Matt Yglesias

Why Does Chris Muir Hate America?

Ezra Klein suggests that “It’s worth reading this crazy Chris Muir comic, if only to understand the narrative that hardcore conservatives have created for themselves.”

Two points here. One is that not only is the joke at the end here not funny, it has literally nothing to do with the political commentary that takes up the bulk of the comic. It’s just a ludicrous political rant followed by a lame pun.

But more to the point, “nationalisation of banking, insurance, auto, and healthcare?” “Unrecognisable?” This is not how we spell words in the United States of America. If Chris Muir wants to run around spelling words like thatmaybe needs to revisit the point of the original tea parties. Here in America we recognize that Barack Obama did not, in fact, nationalize the banking industry but probably should have.

“Intension” vs “Intention”

Emerson Hall, Harvard University (cc photo by Dan4th)

Back when I was in college I thought the philosopher’s distinction between “intensional” with an “s” and “intentional” with a “t” was a sick joke designed to confuse undergraduates and the typo-prone. So I’m heartened to see that in his paper “Against Darwinism” (via Tyler Cowen), Jerry Fodor has a footnote lambasting this nonsense:

It’s hard to imagine a less fortunate terminology than the philosopher’s ‘intention/intension’ distinction. But I suppose there’s nothing can be done at this late date. In what follows, an intensional context is one in which the substitution of coextensive expressions isn’t valid. Intentional states are just the familiar beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth that populate theories of cognition and of the integration of behavior.

I don’t really think the philosophical community should adopt this fatalistic “there’s nothing can be done” attitude. Surely this is what professional associations are for. This is a very, very confusing terminological choice and it helps nobody.

At any rate, haven’t read the paper beyond this footnote, but I have strong feelings on this issue.

James Fallows Declares Victory in Metaphorical Frog War

As you probably know, if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog won’t notice the water is getting hotter. Soon enough, the pot’s boiling and the frog’s cooked! It’s a great metaphor for all kinds of situations. But biologically, it’s false, and James Fallows has been on the warpath ever since he started blogging to try to get people to knock it off. And in today’s column, Paul Krugman writes:

I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.

Fallows proclaims himself satisfied “I had not previously thought of Paul Krugman as a peacemaker or placater, as opposed to a provocateur, but he may now have shown a new field of achievement.”

Krugman’s column, which is good, is about economic policy and stimulus. But of the current policy debates, the one that most resembles the proverbial frog is of course climate change. By the time average global temperatures are 7-8 degrees higher than they are today and people start getting really bothered by the consequences, atmospheric CO2 levels will be so high that even if we suddenly cut emissions levels to zero we’d be in store for additional warming. And of course it won’t be possible to suddenly cut emissions levels to zero, we’ll be looking at the same difficulty of implementing cuts but from a much higher future level. And yet on any given day, it’s more convenient for the political system to respond by doing nothing.

The Absurdity of Nescafe Advertising

I contended back in June in response to a question on le bac that it is, in fact, absurd to desire the impossible. John Holbo struck back citing the Nescafe ad reproduced here, which he says “crosses over into Kierkegaardian territory.”

It is absurd to expect to get more from something than you think it is possible to get from anything. Especially if it’s instant coffee.

Still, I don’t think it is absurd to want coffee that would be better than life itself could possibly be. That would be a damn fine cup of coffee.

I think this is exactly backwards. It’s perhaps misguided to have unrealistic expectations about your instant coffee. But it’s not absurd to want an instant coffee that far exceeds the performance of any real-world instant coffee. And, indeed, with its Nespresso line I would say that the Nestle corporation has in fact succeeded in far exceeding my instant coffee expectations, albeit at a price that’s higher than I’m willing to pay. But to want more than “the most” is absurd. It’s on a par with wishing that you could put your coffee in a mug shaped like a square circle.

The larger story here is simply that Nescafe ad copy is often absurd. For example, when I visited Nestle HQ outside Geneva on my junket to Switzerland they had this in their office:

And also this puzzling statement of overall corporate philosophy:

Ever since I saw that last one, “creating magical enjoyment you feel good about” has been my informal mission statement here on the blog.

The Case for Less Words

Brian Beutler was trying to convince me to skip the NBA Finals and go with him to see Drag Me To Hell tonight. I objected that, among other things, I don’t like horror movies. First he said it’s not a real horro movie, “it’s a comedic horror movie like Evil Dead, only funnier and less monsters.” Then he corrected himself: “fewer” monsters.

Matthew Yglesias
eh, I think I’ve got a solid plan
never did understand the less/fewer thing though

Brian Beutler
really?
fewer is for countable items
such as
monsters
less is for abstract quantities
you have less milk
or fewer gallons of milk

Matthew Yglesias
yeah, yeah, people always reexplain it to me
then I forget again
sounds like b***s***
if we just abolished the word “fewer” we’d be in good shape

Brian Beutler
i don’t know man

Matthew Yglesias
how does it really help us?

Brian Beutler
“I’ve got less gallons of milk”
sounds weird

Matthew Yglesias
less words!
more easier to learn the language!

I’m prepared to stand behind this view. The less/fewer distinction isn’t really that hard to learn, but it would be much easier to not have to bother. I can’t think of any situations in which the existence of the two different words is actually helpful to our understanding of what’s being communicated. Native speakers of the English language have a perverse tendency to take pride in the difficulty of our language, but it’s not actually a good thing.

Pat Buchanan Mocks Sotomayor for Learning English

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

Amanda Terkel reminds us that normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

Meanwhile, Buchanan also thinks a vote against Sotomayor would be a vote for the white working class. In the real world, of course, despite the attention on “hot button” social issues, the bulk of federal litigation has to do with economic matters. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote of John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

It’s not clear to me why consistently siding with corporate defendants would count as a blow for the interests of the white working class.

Racism vs Reverse Racism

Rush Limbaugh thinks Sonia Sotomayor is a “hack” and worse, “Here you have a racist — you might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist.”

This seems very confused. Being a “reverse racist” can’t be similar to being a “racist,” it needs to be the reverse of being a racist. Limbaugh clearly just thinks Sotomayor is a racist. She hates white people. For a Latina to hate white people isn’t “reverse” racism, it’s racism. Reverse racism would be if you had a white person who hates white people. It would be like racism, where you hate people of other races, but in reverse.

At any rate, I’ve made this point a million times, but it’s fascinating to me the kind of double standard conservatives apply to these issues. You never hear Rush Limbaugh decrying everyday racism against non-whites in the United States. You never hear him recounting an anecdote about an African-American man having trouble hailing a cab or being followed by a shopkeeper. He doesn’t do stories about how people with stereotypically “black” names suffer job discrimination. He doesn’t bemoan the fact that the United States has an aircraft carrier named after a fanatical segregationist. Which is fine. Everyone’s interested in some things and not in others. Rush isn’t interested in racism. Except that like most conservatives, he’s actually very interested in allegations of racial discrimination against white people. He sees the defense of white interests as integral to his political mission. And he hates identity politics.

Obama’s Pronunciations

I don’t have a problem with the fact that Barack Obama says “Pah-kee-stahn” when referring to the country to the west of India. Nor do I have a problem with the fact that Obama says “Afghanistan” in the customary American manner. But given that the two countries are adjacent to one another and often come up in the same speech, it’s really infuriating to see him offer the two pronunciations in tandem. If you’re going to say “Pah-kee-stahn” you should say “Af-gah-nee-stahn” and if you’re going to say “Afghanistan” you should say “Pakistan.”

That’s just how I feel.

Pronunciation aside, good speech. Full text (as prepared) below the fold:

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The Breeders

So in this post about how John Thune says he won’t vote for a gay Supreme Court nominee, I used the term “breeders” which is a derogatory slang term for heterosexuals. For this I stand accused by the humorless right of anti-straight bigotry. As a hetero-American myself, I think of it as me “reclaiming” the term.

Good excuse for a “Cannonball” video, though.

A Justice I’d Like to See

I think it’s obvious that an Obama judicial appointment is going to be a great fundraising opportunity for conservative groups even though the votes clearly aren’t there for a real Jüdgerdämmerung. But this would be fun:

Early front-runners for the bogeyman nod have cropped up: Darling mentioned Yale University Law School Dean Harold Koh, whom he called “very extreme.” Sekulow specifically called out 2nd Circuit Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, an early favorite for the nod, as “to the left of David Souter.”

“This is not my ideal situation,” said Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary. “Obama could conceivably put a justice onto the bench that literally would make Souter look like [Associate Justice Antonin] Scalia.”

If Obama knows someone who can literally make Souter look like Scalia, then I think Republicans better be careful before opposing the person in question. Maybe he or she can also turn Mitch McConnell into a toad or turn lead into gold. Watch out! Meanwhile, David Souter was appointed by George H.W. Bush so would it really be so crazy if Obama appointed someone who’s somewhat to Souter’s left? But ideology aside, I want the magician-justice!

Spelling Reform

To a much greater extent than other language, the United States suffers from confusing spelling. A point that’s well-illustrated by this video:

And all this is to say nothing of the fact that the same word is often spelled differently (”colour” vs “color”) depending on which country you’re in. This all makes it more difficult for immigrants to English-speaking countries to become literate and, in general, it’s an extra disadvantage for children whose family background puts them at a relative disadvantage. And as English has increasingly become the international language, it’s particularly problematic for the world to be operating with one of the languages in which it’s hardest to communicate.

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to organize some kind of totalitarian effort to force everyone to adopt a new, more logical spelling system. But spelling conventions have changed over the years, and other languages are easier to spell in part because there’s more deliberate effort by leading institutions to play a custodial role and implement periodic reforms. Something similar for English could be very useful.

Astroturf vs “AstroTurf”

Paul Krugman’s column on the right-wing’s tea party’s does yeoman’s work in bringing this to the attention of a wider public, but doesn’t contain much news you won’t already know if you’re a consumer of progressive blogs. It does, however, provide fascinating insight into New York Times style:

Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

They’ve got that capital “T” in “AstroTurf” because it’s an actual brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex, and not just a generic term for fake grass. But Krugman is using a metaphorical extension of the term that’s common political discourse. An astroturf operation is a fake grassroots operation. It’s not not a brand name, it’s just a word, albeit a word based on the brand. I think the Times has made the wrong call here.

On the other hand, the company that owns the AstroTurf trademark presumably feels compelled to dispute the use of its mark as a generic term for fake stuff. A blog can fly under the radar easily enough, but the NYT might be exposing itself to legal harassment if they let Krugman write “that’s nothing new, and astroturf has worked well for Republicans in the past.”

“Reinvestment”

The official title of the stimulus bill that will be signed tomorrow is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I understand why one would prefer calling it a “recovery” plan to using the funny word “stimulus.” And we progressives like to characterize spending as “investment” both for political reasons and because it captures our substantive beliefs. But why “reinvestment”? What is “reinvestment” anyway? Why isn’t it just “investment”? Among other things, I think ARIA is a better acronym than ARRA.

“Stimulus”/”Stimulate”

This is a consideration hardly worthy of such momentous times, but it seems to me that the world would be a much better place if we could adopt different terminology like “fiscal expansion” rather than “stimulus” or “stimulate.” I heard someone talking earlier today about Barack Obama’s “huge stimulus package” and started giggling.

The Jobs of the Future

One great trick that 200+ years of Anglo-American hegemony has pulled has been to entrench the English language as the global lingua franca. It’s not just that people need to learn English in order to communicate with Anglophones, everyone relies on English to communicate with each other. A Korean jet talking to an air traffic controller in Bangkok will do it in English. A Finnish businessman talking about a deal with a firm in Lisbon will speak English. And at any major international gateway you’ll see signs up in one or two local languages and, of course, English. But as James Fallows observes, the English is often not quite right:

Literally, the Chinese could be rendered as: “Traveler, halt!” Or, to sound less Teutonic, “Travelers, stop!” But if you’d asked a native speaker you’d probably just end up with the simple “No entry.”

My reaction to this and innumerable similar signs in China has become sympathy rather than anything else (frustration, mirth, etc). All the fiddling with computerized translation programs, all the paging through English textbooks, all of whatever other effort came up with “The traveler halts,” for a result whose oddities could so easily have been avoided. Oh well. The airport itself is nice. Other topics shortly.

The interesting thing is that you don’t need to speak Chinese at all to fix this sign. You only need to be a native English-speaker who’s familiar with airports. I would rewrite this as “Do Not Enter.” And there are tons of examples of this sort of thing all over the world in both official signage and corporate advertising. And it seems to me that after the total collapse American journalism’s economic foundations, this will be a lucrative line of work for US-based writers — we can travel the world and fix everyone’s signs.

You’re So Very Special

The Transition is a magical time when political junkies get to remind themselves of all the wacky titles that are out there lurking in the bureaucracy. And then there’s the White House, where titles tend to be kept short and sweet. You’ve got your assistants to the president, and you’ve got your special assistants to the president. And I, for one, always think it’s odd that the special assistants are outranked by the plain old assistants. It’s a reminder that special is a, well, special kind of word in the English language (see amusing Nestle ad copy below, clearly a result of a too-literal translation from French):

If you were to talk about a “special friend” or “that special someone in your life,” you’d be elevating the modified noun above your regular friends. Similarly, it seems to me that the president’s special assistants should be his most-valued advisers, not his most-valued advisers’ underlings. After all, everyone’s special to someone, but a special assistant to the president should be special to the president. Like, “gee David, you sure did a great job helping me beat the establishment candidate in the primary and then the most popular politician in America — you’re not just an assistant, you’re a special assistant.” Instead, though, the White House seems to operate on a Special Olympics paradigm. The special assistants are even outranked by the deputy assistants.

Code Names

It seems that these are the Secret Service code names for the first and second families:

President-elect Obama: Renegade
Michelle Obama: Renaissance
Malia Obama: Radiance
Sasha Obama: Rosebud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri

If Jill is “Capri” that suggests that Biden is Celtic like FC Celtic rather than Celtic like the Boston Celtics (i.e., keltic rather than seltic) which, to me, is a huge affront to basketball fans everywhere. Or perhaps it should be seen as a slap in the face to Boston sports fans, in which case it’s a good thing.

A but B or B but A?

Ever since I took formal logic, I’ve been fascinated by the way in which logically irrelevant changes in phrasing totally alter the understood meaning of a phrase. Cato’s Chris Edwards, for example, writes:

Many highways are congested, but at least on the East Coast where I travel, states seem to be continually adding capacity.

I learned in QR-22 that “A but B” is logically equivalent to “A and B” and also that it’s transitive to “A and B” is the same as “B and A.” In terms of Edwards’ observation, someone familiar with induced demand would say something like:

East Coast states have been adding highway capacity, but the roads are more congested than ever.

Edwards’ formulation emphasized the (mistaken) idea that continuing to add capacity will alleviate the problem, whereas my formulation is designed to highlight the fact that the problem has consistently worsened despite past capacity additions. The difference being, of course, that I’m right and Edwards is wrong. Space on East Coast highways is a precious commodity and pricing it at $0.00 at peak-demand time guarantees congestion. Additional capacity will ameliorate the problem only very temporarily as the newly uncrowded highways will encourage people to drive longer distances (re-equalizing the amount of time they’re willing to drive) and spur additional development until things get locked up again. The way to alleviate congestion in crowded areas is through congestion pricing — putting a price on access to the roads at peak times.

Measuring the Drapes

New McCain stump speech:

Senator Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending — take away your right to vote by secret ballot and labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq

I was non-metaphorically laying the groundwork to hang some curtains earlier today and it occurred to me that I don’t quite get this metaphor. I’m measuring my window and hoping to get appropriately sized curtains. What are you going to accomplish by measuring the drapes? You can’t make your window smaller.

Main Street

One result of the extended bailout debate has been to make me pretty sick-and-tired of metaphorical invocations of “Main Street.” This isn’t 1908. Normally in the present-day United States, I see a traditional Main Street being the center of activity when I’m in a picturesque vacation spot for rich people. Aspen, Colorado and Blue Hill, Maine are both focused on their Main Streets. But just about everyplace else you go, people are shopping and working either downtown, or else in a suburban mall or office park. We need an economic recovery plan that works not only for Wall Street, but also for people shopping at big box stores.

In some respects, it’s not a big deal. A cliché is just a cliché. But I do think it’s harmful in some ways that American political culture continues to have such a small town orientation long after the country ceased being primarily rural or small town in nature. Most people live in suburban portions of large metropolitan areas and participate in an economy that operates in part on a global scale and in part on a metropolitan scale. It’s important, it seems to me, for our basic language about our politics and our society to reflect reality and not some dimly recalled echo of the past.

Question of the Day

Do people really say “frickin’”? I’ve always been a believer in the view that one should either curse, or else one should not curse. These gosh darn stand-in profanity terms are just silly. Battlestar Galactica gets a pass on “frack” because (a) their use is clever and (b) it’s clear that in the fiction “frack” is a full-bore profanity and not a substitute.