The fact is, liberals are faggots and should shut up. Iraq=free. Economy=awesome. Terrorists=on the run. America=safe. Bush=awesome. Why won’t you admit it? Oh, you need to defend a john and loot successful businesses to fuel your class war.

Yeah but Gary you have no class so don’t worry about it.

In the rhetorical style of a famous character actor with a slight lisp: But everyone knows Harvard educators are leftist scum sucking dogs that can never be trusted. So clearly this report is complete bunk. But you must have known I would say that, in fact, you probably counted on it, so clearly the report is completely truthful and accurate.

(Baconator line was teh awesome, btw.)

That was incredible. Damnation. For me it was like how it would sound if Quentin Tarantino wrote the dialogue for Juno.

Is it just me, or does it seem like Gary’s heart just isn’t in it anymore? He didn’t even call us traitors.

It’s so nice that Gary does his satirizing for you.

Gary
I don’ thin “=” means what you thin it means.

I’m sorry, but oversimplified, 1D, onvcorrelated, non-experimentally verified (or even tested!) mathetmatical models for human behavior don’t really impress me. Also, citing nothing in the realm of statistical modeling to back these equations up is less than impressive as well.

How is defending a bathroom going to fuel a class war?

How is defending a bathroom going to fuel a class war?

Like this:
Step 1: Defend bathroom
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit Class war!

As a person named John, I object to the lack of capitalization when my name is misappropriated to mean bathroom. Thought you might like to know.

You know, I have to agree with NBC having the duty on declaring Iraq as not being in civil war.

Naturally, I assume them to take some time, like they did with declaration of Iraq being IN civil war just to be sure. So, if a year or two after the whole world thinks Iraq civil war is over the NBC doesn’t declare the civil war over I would be very disappointed in them.

However, judging what has been said about this January in Iraq, it looks like they have no hurry to make such statements.

Which nutjob is Ace anyway? Is he the grill guy who’s picture on his website was taken ten years and 30 kg ago? You guys really should put up some avatar for each nut, there is not enough variation in their opinions to learn which one is which.

I always thought we were trying to succeed looting businesses. Damned dyslexai.

Yeah, but imagine how all the Dicks out there feel.

Rats. I should have refreshed or quoted or both or something. That was, perhaps not so obviously, directed at Pirelli’s Purse’s comment.

Great Caesar’s Sheepdip Batman!

It is easy to see why Ace et al are all jiggy about that document. It is full of real big purty words that they can’ understand but it must be true seein’s how its got those big words and all.

Problem with this paper is that it presents the illusion of research by disinterested third-parties – Sort of a Joe Friday “just the facts mam”. A quick check of the Works Cited appendices shows its true agenda. Just a different wrapper for the New! and Improved! goodness from the Neocon assmasters. The authors even cleverly eliminate any data from that wonderful new vacationland, Baghdad. ‘Cause, ya know, that might not help support the facts mam. Pure Bullsheeto.
Goobers wet themselves over disingenuous crappola like that.

I just finished reading through the paper, and am distinctly unimpressed. IANA sociologist, but I am an engineer and a decent mathematician.

Primarily, I object to the model they’re using. The authors apply the rational-actors model of criminal behavior to the insurgency in Iraq, which has a number of problems (and I’m assuming the rational-actors model is valid in the first place, which is apparently a going argument among sociologists and economists).

The rational-actors model as applied here substitutes the probability of US withdrawal in Iraq for the profit motive of domestic criminals. This implicitly assumes that the withdrawal probability is as simple and directly measurable as profit. I also don’t see any attempt to account for additional motivations for “attacks”, such as sectarian violence and ordinary criminality and corruption.

Finally, even if the paper it correct in every detail, it still doesn’t support the “media lies, people die” narrative Ace is shoehorning it into. All the paper says is that, after correcting for other factors, there is a measurable causal relationship between weakening American “resolve” and increased levels of violence. That’s NOT an argument against media reporting on the war; it’s one more indication of the inherent weakness of a protracted counterinsurgency operation.

(Sorry, I forgot to bring teh funny or teh troll-bashing. I’ll come back and add it in later.)

(Sorry, I forgot to bring teh funny or teh troll-bashing. I’ll come back and add it in later.)

We’re all just imagining teh funny of Ace’s head exploding while he reads your post. Robert, you have been successful in your mission.

DAMN YOU, SCOTT BEAUCHAMP!

Wendy’s has a spicy version of the Baconator? Jeepers! Guess I know what’s for dinner!

That was really funny.

I’m sorry, but oversimplified, 1D, onvcorrelated, non-experimentally verified (or even tested!) mathetmatical models for human behavior don’t really impress me. Also, citing nothing in the realm of statistical modeling to back these equations up is less than impressive as well.

Problem is, those things do impress the yokels who read Ace and everybody who wants to pin the blame for the disaster in Iraq on the media and/or “The Left,” instead of on the people who fucked it up in the first place.

Holy mathematical legitimacy, Batman!

Makes me very glad I’m in a field (at least now) that doesn’t insist on putting forth ridiculous “equations” to provide authority claims and/or obfuscation of denying said claims.

In addition to tracing the grant money, you’re right on the money remarking on:

with its deep upfront caveats and if-thens.

-Well, Baghdad doesn’t count, which some might say weakens our argument…

-The first Bush term doesn’t count…

-“We restrict our sample to provinces with similar characteristics…”

-We did not actually watch all that much Al-Jazeera, or interview Iraqi insurgent captives (we couldn’t find them in the secret prisons?), but rather estimated the impact of “high satellite” availability, because that was something we could do without leaving our office chairs…

[On an unrelated note: weird how with this sort of evidence, wingnuts are now insisting that Islamofascism is rational…]

The fact is, liberals are faggots and should shut up. Iraq=free. Economy=awesome. Terrorists=on the run. America=safe. Bush=awesome. Why won’t you admit it?

ZOMG, teh stoopid. It. burns!!!!

Seriously Gary, your cognitive dissonance is impressive, I’ll grant you that. No wonder John Edwards talked about two Americas – clearly you aren’t living in the one the rest of us are.

Economy = in a recession
Terrorists = your boy has left OBL in a cave since 2001
America = a politicized shambles we almost cannot recognize
Bush = a guy upon whose package you appear to want to suck

There, I’ve admitted it all now. I feel so much better!

damn, but Gavin pwns Ace’s “voice.”

Since when has Ace ever, evar made an argument that didn’t start out with anecdotal evidence? Since when did Ace evar care about the morality of anyone’s actions, with the exception that he can’t seem to bring himself to link to anything but softcore sites, which he does a lot. since when is a dodgy source in an AP wire story a logical defense to an absurd attempt at military adventurism and nation building that will cost trillions of dollars and take tens of thousands of lives? It’s about scoring that feel good point that will make everything ok. It’s like Clinton’s pensi made everything he ever did wrong and Spitzer’s whores made you shut up. That so worked on us sefl-righteous lefties with our damned statistics. Why can’t a study from a guy at Harvard totally win the argument that the media are to blame? Zing! snipe. slam dunk! game over. we win! It happens in that last second shot at the buzzer. One feel good moment is all Ace is looking for. Like the softcore sites, how much bacon and play-doh do you really need to see if the suggestive stuff is all it takes?

From Ace’s comments:

A stupid question perhaps, or maybe not…

If the US Government will not charge the media with treason and bring them to trial, could the dextrosphere do so? Could we find the required legal expertise and go through the whole process of bringing charges, taking evidence and determining guilt or innocence? It would be an incredible amount of work, but if someone does not at least try them in the court of public opinion, they will only become more brazen in their efforts to emasculate the US, an outcome that would be a world tragedy.

Submitted without comment.

Even if you can prove that an anti-war message in the US media “emboldens terrorists” how is it a reasonable assumption that a pro-war message would not have the same effect (of possibly greater magnitude).

Didn’t the Whitehouse representation of the Iraqi’s pro-war stance embolden the US population to support our invasion? So why wouldn’t the terrorists do the same thing? (More to the point isn’t that what Bin Laden’s videos do for the most part: i.e. They’re going to attack us, so we must attack them.)

…could the dextrosphere do so?

I choose to believe he’s talking about a giant ball of artificial sweetener–perhaps a roadside attraction at the Potato Starch Hydrolysis Capital of America. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Gavin! Kick-Ass Ass Kickin.

That was a hoot. Birds fell outta the trees.

You sir, rock.

Ace, on the other hand, is an idiot and a tool who has had his shame organ surgically removed so he can sing a song of stupid at the top of his lungs for all to hear, and mock, and come back and do it again tomorrow…

mikey

This is the same doofus who huzza’ed the Philosopher-Pantload’s excretion as a “tour de force.”

Shrug. Bitch-slapping the Ace is fun, but once you recognize that he’s nothing but a one-trick pony whose sole trick consists of Proof By Assertation, dissing him looks a lot more like kicking a cripple than a well-deserved beat-down.

Not that I have anything against a good wingnut beat-down, mind you.

“Spiderman Underoos with a .45 Glock in the waistband to a Hollywood Hentai celebrity porn orgy with celebrity hookers in Hollywood ” almost made me fall over.
Not that I object to attending Hollywood hentai celebrity porn orgies. I am an Amurican, after all.

I did too have sex today!

You really outdid yourself, sir.

Bravo!

I agree with the others. The Baconator and Hollywood Hentai orgy lines were classic material.

ace said,

With another person?

“ace said,
March 13, 2008 at 18:52
I did too have sex today!”

And her name was ummm, let me guess…Rosie Palm

whats a twat-knocker?

sounds either fun or painful.

may be both?

Mommy, they’re making fun of my inflatible girlfriend again.

Actually, the line that made me laugh out loud in a startle-the-colleagues kind of way is this:

Which is reasonable enough

Anyway, now the people in the offices up and down my corridor want some of what I’m having.

Just a note on NBER. Martin Feldstein was the leader and a conservative economist. Economists from many institutions – Harvard, MIT, Stanford, among others – are affiliated with NBER. And, while economists are on average among the more conservative social scientists, there are many center and left economists on the faculties associated with NBER who regularly present at NBER conferences and have their working papers published by NBER.

Faculty also often run their research grants through NBER, possibly because their office space in Cambridge is better than at the universities. Doctoral students at affiliated institutions are often research assistants, with offices at NBER, and can frequently publish their working papers on the NBER web site.

The key thing about the working papers is that they have generally not been subject to stringent peer review when they are posted. The posting process is part of vetting a paper and getting comment to revise before submitting to a journal. Endorsement by NBER or other economists associated with NBER of the findings should not be inferred from posting a working paper. And, while the faculty and graduate students associated with NBER are among the best in the country, high quality should not be assumed. Graduate students in particular will often jump on an “interesting” question, find some data that think will allow it to be “answered” and push it through some standard econometric modeling relatively quickly.

So, tear away at the quality of the analysis. Question the data, question the model, or question their failure to consider alternative explanations. Tarring NBER as a right-wing think tank publishing right wing crap misstates what is going on and feel more like the ad hominem attacks that I associate with right-wing cranks. At least that’s the view of this left-of-center economist.

Thanks for the context. What stood out for me, though, was the Olin and Scaife funding, which is always ideologically-based, and is (practically speaking) a sure indicator of research that’s expected to provide concrete, near-term benefits to the conservative movement. Olin and Scaife don’t fund inquiry; they fund advocacy.

You know much more about the field than I do. Why are these foundations financing NBER?

Just a note on the Sourcewatch information linked to as the justification for the Scaife Olin funding assertion. Over a 16 year period, it reports $9 million in grants and Sourcewatch implies this was THE funding for the organization.
The data are crap. NBER was founded in1920. It is not a post-Reaganite think tank, as characterized in the original post. In 2005 alone, according to its Form 990 filing, available at guidestar.org, it had $80+ million in endowment, $3.6 million in contributions, and $16.7 million in government grants. As I said in my earlier post, economics faculty members at the affiliated universities often put their grants through NBER. Economists are not particularly left, but one is likely to see David Cutler and Jon Gruber and their graduate assistants working in and publishing working papers at NBER, and the NBER Board likewise includes left-of-center economists, including an appointee of the AFL-CIO.

Let’s try to maintain our reputation as being part of the reality-based community.

Linkage, please, Mr. Needleman?

I’d like to see that 990.

Drafted my last comment before I saw Gavin M.’s. It provides some of the context he asks for.

As to why Olin & Scaife funded NBER. Without looking more closely at what and who they funded, I can’t be sure. Olin & Scaife fund people. There are right-of-center economists. Some do good empirical and theoretical work, even as their policy recommendations are crap. Some do shoddy work. (Same as left-of-center economists.) NBER-affiliated faculty have done research on the impact of immigrants on wages, saving and social security “reform,” other hot button right wing issues. Scaife & Olin can get a fairly good, well regarded bang for their buck by funding a few well-respected academics whose political sympathies match theirs and whose research and public advocacy supports the right.

The magnitude of the Scaife & Olin money, about $600K per year, is small against a $20 million annual budget. Without doing more research, I would guess the funds were going to individual researchers and not to organizational support per se.

Jack, I added a footnote in the relevant passage, above, that points to your first comment.

In response to OB-GYN Kenobi:

Recent IRS 990s are available after registration through the following website: http://www.guidestar.org

Also, there’s a breakdown of recipient grants here:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=243

The dollar total isn’t huge, but the Smith Richardson Foundation is a major supporter of supply-side projects.

In any case, the post ought to be changed. I’ll make that passage clearer.

See, this is one of the (many) reasons I love SN! and many other liberal blogs. Someone who knows of whence they speak posts comments that might clarify or even dispute some points made in an article, and they aren’t crucified for doing so.

Hat tip to Gavin and co..

I will reiterate my opinion again that Ace is hands down the ugliest of all the major conservative bloggers. Even uglier than Charles Johnson, who at least has that womanly appearance.

“Someone who knows of whence they speak posts comments that might clarify or even dispute some points made in an article, and they aren’t crucified for doing so.”

And a polite request for supporting documentation isn’t met with disdain and name-calling. A hat tip to Mr. Needleman, as well.

The major point, as I see it, is that the right-wing bloggies’ reaction to this paper is utterly inappropriate. Yeah, in standard academia this would be the point at which it would be peer-reviewed and hashed out further (and, in this paper’s case, either turned into a right-wing potboiler or thrown in the trash – for the reasons Gavin points out, this dog doesn’t hunt as research), but it’s a lot easier to point to a pre-peer-review paper making ideologically attractive findings than a post-peer-review paper which only vaguely coheres to The Narrative.

In essence, the people who wrote this thing did it in such a fashion that they KNOW it’s not going to stand up to peer review – anyone with even the vaguest sense of vocation, right-wing or no, is going to tear it a new asshole – but they let it get out and get leaked to the righties anyway, and because they knew they’d be doing that, they made it as direct, inflammatory, and self-congratulatory as possible.

For a researcher, this would be a career-ending blunder. For an ideologue, it’s a sort of hat trick. And it’s all the more shame that a think tank with a pedigree into the 1920s would get tarred with something like this.

What are the economic theories that support the correlation of video games and violent juvenile behavior?

That should read: “Ace did not have sex AGAIN today.”

Posted at Ace’s:

Read the study. It’s not a measure of media anti-war messages, those are not factored into the study at all. The emboldening messages that are being measured in the study come from top Bush Administration officials.

Anti-war criticisms that come from “the media”, liberals, Democrats or other common critics are not measured at all.

If the study shows anything it shows that top Bush Administration officials needs to complain less about war criticisms in the media, as that is what the study actually measures.

Your headline is wrong. Next time read the study before you report on it.

—-

Seriously, look at Appendix 2. There is no correlation shown between anti-war criticism and Iraq attacks, because that is not what the study measures.

do the jihadis really understand english well enough to pick up on all the iraq is a shithole stories? if so, why do the troops need translators?

In other news: coverage of mass shootings by deranged college and high-school kids emboldens other deranged college and high school kids to go on mass killing sprees.
The conclusion:
THE MEDIA IS KILLING INNOCENT KIDS! THEY ARE MURDERERS! CITIZEN, SHUT UP TEH MASS MURDERING MEDIA!

I think Ace is the one whos BBQ or Webber fell over in a wind storm, and he begged for donations to help him pick it up again. He also won an award as “B-B-B-Best B-B-Blogger of the Year! (1997)
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg205/fozzetti/acedeepend2.jpg

It was Confederate Yankee with the grill and IT WAS FAKED!!!

I think the ever-alert folks at NBC who refuse to undeclare the Iraqi Civil War, are taking their cues from Senator McSame, who, within the last twenty-four hours opined thusly:
“. . . defeat in Iraq could lead to the ‘nightmare scenario’ of genocide.”

Oops. No that was on March 14, 2007.
The Caucus: New York Times Politics Blog

Rather, he held forth straight-talkingly:
“Both Senator Obama and Clinton want to set a date for withdrawal. That means chaos. That means genocide,” the 71-year-old Arizona senator told CNN’s Larry King late Thursday.

Ooops again. That was Feb. 15, 2008.
McCain says early withdrawal from Iraq would mean ‘genocide’

No, he plain-speakingly warned that an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq would lead to “chaos and genocide across the region,” on the eve of his first trip to Europe since becoming the Republican nominee for president.

John McCain: Early US pull-out from Iraq will cause ‘genocide’

If nominee Senator McSame believes that Iraqis are still at each others’ throats with lethal weapons, who is NBC to disagree?

LD said: “You guys really should put up some avatar for each nut, there is not enough variation in their opinions to learn which one is which.”

Does designing those sound like a fun challenge or what?

Tim quoted a comment from Ace’s site.
“If the US Government will not charge the media with treason and bring them to trial, could the dextrosphere do so?”

Through the Smoke

“SINISTROSPHERE This has started to appear online as a disparaging collective term for bloggers with left-wing political affiliations.

“Its opposite is the dextrosphere, a sweeter-sounding and much less sinister term. Both words are based on “blogosphere”, a collective term for the whole blogging environment.”

The above 2005 entry references the worldwidewords.org site, where neither word appears to be defined. I guess they didn’t catch on.

I’m waiting in great suspense to witness the case brought by the dextrosphere against the networks for occasionally noting that some people died violently in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday as a result of military activity that might have included American troops.

And another thing: Every time you media ass-dongs report a soldier is killed, a soldier gets killed. [waves sheet of unmarked printer paper] At last I have the proof! So, dweeb that I am — and I warn you, you twat-knockers are tangling with a man who would not hesitate to wear Spiderman Underoos with a .45 Glock in the waistband to a Hollywood Hentai celebrity porn orgy with celebrity hookers in Hollywood — allow me to beg the favor of your presence at a sumptuous catered banquet of all-you-can-eat crow, with unlimited soup and breadsticks, if by ’soup’ you read shut the fuck up, and by ‘breadsticks’ you properly infer bitch, shut the fuck up some more. Ah mo stick mah foot so far up yo ass, you is be havin’ toes for teeth, word up.

Your parody of Ace is so good that it renders actually going to his site pointless.

Doesn’t everybody know a dozen guys like Ace? I do. He’s very literate, certainly not a bad writer language-wise, but a lot of us employed that lame-ass unrestrained-id style of writing when we were 17. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, someone comes along and tells us it isn’t funny or entertaining and gives us some kinda figurative kick in the ass, and we get our linguistic shit together.

I get the impression that Ace never got that kick in the ass either to clean up his writing style, or in terms of straightening out his kooky political delusions.

The name “Spicy Baconator” sounds like a good excuse to brew a Doppelbock. Like Salvator or Kulminator. But with bacon.

“Your parody of Ace is so good that it renders actually going to his site pointless.”

Not that such was needed.