The Post-Fact Society

Reviving this thread in response to two pieces in the Sunday New York Times.

First:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/o...t-doesnt-matter.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Money quote and premise of entire article:

Really? Is that true? Who is saying that? At least one quote from a noted, influential progressive should be easy enough to get if this notion is so widespread. I'm a progressive and I certainly don't believe that deficits don't matter. In fact, it was Cheney who said that, no? So the whole column fails any sniff test in my book because it's rooted in a lame Fox News talking point with no facts to back it up. Why is the Sunday Times printing this crap?

Second:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/what-we-give-up-for-health-care/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Again, who are these liberals that ignore costs? No quotes or evidence of this, just stating it and assuming it's a fact.

I'm offended by the broad brush stroke and the assertion that because the health care politics of the last 20 years been driven by industry greed and old people, that this all comes down to free-spending liberals. Medicare Part D alone reminds us that no one is above pandering to voters with some free handouts. The only difference is that Republicans will only do it when they're in power and not when Democrats are in power.

I'm a liberal, and I care a lot about healthcare costs. I think the US population is way overpaying and the profits go straight to giant insurance companies. My solution is to remove them from the equation. How is that ignoring costs?

Anyway, I know it's the opinion page, but the Times is better than this. Two opinion pieces on the same day rooted in baseless right wing assumptions about the left is two too many.

James Galbraith is I think the leading voice in the "deficits don't matter" camp, but that's not actually his viewpoint. Per this article, his view is rather that deficits do matter but not as much as most people think and anyway now is not the time to be fussing about spending cuts, when the economy is bad.

http://prospect.org/article/qa-why-deficit-doesnt-matter-0

Of course, Krugman is the usual suspect when "progressive" economists are mentioned, and he has gone out of his way to say that yes the level of deficit does matter.

So indeed it does appear that the Times has puffed up its opponent for the first point.

The second point is a lot worse. Federal spending growth was lower under Clinton than under Reagan or W. Plus the whole tone of what "liberals" do or don't care about is patronizing and insulting. How about writing that "conservatives" don't care about pain and suffering. This is WAY below what is expected from the Times. This is Fox level.

1) I agree with you that the article has some straw liberals in there, the sort that usually appear in the WSJ, but the end isn't that offbase:

I agree that short-term help for the economy combined with long-term deficit reduction is the right direction for budgetary policy.

But we also need to make every dollar of debt matter, and therefore we should be directing our efforts to lifting the economy toward programs that provide long-term benefit, not just a short-term burst of caffeinated energy.

The only problem is, I think I read that same point in a Duh: The Public Policy Research Journal of Painfully Obvious Points


2) Ezekiel J. is getting his ass kicked in the comments. Seriously, that article sounds even more like a Wall Street Journal op-ed dependent upon baseless claims made by liberal strawmen.

Ooops. Make that "people of straw."

1) True
2) Yes I wasn't the only one with this reaction to the piece

Bolded: Ha - I almost made a comment that replace the word 'liberals' with 'blacks' or 'gays' and there's no way that the Times would let this crap fly.

Wherever the "persons of straw"/"straw persons" debate ends up, it's pretty clear that author had an agenda to push.

So true. Also, look at many of the articles blaming the "rich" and the "1 percent". Replace those words with "Jews" and you would think we were in 1930s Europe.

Only not, so much...

Link me to those articles, please. In particular I'd like to see the ones from reputable papers like the New York Times.

Oh, please! There are so "many" "articles" that are "blaming" the rich! It shouldn't be that hard to find!

Replace them with "robber barons" and you'd think you were in late 19th, early 20th century America.

And you'd be doing something more accurate and intellectually honest, since no one is talking about a final solution for the rich. They're just trying to figure out a way to build a society where we're all in this together, and one group doesn't get a disproportionate share of the benefits while simultaneously being completely shielded from the risks.

This thread refuses to die - because I won't let it, and because Bill Kristol was able to write out

It didn't matter that the polling data show no major trends towards or against Obama, Kristol had 1000 words to write, dammit!

To call him a hack is to give grave insult to hacks everywhere.

http://www.colbertnation.com/

Last night's interview with Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Watching it made me think of this thread (i.e. he's pushing the same argument I am). Here's a link to his website for those interested in getting the book.

Slate.com: Romney, the GOP and the War Against Facts

It’s tough times for facts in America. First Mitt Romney—interviewing for the position of president—declined to release his tax returns because, as he explained, the Obama team’s opposition research will “pick over it” and “distort and lie about them.” He isn’t actually claiming that his opponents will lie. He’s claiming he’s entitled to hide the truth because it could be used against him. As Jon Stewart put it, “You can’t release your returns, because if you do, the Democrats will be mean to you.” These are tax returns. Factual documents. No different than, say, a birth certificate. But the GOP’s argument that inconvenient facts can be withheld from public scrutiny simply because they can be used for mean purposes is a radical idea in a democracy. It has something of a legal pedigree as well.

Probably not coincidentally, last week Senate Republicans filibustered the DISCLOSE Act—a piece of legislation many of them once supported—again on the grounds that Democrats might someday use ugly facts against conservatives. The principal objection to the law is that nasty Democrats would like to know who big secret donors are in order to harass, boycott, and intimidate them. The law requires that unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations report campaign-related spending over $10,000 within 24 hours, and to name donors who give more than $10,000 for political purposes. Even though eight of the nine justices considering McCain-Feingold in Citizens United believed that disclosure is integral to a functioning democracy, the idea that facts about donors are dangerous things is about the only argument Senate Republicans can muster. Last week even Justice Antonin Scalia told CNN’s Piers Morgan that “Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better. That's what the First Amendment is all about. So long as the people know where the speech is coming from.”

That’s a ringing defense of the need for disclosure, which Scalia has always supported.

Yet GOP senators aren’t brave enough to have true facts on display anymore. For Republicans, the truth is almost Nixon-esque now. Here’s Mitch McConnell comparing the disclosure requirements to an “enemies list” last Tuesday: “This amounts to nothing more than member and donor harassment and intimidation, and it's all part of a broader government-led intimidation effort by this administration. There are parallel efforts at the FCC, SEC, IRS, DoJ, and the White House itself to silence its critics. The creation of a modern day Nixonian enemies list is currently in full swing and, frankly, the American people should not stand for it. As I've said before, no individual or group in this country should have to face harassment or intimidation, or incur crippling expenses defending themselves against their own government, simply because that government doesn't like the message they're advocating.”

If those claims sound familiar, it’s because these are precisely the arguments donors from the National Organization for Marriage recently raised in an unsuccessful 2009 legal challenge to a California statute that requires political campaigns to disclose the identity of donors who contribute more than $100 to their cause.

In other words...

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things

Adding to this the article about the invention of the Internet:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2012/07/23/government_didn039t_invent_the_internet_285419.html

I was on The Economist board the other day, a guy opened his post by talking about "idiot Democrats" who wanted to penalize the wealthy, and then said if you took all the money from the top 1% in the U.S. and redistributed it, it would come out to $78 per person.

The true answer is about $50,000.

The false equivalency people will always say "Oh both parties do it" but no they do not. You don't see lefty bloggers confusing $78 for $50,000. Bad lefty bloggers are stupid and annoying and repetitive and bad at listening and tedious and so forth, but they do not make errors of that level. Which I see time and time again from the right, that is hardly an isolated example.

This is Dick Morris, so caveats abound when dealing with the truth, but let's take apart why he thinks this organization should be trusted in, oh, maybe thirty seconds.

First:

1) One organization conducted polls in nine states that add up to slightly over 600 likely voters. That's 66 or 67 voters per state, assuming they're roughly equal in population. Thanks to ARG, we calculate that a voter population of 5 million and a sample of 67 gives us a MoE of +/- 11.97 points. With that margin of error, I'm surprised Morris' "trusted organization" doesn't have Ross Perot leading at least one state.

2) The organization conducted that poll over 8 days. So that's 75 voters per day. That MoE would be roughly 11.5%, much better than the 9 states problem, but much worse than a real poll. BUT! That's compounded with the nine states. So let's spot Dick 1000 likely voters and see how many they called for our hypothetical State A (hint: Wisconsin) on any given day. 13 or 14. That's a MoE of worthless, because you don't do margin of error for stuff less than 30.

3) The trend line is pro-Romney. That's great, except that if it were pro-Romney, thanks to the Central Limit Theorem we'd see that in other polls. As I've made a point of doing in the 2012 thread, Obama's winning this election by 1.5%-2.5% and there isn't a damn thing anybody or any amount of money can do to sway that number. In fact, 538 has found variations in the popular vote projection of less than 1% for either candidate.

4) The trend line is pro-Romney in WISCONSIN. According to 538, Obama has an 86.6% chance of victory in Wisconsin in November. That would mean that, given an even swing, Morris should have written that all the states with worse probabilities would be going Romney. However, according to Morris, Romney appears to be losing in Iowa (65%), Ohio (72%), Florida (56%), and Virginia (59%). In fact, Morris' states chosen appear to be the 'swing states' least in doubt: it is almost a certainty Romney will win North Carolina and Indiana, whereas Romney has barely campaigned in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Nevada compared to the big Four (FL, OH, PA, VA).

This is partially to beat up on Dick Morris, who has a track record of 0/infinity in major elections (remember 2008 when Condi Rice beat Hillary Clinton?), but also partially to remind people that if they suggest ANYTHING without reporting the crosstabs, you should automatically be suspicious of it, and if they report something as 'the real story' without accounting for the vast majority of pollsters whose living depends on accuracy, chances are you should ignore the conclusions.

And that Dick Morris is a fat little toad.

Nobody beats a dead horse more than I do...

In the same goddamn article, too...

I think that "It would be a shameful" is a "wink wink" kind of thing.

Here's my favorite comment.

Obama is screwed. He must go. There is just too much going on. We have all these scandals. We have had a terrorist attack in Boston (not just Bengazhi). The power grab by the liberals just because they won the elections is unreal. I am tired of hearing about gay marriage on TV every day when less than 1% of the country is gay. Go marry a goat, I do not care. Just leave me and my kids alone to watch TV.

But then, will Joe Biden be the President? That is worse.

I read the first paragraph, without looking at the author, and I knew it was Noonan. Lord lacks she shame.

Really, that beat out this gem?

I cannot find this "Enemies List..."

Well, I only looked at two or three pages. Much more and it would've been close to a self-induced lobotomy.