Being accurate can be helpful: Postcards from the outer blogosphere

I had a lot of hope for blogs ten years ago. I really did. That was especially true of political blogs.

When the blogosphere started picking up steam in a significant way after 9/11, I thought that there was a strong potential for it to circumvent the traditional media's narrative and the insipid talking points of the political parties. Because it is so decentralized, I thought that independent, thoughtful voices could insert themselves into the conversation and at least partially influence it.

Let's face it, since the advent of television, political discourse has suffered from the simplistic interpretation of the media and the used-car-salesmanship of the parties. Consequently, people have grown less informed and more cynical about their own democracy, a pretty astonishing feat when you think about it. Proper cynicism usually requires some level of knowledge and experience.

Ideally, I thought that blogs could get around the short attention span theatre of television and buttress more informative forums, such as books and long-form magazine articles. Y'know, the kind of shit that you can actually learn something from and actually challenges what you already believe. Because newspaper op-eds are limited to about 700 words, they're almost as bad as TV. There's no room for historical context, or even fact. Just opinion. And that opinion is usually retarded precisely because it doesn't consider facts or historical context.

Being the eternal optimist that I am, I thought that blogs could actually be a tool to make people smarter and actually think for themselves for a fucking change.

Christ, was that ever stupid.

What never occurred to me was that blogs could be monetized and that bloggers had higher ambitions. Once the initial big bloggers started making a living from their hobbies, and getting book deals and TV gigs, everybody wanted to.

When that happened, blogs not only mirrored TV, they mirrored the very worst of it, specifically Fox News and MSNBC, which are little more than fact-free zones populated with hot chicks that are thrilled to be promoted from working at Hooters. But because the news is classy, they don't refer to their fucking bloggers as such. They're "online journalists," which serves only to further discredit journalism. Party spin doctors started feeding talking points to bloggers when said spin doctors weren't already bloggers themselves.

If anything, blogs are now even worse than cable news, which is at least held to the minimum standards of professionalism, basic fact-checking, and being at least somewhat good-looking. And when they don't rely on the work product of the very "lamestream media" that they continually try to discredit, bloggers rely on each other, which is immeasurably fucking worse.

So the entire political blogosphere can be divided into two camps: Red State and the Daily Kos. They're both headed by the least charismatic people to be featured on a television show that isn't Cops and cater to audiences that are more partisan and less informed than even the writers on them. The only difference between the two - and it pains me to say this - is that Erick Erickson isn't a half-bad writer. Sure, he's wrong and everything, but he's wrong in a much more readable way that Markos Whateverthefuckhisnameis is.

My own experience is interesting. The people who tend to like me most are far more liberal than I am. This is because I focus my attention mostly on the modern conservative movement. I also tend to agree with liberals on social issues because I don't think that you can have a small government while favouring a state that regulates consensual personal behaviour. My liberal  friends like the fact that I insist that governmenr be paid for, while ignoring that I would sharply limit what it does and when.

Conservatives are displeased with me (to put it mildly) for the same reason. I would have a considerably smaller government than even they desire. And I insist that their pie-in-the-sky nonsense wishlist of programs and tax cuts be paid for.

Both misunderstand my purpose. I ultimately would like to see an informed, consistent conservatism annihilate liberalism (specifically economic and foreign policy liberalism, the latter of which too many conservatives have embraced.) To do that, I necessarily think you have to leave social decisions to individuals, just as modern conservatives would economic issues. But if that conservatism isn't informed and consistent, the Left may as well win because we'll only destroy ourselves.

Look, I know how to be successful, influential blogger who has lots of readers and makes money from their work. It isn't hard, really.

You always, always reinforce what your audience already believes and never challenge those core assumptions, regardless of how intellectually inconsistent or ridiculous they might be. You keep your posts under 800 words, which obliterates the possibility of putting anything that happened before last month in some kind of historical context, You mercilessly attack the other side, while justifying or ignoring the excesses of your own. Of course, if you can find a marginal cartoon character, like  Jeremiah Wright or David Duke on your own side to denounce, that makes you look "fair." Whatever you do, make sure that cartoon character isn't Sarah Palin, lest you be denounced as "sexist" by people who spent sixteen years making Hillary Clinton jokes.

You link-whore relentlessly, and suck up to folks with audiences larger than your own. And you never disagree with your own side in public, no matter how damaging to your credibility doing so might be. Look at the high level of support George W. Bush had among very conservative Republicans during his spending spree and military adventurism, or the very liberal support for Bill Clinton during his corporatist term in office.   Then look to what those former supporters say about them now.

I could write pieces like this.

At this point an exercise in simple arithmetic suggests that any nation breaking even on its balance of trade would have to tax 100% of its private sector value production in order to balance this size of government with adequate revenues. That would be the 100-100-100 Plan that replicates what would happen if Herman Cain and Nancy Pelosi ever submitted a joint tax reform proposal.
 
Given a $14Tr US GDP, Krugman is implying a year in which the government executed $7Tr in expenditures. With no change in revenues from recent years Krugman is advocating a $4.5Tr annual deficit. He opines this will prevent a depression. That a tenured professor at MIT who writes a widely-flogged column for the NYT actually believes this is the case depresses me to the point that I need another Gin and Tonic.

Thankfully, I was well into my cups of Maker's Mark when I read those paragraphs by Repair_Man_Jack for a couple of reasons.

First, a "100-100-100 Plan" would necessarily require a 300% tax rate, which defies even the most basic laws of both mathematics and common sense. Cain's "999" plan was as crazy as a shithouse owl, but it only would have put in place a 27% flat rate, which most economists agree a flat rate needs to be.

Repair_Man_Jack's analysis also presumes that Krugman's plan wouldn't rely heavily on deficit spending. As much as I can actually make sense of the Red State article, it seems to operate on the premise that people like Professor Krugman believe in balanced budgets, which they don't.

In fairness, Krugman's spending proposals differ from Paul Ryan's only in the scope, and even then, not all that much. You can't properly cost the Ryan Plan, because he won't tell you what tax deductions he'll eliminate to reduce rates. So, for the purposes of costing, you have to assume that he won't eliminate or reduce any. And you have to assume that Ryan's fifteen-year-away Medicare reforms will cost roughly the trillion dollars that Bush's 2005 Social Security reforms would have, if not more.

Second, Paul Krugman is a tenured professor at Princeton, not MIT.

If you can't get the top line of Krugman's easily verifiable CV right, how can you possibly be expected to credibly attack his ideas? And Paul Krugman's economic ideas are among the easiest in the world to credibly attack! Shit, if your target is a Nobel laureate and you want to discredit him, a good start would be getting where he works right.

When I read this Red State nonsense last night, I skimmed through the comments and saw that no one pointed out Jack's factual errors. As of this morning, they still wasn't corrected.

Such is life in the echo chamber, where you strive mightily to convince people who already agree with you, in a neatly-packaged realty-free zone.


And before my friends on the Left start throwing high-fives my way, don't. I just spent six weeks watching Canadian liberals arguing on their blogs about the purity of their position on abortion, which almost no one in this country considers an issue. The dynamic on your side works exactly the same way, you just amazingly seem to be even less disciplined about it.

If anything, my problems with the modern Right stem exclusively from its insistence on acting exactly like the Left.