; that indicates a deep obsession, but you are evidently in denial about your own beliefs. One of the very few things I like about the blogosphere around Moldbug etc is that they are open about their racism. For you to deny yours (while quoting from Peter Brimelow no less) diminishes your standing.
October 25, 2011 at 11:31 am
Further to mtraven:
Here is a link to your screed of 7 June 2009, blaming Fox News and Bill O’Reilly for the murder of the abortionist George Tiller -
http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2009/06/nobody-believes-in-embryonic-personhood.html
and here are excerpts from it -
“I’ve been trying to find something original to say about the assassination of George Tiller. That this is an act of domestic terrorism seems indisputable. That this terrorism was egged on by a major media corporation, Fox News, is also indisputable.”
And from your subsequent comments -
“Fox News seems to have been directly involved in instigating violence against Dr. Tiller, and it has a greater reach than the New York Times and similar organs of liberal opinion.”
“I was speaking of Bill O’Reilly, who went far beyond “pressing a point”, and targetted a single individual…”
On the purported racism of the Tea Party, from your comments subsequent to your post of 31 May 2010, found here -
http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/05/support-nontroops.html
“You can see a manifestation of this in the tea party movement, which is an ominous stew of libertarian rhetoric and racist practices.
“I’m beginning to think (and it’s not a terribly original thought, but it is becoming clearer to me) how race underlies almost every issue in US politics, even when it isn’t explicit. Why don’t we have a system of national health care, for example, like every other industrialized country? I’m convinced that it’s because a good segment of the population views this and any other social-welfare scheme as transfer payments from deserving whites to undeserving blacks.”
You provide no evidence of the Tea Party’s “racist practices” – it suffices that you are “convinced” that opposition to socialized medicine and any other social welfare scheme is due to the opponents’ racism. That’s a considerable stretch, compared to conservatives’ drawing attention to the overtly anti-Semitic palaver of some OWS protesters. If you can seriously call the article you linked to in the Washington Post (hardly an organ of right-wing propaganda) “just the latest wingnut hackery,” you show only how far out in left field you really are. Well, I suppose Browder is your leader and you shall not be moved.
October 25, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Moldbug is not a “racist.” He does not propose to put on a bedsheet and lynch blacks. He is critical of the lumpenprole subculture, which by an accident of history in this country happens to be largely black. He would be as critical of such behavior whether or not they were.
Here’s an interesting link from the New York Times, a map showing the distribution of murders in the city from 2003 through 2011:
http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map
By using the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page, the reader can see statistics on these crimes broken down by the race or ethnicity of the perpetrator. In doing so we find that 61% of them were black, 29% Hispanic, 7% white, and 3% Asian.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 blacks comprised 25.5% of New York City’s population, the Hispanic or Latino element was 28.6%, whites of non-Hispanic ancestry amounted to 33.3%, and Asians to 12.7%.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html
Is calling attention to the disproportionate number of murders committed by blacks “racist”? Is merely having an aversion to murder?
October 25, 2011 at 9:15 pm
I don’t really feel like I need to walk back a word of that.
But, I will add that the Tea Party, like OWS, is a complex movement and the people participating it have a range of motivations. So I would never say that participating in them makes you a racist, or anything that simplistic.
The racism found in the right-wing events and writings is an almost inescapable fact, a constant underground force in American politics that nobody can avoid dealing with in some way, aligning either with it or against it. In the case of the tea parties, they are pretty much just a rebranding of the low-rent segments of the Republican coalition, which has come to be virtually identical with the neoconfederacy. So, despite their best efforts to woo minorities, they just can’t help being the party of white privilege. Having a black president has just precipitated this stuff out of the solution.
Some more on the neoconfederacy here and here, for starters.
October 27, 2011 at 9:34 am
I’m sympathetic to neoconfederate agitation, if that means divorcing blue America from contiguous red southern America.
I think there would be major economic gains for the world by non-southern US socializing its healthcare system alone.
October 26, 2011 at 11:29 am
If “racism” is such an “inescapable fact” on the right, why is Herman Cain currently leading the field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination?
I am acquainted with no conservatives who admire the Ku Klux Klan or who wish to reinstitute Jim Crow laws. These are positions that could reasonably be called racist, and are held by very, very, few people.
On the other hand, if a preference for lower taxes and smaller government, caution about the costs of welfare programs, criticism of the idleness and criminality of the lower classes, and other aspects of social dysfunction abetted by the welfare/regulatory state, are to be identified as symptoms of “racism” – why, then, racism is everywhere. No wonder any attempt to discuss such matters with you devolves to a “diatribe about race.” Racism is the bogey-man under your bed.
Your assertion that the Tea Party represents “low-rent segments of the Republican coalition” is, for a professed egalitarian, a remarkable display of hauteur. Scratch a leveller and uncover a snob! It is also in error – the demographic data show that Tea Party members have above-average incomes and are better-educated than average:
http://digitaljournal.com/article/289821
October 27, 2011 at 12:41 am
“He is critical of the lumpenprole subculture, which by an accident of history in this country happens to be largely black”
It would be an improvement on reality if that were true, but unfortunately I think it’s bullshit. The share of lumpenprole subculture which is non-black is unfortunately ginormous, it seems to me.
October 27, 2011 at 12:46 am
I think good empirical tests (because I think a New York metro sample of whites and maybe even hispanics would be skewed non-lumpenprole) would be the % of murders committed by whites in Alabama & % of murders committed by non-blacks in Texas. If blacks continue to be the vast majority of murderers in both states, dwarfing whites by an order of magnitude, then I’ll concede that by some measures the lumpenprole is largely black in the US.
October 27, 2011 at 7:37 am
The national statistics show that 51% of murders are committed by blacks, who make up about 13% of the population. The disproportion is even greater than these numbers suggest, because the offenders in question are almost all males, and aged between their later teens and early thirties.
As soon as I find the data for the states you indicated, I’ll post them here. I expect they will parallel national data in the same way New York’s did, that is, with numbers in proportion to the black population.
The difference between the black and white lumpenproletariats is that the blacks are largely urban, whereas the whites are more rural. They are also considerably less violent. Your point is taken that trash is still trash, regardless of color; and it is really against a trash culture, not against any particular race or color, that Moldbug’s distaste and mine are directed.
November 1, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Should let this thread die, but could not resist posting this quite comprehensive list, from a whole swathe of Jewish sources, putting to rest the wingnut propaganda that OWS is anti-semitic.
November 2, 2011 at 7:35 pm
All those quotes are from subscribers to the maxim “pas d’ennemis à gauche.” It is an unfortunate accident of history that the pattern of Jewish immigration brought with it such a sympathy for left-wing causes that it has induced a sort of willful blindness to the obvious. Left-wing Jews fell obediently into line with the Hitler-Stalin pact, despite its obvious disadvantages to their co-ethnics abroad. In the case of OWS, to quote Marx’s one true aphorism, “History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Of course OWS is not primarily focused on anti-semitism; it is an incidental and occasional manifestation. And some of the people behind OWS, like David Graeber, are ethnically Jewish red-diaper babies. The major current in this movement is, however, summarized in the following (N.B. – click “skip this ad”):
November 2, 2011 at 9:02 pm
I’ve noticed you have a habit of dropping a foreign phrase and pretending that it constitutes an argument.
Bill “steely-eyed missle man” Whittle. What a scheisskopf. The argument that since protestors make use of the products of corporations, they can’t possibly object to any actions whatsoever of corporations, of course means that people who make use of any of the products of government (eg roads, law, defense) can’t object to any actions of government. In short, it’s idiotic and any halfway bright six-year-old could see that it’s idiotic.
November 2, 2011 at 11:20 pm
I have a real soft spot for intellectually average, well-meaning public advocates for change -the type that abound in particular in the Occupy videos of lesser cities than NY or LA.
They’re the folks that stand up to the wrong boss, the sibling that stands up to the wrong parent while folks like me kiss his ass -they tend to bear the costs of their virtue and the slicker of us benefit double: first from the positive change that frequently results from their advocacy, and second for increase in the value of our loyalty to authority thanks to their transgression.
In my own microsocial activity I treat the defiant complainer role as a spot usually to avoid, and a tell that the defiant complainer is the least socially intelligent person in the room. But of course it doesn’t always play out that way in real life- sometimes the defiant complainer rises in status and has the all around better outcome -but this type of success holds only for the socially flexible, able to nimbly switch from outsider to insider roles as opportunity dictates.
That isn’t the typical fate of the stickily defiant complainers of the types at these Occupy movements. In some ways they’re more earthily human that people like me, although I suppose we’re all just as doomed.
November 3, 2011 at 11:58 am
HA, as usual you are making explicit some of the dynamics that usually are left under the table — probably a good thing, but you tend to be too reductive, or at least your style seems that way. Have you read Goffman?
It’s an interesting question as to what motivates someone to complain or take direct action. Part of it may be low social intelligence, part of it may just be desperation, or a need to be heard.
There’s no rational reason to vote, either, to take a small and institutionally approved way of making your voice heard. But people do it, because they want to be part of things. You may consider movements like OWS an extension of the same dynamic.
November 4, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“Have you read Goffman?”
TGGP, please fight the urge to laugh at that one.
MTravern, yes, Goffman’s analytical framework for looking at microsociology and semiotics (I think he calls it interpersonal theater or some such thing) is probably one of my strongest influences.
November 3, 2011 at 12:31 am
Whittle’s argument is not as you state, but rather that the OWS protesters are spoilt children.
The phrase means “no enemies to the left,” and describes precisely the sort of willingness you and others of your stripe perennially exhibit to ignore the unpleasant aspects of your allies in the cause – whether it be Stalin’s alliance of convenience with Hitler, or the crazies and extremists of all sorts that populate OWS – all in the pursuit of the main chance, the hope that springs eternal on the left, that you can at last destroy social hierarchy, private property, and free enterprise.
I very much doubt that this will be accomplished by the motley crew present in Zuccotti Park made up of red diaper babies and collegiate crybabies, keepers of the Communist Party flame, LaRouche followers, bums and derelicts looking to mooch free meals, druggies, gropers, and people who defecate on police cars. I look forward to seeing their reaction to the first good snow storm.
November 3, 2011 at 11:52 am
I know what the phrase means, and it seems to have zero applicability in this case. The list I quoted includes quotes from such radical leftists as the ADL and Elliot Spitzer. None of these are shy about calling out anti-semitism where it actually exists.
For someone who inherited a bank and presumably has never had to worry about paying the rent or feeding himself to tell young people facing both economic hardship and police violence, people who are putting themselves on the line to fight social injustice, that they are “spoiled” — well, that takes an extra-special brand of clueless douchebaggery.
Of course, there is some truth to the accusation, there always is an element of truth in wingnut propaganda, enough to support the lie. Americans in general are kind of spoiled and expect all the benefits of civilization without having to pay the costs, and tend to sit on their asses rather than doing anything about the problems facing society. However, the OWS activists are doing something, so I’d say they are the last people in this country to be labeled “spoiled”.
And I believe you started this discussion complaining about the influence of labor unions. You can like or dislike labor but “spoiled” generally doesn’t apply, they too tend to be people who are fighting for their rather small share of the pie. So which is it — is it a movement of spoiled, overprivileged college undergraduates, or does it include workers and the rest of society?
I believe and hope that it’s tending towards the latter, which is what will make it successful. There are signs of it becoming a sort of closed countercultural phenomenon, which will limit it. We’ll see.
November 3, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Oh, it’s a Duke’s mixture, to be sure. The labor unions have given it support, because they see an opportunity to press their agenda. So do the inveterate commies and other crackpots. The labor union movement today is hardly made up of horny-handed sons of toil. It is mostly composed of government employees of some sort, who have saddled the taxpayer with unaffordable pension and benefits obligations.
As for “clueless” behavior, today’s Wall Street Journal contains an article by Jeff Greene, a Democratic candidate from Florida for the Senate in 2010, who although expressing sympathy for the protesters, reports:
“At Zuccotti Park, I found that no one could offer me a coherent explanation of why they hated Wall Street, and no one suggested a workable plan for regulating banks. (One fellow told me all we need to do is establish more small farms.)…”
Such uninformed people, who have no real grasp of issues, but plenty of resentment that their sense of entitlement has not been fulfilled. Apparently, their parents never told them – as mine did me – that the world does not owe them a living. Such people are clay in the hands of the labor thugs and red-diaper babies that are all too ready to exploit their naive self-absorption.
“Social justice”? What a chimaera! Hayek pointed out that the notion is absurd, and his argument has not been successfully answered. All that “social justice” amounts to in practice is a banner in which people who want to help themselves to other people’s property cloak themselves. In other words, it is a way of putting lipstick on that particular pig normally known as thievery.
You may sneer at my inheritance of good fortune, but long before I came into that inheritance, I learnt (at the hands of my father, a stern master) the difficult skills necessary to manage it, and since coming into it I have used those skills to do so without so much as a single quarter of loss, to the general satisfaction of customers, and without having to lay off a single employee. What have you done that has served your fellow man so concretely?
November 3, 2011 at 4:43 pm
A couple of further points -
You wrote: “However, the OWS activists are doing something, so I’d say they are the last people in this country to be labeled ‘spoiled’.”
But what ARE they doing? Engaging in a great collective whine. Whining is the typical resort of the spoilt child, engaged in the more because it is gratified with the desired response.’
You wrote: “You can like or dislike labor but ‘spoiled’ generally doesn’t apply, they too tend to be people who are fighting for their rather small share of the pie.”
Here you are making either an error or a deliberate confusion of labor unions with the people who belong to them. Unions rely on compulsory membership. If a person should wish to work in certain occupations, he is obliged to belong to a union, whether he wants to or not. Under Communications Workers of America v. Beck (vide supra at post no. 12), unions are forbidden from using compulsory dues monies for purposes other than defraying the costs of collective bargaining. Naturally, this decision was very unpopular with union leadership, and accordingly, the present administration has simply decided not to enforce the law. Monies being used by unions to support OWS are most likely being so used in violation of the law, with the active collusion of Obama and Holder.
How many people who are compelled to belong to a union really support its aims? Wherever the compulsory collection of union dues has been banned by law (as in 22 states), union membership has fallen dramatically. Given the choice, people don’t want to belong to unions. It is reasonable to assume that most people who belong to unions in the other 28 states do so because they have to, not because they want to. A recent Frank Luntz poll shows that 80% of current union members support the right-to-work principle:
http://www.nrtwc.org/FactSheets/2010NationalRightToWorkLuntzUnionMemberSurvey.pdf
November 5, 2011 at 10:30 am
Michael,
I read you, Prof. DeLong, Prof. Krugman, Prof. Christina Romer. In good faith, I get the sense they know what they’re talking about, think about this topic in a nuanced way, and are responsive to our best empirical models of reality. I get the sense that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that you think about this topic in a rigid way binded by a type of conservative identity politics, and that you don’t have the fundamental literacies to really understand our best empirical models of macroeconomic reality (hey, I don’t have those fundamental literacies, either).
November 3, 2011 at 1:54 am
“On July 13, Adbusters put out its own call for a Wall Street occupation, to take place two months later, on Sept. 17. Setting the date and publicizing it was the extent of the magazine’s involvement. A group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—student activists and community leaders from some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods—stepped in to execute the rest. For three weeks in June and July, to protest city budget cuts and layoffs, the group had camped out across the street from City Hall in a tent city they called Bloombergville. They liked the idea of trying a similar approach on Wall Street. After talking to Adbusters, the group began advertising a “People’s General Assembly” to “Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind” and plan the Sept. 17 occupation.”
From a businessweek profile on David Grueber (sp?) this seems virtuous to me. It seems like OWS explicitly was organized to “Oppose Cutbacks and Austerity Of Any Kind” -and thus, as far as I can tell as a nonexpert, it was organized to support a technocratic aim of best of breed economic policy.
November 3, 2011 at 9:16 am
It’s Graeber, not Grueber. An extensive article on him may be found at Wikipedia, including the interesting detail that his father fought for the communists in the Spanish civil war.
How does “opposing cutbacks and austerity of any kind” serve to “support a technocratic aim of best of breed economic policy”? Would not “best of breed economic policy” necessarily involve the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse? And would not so doing involve “cutbacks”? The stated opposition is to “cutbacks… of ANY KIND” (emphasis mine), including those resulting from elimination of inefficiency, corruption, and peculation.
These are people who never saw any government spending on domestic programs they didn’t like, and if some of it falls through the cracks, they don’t think it’s a big problem. It’s all at the expense of someone else, after all – as indicated in the original post, they don’t mind, but indeed believe it is an admirable thing, that the top 10% of personal income tax filers pay 70% of the tax, while some 40% pay nothing.
November 3, 2011 at 10:58 am
Michael, I obviously can’t include infinity footnotes to every comment, but my intuition has adjusted to match the argument that at times where rapid spending is the best way to go, it can be non-technocratic to slow things down much over issues of “waste”. There’s always a cost benefit angle to spending time detecting costs and benefits (and to work on improving the ratio), and I guess that derivates to some sort of cousin of zeno’s paradox. I intuit the somewhat hazy approximation has to be done in good faith as best as we can, and then we move on to our probably doom.
November 3, 2011 at 11:57 am
Your “intuition” is for “rapid spending” at a time when the indebtedness of the country is at an all-time high?
The country needs a rapid CUT in spending and rapid liquidation of debt and debt-encumbered assets, both public and private. The sooner the inevitable pain is dealt with, the sooner it will be over. The prevailing political attitude towards these issues resembles that of a person with a toothache, who, fearful of having a dentist pull the abscessed tooth, procrastinates in seeing him, and chooses instead to mitigate the pain by applying oil of cloves to the bad tooth and gulping hydrocodone tablets. Such a solution is ineffective and only prolongs the misery, while needlessly delaying the use of the sole proven remedy.
We’ve seen such “good faith” but misguided approaches in such cases as the Carter-era economic policy, which served only to create “stagflation,” or the lost decade of the Japanese economy, in which banks were encouraged to “extend and pretend” with their bad assets, instead of taking their lumps and getting it over with. The grand-daddy of all these episodes was the New Deal itself. Unemployment was still at 18-19% in 1939, ten years after the crash of 1929. Is this not an indication that the policies pursued were failures? Politicians, especially the present administration in Washington, have repeatedly refused to learn from history, and so persist in repeating its mistakes.
November 3, 2011 at 5:16 pm
“Whining” is what the powerful call the less powerful when they dare to speak out.
I’m not sure I see the point of this conversation. Whether OWS is a success or not, whether they end up promoting small liberal band-aids like financial transaction taxes or call for socialist revolution, it’s clear you will be on the other side. That’s fine with me and with OWS, after all, they only claim to be the 99%, not the 100%. I don’t think anyone is after your approval.
What have you done that has served your fellow man so concretely?
I make software that helps scientists work more effectively. That is to say, I apply what skills I have to the area where they have the highest possible impact on the progress of mankind. Sorry if that sounds grandiose, I certainly don’t have as much impact as I’d like, but I do my best at what I feel is an important and neglected area. And unfortunately it pays rather less well than shuffling around other people’s money while taking a cut.
November 3, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Whining is what people do when they neither lead, follow, nor get out of the way.
The OWS people are making a very grandiose claim indeed in asserting that they speak for 99% of the American population. I suspect their antics impress the average citizen in about the same way as the hippie-dippie types of the 1960s did – not well. Do, please, remember that the result of the late ’60s and early ’70s left-wing activists’ demonstrations and riots was a landslide for Richard Nixon against George McGovern.
To put your claims about what you do in the light many would view it, you are a computer technician working for some boffins superior to yourself in an obscure research project funded by the taxpayers, which if Sen. Proxmire (a Democrat, by the way) were still alive, he might give one of his “Golden Fleece” awards. The project itself, like the great majority of similar projects, is more likely to flame out without consequence than to accomplish anything lasting.
In the mean time, by “shuffling other people’s money while taking a cut” (actually, by putting my capital at risk, investing other people’s money with a guarantee of repayment of principal plus a fixed rate of interest, and trying to lend it at a sufficiently higher rate than that to defray expenses and earn a modest return on my own capital in the process) – I’ve contributed to the building of my community’s businesses and homes, at the same time providing good livings for numerous employees and their families. Both customers and employees seem to be happy and grateful for the result.
I have no illusions about serving “the progress of mankind,” which is a dubious concept at any rate. Do you have a clue about stewardship and reciprocal loyalty? It is both morally sufficient and personally pleasing to have done some good for my friends and neighbors in the place where I was born, have lived almost all my life, and hope to die.
November 3, 2011 at 5:44 pm
BTW, the argument that since you’ve made a profit and employed people, you are therefore creating social benefit is also idiotic, since you could say the same thing about any random Mafia chief.
November 3, 2011 at 6:26 pm
If you compare a legitimate business that deals in lawful products without compulsion in transactions with willing customers, and that doesn’t kill or steal from people with the activities of a “random Mafia chief” that serves only to show how far removed your view is from that of the law, and of the great majority of ordinary people.
November 3, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Since you’re so fond of the foreign phrase, I assume you know what a reductio ad absurdum is.
November 3, 2011 at 7:04 pm
If that’s what you think you accomplished, then you weren’t very successful.
By the way, hadn’t you better get back to your job as a computer technician for those boffins you work for? Either way, of course, it’s a waste of tax dollars, but they might find your extracurricular blogging activities to be a distraction from what you’re hired to do. Disciplinary measures might be in order.
November 3, 2011 at 8:50 pm
It occurs to me further that comparing capitalists to gangsters is an old commie trope, pioneered (among others) by the British communist Claud Cockburn – so, although you’re not very original, you’re doing your red diaper heritage proud.
The irony was, of course, that Cockburn was an abject shill for Stalin, whose brutal and murderous regime bore a far closer resemblance to that of a mafia family than any lawful private enterprise ever did. Indeed, as Robert Conquest had it -
“There was a great Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in,
That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in,
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”
Moreover, an apologist for labor unions should hardly bandy about accusations about resemblance to mafiosi – seeing that those labor thugs who were not shaded deeply pink if not red (e.g., the Reuthers and Harry Bridges), were most likely to be mobbed-up (e.g., ex-con Jimmy Hoffa and his IBT vice-president from 1961, Anthony Provenzano). Yes, with such admirable examples on your side, you’re a fine one to compare anyone to a “random Mafia chief.”
November 3, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Sigh, I would advise you not to comment on matters of science, technology, or research; areas where you clearly know nothing. Stick to dropping pretentious latinate phrases where you have a comparative advantage.
The project itself, like the great majority of similar projects, is more likely to flame out without consequence than to accomplish anything lasting.
Well, that’s why they call it “research”. By definition, if you are doing something with a high likelihood of success, you aren’t doing research. That’s also why we need governments (or companies that enjoy monopoly rents) to fund it.
Actually the project I currently work on has a research component, but is atypical in also being a tool with a quite well-established user community — the software is in use in dozens of research institutes. But I suppose they all could be money wasters as well. The place I work at helped invent the internet and associated technologies that make it possible for us to have these delightful and enlightening exchanges; I suppose the verdict is still out on whether that is a benefit to mankind or not, but it seems the height of ingratitude to sneer at “computer technicians” while making use of their work.
By the way, hadn’t you better get back to your job as a computer technician for those boffins you work for? … blogging activities [are] a distraction from what you’re hired to do. Disciplinary measures might be in order.
Interesting tactic. It really does come down to that — I work for a living, so I’m obligated to shut up and get back to work while my betters use their inherited leisure to spew witless propaganda all day long.
I don’t really have much cultural solidarity with the working class, but you are certainly helping me develop some.
November 4, 2011 at 12:22 pm
Mtraven wrote: “The place I work at helped invent the internet and associated technologies that make it possible for us to have these delightful and enlightening exchanges; I suppose the verdict is still out on whether that is a benefit to mankind or not, but it seems the height of ingratitude to sneer at “computer technicians” while making use of their work.”
Well, at least you aren’t claiming that Al Gore invented the internet.
I don’t have to admire the moral character of a person or institution that invented something in order to use it. Nor do I have to overestimate that person’s or institution’s importance in the grand panoply of history. I benefit far more measurably every day by the work of plumbers and tailors than I do by the ability to exchange jibes on the internet, yet no one considers plumbers and tailors great benefactors of humanity.
Government funding may have provided a point of departure for personal computers and the internet – but isn’t its present condition much more the product of the many innovative and competitive private enterprises in Silicon Valley? You might as well attribute the wristwatch you wear to the £10,000 prize offered by the British government for the development of an effective method of determining longitude. Indeed, that inspired Harrison to develop the first marine chronometer, for which (after many vicissitudes) he claimed the prize. But the further development of precise and small instruments for timekeeping was largely the province of the private sector – and while British horologists led the field until the mid-nineteenth century, dominance eventually passed to the Swiss, who had neither a navy nor any government subvention of their horological industry.
Calling my arguments “witless propaganda” does not make them so, and you have provided very little in the way of effective rebuttal. Name-calling does not replace facts.
In conclusion, I note that the “Occupy” protests in Oakland have degenerated into full-scale riots, with fires set and shop windows smashed, just as in the “anti-globalization” protests a few years ago. This was entirely predictable, and indeed was predicted. Here we have a city run by left-wing politicians, host to protests applauded by and egged on by left-wing politicians (including Obama, Biden, and Pelosi) – and this has been the result. Remember back in January when these same people were calling for “civility”? Let us behold what they have delivered. The footage will undoubtedly appear in Republican campaign ads next year. It will disgust Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. This bodes as well for the left as similar riots did in the ’60s and ’70s – mark my words.
November 4, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Michael and Mtraven, you are both extremely entertaining (even more so together than apart), like if someone dropped an IQ bomb on CNN’s Crossfire or Politically Incorrect.
I’d encourage slightly greater civility.
I think both of you do impressive work, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Michael, I don’t think its fair to call your propaganda witless, and you provide an entertaining way to learn quite a bit about history (though I do think your good faith economic analysis is a bit more suspect).
One thing that comes to mind reading Michael describe his work achievement is that inheriting a bank may have been a bit of an unfortunate shackle to his talent. I subscribe to the Peter minus 1 Virtue, which is that someone should aim to work at their level of greatest competence, but no higher. If you’re doing so deviantly perfect at your level I think you should consider modestly expanding your responsibilities.
November 4, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Well, at least you aren’t claiming that Al Gore invented the internet.
You wanted an example of witless propaganda? There you go.
Of course, Gore never claimed any such thing, and wingnuts have simply repeated that lie over and over (and its been 12 years since it was used against him in an election, but I guess some lies never die).
What he did do is champion funding for early internet development.
I benefit far more measurably every day by the work of plumbers and tailors…
Indeed. If all the plumbers were suddenly removed from the world, we’d be in big trouble. If the bankers were removed, nobody would miss them.
In fact, I sometimes jokingly call myself a data plumber. Not the most interesting part of my work, but there’s no shame in it either.
Government funding may have provided a point of departure for personal computers and the internet… but isn’t its present condition much more the product of the many innovative and competitive private enterprises in Silicon Valley?
There’s no “but” involved. It’s a basic flaw in the right’s thinking that it persists in picturing government and industry as unalterably oppposed to each othert. In fact, they most often work together, either for good (funding research that later is commercialized into useful technologies) or evil (spreading militaristic empire). In the case of computer and internet technology, government and private enterprise and academia all played significant roles and continue to do so.
November 4, 2011 at 2:48 pm
You’d miss your banker when you couldn’t write a check, couldn’t use your credit cards, and had to keep all your assets in physical form under your own roof. Indeed, banking is something that would be invented all over again if it ceased suddenly to exist. Were it to disappear, the world would revert to the condition in which it existed in the early middle ages, before the advent of a credit economy. For you to propose that banking would not be missed is only to reveal the depths of your historical and economic ignorance.
I don’t picture government as unalterably opposed to business – only certain kinds of political philosophy, which unfortunately have dominated in government in recent years. Some governments are quite business-friendly. Instead of placing obstacles in the paths of private enterprise, they strive to remove them. Capital flees from hostile jurisdictions to friendly ones. Thus, for example, we see entrepreneurs leaving the business-hostile climate of California for that of business-friendly Texas, as described in Daniel Henninger’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal:
‘Mr. Raymond remarks that the economic policies that in time trapped the Northeast and Rust Belt in spirals of decline never touched Texas. But this is about something beyond low taxes and no unions: “In Texas the people tend to be farmers or individual businessmen, and they have this attitude: We have to make do with what we have and work together to get things done and survive. It’s can-do. That attitude permeates everything there.”
‘A more recent corporate immigrant, Alan Boeckmann, until recently CEO of Fluor Corp., the engineering and construction firm, says regulatory and legal hassles pushed Fluor out of California. Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, but “California had its own version.” There were constant class-action suits over Fluor’s benefits. “It could have been settled, but not in California. That’s how the game is played there.”
‘When word of the 2006 move got out, “California made no attempt to keep us.” In Texas, “things started to happen quickly, without us initiating them.” The Irving Chamber of Commerce did orientation sessions for employees and spouses, even helping with new-house searches. Or “little things”: Irving on its own renamed a street Fluor Drive, which in California or the Northeast would be laughable. Those Texas rubes!
‘Ed Trevis, a smaller fish, is also happy. A California-educated Brazilian immigrant and tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for 25 years, Mr. Trevis moved Corvalent Corp. to Austin for similar reasons. He had to hire a firm just to do California’s compliance. “In California,” he says, “you are always doing something wrong.”
‘”What I found in Texas is that from the standpoint of running a business, cost of living, education, the labor pool, quality of life, it just blew other states out of the water.” I heard this constantly—people enjoy being in business in Texas.’
More at: http://online.wsj.com/article/wonder_land.html
How well a jurisdiction treats its businesses and owners of capital has a direct relationship to its prosperity. Texas, which has no income tax and modest levels of regulation, is doing much better than California, where, if you are in business, to quote Mr. Trevis, “you are always doing something wrong.”
I visited some cousins in California this past August, and as part of the trip, spent some time at one cousin’s second home on Lake Tahoe. It was an interesting lesson in comparative economic policy to drive around the lake. One could immediately tell when one crossed the state line. The California side was characterised by kitschy, low-rent tourist traps, and the roads were poorly maintained. The roads immediately improved on the Nevada side, and the quality of the buildings and homes was of notably higher standard. California “soaks the rich,” and is inordinately dependent on about 150,000 wealthy payers of income tax; Nevada levies no personal income tax. The consequences of the two different policies are obvious to anyone who has eyes.
November 4, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Weird, because when I go to Tahoe I get the opposite impression. Truckee and Donner in CA are on the whole quite nice, then there’s Reno on the Nevada side. Sure you weren’t turned around?
As for quality of life in Texas, opinions differ: http://www.theeagle.com/politics/Report-calls-quality-of-life-in-Texas–abysmal-
Of course, they are evaluating quality of life for everyone, not just the subset of rich business owners. I’m sure Texas is fine for those with money (although why anyone with enough money to have options would choose to live in that overbaked shithole is beyond me).
Bankers do perform a few useful functions. The problem is that they have taken over the system; instead of a real economy we have an economy based on financial chicanery. A little of that is fine, when it takes over and pulls down the rest of us, that’s a problem. The useful functions of finance could be accomplished with a set of fairly simple computer programs, and I imagine eventually we’ll figure this out, and put all intelligence and effort wasted on Wall Street to better use.
November 5, 2011 at 4:24 pm
I would have found it very difficult to confuse King’s Beach, California with Incline Village, Nevada. If you trouble yourself to look, you’ll find that the per capita income of Incline Village is about double that of King’s beach. I suspect Incline Village owes its relative prosperity to the number of ex-Californians who have escaped California income taxes by moving their legal domiciles there – a neat lesson in how the law of diminishing returns operates in practice with relation to tax rates.
We would, of course, be better off if the U.S. economy had more robust manufacturing and extractive sectors. Finance has assumed the disproportionate significance it has here in good part only because it has not been run out of the country by overzealous environmentalism, as so much manufacturing and extractive industry has been.
If you suppose the allocation of capital could be accomplished as well by “a set of fairly simple computer programs” as it is by existing markets, you are perhaps not aware of the extent to which this is already the case. The programs are not “fairly simple,” and their benefit to the economy is debatable at best. Many believe, and I am inclined to agree, that they have had a negative impact, and have increased economic volatility.
Or perhaps you believe that computers can be used to do central economic planning. I do not believe they would succeed any better than earlier attempts. There is plenty of empirical evidence that central economic planning does not work, and almost none that it does. Even the socialist Robert Heilbroner was compelled some years ago to admit that Ludwig von Mises was right. Using a superior tool to do a futile task does not make it any less futile. A bad idea does not become better by virtue of more efficient implementation.
November 4, 2011 at 3:05 pm
P.S. – Here is a direct quotation from Al Gore:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
This is from a transcript of an interview he gave Wolf Blitzer on CNN on the 9th March, 1999. Examination of the surrounding context shows no modiying or mitigating claims such as merely having “championed funding.”
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/index.html
True, to say “I took the initiative in creating” is not the same as saying “I invented,” but it does make it sound as if he hadn’t taken the initiative to create it, it would never have happened. That’s a mighty boast for someone to make whose contribution was in actuality quite modest.
November 4, 2011 at 3:21 pm
You didn’t take my advice to stay away from science and technology, did you? Pity.
Here is a statement from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two important figures in the development of internet technology: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
November 4, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Your response to a direct and vainglorious quote from Gore himself is to quote some apologia from two defenders? That’s lame. Gore said what he said, “nor all thy piety or wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line…”
If you want to talk about real science and technology, let us discuss, say, exothemic intermetallic reactions. Let’s have a conversation about Hume-Rothery compounds, or Laves ‘size factor’ compounds, and how what we know about these might explain why certain alloying reactions evolve heat, as, for example, those of nickel and aluminum or of palladium and aluminum. This is a type of phenomenon known to chemists since the time of Boyle (cf. his “Of the Incalescence of Quicksilver with Gold,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. X, 515-33 [1676]). Why don’t you pop down to the library and look it up?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the mechanism involved in these incalescences. I don’t know what it is, and am genuinely curious. Let’s see what kind of boffin you really are.
November 4, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Michael,
We’ve all read a ton of your posts and they don’t signal deep scientific literacy. Whereas Mtraven has a whole blog on leptons or some such thing. I’d cede to his relative literacy in this area gracefully. I suspect you and I both have a bit of an Igon Value problem, and MTravern’s scientific/quantitative literacy deficiencies, to the extent they exist, aren’t in our league.
November 4, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Whoops, confused Mtraven with Mitchell Porter regarding the Lepton blog.
November 4, 2011 at 6:14 pm
The two people often credited with being the fathers of the internet (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf ) say Gore spoke nothing but the truth. So on one hand, we have people who know what they are talking about, on the other, we have the usual horde of wingnut flying monkeys. Gosh, I wonder who we should believe.
November 4, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Maybe you can start by explaining why exothemic intermetallic reactions are “real science and technology” and how that is distinguished from what I guess must be the fake science and technology of computers and the internet. Then you can explain what that has to do with anything we were talking about, and why I should care.
November 4, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Incalescent alloying reactions are, first of all, a subject of pure and not applied science. They are an interesting and incompletely explained phenomenon of physical chemistry. I suspect that the only comparable question in the computer field that is on a similar plane relates to the crystallography of silicon and allied semiconductive materials, and why slight impurities in these materials have the effects they do. It is of course for their investigations of these matters that Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain won the Nobel Prize in 1956.
Most of what is called computer science is, at bottom, office machine design. It may be very sophisticated, but it does not touch upon the nature of matter and energy at the level of pure science. The intermetallic reactions I mentioned do.
I brought intermetallic reactions up, because you have demeaned my knowledge of science and technology. Yet you don’t give evidence of knowing even the little about them that I do, and so are unable to improve my knowledge about a class of phenomena that I find interesting just for the sake of curiosity.
You may be a competent office machine designer, but your interest in and command of science is too narrow to motivate anything more than a dismissive comment about my question. You have thus shown both the compass of your knowledge and the quality of your character. It was no surprise.
November 4, 2011 at 7:13 pm
Most of what is called computer science is, at bottom, office machine design. It may be very sophisticated, but it does not touch upon the nature of matter and energy at the level of pure science.
Wrong again, what a surprise.
The theory of computation is one of the genuinely deep ideas to come out of 20th century science, with implications felt in everything from philosophy (see eg http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1791 ) to sociology, as well as the more obvious engineering fields.
The fact that as a field it involves both the fundamental structures of the universe and building fancy office machine makes it interesting, at least to me.
I think I detect another pattern in your thought. As a (would-be) aristo, you classify the practical arts, from plumbing to computer science, as beneath you, fit only for the lower classes. A distinctly un-American attitude, if you ask me, but then there have always been that small class of Americans who like to style themselves after the decayed model of European aristocracy.
Oh well, the sun is setting so I will declare a Shabbat truce to this edifying debate.
November 4, 2011 at 7:53 pm
All you have said begs the question, do you or do you not know anything about the physical chemistry of the solid state? I thought that was the foundation of the science of computing, and that the knowledge of a self-styled computer scientist might shed some light on a curious class of intermetallic reactions.
Far from finding the practical arts unappealing, I am actually very interested in manufacturing, extraction, and construction – and lament the fact that this country has exported so many jobs as the result of foolish overregulation. We have, for example, lost almost completely the organic dyestuffs industry, thanks to environmentalist overreach. The Japanese are happy to have the business. Domestic paper manufacturing has suffered severe inroads for similar reasons. We can actually import pulp from Sweden – not a third world country, but Sweden! – more cheaply in some cases than we can make it here. We have a president who seems to want to put coal mining and coal-fired power plants out of business and put the brakes on oil and natural gas development.
It is persons of your political stripe and not mine that find these industries an offense to their daintiness and do not want them anywhere near. This is going to be a real problem for your man in the White House, too:
http://online.wsj.com/article/potomac_watch.html
An excerpt -
“The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can’t count that high). The administration blew up Louisiana’s offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country’s one booming industry: natural gas.
“Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don’t care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president’s attack on their work.”
Personally I feel more comfortable with industries that have actual physical assets like mills, mines, and oil or gas wells behind their market capitalization, than I do with so many in the computer field, in which the worth of a business seems to be based on debatable projections of future earnings rather than anything tangible. I also like and admire skilled tradesmen, and have known and employed a good many of them. I have found most to be quite socially conservative, politically-incorrect, and sceptical of the welfare state, so we get along quite well.
November 4, 2011 at 3:15 pm
HA, glad you are being entertained, I knew there had to be some justification for spending time on this stuff. Civility might be nice but kind of misses the point.
November 5, 2011 at 10:23 am
MTraven,
Well, Michael does seem to make real positive contributions to society and the perhaps toxic elements of his propaganda seem to be as uninfluential as my own writings (I think based on your social network participation that you may be more of an influential social node than either of us) -I think in fairness you should have the grace to acknowledge his significant positive contributions and the seemingly harmless/low-harm impact of his negative contributions.
I’d analogize it to Mayor Bloomberg, who recently got bashed by Prof. Krugman and Mr. Taibi without, in my opinion, the grace to acknowledge his overall scope of social contribution and the humility to acknowledge their own shirking of unglamorpous human and resource administrative work. In contrast consider Prof. Chu who manages to be a productive nuclear physicist while managing decabillions as Energy Secretary. Glorification of every element of self while not acknowledging positive contributions in someone one is criticizing is no virtue in my estimation.
November 5, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Hopefully Anonymous, what do you mean supra when you write that “you and I have a bit of an Igon Value problem”? I believe the correct spelling is eigenvalue, and (although the last time I looked into a textbook on linear algebra was forty years ago) I fail to see what this has to do with the discussion here.
As for mtraven’s scientific literacy, it is no doubt deep, but also narrow. You will see from the above how he has evaded a discussion of a phenomenon in the physics and chemistry of the solid state, the very fields that underlie the development of semiconductors. Semiconductors are, of course, central to the modern computer, yet our computer scientist has carefully circumnavigated my question, after he asserted that “science, technology, and research” were areas where I “clearly know nothing.” He has yet to demonstrate what he knows about physical chemistry and crystallography.
I think that what he refers to as the “science of computation” is software design – code writing. This is less a natural science than it is the manipulation of a type of symbolic logic. Following Kant (with whom I agree), natural science is synthetic and à posteriori, and involves finding and systematizing knowledge about the universe of matter and energy. Mathematics and logic and analytic and à priori, deriving all of their elaborations by deduction from first principles. It is to these fields, and not to that of natural science, that software design properly belongs.
The claims of “implications felt in everything from philosophy to sociology” are just the latest incarnation of the vast portent imputed to similar schemes for the organization of memory and knowledge in the past. Blessed Raymond Lully was perhaps the first to make such claims for his Ars magna et ultima, and even developed “machines” (the little volvelles one sees in his books) for its application. I remember quite a long time ago becoming acquainted with a Tunisian postgraduate student in economics whose interest lay in the taxonomy of knowledge, as applied to his field. I told him that Bl. Raymond tried to teach his countrymen such a system, and for his pains they stoned him.
Similar techniques were advocated by Giulio Camillo, Peter Ramus, Guy le Febvre de la Boderie, Blaise de Vigenere, Giordano Bruno, Amos Comenius, and last by Gottfried Leibniz, whose “Dissertatio de arte combinatoria” marked the end of such pansophick conceits for almost three centuries. These were all, of course, techniques to be applied to improving the human memory – that is what “artificial memory” meant at the time. All were supposed to revolutionize thinking, but generated much smoke and little fire. A late manifestation of such ideas, this time with electro-mechanical assistance, is found in Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” but it was only a thought-experiment. While the modern personal computer and internet have brought some of the promised results to fruition, where is the revolution? Human nature hasn’t changed. The best possible demonstration of this is that one of the most popular uses for personal computers is in getting access to pornography.
Every new invention, particularly of the electrical or electronic type, has had its utopian prophets. Alexander Graham Bell thought that the telephone would prove a great advantage to the despatch of business; he was distressed to find that it had come to serve mainly to facilitate and extend the opportunities for idle chatter and gossip. I am old enough to remember the ‘fifties, when there were people who seriously thought that the primary function of television would be to educate and edify the masses! When we contemplate the great fortunes that have been built on frivolities like Facebook and Twitter, we see the latest manifestation of the same social phenomenon. This is what “implications felt in everything from philosophy to sociology” boil down to at the last. One need not accept the literal truth of the Bible to affirm the fallen nature of mankind, which explains why all these visionary predictions come a-cropper as they do.
November 5, 2011 at 11:58 pm
As for mtraven’s scientific literacy, it is no doubt deep, but also narrow.
You have missed the point entirely (big surprise there). There are many areas of science where I am sadly ignorant. That’s life, there is far more knowledge being produced than one person can learn. I probably know somewhat less about physical science a lot of my peers because I spend more time and energy on things like philosophy and sociology than they do.
The point is that I generally confine my remarks to areas where I in fact do know something, whereas you are pontificating on areas you clearly know nothing about. Attempts to throw me pop quizzes on crystallography are a desperate attempt to cloud the issue, much like a squid releasing ink as it runs away.
I think that what he refers to as the “science of computation” is software design – code writing.
No. I was referring to the theory of computation, a branch of mathematics based on early work by people like Turing, Church, and Kleene and leading into modern complexity theory. The paper I cited applies these ideas to various philosophical questions (and the author’s main research area is at the intersection of computational theory and quantum physics).
You are conflating at least three separate things, each of which has some deep and interesting implications, but they are largely separate: the theory of computation, software design and programming, and the social and cultural implications of computers and the internet.
While the modern personal computer and internet have brought some of the promised results to fruition, where is the revolution? Human nature hasn’t changed.
Early days. There is certainly a lot of overhype about the internet, but in some respects it is actually underhype, since some of the more importent institutions being affected are slow to change (eg higher education), but will eventually get transformed or eaten, like newspapers and bookstores are currently being. I would guess that its eventual impact will be comparable to that of the printing press, another technology which did not alter human nature but did have a profound impact on human culture and social arrangements.
One need not accept the literal truth of the Bible to affirm the fallen nature of mankind, which explains why all these visionary predictions come a-cropper as they do.
I guess this is what passes for conservative thought — because we are spiritually fallen, there is no hope of improvement in our conditions or tools. Oh well, I may be getting old but at least I’m not getting that stodgy.
November 6, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Oh yes you are actually conflating a fourth area (which I forgot because as you correctly surmise, I don’t spend much time thinking about it): hardware, which is actually itself at least three separate areas (hardware architecture (like software, primarily a design field), fabrication technology (physical engineering), and semiconductor physics). Your crystallography question might conceivably be relevant to the latter two of these, but one of the major triumphs of computer engineering is abstraction, so that you can use a computer or program one without knowing a great deal about the physical basis on which it is constructed.
Just getting this message from me to you involves hundreds of different mechanisms at various levels of abstraction, some built on top of others, some scattered over the network. It is kind of amazing that this complex assemblage works at all. I have done some work in hardware design, but mostly I work at the higher end of the abstraction stack.
November 6, 2011 at 2:21 pm
You can also drive a car without knowing a great deal about the physical basis on which it is constructed. How does the personal computer differ very greatly in that respect from thousands of mechanical or electrical devices that people use every day without such deep portent being attached to them?
A far greater impact on human society was exerted by Morse’s telegraph, which was a qualitative change, than has been by the development of the internet, which has been merely a quantitative one – a difference of degree in the already-established pattern, rather than a fundamentally new pattern. E.g., before we had e-mail we had telex. Before we had stock quotes via the Internet, we had the Edison ticker. All the vaunted science of computation has done is to make these communications cheaper.
Of course conditions or tools may be improved, but that is a far cry from saying that human nature is improved by them. All the evidence suggests the contrary.
You of course tacitly admit that you know little about the physics and chemistry of the solid state, perhaps less than I do. So much for your vaingloriously boasting and your dismissal of my knowledge of the sciences.
For all your egalitarian posturing, you do not really envision a society in which all are equal. Indeed, you sneer at those you consider not to be up to your standard, and have done so in these comments. Your egalitarianism is merely a tactic for attacking an elite you despise, with the hope you might replace it with one that includes yourself.
November 6, 2011 at 9:14 pm
You can also drive a car without knowing a great deal about the physical basis on which it is constructed. How does the personal computer differ …
It doesn’t, except quantitatively. A 1960s-era car was made of components (engine, carburetor) which were in turn made up of parts, and that’s about as far as it went. A modern computer, or a car for that matter which typically contains dozens of embedded computers, has a part hierarchy much deeper than that. But yes, the standard car controls are also an abstraction which allows the driver to mostly ignore the mechanism underneath.
Eventually quantitative changes can become qualitative changes if they are big enough.
Of course conditions or tools may be improved, but that is a far cry from saying that human nature is improved by them.
I’m not sure who said that human nature is improved by computers, but it certainly wasn’t me.
Indeed, you sneer at those you consider not to be up to your standard, and have done so in these comments.
The standard of knowing what you are talking about? Guilty!
Your egalitarianism is merely a tactic for attacking an elite you despise, with the hope you might replace it with one that includes yourself.
Yep, that’s why I spend time on futile arguments in the comments of obscure blogs, because it’s all part of my super-secret strategy to gain a place in the new elite once OWS sweeps away the old order. You’re onto me.
November 6, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Do you know what you are talking about? Certainly not with respect to economics and the financial system. You evaded my questions about solid-state physics and chemistry, thus tacitly confessing your ignorance of those disciplines. Claiming to be familiar with the communities around Lake Tahoe, you do not seem to be aware of the economic difference between King’s Beach, California, and Incline Village, Nevada, separated only by the state line. How might an objective reader discern that you know what you’re talking about with respect to anything else?
You don’t of course have to have a “super secret plan” – just envy and hatred for persons more successful than yourself (which is what motivates most commies) and a forum in which to vent it. That was evident in your snobbish comment supra at 16 about the Tea Party constituting a “low rent segment” of the Republican coalition, despite demographic data indicating that they have higher than average incomes and more than average education. You greatly overestimate your own merits and, I suspect, the place you deserve in society.
Conservative thought does not deny the possibility of improvement in conditions and tools, but it does deny that these will lead to any great improvement in human nature. You are living proof of the point.
November 7, 2011 at 12:49 am
Try to imagine how little I care about your evaluation of my character.
Perhaps there are readers who care more, but I sincerely doubt it.
November 7, 2011 at 9:24 am
Well, then, we reciprocate each other’s sentiments. But if you care so little, why have you bothered to continue responding to my comments? Might your time not be better employed, perhaps in setting fires and pitching garbage cans through shop windows in Oakland?
November 6, 2011 at 2:37 pm
“Hopefully Anonymous, what do you mean supra when you write that “you and I have a bit of an Igon Value problem”? I believe the correct spelling is eigenvalue, and (although the last time I looked into a textbook on linear algebra was forty years ago) I fail to see what this has to do with the discussion here.”
Michael, I feel like you’re trying to hard here to disguise your source -which I’d guess is a search engine into which you entered the search “Igon Value problem” and encountered Prof. Pinker’s awesome essay. Claiming a linear algebra textbook you used 40 years ago is a bit of a tell, it seems to me. I’d guess eigenvalues pop up all over the hard and quantitative sciences, since the idea of a vector (in my unexpert mind a direction with a magnitude) seems to me to be qidely useful as an analytical tool -in physical chemistry, physics, finance, etc. ad nauseum.
November 6, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Actually, if I had entered the words “Igon Value” (as you spelt it) into a search engine (which I just did) I’d have found the meaning you intended. But at the time, I had never seen this usage and thought you were referring to the mathematical term eigenvalue. Your remark prompted me to find my old textbook – it is “A Primer of Linear Algebra,” by Gerald L. Bradley, published by Prentice Hall back in the early ’70s. Chapter 6, beginning on page 284, covers “Eigenvalues, Eigenvectors, and Diagonability.” The definition of an eigenvalue is given on the first page of that chapter. Now tell me how you think I found that information via a search engine!
I had this textbook at a time I thought I might pursue a postgraduate degree in economics, and I was weak in the mathematics demanded. I never did finish it, because I found it easier and more rewarding just to make money. If linear algebra has a use in my kind of finance, it is probably in funds management, which is the job of analyzing the respective maturities of assets and liabilities, and given these, trying to predict what the risk to the bank from changes in the prevalent interest rate may be. We contract all this work out to a consultant who gives us very informative reports that can be read by anyone having a command of arithmetic.
November 7, 2011 at 9:49 am
I’ll leave it as an exercise in probability for the reader, whether you read my “Igon Value problem” comment and though back to eigenvalues from a linear algebra textbook you used in the early 1970′s.
November 7, 2011 at 1:27 pm
I should note that I am quite used to seeing misspellings and attempts to spell words phonetically, even from relatively educated people these days. They are the products of modern educational methods. This is what I supposed was the case in your post. I did not recognize the phrase as some sort of neologism. There also seem to be a great many of these in use today, especially amongst younger people. I have not kept up with them, nor have I much desire so to do.