Last Thoughts of the Year
Posted by SBG on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 8:07 am
The calendar on the wall of my den says January 2007. It's off by a day.
I was reading the Coffeyville Whirlwind (which I enjoy quite a bit, by the way) the other day and he linked to an article by the Washington Post's George Will, the unofficial winner of Pompous Ass of the Year Award for the 23rd year in a row, in which the always uptight Mr. Will pooh-poohed the "blogger" en masse in response to Time Magazine's naming of "You" has Person of the Year. Really, if you must read that unreadable blowhard, go ahead, but don't say I didn't warn you. In his latest piece of drivel, Will is dismissive of bloggers as a whole because a lot of bloggers write "have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction." Will writes that in 2007 there will be 100 million bloggers and that "37 percent -- soon, 37 million -- say the primary topic of their blog is 'my life and experiences.' George III would have preferred dealing with 100 million bloggers rather than one [Thomas] Paine."
Here's Will's argument: a lot of bloggers write about their stupid everyday lives. And, he's right about that. Do some searching on blogs -- hell read this one -- and there is talk about things that are very little consequence. Therefore, because some blogs are about nothing, all blogs are thus unimportant. Actually, Will goes further. Quoting Brian Williams, Will warns that blogging or more accurately, the Wild, Wild Internet, creates a danger that the collective we might "miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we will fail to meet the next great challenge . . . because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart."
What bullshit.
Of course, not all blogs are about "my life and experiences." And not all blogs that include talk about "my life and experiences" are devoid of value. In fact, there a lot of blogs out there right now that are providing excellent political analysis and discourse. Admittedly, some of the stuff is drivel. I personally filter out what I consider to be drivel from that which I believe to be good. I believe that there are some writers out there writing on blogs who are brilliant thinkers. And further, they've provided voices of dissent when the old guard media, an institution that pays Mr. Will's salary, has been afraid to question. And dare I say it, some of the voices are the voices of genius. But, of course, that's rare, as Mr. Will points out. Not everyone is a genius. Not every blog has a readership of 400,000 readers a day. That's kind of how it works in an egalitarian society. Everyone has an opportunity to express their ideas. In the marketplace of ideas, those ideas that are the best rise to the top. Dare I say it -- it kind of sounds like the rationale behind having freedom of speech and of the press. There are few ideas that are more American than that.
The democratization of the Internet lets every doofus with Internet access to publish their thoughts. Those with something important to say have garnered followings. Those who publish half-baked crap garner lesser followings. 
Will knows damned well that the age of the Internet is killing the traditional media's hold on the story coming out of Washington. He and his type don't like it. He can be as dismissive as he wants to be. But, there's nothing he can do to stop it. Will takes an hilarious swipe at YouTube, choosing to ignore how it played a huge part in unseating the senator from the Commonweath of Virginia (perhaps Mr. Will hadn't heard about that, being so far away in Washington, DC). Will ends his pretentious pile of dung of a column by sneering that "99.9 percent" of the content of the Internet is unserious. If that's the case, then by his own admission, there are 100,000 serious bloggers out there that have been given voice that would otherwise not have a voice. That's nothing less than earth-shattering.
On that note, I wanted to take some time to talk about a personal life experience.
My mother-in-law has cancer.
I'm no stranger to the disease, as I'm sure most people aren't. Both of my grandmothers died of cancer. My paternal grandmother had brain cancer and died just four months after being diagnosed. My maternal grandmother had bone cancer and survived for about three years after being diagnosed. My dad's mother died three days after my 18th birthday and my mom's mother died when I was 30. In each case, it was difficult to watch them suffer, although I saw a lot more of my mother's mother as I was in a boarding school in high school and well, my other grandmother died very quickly. I'm sure most of you have seen what it's like and can appreciate what I'm talking about.
My mother-in-law was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987. She fought that. Then, she got lung cancer and had surgery to remove part of her lung. Then, about five or six years ago, she got bone cancer. So, she's been living with cancer for most of the last 20 years. I've only known her for about four years, so I've never known her when she didn't have this latest form of cancer.
I suspected when I met her, based on my own experience, that she'd live about three or so more years. But, happily, I was wrong. My observations of her over time were such that she seemed to be maintaining and so I was optimistic that she was going to continue to live and have a good quality of life for a fair amount of time. The years have passed and she's done pretty well. This fall, however, she seemed to start to lose energy. We hadn't seen her for a while, but Lucy and I went to a 50th Wedding Anniversary celebration on a bitingly cold day in October and met Lucy's parents there. The woman who was being honored introduced my in-laws to each other 45 or so years ago and she is my wife's godmother. So, my mother-in-law was determined to go. But, she was in markedly worse shape. I was really taken aback at how weak she was and I was fearful.
What struck me that day, however, was her determination. She said that her doctor was going to put her on a new treatment and she believed that it would make a difference. Now, I'm not a doctor, but I was not so sure about that. Nevertheless, she started the treatments. When we went down to Winona to see her at Thanksgiving, once again, I was taken aback. I could not believe how much better my mother-in-law looked. She really seemed to have regained the strength that she had lost. And, at Christmas, she again showed that she had improved. The improvement has shown up in her diagnostic numbers as well. I am optimistic that she will continue to maintain and she will continue to fight.
She has a tremendous amount of courage and resolve. I believe that her attitude and stuubornness has had no small part in her ability to continue to fight through this. I have a tremendous amount of admiration and respect for her. She doesn't complain about it a whole lot. But, she hasn't given in, either. God love her. I sure do.
She semi-famously gives me beer and a corny t-shirt (among other things) for Christmas every year. It brought me great joy to open those gifts and spend this Christmas with her and I am optimistic about the future.
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I just asked the wife how many times this last year she asked me to quit reading George Will and go to sleep.
Her response: "None, but I can't tell you how many times I've said 'say goodnight to ubelmann'."
an hilarious - nice.
but to what does NBB attribute his even-later-night (local time) communication with us Left Coasters?
Charlie Rose. (just kidding)
Will is an example of journalistic arrogance I hate on both sides of the spectrum -
"I am more intelligent and more educated than you and that....more than any facts......means my opinion and analysis is more important than yours."
One thing I do appreciate about George Will is even though he is an overeducated arrogant blowhard - he doesn't misrepresent himself. Anyone who reads Will knows he is an unabashed conservative. That he readily admits his bias is more than can be said for most journalists and psuedojournalists (Keith Olberman, David Brooks, David Gregory to name a few right off the top of my head)
Attempts by mainstream journalists to discredit blogs show how insecure they are along with their growing incompetence. Fact of the matter is I read SBG, Will Young and others before going to any Minnesota newspaper or Fox Sports North. The newspapers and FSN will try to discredit the blogs, and then try to minimize me as a reader, but soon the advertisers will realize where I am and they won't care about why.
It's worth pointing out that the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, in 2001 named David Gregory the Best White House Correspondent because he "offered fewer biased reports and even achieved some balance on stories on the estate tax repeal, income tax cuts, and campaign finance reform." Now the hardcore conservatives hate him only because he started challenging the Bush press secretaries on their bullshit; or, in other words, for doing his job.
I think Olberman's sympathies are always clear, but I don't believe he's dishonest or unfair (unlike his counterparts on FOX), which is basically what I want from a journalist or pundit.
George Will is not only an arrogant blowhard, but a sanctimonious hypocrite. Yes, he's an unabashed conservative, but he also pretends to be some kind of objective, principled observer of current events--when in truth he's a partisan player who often flip-flops his principles depending on how the circumstances may suit Republican party interests. He's a hack and an enabler of Bush before he saw the tide turn and decided to distance himself from the President who suddenly wasn't 'a true conservative' anymore.
My thoughts are also with Lucy's Mom and the SBG family. I wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year.
I'm going to agree with that observation on Gregory. There are times when I absolutely agree with him and other times when he infuriates me. That is probably an indicator that he's doing a good job, that is, if you accept my analysis as being worth anything more than a warm bucket of spit.
The main point I want to make here is that although my personal political opinions may differ from SBG (whom I have met and had excellent political dicussions with) and differ from frightwig (whom I hope to someday meet in person and undoubtedly have great disucssions with) - the difference of opinion does not effect my positive opinion of the person. I actually, believe it or not, enjoy both Bill O'Reilly AND Keith Olberman - my frustration with both men is that they seem to be incapable of appreciating each other.
Frightwig - I would be interested to have you point out a specific example of George Will being dishonest and/or unfair (other than his gaffe in the 80's supporting a republican candidate as a commentator when he was writing speeches and doing debate prep for him). Is it possible that one who tends to agree with George Will sees a Keith Olberman in the same light you see Will in and vice versa?
Tim Russert - worked for Democratic party before becoming "media" by far and away the best and most "objective" reporter out there IMHO. David Gregory is not, and never will be, a Tim Russert. I agree that he does a great job of eliciting emotion good and bad but I think he is more interested in David Gregory than he is in the objectivity of any story he covers.
My main frustration with O'Reilly is that he's not only a GOP shill, who has made a habit of referring to Democrats and liberals as traitors to America, but that he's fundamentally dishonest. Besides Olbermann's lack of appreciation for such a person, what is wrong with what he does?
As for George Will's dishonesty and hypocrisy, there's his late November column about Sen.-Elect Jim Webb's (D-VA) encounter with President Bush at a White House reception, documented LINK There's his history of undisclosed conflicts of interest, discussed HERE And there is a list of hypocrisy documented in this article at the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting site.
I hope SBG's comments still support HTML, and that I got my tags right....
I read the links on George Will and I have to agree with you.
On O'Reilly - GOP shill - again I would call Olberman a Democrat shill...difference of opinion and probably difference in how things are heard. However, Id be interested in hearing you provide specific examples of him referring to Dems or libs as "traitors" - Hannity yes, Rush yes, but Ive not heard O'Reilly do as much. He is on this whole secular progressive kick and certainly is much more agressive verbally than he is constructive, informative or objective, but Ive not heard him use the word 'traitor'.
Here's one quote by Bill O'Reilly, from June 20, 2005, in reference to Sen. Dick Durbin, who had criticized the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo, and everyone at Air America Radio:
Last July, he said in reference to The New York Times:
Last May, he said:
He has said of the ACLU:
That's just a small sample. He's made a habit of referring to liberals as terrorist sympathizers, terrorist enablers, jihadis, Nazis, cowards, and America-haters--the last particularly ironic since he himself once suggested that he'd welcome al-Qaida to bomb San Francisco. (I'm just waiting for somebody, someday, to call out a Republican politician or rightwing pundit for taking cheap shots at certain parts of America, like San Francisco or Massachussetts, while claiming to love America out of the other side of their mouths.) He's often suggested that activity in the Middle East or North Korea is motivated by a desire to hurt Bush and Republicans and benefit Democrats. So, ipso facto, Democrats are in league with terrorists and other enemies of America. Even his crusade against "secular-progressives" is just another guise for demonizing Americans he doesn't like; if he can't dismiss them with honest, rational points, it's always convenient for him to call the liberals Godless Heathens who are set on undermining the American Way of Life. Just like the terrorists!
Regarding Olbermann: it remains to be seen how his reporting may change, or not, once Democrats hold power, particularly to the level that Republicans have held since Bush took office, and if they ever abuse that power or show incompetence in governance to the extent that Bush and his party have done the last 6 years. If the Dems follow the same road and Olbermann looks the other way, I'll agree he's a shill. At this point, considering that Bush is in charge and what he's done with that power, I think it's a testament to Olbermann's integrity that he has been willing to stick his neck out, nearly alone in the corporate media through most of the Bush administration so far, and report as he does.
Here's more of our boy Georgie Will today:
People are like soybeans and pork bellies.
Apparently Mr. Will slept through the lectures on externalities in his econ classes.
He slept through a lot more than that. Labor is a service; commoditizing services is quite difficult.
If all a worker does is repetitive, mechanical actions, he can be commoditized and, in principle, replaced with robotics. But the more a task requires context-sensitive responses by the laborer, the more the job has to do with human capital and the less to do with labor-as-commodity.
To be fair to Will, most of the essay argues a pretty straight-forward, conservative position on the minimum wage. That is, (1) the minimum wage mostly affects part-time, young, entry-level workers in service industries. (2) raising the minimum wage would probably induce those employers to cut minimum-wage employment (restricting jobs and/or hours). So raising the minimum wage would largely be a symbolic act combined with little or no benefit (and perhaps net losses) to the class of workers most affected by the minimum wage.
on the other hand, minimum wage legislation provides important information to workers bargaining with employers over wages. Workers who earn above the minimum no doubt expect to maintain their relative advantage over the minimum even after increases in the minimum. If you believe that employers are generically advantaged informationally in wage-bargaining with low-skill workers, minimum wage legislation can act to shift bargaining power towards those workers, thus inducing a change in the distribution of profits between factors of production without necessarily reducing employment.
Yeah, what you said.
Set aside Will's body of work for a moment, and say you just wanted to evaluate this argument on this column alone. Despite the fact that most of the column is one of the few generic positions on minimum wage, I think the last paragraph really hurts the credibility of his argument. No one with a beating heart ought to think that the minimum wage should be $0. Taking such an extreme and unreasonable stance makes me wary of the rest of his reasoning.
That "it doesn't affect a lot of people" is horseshit. Will reports that 479,000 people make exactly the minimum wage. That's a worthless piece of data. People that make a nickel or a dime or a quarter or 50 cents more than the minimum wage will be impacted by a rise in the minimum but aren't counted in that 479,000. Another fact that Will leaves out is that 1.4 million people reported making less than the Federal minimum wage.
I've also read somewhere that studies have shown that raising the minimum wage really doesn't lead to mass job cuts for low-wage workers, but it does significantly help those working low-wage jobs. As you indicate, SBG, just about every hourly employee walking the floor in the retail and service industries would benefit from a raise in the minimum wage, not just kids hired part-time at the minimum. I think the earning power of the minimum wage today is at its lowest point since the late '60s. It's time to update it, and the vast majority of Americans support doing so, too.
yah, the economic literature on the minimum wage is mixed. Will's rhetoric is stoopid. He's not actually advocating slavery. What he means is that he wants the minimum wage set below the "market clearing price" for unskilled labor, so that the law has no impact on wages and hours.
But again, that's an Econ 1 version of labor markets.
First, our thoughts and prayers to your mother-in-law. She sounds like a very special lady. It is a blessing indeed to have such a good relationship with your in-laws.
Second, I'd have thought the Pompous Ass of the Year competition would be harder to dominate. I'm not disagreeing that Mr. Will is a worthy contender, just that it's a rather crowded field.
When it comes to this subject, however, he is simply carrying on an honored tradition. Television and print disparage blogging and the internet; the movies disparaged television; print fiction writers disparaged movies. It probably goes back to the initial invention of communication.
What interests me more about this subject, though, is the increasing segmentation of communication. It seems to me that, while it is now possible to be more informed than it ever was before, it is also much easier to be ignorant than it used to be.
Let me explain what I mean. When I grew up in rural South Dakota, we could get three television stations (ABC, NBC, CBS), plus on certain days, ETV (now PBS). Each of the network affiliates carried national news at 5:30 p.m. and local news at 6:00 and 10:00. Therefore, if you had the television on at those times, you would hear some of what was going on in the world, whether you were actually interested in it or not.
Radio was similar. Almost all the stations at that time carried a national news break at the top of the hour, and many had a local news break at the bottom of the hour. Again, if you were listening to the radio, you would hear something of the news, even if you weren't particularly interested.
Now, of course, we have many more television stations, radio stations, the internet, etc. All of us have an infinite amount of information at our fingertips. However, it is also quite easy for someone to go through his entire day, day after day, constantly connected to various forms of communication, but learning nothing about what is going on in the world.
Now, I'm not saying things were better when I was growing up. I don't believe that, and even if I did, we couldn't go back to that. But every time we make progress, something gets lost. While the communications revolution has made information much easier, it has also made ignorance easier. I don't know what we do about that, or even if we should do anything, but I think it's something to think about.
SBG: I echo the good thoughts directed toward Lucy's mom. Positive thinking seems to have powerful effects on health. Keep it up, Mama Lucy.
Jeff A: interesting comments. Here's something of a counter-argument/parallel discussion, in three steps.
Step 1: the "by-product" theory. Matthew Baum, a political scientist at UCLA, wrote an excellent study of "soft news" coverage of foreign affairs (references upon request; heh), in which he argues that the TV viewing public is episodically informed about foreign affairs via consumption of entertainment. That is, shows like Jon Stewart's actually contain quite a bit of information, packaged as entertainment, so that individuals who claim to have very little interest in foreign affairs generally end up exhibiting rising levels of knowledge and interest in particular foreign affairs threads (generally, "crisis" threads) with rising consumption of soft news.
2. as Jeff A notes, there is much, much more info available to consumers today via cable, internet, etc. This allows interested individuals to become much better informed on issues on which they desire to become well-informed than was true during the broadcast oligopoly era. Relatedly, viewership of such events as presidential addresses and debates is sharply, demonstrably lower among low-interest cable subscribers than among (more captive) low-interest non-subscribers. But new "communities of interest" have arisen, such as this one.
3. social network research continues to show that we become informed through our social interactions. The web/internet has vastly increased the geographic spread of social networks, while strengthening some (interest-oriented) nodes and weakening others. To the degree that we as individuals interact with others who are well-connected (or communicate with others who themselves communicate with well-connected individuals, or perhaps even higher-order relations a la 6 degrees of kevin bacon), we can become informed about the world at relatively low cost to ourselves.
My prejudice is that modern American society is much better connected and better informed than was society 20 or 30 years ago. I agree to some extent with Jeff A that "ignorance is easier" than it used to be. But as a near-libertarian (?? for a fairly liberal Democrat, that is, if that makes any sense), I'm very much in favor of freedom of choice. And I would also question the degree to which Americans in the 1970s were really all that well informed about the world on average.
empirically, levels of information about the lands controlled by the King of Foreign seem to fluctuate with real-world affairs trends. When the key issues of the day are about foreign (e.g., Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the Cold War; Arab oil embargoes), people tend to become informed about those key issues. When the key issues are domestic (inflation, unemployment, environmental disasters, political corruption, etc.), people tend to become informed about those issues.
umm. Do we have to html-in spaces between paragraphs now?
like this...
test test test
test test test
test test
I'll fix that, too. Give me a second.
liar, liar, pants on fire. Is there a space between paragraphs here?
I think not, but we shall see.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I'm pretty frustrated by it.
or like this...
test test
test test
icky.
Or we might get turned on to the next great book or idea that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by traditional media. Who knows what sort of great works we have missed in the past because a great thinker didn't have an appropriate means of publishing their thoughts/works/etc.
George Will seems to have a trust issue. He doesn't trust us to make good decisions about what content we choose to consume. Certainly, with more options to the consumer, it becomes more difficult to make good decisions, but as long as you trust that consumers can handle that added level of difficulty, it shouldn't be a problem.
Certainly, with more options to the consumer, it becomes more difficult to make good decisions
This is a tricky statement. Adding more alternatives should have no effect on the optimality of choice if the expected difference between the best alternative and the next best choice is "large".
Think about it this way. Adding a third alternative "C" (or fourth or ... or Nth) should have no impact on a person's ranking of "A" vs. "B". For any pair of choices, a person should be able to say that she expects one to be the better choice OR that the two alternatives yield equivalent expected payoffs. So each added alternative to a set should add only ONE additional calculation (is the new alternative better than the best out of the prior set?)
hence the ex ante choice problem isn't really with the number of alternatives -- it is with the chooser's confidence about binary comparisons. and if the problem lies with confidence about consequences, it doesn't lie with the size of the set of alternatives.
as to your more substantive point, I agree wholeheartedly. Will has an elitist streak a mile wide. This is a common feature on the Right, but also on the Left -- "elites" who disdain the preferences of ordinary people because they don't conform to the elites' own preferences.
I guess I was thinking more of something that takes a long time to evaluate. Say I want to find the best book around. It generally takes me a long time to read a book, as I'm not a very good reader. So, if I don't trust a critic or my friends, then it will take me a long time to figure out what the best book is if everyone can publish their book online as opposed to if I let dead tree editors screen out some of the choices.
Actually, this is a big problem that physicists (and probably many other scientists) now face. With LaTeX and other ways of easily creating publication quality documents without the need of a publisher, anyone with a computer and some time can write and publish a paper online. So if you go check out recent submissions at the arXiv for condensed matter physics, there are literally dozens of papers posted every day per subfield. There's no way that anyone can sit down, read, and understand all of those papers. There's also no way that anyone should sit down and read all of those papers. Certainly some of them are more relevant to each physicist's own research, some of them are better written than others, and some are just plain wrong.
When there were only a few physics journals in print, papers had to be submitted to be controlled for quality and content. It was up to the editorial staff and some referees whether or not something got published. Those journals still exist, but now if your paper gets rejected, you can still post it on your homepage as a preprint. But while most people enjoy some level of quality control, they also don't like to take time out of their already busy schedule to help with quality control. It's also a lot more expensive to go through the process of paying people to review papers, to be part of an editorial board, and to either print those articles or maintain a large server to deliver those papers.
Most people are torn about this. Having access to something that otherwise might not have gotten printed in a journal could be very valuable, but is it worth the number of bad papers that you have to wade through by hand? The answer's not clear at all.
Yes. I think this is a (slightly?) different problem. This is the "needle in a haystack" problem of information search. Nature provides us with an unknown distribution of "good" information, so what's the optimal search pattern? Two common responses are (1) the "drunkard's search (drunk loses keys in parking lot at night; he searches under the lights, because that's where he can see) and (2) "satisficing" strategies of info acquisition (search until you find a solution to your problem that meets some ex ante standard of "good enough"-ness).
anyway. Interesting problems to ponder.
Most likely th' problem of memes and filters. With th' overload of same memes, filters are constructed. Only new memes escape the filters and create a blip on th' screen. Ahah! we say as we scrape th' new, different pattern.