“President Obama’s second Inaugural Address offered a lot for progressives to like. There was the spirited defense of gay rights; there was the equally spirited defense of the role of government, and, in particular, of the safety net provided by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But arguably the most encouraging thing of all was what he didn’t say: He barely mentioned the budget deficit.
“Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse. And that’s a very good thing.
“Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.”
The reasons, in short:
1. Scolds cried wolf
2. Declining deficits and public spending
3. Failure of fiscal austerity in practice
4. Agenda increasingly exposed
Paul Krugman writes: “Back in the 1950s three social psychologists joined a cult that was predicting the imminent end of the world. Their purpose was to observe the cultists’ response when the world did not, in fact, end on schedule. What they discovered, and described in their classic book, When Prophecy Fails, is that the irrefutable failure of a prophecy does not cause true believers — people who have committed themselves to a belief both emotionally and by their life choices — to reconsider. On the contrary, they become even more fervent, and proselytize even harder …
“Oh, wait a second — did you think I was talking about the Mayan calendar thing?
“Seriously, at every stage of our ongoing economic crisis — and in particular, every time anyone has suggested actually trying to do something about mass unemployment — a chorus of voices has warned that …” More…
“The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) has produced the first report focusing on how countries around the world discriminate against non-religious people. Freedom of Thought 2012: A Global Report on Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists and the Non-religious has been published to mark Human Rights Day, Monday 10 December.” —IHEU
“In at least seven U.S. states, constitutional provisions are in place that bar atheists from public office and one state, Arkansas, has a law that bars an atheist from testifying as a witness at a trial, the report said.” —Robert Evans, Reuters
“Freud couldn’t have imagined a clearer case study in projection.” —Frank Rich
Here’s the article in New York magazine:
Fantasyland: Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too.
A key excerpt towards the end of the article:
The GOP’s wholesale retreat from reality perhaps found its ultimate expression in a Peggy Noonan blog at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that may achieve “Dewey Defeats Truman” immortality. Writing on Election Eve, she informed the faithful that “Romney’s slipping into the presidency” and will win. “All the vibrations are right,” she explained, citing such numerical evidence as crowd sizes in Pennsylvania and Ohio (both of which Romney would lose the next day) and yard signs. In Florida, she “saw Romney signs, not Obama ones,” adding that she’d heard tell of similar visitations in both Ohio and “tony Northwest Washington, D.C.”
Noonan’s revealing summation of her thought process was this: “Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.” Thus is the post-fact worldview of today’s GOP boiled down to its essence. It assumes that any “data on paper” must be distorted, and yet doesn’t look at what is in front of its very own eyes either. Otherwise, Noonan might have wondered if the neighborhood in Florida with Romney signs, not Obama ones, was not representative of either Florida or the country but was instead a white enclave. Otherwise, Noonan’s fellow conservative honchos might not have taken until November 6, 2012, to recognize that you can’t alienate every minority group in the country (blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays)—not to mention the majority group, women—and hope to win a national election. It’s not as if these rapidly changing demographics have been classified information. Bill O’Reilly’s astonished Election Night revelation that “the white Establishment is now the minority” was almost pathetic in its naïveté. Next to him, Rove, and Noonan, even Pat Buchanan was ahead of the curve.
The rude jolt administered by the election does not mean that the GOP will now depart from its faith-based view of reality — though it will surely heed Laura Ingraham’s postelection call for changing “the language of dealing with Latinos.
. . .
Nor, for all the panicked Republican talk about trying to make the party more inclusive and rational, is there any evidence that the GOP base wants to retreat a whit, whether on immigration or gay marriage or reproductive rights or the reinstatement of Jim Crow–era roadblocks to voting in states like Florida and Ohio. Or that any Republican leaders with actual power (as opposed to the out-of-office Jeb Bush) want to, either. The right is taking solace from exit-poll findings that more Americans still label themselves conservative than liberal and still think government does too much. A moderate putsch led by Olympia Snowe in exile, or David Frum, David Brooks, and Michael Gerson from op-ed pages, or Meghan McCain on Twitter, is not going to get very far.
But that’s the Republicans’ plight. The country has a larger problem—“intellectual nihilism,” as the writer Noam Scheiber recently labeled it. Since 9/11, often but not always under the right’s aegis, truth has been destabilized in America. The Bush administration’s contempt for what it dismissed as the “reality-based community” was vindicated when it successfully ginned up a war by convincing Americans that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Our susceptibility to elaborate, beautifully wrought myths remains intact—whether we’re being spun by politicians, captains of finance pumping up a bubble, or sports heroes like Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno. The news business, which we once counted on to vet hoaxes and fictions, is now so insecure about its existential future that it was cowed to some extent by the Scarboroughs, Noonans, and Roves, with most of the networks, not just Fox, ignoring the statistical data of Silver and others and instead predicting a long, nail-biting Election Night. (In reality, the election was called for Obama at 11:12 p.m. EST on NBC, just twelve minutes after it had been in 2008.) Our remaining journalistic institutions have even outsourced what used to be the very core of their craft, fact-checking, to surrogates relegated to gimmicky sidebars (awarding Pinocchios and “pants on fire”). The fact-checkers have predictably become partisan targets, only further destabilizing the whole notion of what is meant by “news.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.
This highlights an area for further study, to discover that elusive but ever-present balance beyond both relativism and absolutism (or objectivism), both of which I compare to trying to ride a unicycle — not just occasionally for the fun of it but trying to live on one, unicycling all of the time. (The comparison to circles allows me to introduce a little math, too.)
Check it out: “Mitt Romney’s Entirely Untrue, Objectively False Statements”
The Huffington Post article by Nick Wing with slide show and link to Politifact’s “All Pants on Fire! statements involving Mitt Romney”The Romney campaign and the Republican Party it represents seem to want to drive relativism like a stake into the heart of America. They are preying on a cultural environment where we are free to explore ideas. As the philosopher Simon Blackburn points out in his, book Truth: A Guide, too many philosophers have let the subject of the “truth” slide, if I paraphrased that right. We should not drop an important subject of inquiry for fear of clichés or because it seems hopeless. Writing Unicycle, I have discovered that it is often as important to persevere as to solve the question. For example: When we stop looking for the truth, the Romneys of the world will find a favorable environment for their ascendency. And they never go away entirely. Every generation has their work to do. Let’s hope that the the Romney campaign — with its combination of opportunists and zealots like Paul Ryan — has reached its apex to be surpassed by the Democrats and proponents of real opportunity. But it is far too marginal; we all need to help change the culture in many individual ways every day, to look out for each other and strengthen community locally and round the world.
At The Vice Presidential Debate: Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes
By Igor Volsky on Oct 12, 2012 at 9:04 am, via Think Progress. Thank you!
Paul Ryan spoke for 40 of the 90 minutes during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate and managed to tell at least 24 myths during that time [my emphasis]:
1) “It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that [the Libya attack] was a terrorist attack.” Obama used the word “terrorism” to describe the killing of Americans the very next day at the Rose Garden. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said in a Rose Garden statement on September 12.
2) “The administration was blocking us every step of the way. Only because we had strong bipartisan support for these tough [Iran] sanctions were we able to overrule their objections and put them in spite of the administration.” Even the Israeli President has effusively praised President Obama’s leadership on getting American and international sanctions on Iran, which have significantly slowed Iran’s progress.
3) “Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” [T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medicare would still be able to meet 88 percent of its obligations in 2085. Social Security is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter. There is also an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits.
4) “The vice president was in charge of overseeing this. $90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups.” Multiple reviews, including an independent review of all Department Of Energy loan programs by Herb Allison –- finance chair for McCain for President 2008 –- have found no “pork” in the stimulus’ funding of green projects, concluding that the loans were not steered to friends or family, as Ryan claims.
5) “Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China?” As PolitiFact has pointed out, the money for electric cars in Finland did not come from the stimulus. Rather, it originated with the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which predated the Obama administration. The claim about “windmills in China” is also inaccurate.
6) “When they see us putting – when they see us putting daylight between ourselves and our allies in Israel, that gives them encouragement.” The Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, told CNN, “President Obama is doing … more than anything that I can remember in the past [in regard to our security].”
7) “You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don’t change for people in or near retirement.” Here is how the Romney/Ryan Medicare plan will affect current seniors: 1) by repealing Obamacare, the 16 million seniors receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving $3.9 billion on prescription drugs will see a cost increase, 2) “premium support” will increase premiums for existing beneficiaries as private insurers lure healthier seniors out of the traditional Medicare program, 3) Romney/Ryan would also lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.
8) “Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.” Ryan is claiming that Obamacare siphons off $716 billion from Medicare, to the detriment of Medicare beneficiaries. In actuality, that money is saved primarily through reducing over-payments to insurance companies under Medicare Advantage, cutting waste fraud and abuse, and eliminating inefficiencies in the system. Ryan’s budget plan keeps those same cuts, but directs them toward tax cuts for the rich and deficit reduction.
9) “And then they put this new Obamacare board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.” The Board, or IPAB is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). Relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himself proposed two IPAB-like structures in a 2009 health plan.
10) “7.4 million seniors are projected to lose their current Medicare Advantage coverage they have. That’s a $3,200 benefit cut.” Enrollment is actually projected to increase by 11 percent in Medicare Advantage (MA) in 2013. Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, Medicare Advantage premiums have decreased an average of 10 percent and enrollment in these plans has increased 28 percent.
11) “This [Medicare premium support] plan that’s bipartisan. It’s a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.” Wyden not only voted against Ryan’s budget, he also called the idea that he supported it “nonsense.”
12) “Eight out of 10 businesses, they file their taxes as individuals, not as corporations.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased.
13) “[Unemployment is rising] all around America.” In August, the unemployment rate dropped from a year before in 325 of 372 metro areas surveyed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
14) “The average tax rate on businesses in the industrialized world is 25 percent, and the president wants the top effective tax rate on successful small businesses to go above 40 percent.” The U.S. is raising historically low amounts of revenue from the corporate income tax, and it already has the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the world. U.S. corporations are taxed less than their foreign rivals, and the U.S. effective corporate tax rate is low compared to other developed economies.
15) “He’ll keep saying this $5 trillion plan, I suppose. It’s been discredited by six other studies.” The studies Ryan cites actually further prove that Romney/Ryan would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction.
16) “You can – you can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayer. It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.” If Romney/Ryan hope to provide tax relief to the middle class, then their $5 trillion tax cut would add to the deficit. There are not enough deductions in the tax code that primarily benefit rich people to make his math work. As the Tax Policy Center concluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.
17) “So they proposed a $478 billion cut to defense to begin with. Now we have another $500 billion cut to defense that’s lurking on the horizon. They insisted upon that cut being involved in the debt negotiations, and so we have a $1 trillion cut.” Ryan has frequently gotten in hot water for criticizing President Obama for the very same defense cuts that he voted for in 2011.
18) “If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest – the smallest it has been since before World War I.” PolitiFact rated this claim as “Pants on Fire,” noting that “a wide range of experts told us it’s wrong to assume that a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military.”
19) “Look at what they’re doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They’re infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.” Religious institutions haven’t been forced to “violate their conscience” by paying for contraception. Houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt from offering birth control.
20) “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7-point million – 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.” The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans and all seniors will keep their guranteed Medicare benefits, despite Ryan’s fear mongering. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that very few people will have to enroll in new coverage.
21) “We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.” In March 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that “many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” However, she did not endorse their view.
22) “When Barack Obama was elected, they had enough fissile material — nuclear material to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five.” This is misleading and unproven. Iran now has enough fissile material, but has not yet enriched to the necessary level for a weapon. The Institute for Science and International Security says “it would take Iran more than two months to produce that amount if it started with 20%-grade uranium, and ‘several months’ to make enough for a bomb using low-enriched uranium. That would give the world community enough time to detect the operation and organize a response, ISIS noted in June.”
23) “[Iran is] racing toward a nuclear weapon.” Israeli and American intelligence officials aren’t so sure.
24) “We don’t want to do is give our allies reason to trust us less [by announcing a withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan].” It’s unclear how our allies would trust us less since they too agreed to the timeline. As Biden pointed outed, “That’s a bizarre statement. .. Forty-nine of our allies — hear me — 49 of our allies signed on to this position.”
_____________
Now contrast the above quoted 24 points with this slideshow of how the newspapers reported the vice-presidential debate.
Why can’t the media call out a lie in view of the facts? Even the competitors of Fox News are incapable of describing them simply as propaganda. Fox is still outlawed in Canada, last time I looked.
Paul Krugman: “It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.”
For Labor Day, and lest we forget: Robert Reich states it succinctly.
Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
To get a feel for this, I think of that time where a couple hundred guests were crammed into a sizable house—then I just double it. Then I wonder what 150 million means. If we can’t understand this in sufficient numbers we are surely as doomed as the despots of times past.
In A Better Way to Talk About Faith David Bornstein writes:
Is there a way to overcome religious intolerance?
Given global demographic changes, it’s a vital question. “The most certain prediction that we can make about almost any modern society is that it will be more diverse a generation from now than it is today,” the political scientist Robert D. Putnam has written. “This is true from Sweden to the United States and from New Zealand to Ireland.”
In the United States, the question holds special significance for the simple reason that American society is highly religious and highly diverse and — on matters concerning faith — considerably more politically polarized than a quarter-century ago. …
The United States prides itself on welcoming people of different faiths. The Bill of Rights begins with a guarantee of freedom of worship. In 1790, George Washington sent a letter to a Jewish congregation in which he expressed his wish that they “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants,” and declared that the government “gives to bigotry no sanction.” …
But while there have been widespread efforts over the past generation to promote and celebrate ethnic and racial diversity — everything from “Sesame Street” to multicultural studies to work force sensitivity training — the one topic that has often been kept off the table is faith. Americans have grown more comfortable talking about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, but not faith. It’s too personal, too divisive, too explosive. How do you conduct a productive conversation among people whose cherished beliefs — exclusive God-given truths — cannot be reconciled? …
IFYC’s Better Together campaigns are based on these insights: the most reliable way to improve attitudes about religious groups is to intentionally foster meaningful relationships across lines and gain “appreciative knowledge” about other faith traditions. The worst thing society can do is to continue what it’s doing today: allowing attitudes to be shaped by the shrillest voices, the voices of intolerance, political expedience and xenophobia. “If we don’t talk openly about faith and bring people from different traditions together, we forfeit the conversation to people who are happy to build barriers,” notes Patel. “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.”
In times when fundamentalist extremes are not prevalent, we may not feel the need to make a special effort to say why it is important to encourage the “better angels of our nature.” It just seems so obvious. We understand in general what we mean by “better.” It’s a little weird for anyone to say, What do you mean by better? But such peaceful times are historically bounded by conflict. Nowadays, our sense of what is good and helpful is in question. Extremism requires us to get back to basics and say why and how our ethics is justified. Through combined efforts to help out in society, IFYC’ Better Together Campaigns show how. And they go a long way to showing why. In a cultural environment where science and technology are everywhere interwoven, the deeper you go into “why” the more a rational explanation is required. Using the tools of symmetry and asymmetry has allowed for a systematic analysis of the relationship between our behavior and nature itself. We can really touch the currents of “good” and “better” in a validating and fundamental way, as exemplified by IFYC’s actions.
“Gavin Kennedy continues to fight against cartoonish mis-representations of what Adam Smith actually said and believed:
Adam Smith and the Myth of Laissez Faire, by Gavin Kennedy: …Let us be clear: Adam Smith did not use the words “Laissez-faire” in anything that he wrote, published in his lifetime or posthumous, or in any student notes that have so far been found, or in any reports of his lectures by those who attended them (John Millar, James Woodrow, Lord Buchan, John Stuart, etc.,) or by those who knew him intimately (such as Dugald Stewart, whose father was a student at Glasgow with Smith). …
We know that Smith knew of the use and meaning of laissez-faire from his close association with the Physiocratic circle around Quesnay during his visits to Paris (1764-67). The fact is that laissez-faire never entered his vocabulary. Nor did an English translation. This has not prevented many commentators from seeking to use Smith’s use of Natural Liberty as a synonym for laissez-faire. It was not the same thing.
“Natural Liberty was a philosophical concept based on Natural Law theories as expressed by Grotius and Pufendorf… The originator of laissez-faire was a ‘plain spoken’ French merchant, M. le Gendre, a deputy of commerce …”
A key consequence of nature’s ubiquitous asymmetry is that it is possible, standing on the shoulders of giants, to unlock definitively the reasons for Natural Law in everyday life.
Econbrowser: The War on Data Collection with a link to Businessweek:
Most U.S. economic data come from three federal agencies: the Census Bureau, the BEA, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have a combined budget of $1.6 billion, less than 0.05 percent of President Barack Obama’s $3.7 trillion proposed budget. These agencies have always had to fight for more funding. Now they may have to fight just to keep their budgets intact. As part of $19 billion in nondefense discretionary cuts in Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget—recently passed by the House of Representatives—the agencies are likely to get less funding. More…
Trying to kill off data collection is like throwing over the chess board when checkmated, with the difference that real lives are at stake. That’s the mentality we are facing in “conservative” leadership. It’s self-destructive. Paul Ryan and company would navigate without instruments or feedback on where we are going. They have become so conservative they have declared war on reality, sparing nothing. Anyway, lets hope the media can keep an eye on this.
River of Asymmetry 