Posted on | April 8, 2014 | 32 Comments
We had one of “those” incidents that you don’t document in detail, but can trigger a neologism, the other night at Schloss Smitty:
Arsemageddon (n): The toddler has a soupy delivery. You think he’s merely wet through & blow away half the house getting to the change table
— Keynesian Meanwich (@smitty_one_each) April 7, 2014
This tweet came to mind while reading Krugman’s “even if it’s true, it’s not ‘true’ true” rejection of Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government, which was the opening feature on Ezra Klein’s U2 tribute site, Vox.
Having read the original research paper in some detail, I’ll venture that the general issues to which it points are that
- people aren’t going back to first principles when analyzing an issue, and
- confirmation bias, which the paper essentially elaborates upon.
Summarizing, the authors say that everyone has their ideology, either collectivist for Krugman and ilk, or individualist for the rest of us adults. Presented with research, people either make it fit their ideology, or try to rationalize some way that the research has been corrupted.
Krugman attempts to have it both ways, accepting the Holy Research as stated, and then attempting to worm his way out of it:
|But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking.||I’m a Nobel Lariat: watch me tie myself in knots!|
|But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change,||I’ll go with:
(a) Nobody argues “constant climate”, and
(b) a great example is the liberal argument that life begins when some pencil-neck, e.g. Krugman, or a jackwagon in a judicial robe, says it begins.
|or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign,||Krugman may have half a point here; I know I didn’t want to believe America was stupid enough to re-elect #OccupyResoluteDesk. Forgive my irrational optimism, please.|
|or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans?||Oh, ObamaCare is covering all Americans in ruin, both insured and uninsured. Only somebody like a Krugman figure would deny this. What a poopy-head.|
|I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.||For example, the Bill of Rights in general, and the Second Amendment in particular, on which Progressives continue to gnaw with a termite-like frenzy.|
Krugman’s self-blindness leads him to write later, emphasis mine:
At this point I could castigate Ezra for his both-sides-do-it article — but instead, let me pose this as a question: why are the two sides so asymmetric? People want to believe what suits their preconceptions, so why the big difference between left and right on the extent to which this desire trumps facts?
One possible answer would be that liberals and conservatives are very different kinds of people — that liberalism goes along with a skeptical, doubting — even self-doubting — frame of mind; “a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument.”
The reason for the asymmetry, Krugman, is that you’re a collectivist crapflooder drawing on a colostomy bag as vast as the national debt. Conservatives are wholly incapable of competing with the combination of hubris and humus you bring. It is with a certain amount of awe that I extend my definition:
arsemageddon, (n) 2: The collective wisdom of Paul Krugman.
If anyone can name a bigger idiot, I’ll cheerfully change this. Granted, Krugman has rivals, but I defy you to name a bigger one.