Who Speaks for H*rv*rd?

Dear Dr. Bones,

Even when alma mommy does not happen to be involved, the particular sloppiness that Mr. Rosenberg here exhibits, with the same sloppiness exhibuted far worse by the Herr von Mondoweiss whom he quotes, makes me wonder if we donkeys are really any better than Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh.

WC and RL bark a dozen times a week, it seems, that "The New York Times thinks" or "says" so-and-so. All but invariably, it turns out that they are not referring to an unsigned corporate editorial, but to an opinion piece or news story with author’s or authors’ name plainly attached. Maybe everybody in the NYTC boardroom in fact agreed with Sam Scribbler, but a Dr. R. H. Limbaugh or a Governess S. L. Heath-Paling -- or indeed, anybody else -- can only guess at such unanimity.[1] [2]

Even with The Wall Street Jingo, which is about as ideologically gleichgeschaltet an organ of agitprop as a hoper could hope to find, one really ought not say "The WSJ says" about some slice of factious tripe and baloney signed by Karl, Firstlord Rove, or by Party Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Fu’ád al-‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins Univesity, or by Miss Piggy Noonan formerly of the Reagan Demoncrats -- by whoever the wingnutette/wingnut du jour may chance to be.

"Every tub on its own bottom" used to be a H*rv*rd apophthegm. A genuinely corporate-H*rv*rd apophthegm, a plan that all the Vice-Presidents of Holyoke Centre had intelligently designed and then deliberately put into practice. ETOIOB was about fiscal responsibility, as I recall, but it seems to me to apply to op-ed responsibilty. I don’t say one may NEVER attribute Sam’s scribbling to some larger class of "people like Sam," but one should not do it often. Above all, one should never do so casually or witlessly, meaning: without discussing and defending the supposed likeness at least briefly.

The proposed rule does not apply to flat-out spoofery: "All’s fair in Love and Foxcuckooland." But Messrs. Rosenberg and Mondoweiss are not, in general, foxcuckoos, nor do they appear to be anything less than completely serious on this particular occasion, and so I fear we must subtract a few points from their score.


*** THIS JUST IN! ***

I sent out the pet google to dig around a little, and it looks as if the principal basis of the pathological "H*rv*rd says" is located at The Daily Beast, as follows:

[T]he university sent the following statement to The Daily Beast: “As an institution of research and teaching, we are dedicated to the proposition that all people, regardless of color or creed, deserve equal opportunities, equal respect, and equal protection under the law. The recent assertions by Dr. Peretz are therefore distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so. “It is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with him, to express their views. “We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas. The undergraduate research fund donated by friends, former students, and colleagues of Dr. Peretz was established earlier this year to recognize his teaching and scholarship as well as his stewardship of the social studies program from its inception in the 1960s through the 1990s. The fund will enable undergraduates to undertake significant research experiences as part of the social sciences curriculum and strengthen our commitment to rigorous intellectual inquiry. ”

Presumably at least one beastly must know exactly with whom she was in contact when she was talking to "the university." Many, many points must be subtracted for not sharing that information with her publication’s victims/patients/customers/freeloaders. [4]

And I wish you, sir, as ever,
Happy days through affordable healthcare



___
[1] One time in 14,309, Sam Scribbler may have actually written "And furthermore, everybody here at the NYTC Twistatorial Bureau agrees with me." I’ll spot the kiddies that one.

Similarly, on one outin’ in 133,265, Limbaughs an’ Heath-Palings an’ such may be allowed to discuss the general ethos of the New York Times Company and drag in some formally unaffiliated sad Sam merely because his handiwork crops up on the NYTC op-ed page so frequently that the real perps can safely be assumed to approve of his views. That special exception is not quite as reliable as the other, but one would not want to spoil ALL the kiddies’ fun, now, would one?


[2] On proofreading, I find that this paragraph might be taken to have been pointing out that there exist (scattered individual) persons of H*rv*rd who zealously agree with M. le baron de Pèretz. Though that is not what I original-intented, yet ’tis nothing to apologize for on the factual side. Such neogentry are undeniably out there, and out there in considerable numbers.

The student of neocomradology used to be able to find ’em flockin’ together (to a certain extent) ar a webspa delightfully called ¡MESH!, the acronym having no doubt been carefully chosen to put one in mind of the application of barrier technology to problems of Native Management.

The formal expansion is "Middle East Strategy at H*rv*rd," which would be pretty bad even without any visions of razor wire, no?

(( Dr. Bones: please make sure to download the whole treasure trove , would you? ))

Having done so myself, I find that the good Herr [¿Prof.?] Dok. Martin von Peretsch is never so much as mentioned, implying there may be something to that business about "He didn’t go to H*rv*rd and he was never more than a TA there."

At the moment, we are not concerned with Master Marty’s exact credentialization, however, but with TNYTS, the "The-New-York-Times-Says Syndrome." Plainly it would be less outrageous to attribute the neoëxuberances of the Baní MESH to H*rv*rd pure and simple than to encourage the Peretzian neo-ego by pretending that it can be the Solo Voice of University Hall. There are a lot of Meshites, to begin with, and then, most of them DO possess scholarly qualifications, more or less.

Worse still, that monnicker that the PowerPointers of Cambridge Street picked for themselves and the URL really does rather tend to give the impression that they somehow speak for a broader institution, maybe the Law School, maybe the whole shebang.

Bein’ real smart cookies, they’d deny in a flash that they meant anythin’ of that kind, should anybody equally smart cookiewise ever raise the point. Yet I put it to you, sir, that the Little Friends of Marty Kramer would not at all mind if lesser breeds without were to infer that anybody in the immediate vicinity of 1737 who significantly disagrees with MESH about ‘strategy’ must be some kind of isolated oddball: "Wink, wink, nod, nod."

Nevertheless, MESH sure as Hell ain’t H*rv*rd simpliciter.


[4] Probably the passage is authentic, in the sense of having emanated from Holyoke Centre, possibly even from University Hall. It has an echt 02138 ring to it, nicht wahr?

That much provenance, however, does not even begin to eliminate the "Says who?" issue. Not as far as I am concerned. Let me know what you think, sir.

Charity Begins at Krugman's Corners

Dear Dr. Bones,

Aunt Nitsy’s least godawful surviving opeddist has distinguishes two classes of SSS -- "smashers of Social Security" --- gentry and neogentry as follows:

What’s really going on here? [SSS-A] Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from [SSS-B] Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

Any analyst who comes up with so grossly asymmetrical a Manichee system as ‘conservatives’ versus ‘insiders’ ought to know enough to go back and check her work without being told. Or at least she might try out the obvious flip-side a little, call it "L*b*r*ls versus Outsiders."

One need not try anything, actually, one need only formulate the thing to be tried, to put oneself in a position to suspect that Prof. Krugman may be a closet wingnut: (you bleedin’-heart) Lieberals v. (us wunnerful self-announcin’) Outsiders is, in itself, tiresome old bilge and Party cries comin’ across the oilslick waters from way off to starboard. The core Party of Grant and Hoover (and Goldwater ’n’ Atwater ’n’ ______) has never for a nanosecond consisted of "Washington outsiders." Long before the POG proper existed, Mr. Cash’s "tariff gang" had already put in decades lobbyin’ at Washington’ City for special favors and extraordinary self-servicin’s from their Uncle Sam.

Elephants and Bourbons really do seem pretty near incapable of learnin’ new tricks, though not of hirin’ themselves a few clever and smirkish young señoritos who can. Though to be sure, the Wreckin’ Crew callin’ themselves ‘outsiders’ chiefly because they have always left what America’s party would call ‘politics’ to third- and fourth-rate comrades an’ neocomrades, who presumably can’t cut it out there in Lord Mammon’s Market, was already an ancient Big Shtyk by the time Freelords Rockefeller Major and J. P. Morgan got around to playin’ it far back in the Ulyssean Epoch of kiddie selfservatism.

If Prof. Krugman truly permits the Party of militant extremists slip that "Barefoot Boy from Wall Street" song an’ dance about what "Washington outsiders" they all are past him, better he should confine himself to wonkery altogether and leave politics to decent political grown-ups.

However PK may have stuck in the word ‘Washington’ by inadvertence, and mostly mean that GOP Geniuses are outsiders at the Faculty Club of the best university in Mercer County NJ. That is, I daresay, true enough. [1]

But I set out to recommend Prof. Krugman’s chairity to you, sir, not meaning by that his taking Wingnut City and Hooverville at their own word about outsider status. More to my original-intented point is when he says that wingnutettes and wingnuts "hate Social Security for ideological reasons." Expressio unius est exclusio alterius: to specify that the selfservicers’ hatred is ‘ideological’ in character lets them off the hook about all their cruder pocketbook (and whight-supremacist) reasons for hatin’.

Unless he has just fallen victim to the vulgar habit of labeling other folks’ silly stances ‘ideological’ when all one really means is "sincerely held" or the like. I myself preach continually that one must almost always assume that political opinions are subjectively sincere, but that presumption has nothing to do with ideology, a product that America’s Otherparty can scarcely be accused of possessin’ since they had to stop callin’ themselves Federalists. Wingnuts love wingnuts; that is, we are Wunnerful US is a brain disease, not ‘ideology’ in any intelligible sense.




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[1] Note, though, that even if the patient ‘only’ meant that, he exhibits dangerous symptoms of omphaloscopy, nobody’s Faculty Club being the luminous orb about which the former Real World in fact revolves.

Only TWO right wings, milord?

. . . Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right . . . .

Presumably this Party-and-Ideology señorito does not want anybody else to count beyond two, though it is very difficult to believe that he does not know better than that himself.

Maybe he regards the rest of the Party of Big Management and the Kiddie Selfservative Movement as nonwinglike in nature? That would make more sense: the "malefactors of great wealth" in particular, Don Rossito’s Daddy Warbucks, and his Uncle Scrooge, and his Uncle Rupert (&c. &c.) are not mere pinions, they are the heart and soul and brain (?) of Yank reaction. And, apart from a few short and unimpressive intervals, they have always been firmly in charge of the Party of Grant and Hoover.

The idea that their traditional Ascendancy is threatened at present by an uppity crew of AstroTurf™ amateurs is very exaggerated, the sort of thing that journalism school alumnuses are predestined suckers for. [1]

Happy days.

___
[1] Don Rossito lives far enough above the fray, evidently, not to be aware that ‘libertarian’ is a trademark of Planet Dilbert, not properly to be used to refer to run-of-the-mill victins or patients of AstroTurf™ Therapy. These latter are good folks, perhaps, but singularly lackin’ in that steel-claptrapmindedness that marks off true Rand-Nozick groupies from more normal people.

Perhaps the culture-bound señorito considers that all those publicists at Wingnut City tanks of thought who preach Finanzkapitalismus as a revealed religion are ‘libertarians’ as well. That neocrew he cannot fail to have actually run into personally, however, which makes it likely that he is hushing up who and what his ideobuddies are rather than in ignorance of it, as he may well be with Dilbertarians proper. Can Don Rossito de Daúthat really not have noticed that what his factional daddies and uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law actually do in the path of Big Management often bears very little resemblace to the dogmas of the AEIdeology?

Were he a little better informed, or a little less given to secret-sector secrecies, he might have sided with the Family against mere hired-hands: I believe freelords Murdoch and Scrooge and Warbucks never had a good word to say about "cap and trade," whereas it is well known that many of their lackies and runnin’ dogs "were for it before they were against it."

But Mammon knows best.

" ...future historians will inevitably...."

Dear Dr. Bones,

... future historians will inevitably wonder ... Will future historians NOT wonder how a democratic state--any democratic state--should presume to [whatever]? ... future historians will have better things to do than wonder about the narcissism of people ....

Speaking of ‘narcissism,’ here's a rather extreme example of the way publicists and tertiary-educationalisers take for granted that the court annalists to Princess Posterity will not -- ¡can not possibly! -- disagree significantly with themselves. What could be more patently silly and selfocentric than to be cocksure like this about any ‘future’ more than (say) fifteen minutes off? [1]

I guess it is a sort of virtual power grab: Rear-Colonel Armchair over at the Commissariat for the New American Innovation invokes a vast host of little imaginary friends from A. R. 1946/2510/6270 to redress all perceived fairness-and-balance problems of 1431/2010/5770.

Oh, well, Qui pauca considerat, facile pronunciat.! Life is far too short to waste any moments noticing that one would have to ransack the year 0916/1510/5270 to find much trace of proleptic agreement with Newhousism and Avishaianity.[2]

Happy days.


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[1] Let the Rev. Sidney Smith say it: "4th--short views of human life--not further than dinner or tea.


[2] I betcha zealot Avishaians and pious Newhousites have no use at all for the one literary genre where the notion that die Zukunft might actually turn out to be ganz anders is frequently recurred to: science fiction, so-called, even though Nat. Sci. proper has usually very little to do with the product.

(( Less unseriously, one might name this trendy brain disease in honor of the late Carl Becker, who unearthed and emphasized M. Diderot’s little zinger, La postérité pour le philosophe, c'est l'autre monde de l'homme religieux.

(( But Condorcet knows best. ))

Crater the Less

Dear Dr. Bones,

Wouldn’t it be fun if Neocomrade J. X. Crater here happened to be President Jimmy's idiot neonephew?

Nepotism is probably lacking, but neoïdiocy abounds. Today’s little neoladdie seems genuinely to expect that if somebody will only repeat the Executive Summary of Chicagonomics for Dhimmies to us economic heathens slowly and emphatically enough, why, naturally we must see The Neolight at once.

One must lead a very sheltered life to believe that sort of baloney, a well-wombschooled life, a life full of "cognitive hiatus" every way one looks. The kiddies can have their Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp explain to them why Crater Minor lives the life of an "idiot" in Greek -- not gettin’ out of Foxcuckooland half enough is the crux of it.

This is the sort of blinkered factious scribble that leads many to wonder whether mammonology can be a science at all: will not Crater Minor keep on floggin’ the same ol’ cocktail-napkin neowares regardless of market response?

But not so quick. Perhaps the señorito is a devotee of Neocomrade Karl, Freelord Rove? Perhaps it supposes the former so-called "real world" to have been abolished [1]. in that case, I guess we must say we have to do with a fancy neoïdeologue rather than a plain vanilla neoïdiot. In that event, from the patient's or victim’s perspective there would be no ‘blinkers’ -- what a Crater Minor declines to acknowledge as real eo ipso ain’t real.

Dr. Krugman suffers from a mild case of the Craterian brain disease, but "with colours reversed" as the chess groupies say. This morning he solemnly and emphatically repeats from the Catechism of us lieberal fiends and demonocrats passages including this one,

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash. But we’re talking about voodoo economics here . . . .

Bein’ naturally [2] less IQ-challenged than a kiddie selfservative, Krugman detects the fragrance of voodoo in the air, but he does not in fact take the whiff very seriously. He scribbles as if he expected that little history lesson more or less settles the greedies’ neohash once and for all. Fat chance of that!


***

Perhaps the neospecimen at hand is a crank as well as a sorcerer? It fantasizes (right above its bottom line) that "Using dynamic economic analysis would prove the critics wrong."

Would you happen to know, sir, whether there is a brand-name ideoproduct available in the bazaars of Rio Limbaugh and Hooverville that is labeled "Dynamic Economic Analysis"? It might be fun to pick up a jug or two, even if it proves no better than that Bolshevik snake oil about how formal logic sadly neglects Dialectic™ and thus arrives at all sorts of uncongenial results that are just dumb mistakes, really.

If Crater Minor is playin’ that sort of neogame, I suppose it falls about halfway between Wally Wombschool and Cindy from Wasilla on the naïve end and Kiddiemaster Rove on the slick end of the Great Scale of Wingnuts. The señorito would not simply fail to see certain uncongenialities because it lives in a womb with its Uncle Rupert and wears blinkers, but neither would it possess his freelordship's sublime self-neocomfidence about damnin’ other people's torpedoes. Presented with detestable whinings like Krugman's, it would neither simply fail to hear the objections with Master Wally and Mizz Cindy, nor dismiss them out of hand as incapable of threatenin’ so august a neoracket as the Rovan Empire. It would have to muster up its DEA neoärtillery and actually do some semiserious shootin’ at poor Rear-Col. Krugman’s retrograde static views.

I doubt anybody would actually learn much from watching such a show, but it might do for a Silly Season entertainment.

And I wish you, sir, as ever,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.



___
[1] ''That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. WE are history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.''


[2] I have a proof that narcissism and selfocentricity are at bottom strictly intellectual failures, but unfortunately the e-margin is too narrow to contain it.

Dr. Krugman Visits the Dumbdumbs

[F]lirting with crisis is arguably part of the [militant extremist G.O.P.] plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Dear Dr. Bones,

Has your colleague Krugman ever met a real, live Republicaniac? Or even read their Party-an’-Ideology agitprop with the same level of attention he would grant some technical paper on a fine point of academic mammonology?

I cannot tell from that paragraraph, or from the whole scribble, whether P.K. supposes that there ever existed a Plan VooDoo, let alone whether he supposes the VooDoo Plansters are carryin’ on with their VD even as we speak.

Obviously (to normal persons, but not to Krugman) if VD was a "cover story," than the genuine Grand Old Plan must have been something else, something daylight-shy that one would have to rip the VD camouflage off in order to detect and deplore. He does think the G.O.P. geniuses are still hidin’ their ¡Smash Social Security! [1] attitudes, which is inaccurate only insofar as there has long ceased to be any serious attempt at concealment.







_____
[1] Like PK, I single out State pensions as especially obnoxious to the slashin’ and smashin’ gentry. Presumably he, like me, understands that what lurks under the Party-an’-Ideology cover story is far broader than that, that the militant extremists really mean somethin’ more like ¡Abajo los entitulamentos! ¡Que comen el pastel!

(( Not altogether relevant, but definitely of interest is that there seems to be no established term in Undocumentol corresponding to ‘entitlement(s)’. I expected that *entitulomento(s) or something close would be all over the place, but not so. The Portugals do have entitulamientos, but not so many of them that they use the word often.

(( The G@@GLE Gibberish Machine cranks out simply derechos, which obviously will not do at all: Uncle Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks certainly think creditors have a derecho to be repaid, they’d die at the barricades spreadsheet in hand for that proposition. Nevertheless, although one may say idiomatically in Greater Texan "Freelord Shylock is entitled to payment in full as originally covenanted for," should we start calling every secret-sector indebtedness "an entitlement" on the lender's side, what we really mean by the E-word would disappear in a vast cloud of irrelevant chaff. ))

The Moynihan Neolegacy

Oh dear.

I had thought Dr. Baker and I agree about the ¡Smash Social Security! gentry and neogentry, but that was before I saw

"The article also implies that it WOULD be reasonable to cut Social Security benefits to finance other parts of the government. This WOULD mean describing the payroll tax as a "Social Security" tax even though the money was being used to finance the war in Afghanistan or other expenditures. It is unlikely that this WOULD be a popular position."

Three ‘woulds’ in a row there, you see, and only the last of them warrantable by my prior understanding of the situation. The first two are to be classified firmly under "have already." Guided, I presume, by the late, and fathomlessly cynical, Neocomrade Senator D. P. Moynihan, our Betters have already taken their loot and disbursed it on "other expenditures." Now that pensions cost more yearly than they bring in, naturally the Betters desire to terminate that racket and replace it with a different one. Any arrangement that has the Great and Good financin’ the Bad Poor -- rather than vice-versâ, as decency demands and all history illustrates -- is not merely unreasonable, it is "irrationality on stilts," as Mr. Bentham might say.

Pretendin’ to do something of the Robin Hood sort -- or more exactly, pretendin’ that one will do it thirty years down the pike was delightfully Moynihanesque, but to assume that the Guide of All Possessive Humanity intended the Sherrif of Nottingham and his golf buddies to be out of pocket for even a single day underestimates the neocleverness of guidance seriously. ’Tis a great pity that we can never know exactly how Dan Paddy himself proposed to handle the inevitable peripateia.

The beneficiaries of Guidance are doin’ remarkably well, it seems to me, although of course it is still very early days, smashwise. Just to get those misleading ‘would’s out of a malignant lefty and paupersymp like Dean Baker is a triumph in itself. Moreover, that third ‘would’ is correct enough: hardly anybody on the ‘popular’ team sees through the DPM flimflam yet. Naturally I keep hoping that (1) some effective rabblerouser will point out that ‘our’ old-age money has already been misappropriated, whereupon (2) We, the Rabble of the United States of America, will arise as one man . . . &c. &c. A dream fit for the Silly Season, no doubt.

In previous articles, Dr. Baker has needled the Moynihanophile Classes a little bit about about placin’ their Uncle Sam in a ("merely technical") status of default. This is great fun for everybody educated expensively enough to have learned about their Gen. Hamilton’s rigid notions of the creditor’s obligation. Nowadays, though, most of the Betters get their history from Master Glenn Beck or thereabouts, and it is pointless to pick on Betters for not livin’ up to an antique Federalist rectitude of which they will scarcely even have heard.

In 2010, who can more realistically be taken as the very model of a modern Fiscal Selfservative than Neocomrade P. G. Peterson, Freelord Concord? And it just happens that His Responsibility was quoted in the McClatchy piece, as follows:

This week the International Monetary Fund urged the U.S. to cut future Social Security benefits, among other painful steps that it said were necessary to avoid unsustainable debt and an increased risk of global economic instability. "If we could address Social Security reform," said Peter Peterson, the founder and chairman of a foundation that works for federal debt reduction, "it would provide a much-needed confidence builder with our valued foreign lenders ... so they don't lose faith that we can manage our own fiscal affairs."

I don’t think Dan Paddy would have taken quite that line. His own neotericities in the foreign-policy line tended, as I recall, to insist that it is for the lesser breeds without to win confidence from Wunnerful US, exactly the opposite of his freelordship’s approach.

On the other hand, Mr. Moynihan must approve from the warm downbelow of the Petersonian jive: his freelordship almost says (does he not?) in so many words that a mere verbal promise or outward show of "Social Security reform" will reassure the heathen with too much money on their hands than Sam will default on mere domestic obligations first before expecting them to take any haircuts.[1]

Happy days.


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[1] It enhances the general moynihanicity of the performance that Freelord Concord is almost certainly worried most about Fedguv obligations to neofolks like himself located much closer to home than Cathay.

Also fun to notice is his freelordship’s solemn insinuation that the Voice of the I.M.F. is the voice of the whole human race, admonishing wayward Sam from the outside. In fact, the Voice comes straight out of pretty much the same pseudo- / para- / quasi-academic Tanks of Thought that Mr. Lightman had recourse to in quest of quotations. Maybe your occasional Gnome of Zürich gets a word in edgewise occasionally, but for practical purposes it is all Yanks all the time at the ‘International’ Monetary Fund. (Is it not?)

In the long run, the Betters at Beijing may not much care for being made to play Charlie McCarthy to his freelordship’s Edgar Bergen like this.

Obviously I am no economist, so let me ask Dr. Baker to assess the possibility that the Chinese might also like the idea of lots of elderly barbarians buying their manufactures with (unreformed) SS checks.

But Ricardo knows best.