Vox Popoli

The transcript of the much-discussed Cramer vs Stewart dialogue:

STEWART: I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a f–ing game. When I watch that I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me, because it says to me, you all know. You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

CRAMER: But Jon, don’t you want guys like me that have been in it to show the shenanigans? What else can I do? I mean, last night’s show–

STEWART: No, no, no, no, no. I want desperately for that, but I feel like that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is… Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst…. But it’s very easy to get on this after the fact. The measure of the network, and the measure of the mess… CNBC could act as-No one is asking them to be a regulatory agency, but can’t-but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile as their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day-to-day for short term. These guys’ companies were on a Sherman’s March through their companies, financed by our 401ks, and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f–ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell, and you guys knew that that was going on.

I don’t watch The Daily Show myself, although I rather like Jon Stewart’s approach to skewering those who insist on shish-kebabing themselves on their own words caught on camera. I’m very much on Stewart’s side with regards to the financial media’s complete corruption; longtime readers are very familiar with my complete contempt for the Wall Street cheerleader set. (Who, as predicted, are already claiming that an obvious four-day bear market rally should be confused with a long-term “bottom”. Listen to them at your peril.) The fact that Stewart is a overt liberal who is in the bag for Obama doesn’t make him any less funny or his criticism of financial frauds such as CNBC any less pertinent. Stewart has no mandate to be an equal opportunity critic and if he wishes to continue overlook the rich panoply of comedic content in the inept Obama administration, that will be his loss.

It is a bit cowardly that Stewart likes to take serious shots, then hide behind his comedian’s hat. But so what? There isn’t a single major public figure of left, right or center that I can think of who is willing to publicly take on those who challenge their opinions in anything but cable news soundbite-fest. In fact, John Derbyshire, Dinesh D’Souza, and I are about the only minor-league commentators who have demonstrated a consistent willingness to do so… Derb and I proposed an atheism debate on NRO a few months ago, but the editors shot it down because apparently National Review readers are much more interested in reading articles about women hyphenating their names and considering whether Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Repbulican Party or not.

Stewart is both a comedian and a commentator; the two roles are not mutually exclusive. If an interlocutor is able to force Stewart to retreat into his “hey now, I’m just a comedian, don’t hit me” shell after successfully dealing with the questions Stewart has raised, then he has won that encounter. Sometimes, one simply has to know how to recognize a white flag when it is flown.

And there will never be a Jon Stewart of the right because conservatives and libertarians have no need of making their intellectual cases indirectly, through negative implication. Stewart is a sophisticated individual, but he is forced to communicate through sitcom irony because the greater part of his audience is immature and unsophisticated, for all that it pretends to be educated and informed. One must, after all, be extremely unsophisticated to get very worked up over the shocking idea that a blowhard star of a financial investment show is doing anything but selling advertising for stockbrokers.

NW inquires:

[W]as wondering how much economics in fiction snap your suspension of disbelief? (like we were talking about women warriors) Does You Fail Economics Forever cover it or are there some economic fails that really bother you? What are some of the best econs in fiction you’ve seen/read and what are some of the worst? One more thing: What ruins your enjoyment most about a story? Economics? Computers? Combat? What? Example: I can just go along with almost anything but a major, MAJOR basic biology blunder or Christian theology research failure really take me out of the story.

That’s an interesting question. I think, for the most part, my expectation of authors possessing even a modicum of economics knowledge is so low that their general ignorance of it doesn’t bother me. On the rare occasions that an author bothers to at least explain why he is violating the basic principles of the science – as Charles Stross with his explicit positing of a society that is post-scarcity in Accelerando, for example – I find myself merely nodding in appreciation. The two best takes on economics that I have ever read in genre novels are Terry Pratchett in Making Money and Going Postal. His understanding of money, in particular, is entirely conventional, i.e. incorrect, but it is an educated perspective. And his take on the dot com boom is really well done. However, there’s no question that far and away the best economics reference in fiction is an obscure short story by Charles Stross, entitled “Bear Trap”. It’s found in Toast, in case you’re interested, and it’s a remarkable achievement.

There are two things I find peculiar about religion in genre literature. The first is the very common, and historically inept, attempt to assign a religious cause to their fictional wars. The fact that irreligious writers are seldom able to write convincingly about religion or religious characters only makes this ineptitude all the more noticeable. The second thing is the amusingly stupid way irreligious writers often like to assume that religious individuals don’t know the first thing about their own religion. For example, rather early on in his Old Man’s War, John Scalzi features the irreligious protagonist publicly schooling a cardboard cutoutreligious bigot courtesy of his superior knowledge of the Bible. As with the movies, where the guy with the six-shot pistol always trumps the guy with the full-auto machine gun, the bazooka, and the flamethrower, in science fiction and fantasy, it’s always the non-believer who knows the tenets of a religion better than the individual who actually takes them seriously and attempts to put them into practice. Amusingly, the section of the Bible that is usually supposed to be completely unknown to the believer is the stoning of the adulterous woman… and the authors inevitably leave off the rather important bit about “go forth and sin no more.”

It makes one wonder what these secular authors believe is being studied in all those weekly Bible studies across the country… it’s rather like reading Dawkins where he expects the reader to be shocked by the savagery in the Old Testament, when every kid who’s ever been to Sunday School knows all about Passover, the Red Sea, and the walls of Jericho.

But I find those things more amusing than annoying. Why would one take offense at someone else’s cluelessness? What I actually find extremely irritating is the way that very few writers these days appears to be capable of grasping basic human sexual relations. In the real world, men pursue and women allow themselves to be caught if they are amenable. In the vast majority of fictional worlds, men are wide-eyed innocents who wouldn’t even think to be attracted to a super-hot woman and are dumbfounded when she is inexplicably overcome with immediate lust for them… after which encounter, a long-term relationship immediately ensues. I think this is because most male writers are overweight wallflowers who have never successfully pursued a woman, so they simply don’t have any experience of normal human sexual patterns. Even those who are married often appear to be relationship betas who proposed to the first woman to show interest in them; although I often make fun of wereseal fiction – and with good reason – at least the women who write it appear to be capable of grasping the very simple matter of which sex is chiefly responsible for pursuing the other.

Especially when you’re ignoring Austrian economics in favor of Keynesianism:

[T]o say that anyone who is a serious student of economics is not thoroughly familiar with Keynes’ ideas beggars credulity. The standard construct of the economy used by virtually all forecasters, from the Federal Reserve on down, is basically Keynesian, with varying opinions about how the model works. That none of them predicted the current crisis is telling, and indeed damning of the approach. What definitely is ignored in academe is the Austrian school of economics, especially for baby boomers brought up on Samuelson’s economics text, which was pure Keynesian orthodoxy….

Austrian economists assert the current crisis is the inevitable result of the Fed’s successive efforts to counter each previous bust. As the credit expansion pumped up asset values to unsustainable levels, the eventual collapse would result in a contraction of credit as losses decimate banks’ balance sheets and render them unable to lend. That sounds like an accurate diagnosis of the current problems. In the meantime, both Western democracies and autocratic governments such as China are actively utilizing the ideas of both Keynes and Friedman alike in enacting massively expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to counter the crisis resulting from the severe contraction in credit.

It’s a pity that many nations have to suffer for the hubris of government and monetary authorities, but now that the Monetarists are dead in the water, perhaps one more nail in John Maynard Keynes’s coffin will suffice to kill the absurdity.

Notice, by the way, all the economic happy talk now that the market has risen for three straight days. There will be ups and downs, of course, but the general trend should be up for a few months until the bottom falls out again sometime between the fall and next spring.

An interesting speech, worth perusing:

Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them….

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality–it drains some of the life from them. It’s inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met–family and community really do have the action–then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

Being a longtime resident of Europe, I think the one thing that Murray misses is that, like most American intellectuals, the only Europe he has ever seen are the urban centers. That’s not to say that his impressions are incorrect, only that they are incomplete. But one can no more hope to get an accurate sense of Switzerland from the twenty-somethings of downtown Zurich than one can expect to get an accurate impression of America in the nightclubs of Manhattan.

Still, this is a very minor quibble, and some of his statements will seem strikingly familiar to readers of this blog: “Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise…. The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible.”

The Elders of Zion finally call it a career:

The Elders of Zion, the venerable and shadowy Jewish organization that controls the international banking industry, news media and Hollywood, has announced that it is disbanding so that members can retire to Florida and live out their golden years on the golf course.

“We had a good run,” said one senior Elder, reminiscing over old photographs of world leaders in his musty, wood-paneled office at an undisclosed location. “Maybe we ran the world for just a little too long. Anyway, now it’s Obama’s problem.”

After a humiliating year left most of its financial holdings, as well as the entire civilized world, on the verge of collapse, the organization has re-defined its mission in terms of bridge games and making it to restaurants for the Early Bird Special.

If Tim GeithnerLarry Summer and Ben Bernanke are really the best that the current generation of Jews can offer, I think we’d be better off trying to lure the Elders out of retirement. At least Hyman Roth always made money for his partners.

Mainstream economists keep pushing back the date of the expected recovery:

The economists, many of whom have been continually surprised by the depth of the downturn, also pushed back yet again their forecasts for when a recovery would begin. On average, they expect the downturn to end in October. Last month, they said the bottom would arrive in August. They estimate that U.S. gross domestic product will continue to contract in the first half of this year, with slow growth returning in the third quarter…. Amid all the gloom, there is a bright spot: Four-fifths of the economists said now is a good time to buy equities, especially if the investor has a long-term view.

It’s going to be years, not months, gentlemen. And next year is when everyone finally begins to realize it. The concept of economic gravity really isn’t that difficult. The economic contraction will be roughly equivalent to the economic expansion. Since the economic expansion was considerable, so too will the contraction be a sizeable one.

I don’t even see any need to score another point versus the so-called experts on their newly revised forecasts since they were so obviously wrong in the first place. There will be a bounce back in the markets sooner than later, but don’t get taken in by all the calls of a bottom. It’s merely going to be an extended bear rally; 400-point up days are indicative of an ongoing bear market, not the end of one. It is probably a good time to buy stocks… as long as you’re planning to sell them in the fall.

But all you need to know that the mainstream economists are going to be hopelessly wrong can be summarized in this single sentence: “More than 85% of the economists agreed that the central bank’s proliferating lending programs are well-designed, well-executed and helping the economy.”

The Other Nate points out a basic problem in combat education:

“And now we’ve reached rock bottom of our insultingly incapable heroes. This is a pretty cruel trick society played on the little girls of the world who saw these cartoons and played with the toys. While boys were taught that evil giant transforming robots could only be defeated with other giant transforming robots, girls were taught that evil could be defeated with the power of rainbows and flamboyant song and dance. Which one better prepared their audience for the real world? If you’d like to find out, go perform a choreographed song-and-dance number in the middle of the highway while a semi bears down on you. In your final moments of consciousness, imagine how much more terrifying this would all be if that semi was sentient.”

Anyway, something I wanted clarification on your take on women & combat:

1) Is the believability of the “warrior woman” motif for you dependent on the context? So, for instance, do you find Trinity of the Matrix series believable since most of her fighting is in a program where you’re only limited by your
mind?

2) What about pressure points & weak spots which any self-defense class should teach?

3) Follow up to #2. Is that then your problem with “fighting women” in current fiction – that they don’t fight “properly” for their size, weight class etc and instead fight like a 200+ pound linebacker?

1) Yes, completely. In fact, in my original post at the Black Gate, I specifically stated that if one wishes to utilize a kick-ass female character, there are any number of perfectly reasonable justifications, especially in fantasy. Making her a demigoddess, giving her a magical sword, or enchanting her with a spell are all eminently viable. But simply saying that she was really well trained is no more credible than a college linebacker who shows up with an additional 50 pounds of muscle gained over the summer and claims that it was the result of an intensive weightlifting program. Forget sex, would anyone have found Achilles’s near-complete imperviousness to blades convincing had Homer not taken the trouble to explain that his mother dipped him in the River Styx? Trinity is an excellent example of credible female kickassery.

2) Pressure points and “weak spots” are wildly overrated. They cause momentary pain that is easily overcome by an adrenaline rush. Unless you’re actually breaking significant bones, gouging out eyes, crushing windpipes, or knocking someone unconscious, you aren’t truly incapacitating an opponent. I’ve had my nose broken and taken a full-force sidekick to the groin without noticing either injury at the time. A few minutes later, yeah, I noticed a lot. But a few minutes later is too late.

3) No, it’s not just a matter of them not fighting properly, although that is indeed a problem. (Many authors seem to be under the mistaken impression that because women are smaller, they are quicker. They are not.) The main problem is postulating outcomes that are simply ridiculous, involving a slower, smaller, weaker, (and usually less-armored) individual easily defeating an extended series of faster, bigger, stronger, better-armored opponents without providing any reasonable justification for this multiplicity of implausibilities.

It’s about time to see this silly little concept fading away:

The time was 1972, and I was on my first date with a guy named Gary Mathewes. “The woman’s liberation movement is very important to me,” I announced, in my best mess-with-me-and-I’ll-knock-you-down-Bub voice.

“Me too,” he said, to my surprise. We sat idling at a stoplight in his puttering green VW. “In fact,” he went on, “I always thought that if I ever got married, I’d want my wife and I to hyphenate our names. Both of us, I mean.”

Wow, I thought, he just might be the one….

Two years later we stood in the woods grooving on a classic hippie wedding, right down to my unbleached muslin dress and the vegetarian reception under the trees. Soon after we hiked down to City Hall to have our names legally changed: both of us would henceforth be Mathewes-Greens. We didn’t know that the usual custom is for the woman’s name to go first; we chose billing solely for euphony. “Green-Mathewes” sounded clunky, and besides, we joked, we wanted to have kids. Don’t you know that old song, “God Didn’t Make Little Green Mathewes”?

It didn’t work out. Oh, the marriage did; 30 years later, Gary is my sweetheart more than ever. We have been blessed in more ways than we can count. But the name didn’t turn out to be such a great idea.

I always thought hypenated names was an ludicrously stupid practice; like feminism itself it held the inevitable seeds of its own destruction. It never ceases to amaze me how even intelligent and educated people are so seldom capable of projecting the logical consequences of their actions into the future. But, as Mrs. Mathewes-Green points out, the most important thing is the marriage relationship itself, not the trappings.

I do wonder, though, why so many writers at National Review are either former Communists, former Democrats, or former hippies. Perhaps if most of their contributors weren’t former members of the other side, they might be taken a little more seriously by the majority of those who are supposed to be on their side now.

It seems that academics are the last to figure out the fundamental impracticality of hyphenation: “There is a bizarro-world custom being perpetrated by many I know in the academy who get married: that of combining both last names with a hyphen to create one last name to be used by both couples.”

Although, I suppose if you’ve got two aging left-wing professors getting together, they’re not that likely to have kids before they divorce or the she-spouse hits menopause.

Yet another school shooting, this time in Germany:

Police said that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, killed a total of 16 people, 13 of them at the Albertville technical school in Winnenden, in the suburbs of Stuttgart, before he was himself shot dead. The death toll matches Germany’s worst school shooting, in the eastern city of Erfurt in 2002, which prompted the rewriting of the country’s gun ownership laws.

One of the many ironies at play here is that Germany actively bans the only action that parents can take to protect their children from the risk of being killed at school, homeschooling. Granted, a child’s risk of being shot at school is still statistically low, but if the risk is sufficient to justify passing additional legislative activity, it must also certainly justify keeping your children out of such harm’s way in such a temptingly target-rich environment.

FS finds it hard to believe I really don’t want to ban anything:

Can you conceive of a chemical that you would ban? Just as an exercise. Define it’s attraction and affects and then say, “Nope, we cant go there.” I bet you can. So it all boils down to a question of degree. The chemicals we have today don’t cross the line for you. You call it recreational drug use, maybe not the best thing but a matter of personnel choice. The drugs we have now crossed my line years ago and I call it national suicide. And I’m glad there are laws against suicide.

You won’t get your way but even if you did there would come a day when the magic in the periodic table would force you to change your tune. I think you know that, but hay it’s Monday, you’ve got to get the column out whether or not you’ve got any good ideas. And by the way, I read that Washington was a little embarrassed about the hemp and tried kept it quiet.

I love your column though, Libertarians are awesome. Libertarians are the true ideological descendents of the founders. I think they are the most hopeful, optimistic and idealistic people in the country. They really believe in the “better angels of our nature”. And in that vein I’d rather have Ron Paul as President than Lincoln, he’s more idealistic and purer. I wish we could live in a libertarian world but we’re addicted to the drugs of selfish partisanship and expedient compromise. Don’t you wish they were prohibited?

No, there is no chemical that I believe should be prohibited from personal consumption. While a theoretical case can be made to prohibit a drug that would directly lead to the inevitable harming of others who did not take it, that’s simply not true of even the most dangerous illegal drugs known today. Nor do I wish to ban either “selfish partisanship” or “expedient compromise”. In that desire to control the behavior of other individuals is the seed of every totalitarian nightmare ever created or contemplated.

I appreciate the kind words, but FS simply doesn’t understand that libertarianism is not an optimistic or idealistic perspective, but rather a pessimistic one. It is also the only rational one. If one does not trust the ability of individuals to control themselves, how does it make sense to place one’s trust in individuals with the power to control others?