Republicans who deserve respect?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

AUGUST 14, 2015 4:19 PM August 14, 2015 4:19 pm

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This is a blog post about fanatical centrists, British debt history, and ponies.

Start with the fanatical centrists: Martin Longman flies into a well-justified rage over a “centrist” column that concedes that the Iran deal is something we really need to do, effectively concedes that the arguments of the deal’s opponents are scurrilous and irresponsible — but condemns Obama for being “dismissive” of the opponents’ arguments.

That’s something that happens to me all the time. I constantly get mail — and sometimes other peoples’ columns — condemning me, not for being wrong, but for being dismissive of the arguments of those I criticize. After all, these are important people, so they deserve to be treated with respect. Right?

Wrong.

If people consistently make logically incoherent, ignorant arguments, the duty of a commentator is to say just that — not to mislead readers by pretending that they’re actually serious and making sense. You shouldn’t make gratuitous insults — I have never, to my knowledge, declared that someone’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries. But stupid/ignorant is as stupid/ignorant does, and influence changes nothing.

Where I’ve been getting pushback lately is in my pronouncements that the whole Republican field is talking nonsense on economic policy. That’s a terrible thing to say, I’m told. But what if it’s true? And of course it is.

Consider a couple of recent entries. Jeb Bush, the supposedly sensible candidate, has been pushing the utterly ludicrous claim that he can deliver 4 percent growth; so now Mike Huckabee is trying to one-up the debate by promising 6 percent. Well, I can beat any of them — whatever they’re promising, I promise the same, and a pony.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul is decrying the irresponsibility of U.S. fiscal management; why, we haven’t been debt-free since 1835. Clearly, disaster looms, and has been looming for 180 years. But that’s nothing: Britain hasn’t been debt-free since at least 1692:

Photo

Credit

More than three centuries, spanning the Industrial Revolution and much more, of crippling irresponsibility. Just you wait!

Should Rand and Jeb! and Huckabee be treated with respect here? Are they outliers, and in that case which GOP contenders do deserve respect?

I know that it’s disturbing to read columns that portray the entire field as a bunch of cranks. But it would be a dereliction of duty, basically an act of dishonest reporting, to pretend that they aren’t. I’m all for respect here — but the people who deserve respect, in the form of honest assessment, are my readers.

22COMMENTS

The End of the CD with a happy ending

CD as We Know It, and I Feel Fine

by Raina Rose
August 11, 2015

As I was driving home to Portland on my first month-long tour in 2005, I had a moment of absolute joy that I was doing the thing in life I wanted to be doing. I was driving north on I-5, from Eugene to Portland, in tears and laughter with this overflowing joy. I was saying to myself, “Doubt is fatal!”

I had driven round trip from Portland, down through LA, over to Texas, and back up through Salt Lake City and Boise. I had managed to come home financially ahead of where I started.

Back in those days my expenses were few. I didn’t go to college so I had no student loan debt dragging me underwater. I had worked as a nanny for a few years and saved up a tiny chunk of cash. I worked with Jim Brunberg at Mississippi Studios in trade for producing my first album, Despite the Crushing Weight of Gravity. I expected the world of $15 CD sales would last forever. That’s how much an album costs, right?

Well, not anymore. Thanks to iTunes, YouTube, and streaming services, the value of a recorded album has been falling. Most musicians I know now think of their records as an expensively produced business card. It feels a little sad, but it’s reality. Simply put, it’s supply and demand economics.

The beautiful thing about this, in my humble opinion, is that your audience is now free to put their own value on the recorded work. I have been giving away my albums for free at shows and I am making more money in merchandise sales than I ever did before.

Wait, what?

Yep, I tell my audiences that if they want one of my albums, they should just take it. They are pay-as-you-are-able. Some people take a CD for free and play it until it is worn out. Some people pay $40 for one disc and might listen once. I think that allowing the purchaser to ascribe their own monetary number to the art makes them value it more. They have to think about its place in their lives. For some folks, $15 equals an entire hour or more of their hard work. To others, it’s spare change.

What sells the most for me are my download cards. I have all five of my albums plus a recording of a radio show on my merch table for $30. Sometimes I sell them for $20. I can sell them over the internet and send the code out via email. I don’t even have to pay shipping. The best part is, a piece of plastic doesn’t have to go inside an envelope made of trees and use fossil fuels to get somewhere. It’s instant gratification.

For artists, recording an album is our life’s work, and putting a price on that is very difficult. Producing plastic CDs in plastic packaging is costly for both artists and the environment. A lot of people have no way of playing discs anymore, but they do have a phone in their pocket – their main listening device. An MP3 is a fine way to go, but streaming takes up zero space on a listener’s phone.

The Cloud is the future. As artists, we cannot stop making art. Music still has an incredibly important place in the hearts of human beings, but the vehicle for experiencing it is changing. The trick will be, and always has been, answering the question: How can I make art and feed my family at the same time? I prefer to leave that in the hands of my audiences, and it’s working out pretty well.

Krugman and the Debates

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

AUG. 7, 2015

Joseph Raff

1 day ago

Result of first debate: One No Trump!

Elizabeth

1 day ago

My reaction to the "debate" - Where's the beef??????

Bob White

1 day ago

Says the clown who's never been right about anything?

SEE ALL COMMENTS

Paul Krugman

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This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor.

Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure whether the president is a Christian?

Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt against Planned Parenthood.

And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)

The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.

Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.

Tragedy

It seems clear that the great free diver Natalia Molchanova is dead. She was diving last Saturday off the coast of Spain, giving lessons to a rich Russian, when she made a dive of her own and didn’t return. She was almost surely the greatest diver in the history of her sport, which, as mentioned in The New Yorker in 2009, is sometimes described as the world’s second most dangerous activity, after jumping off skyscrapers with parachutes.