"Narrative Maintainer" is kind of a slippery term. It's not that it isn't accurate or doesn't happen - it happens all the time and many people seem to devote their careers to it. But so long as it can be perceived as helping or hurting 'one side' of a public controversy, no matter what someone said, or what they thought, or what their intentions really were, you can always accuse them of having said it for "narrative maintenance" purposes, and there's no good way for them to defend themselves from the charge.
“It wasn’t an insurrection. It was only an idiotic farce. Noted."
Someone can think that the 1/6 mob events were ridiculous and really bad for a variety of reasons while abstaining from the use of the manipulative and bogus vocabulary of one set of actual "narrative maintainers", which poses its own dangers.
You can imagine a wide spectrum of possible interpretations of the events of that day, but without getting into semantic arguments, my personal threshold for what would constitute a fair and reasonable use of the word 'insurrection' by American right-wing elements is just not compatible with events that do not involve a *truly incredible* amount of gunfire.
If on 1/5/21 you had said "actual insurrection attempt by the right tomorrow" to basically anybody, streets covered in piles of spent cartridges would have been the least gory of the many extremely vivid images that immediately popped into every sane person's head, as a manifestation of mere common sense, especially one conditioned by Hollywood / media for generations.
Maybe I missed it, but to my knowledge, no rioter fired even a single shot, which for a crowd that large in DC would be a relief even if it were just a music festival. For comparison and perspective: lately, on average, there are about 50 shots fired every day in DC, most not by law enforcement.
The fact that no one is being charged with actual 'insurrection' also weighs against using the word just because the "narrative maintenance" folks would like everyone to keep repeating it. It would be like describing the Navy Yard shooting from seven years prior as a 'Civil War' as it involved infinitely (in the divide-by-zero sense) more shooting and murdered people, though there was just one perpetrator - Aaron Alexis.
At any rate, one thing libertarians are usually very good at is having accurate insights and presumptions and a keen spider sense for when some event is about to get blown completely out of proportion by the powers that be for propaganda purposes in order to legitimate yet another obnoxious, liberty-eroding, constitutional-right-circumventing, and irreversible power grab by the state. They usually try to get people to slow down, think, understand what's really going on, consider costs vs benefits, put things in perspective by laying out objective measurements of actual harm and damage, and so forth. It is the libertarian version of "Standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"
The way 1/6 is actually being used now, which is as justification for turning the domestic security apparatus against the enemies of the state (i.e., enemies of the movement which controls the state), provides another reason to lean in favor of the "not actually a big deal in the scheme of things" interpretation.
I happen to believe that interpretation, but now watch me get accused of just trying to maintain a different narrative.
What term or terms would be an improvement over "narrative maintainer"? Because saying nothing and simply shutting up about it seems... Kafkaesque to me. You seem to object to the "narrative maintainer" language, but then provide a detailed explanation of why if 1/6 has any import, it's because it's a non-event that's being used "as justification for turning the domestic security apparatus against the enemies of the state (i.e., enemies of the movement which controls the state)"...
So you say the event itself is "not actually a big deal in the scheme of things"...
... but what you've described is a rather big deal.
To put it another way, if your interpretation is true (I agree it is), pretty much anything you could say would be susceptible to accusation of "maintaining a narrative". Or worse. The only way to (maybe) avoid accusation is to remain silent and compliant.
Which is, of course, what people implementing a crackdown based on a flimsy pretext want.
How about just 'liars'? Propagandists (e.g. 'agitprop')? Muckrakers? Look at La Wik's description of muckraker, "journalists ... who crafted narratives that established their contemporary institutions and leaders as corrupt or immoral." 'Crafted narratives', eh? Bet they maintained them too.
I am not saying that anyone should avoid what might get them accused of being a "narrative maintainer", precisely because accusations of that sort get weaponized and thrown around all the time without any relationship to justice. Go speak the truth.
I am saying "narrative maintainer" is like an example of "emotive conjugation". Unless one has the ability to read minds and souls, whether one uses it or not is going to depend more on one's disposition toward the claimant than the nature of their claims.
It's clearly meant to be pejorative, and as such, is just another species of ad hominem that moves away from rational consideration of the validity of the object level claims at issue.
"I am a bold and brave truth teller, doing the heroic work of signal boosting the facts *they* don't want you to know, trying to wake up the sheeple and chumps to spread awareness of the real state of affairs, countering all that dangerous disinformation out there. You are a narrative-maintainer, a spinmeister propagandist, knowingly, consciously, and intentionally lying, manipulating the masses and trapping them in mass delusion in order to be the puppet master of their emotions and oppress and exploit them for the gain of yourself and your evil masters."
As a basic test, you can always do the thought experiment of trying to describe the situation to an educated and informed person from 50 or 100 or more years ago, and then imagining whether what you were saying would be totally unfamiliar to them to the point of even lacking words to describe it. "What do you mean, 'smartphone'?" If, on the other hand, they would immediately recognize what you're talking about as a conceptual category and have recourse to a robust vocabulary with which to converse about it, then, probably, you haven't actually stumbled on any new insight or invented a necessary neologism.
In general, in areas of human politics, there is very, very little new under the sun. You could go to a German Catholic 175 years ago and try to explain yourself about narrative maintainers and they would stop you mid-sentence, "Oh yeah, I already know exactly what you mean, let me tell you about how those monsters in the lugenpresse are trying to .... "
Yes, I know about all the meta and meta-meta level tricks and games and that "discourse about the discourse" is sometimes important. Lili Loofbourow had a good article in Slate about it and "good faith" about 18 months ago. "Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that despite their centrality, online platforms aren’t suited to the earnest exchange of big ideas."
But still, we already have more than enough epithets and ad hominems, we don't need any new epithets and ad hominems. No one needs to be convinced that there are liars out there, that politician is a synonym for professional liar, that the reason they lie is because they think they can get something out of fooling people or otherwise getting them to go along with it, and that they will obviously always accuse anyone who disagrees of being the real liars. Duh!
Arnold, I think you are not drawing some necessary distinctions on January 6. A relative handful of disorderly persons, egged on by undercover federal agents in some cases, entered the Capitol. There were on the other hand perhaps as many as 500,000 who were in DC to peacefully protest, which is their right. To treat them all as the same, so as to discredit those with legitimate concerns about the integrity of the election, is not up to your usual standards. Also, you seem to default to the position that the election must have been valid, though there is plenty of evidence of fraud in critical places. I think a better position is to treat that question as unresolved.
Of course, a better position is to treat that question as unresolved.
But that will never be acceptable to neoCon hacks like Goldberg.
"Trump’s claims of fraud, which he could never substantiate, were reckless and damaging."
Arnold has *no" idea that Trump could *never* substantiate such claims.
All that can be said is, that Trump was *unable* to substantiate such claims, in a *very* narrow time frame of only two months from Nov. 2020 to Jan. 2021.
For hacks like Goldberg to sneer at such a "failure", as somehow a classic case of narrative maintenance, is all too typical of the never-Trump mentality.
Have any of his ilk ever come clean, on any of the litany of the flat falsehoods which they were puking out for the last 7+ years (starting with their bile about Trump having "called Mexicans rapists")?
Whatever term is now most appropriate to describe Goldberg these days, 'neocon' isn't it.
"Professional Apostate" is close, but ambiguous. IIRC, Arnold used it in a way to describe people who make their living by doing little else than denouncing the actions and beliefs of members of the group with which they were once affiliated, whose audience is now not people still affiliated with that group, and boy, that fits Goldberg and French et al well.
But Christopher Hitchens used it to describe himself in the formerly more common manner, not at a traitorous mercenary now working for the enemy, but as a profoundly independently-minded person (one might say: nonconformist and disagreeable) and someone who just keeps hopping in and then out of groups, sects, affiliations, ideological group labels, etc.
You see this kind of character in religious circles a lot. There is the ex-Mormon who doesn't just leave the church but has become utterly obsessed and who now simply cannot shut up to his new friends and especially other ex-Mormons about how terrible and crazy the Mormons are. Replace Mormon with anything, really, it's a type.
It's not like Hoffer's True Believer who goes from truly believing in something to truly believing in something else. They go from truly believing something to a kind of oddly specific-nihilist of being dedicated to being against it, to *not* believing that thing, to do whatever he can to undermine anyone else's belief in it. Maybe "The True Nonbeliever"? "The True Infidel"?
OK, Handle, I'll concede the "neoCon" point on Goldberg, but I stand by my point about "hack".
It's not a little depressing, that Arnold, who should know better, still trotts out guys like Goldberg, French, and Rauch, as if their pontifications haven't been cogently spanked/ destroyed, by guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Archdruid Greer, J.H. Kunstler, Karl Denninger, Mark Wauck, etc.
I read a few posts in Arnade's substack. They're really good. Thanks for finding them. He seems to have a pretty good grip on what's going on in "real" America vs. the America of the woke.
Please Arnold, take a break of your regular program of intellectual fantasies and go back to reality. I still remember your Covid strategy so please read this new post by Berenson
and the related interview to Pfizer CEO. You may want to review your strategy. Maybe Berenson has failed to understand what the CEO said and the implications for both our health and his company but I'd like very much to hear your opinion.
I don't get this guy. Seems really conspiratorial to me, and the numbers he highlights are really misleading.
That is, of course as the percentage of people being vaccinated approaches 100%, the number of vaccinated people hospitalized will be greater than the number of unvaccinated hospitalized. I think it's reasonable to talk about this but his use of the data here seems to be bordering on bad faith.
Moreover, it doesn't change the basic math telling me to get the vaccine which is based on individual probability. If I get vaccinated, does it lower my individual probability of ending up in the hospital? The numbers on that are a pretty clear yes.
I'm not a fan of mandates, but I'm a fan of not going to the hospital.
The Berenson v. Tabarrok case is about what the senile President should do: less or more money to Pfizer and other companies. Now in the WSJ, a column argues that is safer to speed the spread (a different argument not to give more money to Pfizer and other companies).
American? Tabarrok seems to have internalized the Clinton-era "indispensable nation" talking point. Why should 'blame' for unavailability of such a thing *anywhere* hinge on how the medicine approval agency responds to public attitudes in one particular country? To be fair, a lot of people think about things this way.
It's a global pandemic. There are lots and lots of other countries, many very big, rich, smart, and technologically advanced, and all with plenty of incentive to get variant vaccines out to their population quickly. BioNTech is German. AstraZeneca is British-Swedish. Janssen (the J&J shot) is headquartered in Belgium. Japan seems to have lost a lot of competitiveness in pharma over the last decade, but AgNes and Shionogi have finally stepped up with their own vaccines. The Russians and Chinese are also real players.
But the reason these things don't exist anywhere is because of American lethargy. Sure.
I would be interested in thoughts on the circumstantial but quite powerful (in my opinion) evidence that Fed agents (or at least people who are being protected by the Fed) instigated the Jan 6 Capitol break in. I haven’t heard many substantial mainstream or center-right takes on this story, although if true it completely changes the interpretation of the event. Are people just waiting for more info before expressing an opinion?
I don't think people are expecting more info. Most of us accept that it's impossible to know the truth (remember: to seek justice, first you have to find truth, but what if the bad guys don't let you find it? how much are you willing to pay for finding it?).
Maybe also, mainstream and center-right intellectuals are happy to see Trump gone. Digging into the “truth” of Jan 6 might fire up the Trumpists - so there is no incentive, especially if doing so will get them labeled by the left as conspiracy theorists.
Arnade's writing is a plainly stated window into a world that almost no elites work in, visit, live, and that few are from. Even with my own history he is worth reading and thinking about. After spending my entire childhood and into adulthood in the Midwest I've now lived in a Southern county for over half a decade. A county where the largest city has over 100K people and there isn't a black or white area. And yet also during this time have heard the N word said out loud half the total times in my life.
Sorry, Arnold. Your latest post proves that your strategy of relying on comments to specific issues as presented by your FITs is not appropriate to address those issues. Neither your FITs' opinions nor yours are well presented: the issues are not well defined and the arguments are incomplete and vague. I regret you present the "voting rights" issue as if it had been defined by the false D-claim of a riot on January 6, 2020, and the "U.S. government strategy to deal with the pandemic in 2022" issue as if it were only a problem of obesity and the need for a diet. Although I regret you refer to Goldberg for any issue, I appreciate Taibbi and Emily Oster’s opinions on the issues they address. I don’t have time to go through the other issues and authors you refer in your post.
I hope you write about the two specific issues I just mentioned. It’s quite obvious that the barbarians have to rely on a large change in “voting rights” to consolidate the power they grabbed last November. It is a U.S. constitutional issue, like it or not, because the current system is based on the states’ authority to set their own voting rights. You claim to be concerned about regulatory reform but the sort of reform the U.S. will have depends on the people elected to represent the states in D.C. and the person elected to be president.
Also, today it’s obvious that the big failure of the past 12 months to address the pandemic is a direct result of the obfuscation caused by the barbarians’ strategy to grab power in 2020. Yesterday’s events prove it. More importantly, anybody who has read Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions” knows that “the science” will be late to take today’s decisions, sometimes too late as it has been the case for the past two years with the pandemic. What has happened since late November 2021 with omicron has made clear how little science has advanced in understanding the virus, the disease, and the vaccines. Today your country’s failure is defined not by what your senile President did in the past 12 months but by his personal failure to understand the trade-offs involved in developing a strategy for the months up to November 2022.
My view is that, on balance, it's kind of unfortunate coincidental* timing that "Web3" tech came into prominence at a time of monetary expansion for the dollar and when there is a lot of concern about high inflation.
My impression is that historically these kinds of expansions are correlated with a lot of frenzied enthusiasm, fervor, and excessive animal spirits in various asset markets, like the tulip-mania phase of a Minsky cycle, but spilling over especially into purportedly non-replicable classes like real estate, 'art', antiques, collectibles, etc.
Of all the smart, clever, promising ideas I've read about how this new tech might enable new possibilities of big-picture meaningful improvements, it's kind of tragi-comic that the bulk of the energy seems to be going into things like NFT madness which often doesn't make any sense and even more often strikes one as foolish and sketchy as hell. Hopefully if (when?) all the weird stuff crashes hard, it won't take the high potential of the other Web3 ideas down with it.
*Maybe not a coincidence, I'm not sure. Some of the expansion probably contributed to Bitcoin rocketing up, which is turn made a lot of people rich and got a lot of other people very interested in the tech. Maybe we'll laugh one day when in the final analysis it turns out that all the effort at stimulus ended up stimulating alternatives to the stimulator.
"anti-vaxxers and people who merely have anti-mandate or anti-passport attitudes? It’s all the same obstructionism to them." Of course there are differences, but they share the same blind spot: vaccines protect other people, not just the person vaccinated.
And this in turn assumes, that we have reliable numbers on any such matters.
My guess is, we have few if any such numbers, since so few institutions give enough of a damn to try to get such numbers.
Why should Fauci etc. care to send $$ toward the gathering of such numbers, when he and his ilk are allowed by the MSM to puke out whatever "numbers" just so happen to help grind the axes he wants pushed?
I doubt seriously the anti-mandate people have that blind spot, they just don't give it the weight the mandate supporters give it, and I think for very, very good reasons.
I've never heard an anti-mandate position that mentioned the other-protecting aspect of vaccines. And I, at least, do not see any good reasons for not weighing it. Blacking out our window probably makes your house a less likely target, but that's not the reason people were told to black out their windows.
I'm saying I see no evidence that it is given non-zero weight for any good reason. Maybe you have seen some and know of a good reason not to weight it.
That's a lot of qualifications, none of which seem reasonable to me.
So let's set that aside and be straightforward. I'm pro-vaccine and think part of the value comes from lowering the risk of contagion. How much... especially in light of omicron is debatable but sure, it "has weight".
But even if it were much more effective at protecting others than even those in favor of mandates suggest, I would still not say the value outweighs the harm of the government broadly compelling people to have medical procedures.
It come down to what is the cumulative loss to people who will not work (and employers and customers) becasue of the mandate and the benefit of the infections prevented. Both are hard to quantify, but that's what I think we ought not be attempting
Agree. But perhaps the problem (part?) are the regulatory steps needed to change the formula. I sort of think that if "we" had started on a Delta variant we might have been able to switch to an Omicron-optimized vaccine/booster.
The good news* is that the FDA has indicated they'll approve variant vaccines quickly with very minimal testing. The bad news is that they still won't get out there until it's too late and we're at herd-immunity for Omicron. But the other good news is that Omicron, while bad, is still a lot less severe than earlier variants, especially if one is vaccinated, but judging from the anecdotes in my circle of acquaintances, even if one is unvaccinated and has typical comorbidities.
The RNA tech allows new vaccines for new variants to be created almost immediately, literally within days. It takes a while to switch over old capacity or build new capacity and to verify six-sigma levels of quality control, but it looks like they can do this at scale in a few months.
They were ready to do this right away for the Delta wave, but back then the FDA hadn't decided / been told to make clear how they would handle a variant vax.
*I am not as confident as many vaccine boosters (heh!) that variant vaccines can be assumed to be just as safe and effective as the original version. Maybe a reasonable assumption is that, knowing nothing else, one's confidence should be proportional to the genetic distance from the known quantity.
Delta has two mutations in the receptor-binding domain, so, not that far away from "virion zero". I'd be pretty comfortable accepting a Delta-variant vaccine with just a little bit of extra clinical testing.
Omicron is said to have at least ten. I'm less comfortable with that leap of faith, especially given that getting infected with it seems to be no big deal for most people.
"I am not as confident as many vaccine boosters (heh!) that variant vaccines can be assumed to be just as *safe and effective* as the original version."
Handle, why in the world would you have any such confidence in any of these recent vaxes?
What have *any* of these Pharma etc. wheels done, to earn a scintilla of trust regarding *any* of this?
"the “stop the steal” movement was not made particularly worse by the events of January 6th." But the 1/6 events were certainly made worse by "the stop the steal" lie.
I'd argue that there are big returns to being moderately in shape, but very diminishing returns to getting really in shape for most people.
Like, it was worth it for me from a quality of life perspective to not weigh 210lbs. I generally felt weak and unhealthy. At the other end of the spectrum, staying at 160lbs, which was about my minimum as an adult doesn't seem feasible to me, because it requires a level of eating discipline and time invested in exercise that I just can't maintain.
About 20 years ago, Paul Campos had two back-to-back books "The Obesity Myth" and "The Diet Myth" that, in my opinion - and assuming I remember them accurately - have held up pretty well.
I don't remember if it was in the books or some of his other related commentary at the time, but one amusing point he made was that, as far as anybody knew at the time, the most effective weight-loss program ever discovered that didn't involve illegal drugs or prescription-only stimulants was tobacco usage, especially cigarette smoking.
And one thing you almost never saw from all the anti-smoking analysis was that, if you convinced lots of people to stop, lots of the quitters would predictably gain lots of weight. I certainly saw examples of that in both directions in my own family. Indeed, it's important enough, that smoking rates in particular demographic profiles is one of the confounders one ought to correct for if looking at the obesity stats over time.
But, if you took seriously a lot of the more alarmist claims that reputable / government sources were making about the risks of even mild levels of obesity, especially when one is old, then one could easily conclude that smoking rates should be encouraged to go up(!) because even the estimated costs of cancer, premature death, etc. would be lower than that associated with a lifetime of obesity.
I think he was right based on what was known at the time, but with the latest covid data, I think Campos turned out to be a little too sanguine about the risks of even mild levels of obesity. It looks like even losing even, say, 10-15 pounds, could have made the difference for lots of people between "very bad cold" and "severe illness / hospitalization / death". Then again, it's always iffy to reason from the peculiarities of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I have been both fat and fit at different points in my life- the work to keep fit, which I have maintained now for the last 30 years is worth it. However, you are right, it really is all subjective down to the individual level. This is why I never criticize a person for not taking care of their bodies- I don't live in their shoes.
This question reminds me of something my father said once. He read an article claiming if you ran so many minutes a day that you would live some number of years longer. But when he did the math, it turned out the total number of minutes spent running was roughly equal to the number of minutes of extra life you got. So it was like you could live a few extra years, but you had to spend that whole time running, which is a pretty terrible trade (and it was worse, because you did the running as a young person but only got the extra life as an old person).
That was a while ago and that article may not have held up. But I think the point remains, many things we do to extend life probably aren’t improving our life much.
There are also a lot of related issues. I'm not in super shape by any means, but it's important to me to be able to get out and do things like hiking and backpacking, so I have to put at least some effort into keeping my weight reasonable and getting at least some exercise.
"Narrative Maintainer" is kind of a slippery term. It's not that it isn't accurate or doesn't happen - it happens all the time and many people seem to devote their careers to it. But so long as it can be perceived as helping or hurting 'one side' of a public controversy, no matter what someone said, or what they thought, or what their intentions really were, you can always accuse them of having said it for "narrative maintenance" purposes, and there's no good way for them to defend themselves from the charge.
“It wasn’t an insurrection. It was only an idiotic farce. Noted."
Someone can think that the 1/6 mob events were ridiculous and really bad for a variety of reasons while abstaining from the use of the manipulative and bogus vocabulary of one set of actual "narrative maintainers", which poses its own dangers.
You can imagine a wide spectrum of possible interpretations of the events of that day, but without getting into semantic arguments, my personal threshold for what would constitute a fair and reasonable use of the word 'insurrection' by American right-wing elements is just not compatible with events that do not involve a *truly incredible* amount of gunfire.
If on 1/5/21 you had said "actual insurrection attempt by the right tomorrow" to basically anybody, streets covered in piles of spent cartridges would have been the least gory of the many extremely vivid images that immediately popped into every sane person's head, as a manifestation of mere common sense, especially one conditioned by Hollywood / media for generations.
Maybe I missed it, but to my knowledge, no rioter fired even a single shot, which for a crowd that large in DC would be a relief even if it were just a music festival. For comparison and perspective: lately, on average, there are about 50 shots fired every day in DC, most not by law enforcement.
The fact that no one is being charged with actual 'insurrection' also weighs against using the word just because the "narrative maintenance" folks would like everyone to keep repeating it. It would be like describing the Navy Yard shooting from seven years prior as a 'Civil War' as it involved infinitely (in the divide-by-zero sense) more shooting and murdered people, though there was just one perpetrator - Aaron Alexis.
At any rate, one thing libertarians are usually very good at is having accurate insights and presumptions and a keen spider sense for when some event is about to get blown completely out of proportion by the powers that be for propaganda purposes in order to legitimate yet another obnoxious, liberty-eroding, constitutional-right-circumventing, and irreversible power grab by the state. They usually try to get people to slow down, think, understand what's really going on, consider costs vs benefits, put things in perspective by laying out objective measurements of actual harm and damage, and so forth. It is the libertarian version of "Standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"
The way 1/6 is actually being used now, which is as justification for turning the domestic security apparatus against the enemies of the state (i.e., enemies of the movement which controls the state), provides another reason to lean in favor of the "not actually a big deal in the scheme of things" interpretation.
I happen to believe that interpretation, but now watch me get accused of just trying to maintain a different narrative.
What term or terms would be an improvement over "narrative maintainer"? Because saying nothing and simply shutting up about it seems... Kafkaesque to me. You seem to object to the "narrative maintainer" language, but then provide a detailed explanation of why if 1/6 has any import, it's because it's a non-event that's being used "as justification for turning the domestic security apparatus against the enemies of the state (i.e., enemies of the movement which controls the state)"...
So you say the event itself is "not actually a big deal in the scheme of things"...
... but what you've described is a rather big deal.
To put it another way, if your interpretation is true (I agree it is), pretty much anything you could say would be susceptible to accusation of "maintaining a narrative". Or worse. The only way to (maybe) avoid accusation is to remain silent and compliant.
Which is, of course, what people implementing a crackdown based on a flimsy pretext want.
Is that what you're arguing for?
How about just 'liars'? Propagandists (e.g. 'agitprop')? Muckrakers? Look at La Wik's description of muckraker, "journalists ... who crafted narratives that established their contemporary institutions and leaders as corrupt or immoral." 'Crafted narratives', eh? Bet they maintained them too.
I am not saying that anyone should avoid what might get them accused of being a "narrative maintainer", precisely because accusations of that sort get weaponized and thrown around all the time without any relationship to justice. Go speak the truth.
I am saying "narrative maintainer" is like an example of "emotive conjugation". Unless one has the ability to read minds and souls, whether one uses it or not is going to depend more on one's disposition toward the claimant than the nature of their claims.
It's clearly meant to be pejorative, and as such, is just another species of ad hominem that moves away from rational consideration of the validity of the object level claims at issue.
"I am a bold and brave truth teller, doing the heroic work of signal boosting the facts *they* don't want you to know, trying to wake up the sheeple and chumps to spread awareness of the real state of affairs, countering all that dangerous disinformation out there. You are a narrative-maintainer, a spinmeister propagandist, knowingly, consciously, and intentionally lying, manipulating the masses and trapping them in mass delusion in order to be the puppet master of their emotions and oppress and exploit them for the gain of yourself and your evil masters."
As a basic test, you can always do the thought experiment of trying to describe the situation to an educated and informed person from 50 or 100 or more years ago, and then imagining whether what you were saying would be totally unfamiliar to them to the point of even lacking words to describe it. "What do you mean, 'smartphone'?" If, on the other hand, they would immediately recognize what you're talking about as a conceptual category and have recourse to a robust vocabulary with which to converse about it, then, probably, you haven't actually stumbled on any new insight or invented a necessary neologism.
In general, in areas of human politics, there is very, very little new under the sun. You could go to a German Catholic 175 years ago and try to explain yourself about narrative maintainers and they would stop you mid-sentence, "Oh yeah, I already know exactly what you mean, let me tell you about how those monsters in the lugenpresse are trying to .... "
Yes, I know about all the meta and meta-meta level tricks and games and that "discourse about the discourse" is sometimes important. Lili Loofbourow had a good article in Slate about it and "good faith" about 18 months ago. "Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that despite their centrality, online platforms aren’t suited to the earnest exchange of big ideas."
But still, we already have more than enough epithets and ad hominems, we don't need any new epithets and ad hominems. No one needs to be convinced that there are liars out there, that politician is a synonym for professional liar, that the reason they lie is because they think they can get something out of fooling people or otherwise getting them to go along with it, and that they will obviously always accuse anyone who disagrees of being the real liars. Duh!
Arnold, I think you are not drawing some necessary distinctions on January 6. A relative handful of disorderly persons, egged on by undercover federal agents in some cases, entered the Capitol. There were on the other hand perhaps as many as 500,000 who were in DC to peacefully protest, which is their right. To treat them all as the same, so as to discredit those with legitimate concerns about the integrity of the election, is not up to your usual standards. Also, you seem to default to the position that the election must have been valid, though there is plenty of evidence of fraud in critical places. I think a better position is to treat that question as unresolved.
Of course, a better position is to treat that question as unresolved.
But that will never be acceptable to neoCon hacks like Goldberg.
"Trump’s claims of fraud, which he could never substantiate, were reckless and damaging."
Arnold has *no" idea that Trump could *never* substantiate such claims.
All that can be said is, that Trump was *unable* to substantiate such claims, in a *very* narrow time frame of only two months from Nov. 2020 to Jan. 2021.
For hacks like Goldberg to sneer at such a "failure", as somehow a classic case of narrative maintenance, is all too typical of the never-Trump mentality.
Have any of his ilk ever come clean, on any of the litany of the flat falsehoods which they were puking out for the last 7+ years (starting with their bile about Trump having "called Mexicans rapists")?
Whatever term is now most appropriate to describe Goldberg these days, 'neocon' isn't it.
"Professional Apostate" is close, but ambiguous. IIRC, Arnold used it in a way to describe people who make their living by doing little else than denouncing the actions and beliefs of members of the group with which they were once affiliated, whose audience is now not people still affiliated with that group, and boy, that fits Goldberg and French et al well.
But Christopher Hitchens used it to describe himself in the formerly more common manner, not at a traitorous mercenary now working for the enemy, but as a profoundly independently-minded person (one might say: nonconformist and disagreeable) and someone who just keeps hopping in and then out of groups, sects, affiliations, ideological group labels, etc.
You see this kind of character in religious circles a lot. There is the ex-Mormon who doesn't just leave the church but has become utterly obsessed and who now simply cannot shut up to his new friends and especially other ex-Mormons about how terrible and crazy the Mormons are. Replace Mormon with anything, really, it's a type.
It's not like Hoffer's True Believer who goes from truly believing in something to truly believing in something else. They go from truly believing something to a kind of oddly specific-nihilist of being dedicated to being against it, to *not* believing that thing, to do whatever he can to undermine anyone else's belief in it. Maybe "The True Nonbeliever"? "The True Infidel"?
OK, Handle, I'll concede the "neoCon" point on Goldberg, but I stand by my point about "hack".
It's not a little depressing, that Arnold, who should know better, still trotts out guys like Goldberg, French, and Rauch, as if their pontifications haven't been cogently spanked/ destroyed, by guys like Greenwald, Taibbi, Archdruid Greer, J.H. Kunstler, Karl Denninger, Mark Wauck, etc.
I read a few posts in Arnade's substack. They're really good. Thanks for finding them. He seems to have a pretty good grip on what's going on in "real" America vs. the America of the woke.
Please Arnold, take a break of your regular program of intellectual fantasies and go back to reality. I still remember your Covid strategy so please read this new post by Berenson
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/if-you-are-a-vaccine-company-executive/comments
and the related interview to Pfizer CEO. You may want to review your strategy. Maybe Berenson has failed to understand what the CEO said and the implications for both our health and his company but I'd like very much to hear your opinion.
I don't get this guy. Seems really conspiratorial to me, and the numbers he highlights are really misleading.
That is, of course as the percentage of people being vaccinated approaches 100%, the number of vaccinated people hospitalized will be greater than the number of unvaccinated hospitalized. I think it's reasonable to talk about this but his use of the data here seems to be bordering on bad faith.
Moreover, it doesn't change the basic math telling me to get the vaccine which is based on individual probability. If I get vaccinated, does it lower my individual probability of ending up in the hospital? The numbers on that are a pretty clear yes.
I'm not a fan of mandates, but I'm a fan of not going to the hospital.
"The numbers on that are a pretty clear yes."
How in the world do you imagine that you *know* this?
The Berenson v. Tabarrok case is about what the senile President should do: less or more money to Pfizer and other companies. Now in the WSJ, a column argues that is safer to speed the spread (a different argument not to give more money to Pfizer and other companies).
I'm sure Arnold has already read Alex Tabarrok's latest MR post
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/where-are-the-variant-specific-boosters.html
and he will have two opposite views. I bet that their batting averages are not significantly different.
"Mostly I blame American lethargy ... "
American? Tabarrok seems to have internalized the Clinton-era "indispensable nation" talking point. Why should 'blame' for unavailability of such a thing *anywhere* hinge on how the medicine approval agency responds to public attitudes in one particular country? To be fair, a lot of people think about things this way.
It's a global pandemic. There are lots and lots of other countries, many very big, rich, smart, and technologically advanced, and all with plenty of incentive to get variant vaccines out to their population quickly. BioNTech is German. AstraZeneca is British-Swedish. Janssen (the J&J shot) is headquartered in Belgium. Japan seems to have lost a lot of competitiveness in pharma over the last decade, but AgNes and Shionogi have finally stepped up with their own vaccines. The Russians and Chinese are also real players.
But the reason these things don't exist anywhere is because of American lethargy. Sure.
If only there were places, where we can get fair analyses of such batting averages.
Alas, such places would likely be deluged (by the usual suspects) with ad hominems etc.
I would be interested in thoughts on the circumstantial but quite powerful (in my opinion) evidence that Fed agents (or at least people who are being protected by the Fed) instigated the Jan 6 Capitol break in. I haven’t heard many substantial mainstream or center-right takes on this story, although if true it completely changes the interpretation of the event. Are people just waiting for more info before expressing an opinion?
I don't think people are expecting more info. Most of us accept that it's impossible to know the truth (remember: to seek justice, first you have to find truth, but what if the bad guys don't let you find it? how much are you willing to pay for finding it?).
Let us hope the Victoria White case is litigated rather than negotiated (see https://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/rochester-woman-charged-in-jan-6-riot-sues-capitol-police).
BTW, it's a shame that the killing of Ashli Babbit has not been investigated.
Maybe also, mainstream and center-right intellectuals are happy to see Trump gone. Digging into the “truth” of Jan 6 might fire up the Trumpists - so there is no incentive, especially if doing so will get them labeled by the left as conspiracy theorists.
Yeah, it's a shame that the killing of Ashli Babbit has not been investigated, but don't hold your breath.
In today's US, the only things that get seriously "investigated" are, those which will help grind the axes of the Beautiful People, and their allies.
Regarding COVID, we will never find truth, although some documents are now being released
https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/2mVob3c1aDd8CNvVnyei6n/95af7dbfd2958d4c2b8494048b4889b5/JAG_Docs_pt1_Og_WATERMARK_OVER_Redacted.pdf
as part of Project Veritas. You can read about what they were able to get here
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2022/01/11/bombshell-project-veritas-expose-poses-urgent-questions-for-fauci-and-the-entire-pandemic-response-n1548529
Arnade's writing is a plainly stated window into a world that almost no elites work in, visit, live, and that few are from. Even with my own history he is worth reading and thinking about. After spending my entire childhood and into adulthood in the Midwest I've now lived in a Southern county for over half a decade. A county where the largest city has over 100K people and there isn't a black or white area. And yet also during this time have heard the N word said out loud half the total times in my life.
Sorry, Arnold. Your latest post proves that your strategy of relying on comments to specific issues as presented by your FITs is not appropriate to address those issues. Neither your FITs' opinions nor yours are well presented: the issues are not well defined and the arguments are incomplete and vague. I regret you present the "voting rights" issue as if it had been defined by the false D-claim of a riot on January 6, 2020, and the "U.S. government strategy to deal with the pandemic in 2022" issue as if it were only a problem of obesity and the need for a diet. Although I regret you refer to Goldberg for any issue, I appreciate Taibbi and Emily Oster’s opinions on the issues they address. I don’t have time to go through the other issues and authors you refer in your post.
I hope you write about the two specific issues I just mentioned. It’s quite obvious that the barbarians have to rely on a large change in “voting rights” to consolidate the power they grabbed last November. It is a U.S. constitutional issue, like it or not, because the current system is based on the states’ authority to set their own voting rights. You claim to be concerned about regulatory reform but the sort of reform the U.S. will have depends on the people elected to represent the states in D.C. and the person elected to be president.
Also, today it’s obvious that the big failure of the past 12 months to address the pandemic is a direct result of the obfuscation caused by the barbarians’ strategy to grab power in 2020. Yesterday’s events prove it. More importantly, anybody who has read Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions” knows that “the science” will be late to take today’s decisions, sometimes too late as it has been the case for the past two years with the pandemic. What has happened since late November 2021 with omicron has made clear how little science has advanced in understanding the virus, the disease, and the vaccines. Today your country’s failure is defined not by what your senile President did in the past 12 months but by his personal failure to understand the trade-offs involved in developing a strategy for the months up to November 2022.
Change is coming
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/01/democrat-strategists-we-have-found-our-change-candidate-for-2024/
Moxie Marlinspike is a very sharp dude.
My view is that, on balance, it's kind of unfortunate coincidental* timing that "Web3" tech came into prominence at a time of monetary expansion for the dollar and when there is a lot of concern about high inflation.
My impression is that historically these kinds of expansions are correlated with a lot of frenzied enthusiasm, fervor, and excessive animal spirits in various asset markets, like the tulip-mania phase of a Minsky cycle, but spilling over especially into purportedly non-replicable classes like real estate, 'art', antiques, collectibles, etc.
Of all the smart, clever, promising ideas I've read about how this new tech might enable new possibilities of big-picture meaningful improvements, it's kind of tragi-comic that the bulk of the energy seems to be going into things like NFT madness which often doesn't make any sense and even more often strikes one as foolish and sketchy as hell. Hopefully if (when?) all the weird stuff crashes hard, it won't take the high potential of the other Web3 ideas down with it.
*Maybe not a coincidence, I'm not sure. Some of the expansion probably contributed to Bitcoin rocketing up, which is turn made a lot of people rich and got a lot of other people very interested in the tech. Maybe we'll laugh one day when in the final analysis it turns out that all the effort at stimulus ended up stimulating alternatives to the stimulator.
"anti-vaxxers and people who merely have anti-mandate or anti-passport attitudes? It’s all the same obstructionism to them." Of course there are differences, but they share the same blind spot: vaccines protect other people, not just the person vaccinated.
"vaccines protect other people, not just the person vaccinated."
It gets quite old to keep hearing vaxers repeat that lie, but, sorry, it just ain't so.
The *only* effect that vaxes have is, to help suppress symptoms, for maybe 6 months.
You are mistaken, but I will not call your mistatement a "lie" as I presume that you believe it to be true.
To clarify, anyone who claims to *know*, that "vaccines protect other people" is lying.
The *only* effect that we *might* know vaxes to have is, to help suppress symptoms.
But, we've got major reasons to suspect, that the vaxes clobber the circulatory/ immune systems.
And this in turn assumes, that we have reliable numbers on any such matters.
My guess is, we have few if any such numbers, since so few institutions give enough of a damn to try to get such numbers.
Why should Fauci etc. care to send $$ toward the gathering of such numbers, when he and his ilk are allowed by the MSM to puke out whatever "numbers" just so happen to help grind the axes he wants pushed?
I doubt seriously the anti-mandate people have that blind spot, they just don't give it the weight the mandate supporters give it, and I think for very, very good reasons.
I've never heard an anti-mandate position that mentioned the other-protecting aspect of vaccines. And I, at least, do not see any good reasons for not weighing it. Blacking out our window probably makes your house a less likely target, but that's not the reason people were told to black out their windows.
Alright-play stupid, I don't care. I didn't say they don't give it weight at all- I said they don't assign it the value you do.
I'm saying I see no evidence that it is given non-zero weight for any good reason. Maybe you have seen some and know of a good reason not to weight it.
That's a lot of qualifications, none of which seem reasonable to me.
So let's set that aside and be straightforward. I'm pro-vaccine and think part of the value comes from lowering the risk of contagion. How much... especially in light of omicron is debatable but sure, it "has weight".
But even if it were much more effective at protecting others than even those in favor of mandates suggest, I would still not say the value outweighs the harm of the government broadly compelling people to have medical procedures.
It come down to what is the cumulative loss to people who will not work (and employers and customers) becasue of the mandate and the benefit of the infections prevented. Both are hard to quantify, but that's what I think we ought not be attempting
I'd sort of like to see us TRY to keep up with new variants and vaccinate more to the billions of bodies where those variants arise.
Agree. But perhaps the problem (part?) are the regulatory steps needed to change the formula. I sort of think that if "we" had started on a Delta variant we might have been able to switch to an Omicron-optimized vaccine/booster.
The good news* is that the FDA has indicated they'll approve variant vaccines quickly with very minimal testing. The bad news is that they still won't get out there until it's too late and we're at herd-immunity for Omicron. But the other good news is that Omicron, while bad, is still a lot less severe than earlier variants, especially if one is vaccinated, but judging from the anecdotes in my circle of acquaintances, even if one is unvaccinated and has typical comorbidities.
The RNA tech allows new vaccines for new variants to be created almost immediately, literally within days. It takes a while to switch over old capacity or build new capacity and to verify six-sigma levels of quality control, but it looks like they can do this at scale in a few months.
They were ready to do this right away for the Delta wave, but back then the FDA hadn't decided / been told to make clear how they would handle a variant vax.
*I am not as confident as many vaccine boosters (heh!) that variant vaccines can be assumed to be just as safe and effective as the original version. Maybe a reasonable assumption is that, knowing nothing else, one's confidence should be proportional to the genetic distance from the known quantity.
Delta has two mutations in the receptor-binding domain, so, not that far away from "virion zero". I'd be pretty comfortable accepting a Delta-variant vaccine with just a little bit of extra clinical testing.
Omicron is said to have at least ten. I'm less comfortable with that leap of faith, especially given that getting infected with it seems to be no big deal for most people.
"I am not as confident as many vaccine boosters (heh!) that variant vaccines can be assumed to be just as *safe and effective* as the original version."
Handle, why in the world would you have any such confidence in any of these recent vaxes?
What have *any* of these Pharma etc. wheels done, to earn a scintilla of trust regarding *any* of this?
Well there could be HCT for vaccine variants
"the “stop the steal” movement was not made particularly worse by the events of January 6th." But the 1/6 events were certainly made worse by "the stop the steal" lie.
It's not irrational if it maximizes your utility.
I'd argue that there are big returns to being moderately in shape, but very diminishing returns to getting really in shape for most people.
Like, it was worth it for me from a quality of life perspective to not weigh 210lbs. I generally felt weak and unhealthy. At the other end of the spectrum, staying at 160lbs, which was about my minimum as an adult doesn't seem feasible to me, because it requires a level of eating discipline and time invested in exercise that I just can't maintain.
About 20 years ago, Paul Campos had two back-to-back books "The Obesity Myth" and "The Diet Myth" that, in my opinion - and assuming I remember them accurately - have held up pretty well.
I don't remember if it was in the books or some of his other related commentary at the time, but one amusing point he made was that, as far as anybody knew at the time, the most effective weight-loss program ever discovered that didn't involve illegal drugs or prescription-only stimulants was tobacco usage, especially cigarette smoking.
And one thing you almost never saw from all the anti-smoking analysis was that, if you convinced lots of people to stop, lots of the quitters would predictably gain lots of weight. I certainly saw examples of that in both directions in my own family. Indeed, it's important enough, that smoking rates in particular demographic profiles is one of the confounders one ought to correct for if looking at the obesity stats over time.
But, if you took seriously a lot of the more alarmist claims that reputable / government sources were making about the risks of even mild levels of obesity, especially when one is old, then one could easily conclude that smoking rates should be encouraged to go up(!) because even the estimated costs of cancer, premature death, etc. would be lower than that associated with a lifetime of obesity.
I think he was right based on what was known at the time, but with the latest covid data, I think Campos turned out to be a little too sanguine about the risks of even mild levels of obesity. It looks like even losing even, say, 10-15 pounds, could have made the difference for lots of people between "very bad cold" and "severe illness / hospitalization / death". Then again, it's always iffy to reason from the peculiarities of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I have been both fat and fit at different points in my life- the work to keep fit, which I have maintained now for the last 30 years is worth it. However, you are right, it really is all subjective down to the individual level. This is why I never criticize a person for not taking care of their bodies- I don't live in their shoes.
This question reminds me of something my father said once. He read an article claiming if you ran so many minutes a day that you would live some number of years longer. But when he did the math, it turned out the total number of minutes spent running was roughly equal to the number of minutes of extra life you got. So it was like you could live a few extra years, but you had to spend that whole time running, which is a pretty terrible trade (and it was worse, because you did the running as a young person but only got the extra life as an old person).
That was a while ago and that article may not have held up. But I think the point remains, many things we do to extend life probably aren’t improving our life much.
There are also a lot of related issues. I'm not in super shape by any means, but it's important to me to be able to get out and do things like hiking and backpacking, so I have to put at least some effort into keeping my weight reasonable and getting at least some exercise.