Your 10-minute Powerline Suh-zzadly Nizzle
I’m doing this one totally off the cuff, without even reading the Powerline post first. All comments guaranteed to be in real-time.
The Smart vs. the Stupid
Posted by John at 09:26 PM
Eternal Booboisie, digitally-enabled. Hurrah, Hoover!
…Because we already know who the stupid is. Ready? Here we go.
The smart, in this case, is David Riggs, a Ph.D. in applied economics with whom I became friends when he worked at the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank on whose board of directors I served for some years, and of which Scott is currently a member. David’s specialty is environmental economics, and, generally speaking, he advocates free enterprise solutions to environmental issues.
On its face, this is a sound perspective. Where have environmental catastrophes mostly occurred in the world? Where governments have been all-powerful–Eastern Europe under the Communists, for example. And where people are poor; as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Where have societies best dealt with environmental issues? Unquestionably, where economies are prosperous–that is to say, free–and where government is limited. So one could say that being a free-market environmentalist is almost a redundancy.
Not quite there yet. Let’s be patient and wait for the honky-horn to sound and the bear on the unicycle to come wheeling through…
That’s not, of course, how Nick Coleman sees it. You probably haven’t heard of Mr. Coleman; he is an obscure local columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His father was a leading Democratic politician in the state, and he has carried water incessantly for the Democrats for as long as he has had a column in local newspapers. The only good thing to be said about Mr. Coleman is that hardly anyone reads him.
I would normally ignore a local nonentity like Coleman. But in his most recent column he attacks Riggs, an old friend, as well as the Center, of which I am fond. So please indulge me for a moment.
Coleman claims that the Center of the American Experiment is to blame for Hurricane Katrina. Really. Here is how Coleman expresses that paranoid fantasy:
Part of what drowned New Orleans is a political ideology determined to shrink government and ignore scientific evidence of global warming. Well, “stuff” flows downhill, and some of those tainted ideas came straight from Minnesota.
Take a 1998 publication of the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis that has pooh-poohed global warming and pushed for “limited government.” …
The results of such recent American Experiments are on view in New Orleans…
So David Riggs and the Center are to blame for Hurricane Katrina.
Ah, that looks promising. It’s hard to believe that Nick Coleman is really saying that David Riggs, et al., are to blame for the hurricane. So let’s go to his column.
Gosh, there’s stuff missing from those quotes. Let’s restore them.
Take a 1998 publication of the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis that has pooh-poohed global warming and pushed for “limited government.” To some folks, that means government should cut taxes on the rich instead of wasting money on flood levees.
The results of such recent American Experiments are on view in New Orleans, where the most effective government initiatives have come in the form of supplying body bags and restricting journalists from recording images of the human costs of government inaction.
Suzzadly, nuh-zo! Bit different there. He didn’t mean the hurricane itself, with Riggs as some gleam-eyed Prospero calling the winds to force, so much as he meant the levees and the response to the hurricane — and ultimately, an ideology that stands against addressing global warming, while claiming that government should not be in the business of saving people from natural disasters.
This has been your 10-minute Powerline suh-zzadly nizzle.
[Update: Thanks to P. Zizzy at Pharyngula, we’re directed to this delicious concluding paragraph. Take it away, John!
It isn’t contemptible to be wrong, of course. But it is contemptible to smear an opponent, impugn his motives, and misrepresent his position–all while arguing from a posture of complete ignorance of the relevant scientific and economic facts, to serve a radical political agenda. Coleman’s obscurity is well-deserved.
Rimshot, slide whistle, ee-yi ee-yi sound effect, etc. There’s simply nothing made of words that one can add to this: It is, in a certain respect, a perfect work of art.]
he advocates free enterprise solutions to environmental issues
And we all know how well that worked out in Bhopal.
Assrocket, creatively parse quotes to make his opponent look stupid/to support his own position? I’m totally shocked.
And what about earthquakes in California? I’m not saying that Cali’s been “Little Europe” as far as government’s concerned over the last 100 years… but it’s never exactly been the bastion of lassiez faire. Things worked out pretty well those last few earthquakes, no?
And we never really hear a ton about governmental fuckups over hurricane damage in, say, Cuba (not that anyone in the US gives a shit,save the crazier and most far-right of the Castro haters (the ones that sponsor terrorist groups and make shit up about him, as opposed to talking about the shit he actually did do)) or Miami-Dade- neither of which are ‘free market zones ‘o freedom’.
Kinda pops that theory… Assrocket, Assrocket- you’re pretty much staying at your customarily low level of journalistic standards.
He’s clearly hoping his readers will be so overwhelmed with the spirit of “America! Fuck yeah!” that they’ll go along with the notion that somehow the US is a bastion of environmental purity brought about by free-market intervention.
A delusional premise at best. The US solved some serious environmental issues back when the EPA and Superfund were fully funded and empowered with strong regulation: hardly a model of free-market fixes.
The penalties in Superfund caused some corporations to clean up their own messes for fear of having the government do it for them *and then triple bill them*. Also not a rousing cheer for the tendency of capitalists to take care of the environment in a free market.
Meanwhile, countries that *do* well, environmentally, are those with strong government regulation and oversight, including what I’m sure Hindrocket feels are a bunch of socialist Europeans.
Captured and defunded regulatory agencies, and a legal finding that a corporation’s only responsibility is to make as much money as possible for its shareholders, regardless of what it may dump into their drinking water in the name of “externalizing costs”, do not encourage free-market environmental solutions: to be frank, even if the company is *in the business* of, say, cleaning up wetlands, its legal duty is to do as cheap and as minimal a job as it can get away with and still get paid. That’s how it maximizes profits.
In short, Hindrocket is a fool.
The least loony rightwing defense of neo-conservative/Bushite policies when confronting critics in the wake of Katrina has been “So, whoever’s being critised caused the Hurricane?” (..with the ensuing ‘That’s crazy-talk’ being implied). This reductio ad asdurdum is the best they can do? I mean, I’d give it style points if it were either funny or original, but it’s just dumb.
Socialism! Fuck yeah!
I think there’s probably a decent argument to be made for the actual *disaster* of New Orleans – NOT the hurricane, but the disaster – as being attributable to human causes.
The city came through the hurricane itsef with just the sort of damage you’d expect from a strong category 3 storm – which as bad as that is, is still orders of magnitude better than the wrath-of-Zeus like destruction it experienced upon the collapse of the levees. And the fact that those levees needed work but couldn’t get the funding to get the work done should not be a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with the subject.
I offer forth a hypothesis for y’all to test as you go about your Sunday watching of the talking heads on TV ritual: those who conflate the hurricane destruction of New Orleans with the collapsing levee destruction of New Orleans are using language in a creative way to push a political agenda. Let me know what you find.
The World According to Powerline
Ah, Powerline. Evidence that even a progressive state like Minnesota harbors nests of right-wing morons. I always appreciate seeing their foolishness exposed, although I rarely have the stomach to read them. Happily, yes, Sadly, No has troubled him…
That was quite a nice smackdown. Also, you get mad points for coming up with “Suzzadly, nuh-zo!”
Nice pic…. which pencilneck to pummel first? Hmmmm…
Free market solutions, fuck yeah!
There have been studies which try to understand how far ahead the market really tries to look in the future and the answer is at most 5 years. It is just idiocy to claim that industry or companies (the ones with the most capital and clout) would see the benefit in very long term planning vs. the quick buck. With investors absolutely keyed on share price, this is basically it. If car companies were in charge of fuel economy standards we would literally have no standards at all, same for power plant emissions. Where is the market force that would drive a power plant to not pollute? Oh, let me guess, some upstart power company would poof into existence and would advertise that they have clean power, but their power costs more, so why would anyone buy it? Oh, wait the invisible hand would cause people in areas most affected by acid rain to choose to pay more for their power and force the big polluting company to compete. Oh shit, that wouldn’t happen, because the even bigger, more invisible hand would cause the evil company’s hack think tank to convince people there wasn’t a problem at all, this the problem would disappear!!!
THANKS INVISIBLE HAND!!
Technically, I think putting an entire city underwater is Wrath of Poseidon stuff. (Though he’s also in charge of earthquakes.)
Otherwise, it’s a good point that I hadn’t actually stopped to try to separate, and I’m gonna agree with everything everybody else has said here so far.
Is it just me, or is “Invisible Hand” the coolest name for a comic book villain? Like maybe a Dick Tracy bad guy?
Or maybe even a horror movie plot….”It crept through the fetid darkness, leaving its trail of hatred and despair through the lives of those it destroyed….where would the Invisible Hand strike next?”
I was involved for a little while with an advice column called “Ask the Invisible Hand”. We’d get letters like “Dear Invisible Hand: I just got laid off from my job because my company outsourced my position to China. What advice do you have for me?” To which we’d offer responses like “Dear Laid Off: Congratulations! As everyone knows, a thriving free market economy necessitates an unemployment rate of somewhere around 5%. By joining the ranks of the unemployed, you are doing your bit to help me maintain the balance of market forces that you all love and know as “freedom”. Thanks for being a patriotic American! Love, the Invisible Hand.”
I have been told before that a bad attitude is not a substitute for a sense of humor. I’m not sure I know what was meant by that.
I am so pissed! I was just thinking of an “Ask the Invisible Hand” feature, but I have been beaten to it, I do think someone should do it, it is so funny.
Here’s what I.H. is up to now!
WASHINGTON (AP) — Internet sites purporting to be charities related to Hurricane Katrina have been popping up faster than the FBI can look at them, and many appear to be fraudulent, the head of the FBI’s cyber division said Thursday.
Hindrocket’s ending line…
“It isn’t contemptible to be wrong, of course. But it is contemptible to smear an opponent, impugn his motives, and misrepresent his position–all while arguing from a posture of complete ignorance of the relevant scientific and economic facts, to serve a radical political agenda.”
…was so spot on that I just asked him permission to forward it to Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove in Washington.
First of all here is a currency crank indulging his sense of witticism at the expense of the Free Market Deity, “Hand, The Invisible” : here. Then here is a brand new paper on Uncle Sam’s Visible Hand, rigging Wall Street : here. Don’ it make you feel free?
We should roundtable out the Invisible Hand column. It can never be the same person twice. DOuble super-secret!
Because there is a charge nearly everyone is making: that Bush screwed up badly in anticipating and responding to Katrina, the righties are falling all over themselves to ridicule a charge that nobody is making: that Bush failed to magically alter the course of the storm itself. Watch this absurd conflation continue in the months to come.
Hindrocket’s ending line…
1) How can he do that without his head exploding?
2) Hindrocket makes the case for atheism. That he could write that line without being struck by lightning the instant it was posted is proof that there are no gods worth worshiping.
3) Hindrocket has filled the Minimum Daily Requirement of Irony for the entire blogosphere.
Thanks, ricky.
Minamata!
Yeah, drowning a city is way more a Poseidon-type activity…and he controlled storms at sea, anyway, so I think the Earth Shaker has to take the blame for this one. Although, depending on who was the patron of the city, it might take a whole council of the the gods to agree on whether it survived (see the Iliad, book 10, if I recall correctly).
What really sucks is I remember the good old days of Hurricane Charlie and Hurricane Ivan, when a death toll of less than 100 people sparked huge controversy and cries for reform.
2) Hindrocket makes the case for atheism. That he could write that line without being struck by lightning the instant it was posted is proof that there are no gods worth worshiping.
I don’t know as that’s true- he makes the case for rational political and religious discourse certainly (which is ironic enough to be worthy of headexploding). Certainly that’s mutually exclusive with the form of fundamentalism that his party practices (be it a form of Calvinist Christianity, pre-V2 Council Catholicism or Free Market Capitalism), though not with religion in general.
pre V2 Catholicism surely not : long catholic think piece Marie Jon’ shoulda stayed Catholic and progressed past what she calls the ‘cafeteria’ stage, methinks.
Heh- I was referring to the draconian policy regarding other religions the pre-ecumenicalist Church had, but it’s great someone besides me brings the economic justice teachings up for once.
I know all about the Church’s social teaching- indeed, it’s formed the basis of most of my economic arguements (and I’ve got an Aunt and an ‘Uncle’ (long story there) who are/were Catholic Workers- who put that policy into practice).
Check out this> site for some more excellant material to that effect.
And also kind of telling that Marie joined a sect for whom a primary tenant of faith is that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon and that the Pope is the Antichrist.
Brad R. is so wrong; everyone knows you say it “sa-dazzle, nazzle.”
“Where have societies best dealt with environmental issues? Unquestionably, where economies are prosperous–that is to say, free–and where government is limited. So one could say that being a free-market environmentalist is almost a redundancy.”
And, of course, these countries are primarily peopled by caucasians. So, one could say that being a caucasian environmentalist is almost a redundancy. If one were a fucking idiot who didn’t understand the whole “correlation is not causation” thing. At all.
And my brother swears by this crap. *sigh*.
Wu
I love how the Powerline dolt has to put down Coleman so he can build himself up. Classic bully behavior.
Hmmm i thought it would be sadizzle, nozzle.
What?!? They aren’t??!!?? Well, that’s it, then.
I’m never blowing that priest again.