CNN runs this headline:

Lessons from the whole Quran episode

The first “story highlight” is:

One viewpoint: Media coverage of crackpot publicity seeker was vastly out of proportion

Gee, you think?  I’m glad that CNN, media and publicity behemoth that it is, has just now realized it.  This is like the article they ran in the 2008 election about how black women were confused about whether or not to vote for Obama or Clinton, and the first highlight was “stop characterizing black women as forced to vote their racial/gender identity!”  The double hilarious part is that a lot more than one of the “viewpoints” outlined in this CNN article vote for the “stop giving this idiot so much air time, fools!” position.

Bob Steele:

Regrettably, the saga of the Rev. Terry Jones and his Quran-burning threat proves that many journalists and news organizations too easily abandon news judgment, professionalism and ethical standards in a zealous quest for a controversial story. [...] However, the coverage of this small band of publicity seekers was vastly out of proportion to the value of the news story.

Arsalan Iftikhar:

Usually in America, when a lone crackpot of any political or religious persuasion threatens to commit a publicity stunt that will needlessly enrage millions of other innocent people, our basic common sense tells us that our national media should not even give that person the time of day.

Sadly, not only did Terry Jones successfully receive media attention, but because of the overexposure of this one man, we are beginning to see other “copycat” Quran burnings around the country.

Ed Rollins:

Before the last few weeks, nobody would even know the pastor existed. Then why did his reckless and self-serving threats to burn hundreds of copies of the Quran become a national and international story that, according to Google news, was in more than 12,000 articles? The secretary of state, defense secretary and many other serious people put aside their real work to placate this man’s ego.

Farah Akbar:

How could this situation, with the potential to have had very damaging effects here and elsewhere been avoided? Simple — don’t let obscure people, whose actions have the potential to incite violence, dominate the news cycle.

Ruben Navarrette:

It’s obvious that he was playing us — the media, politicians, activists, all of us. Whatever it took to get him the most attention at any given time — make a threat, try to make a deal, cancel a threat, catch a flight to New York, etc. — he did it.

They’re literally running an article overflowing with criticism for their choice of covering a specific event so much —  in an article that is continuing to cover that event, even after it is over — even to the extent of conscripting tons of their own contributors into saying “don’t cover this so much!”  Why the hell didn’t they just listen to these people at the time, instead of now?  If you’re CNN, you’re not allowed to stand back and comment on how tragic it is that these big media people gave this obscure idiot so much attention.  You are those people.  Be part of the solution.

Wait, sorry, that’s step 3!  Conor is trying to figure out step 2, in discussing the political likelihood of a Gary Johnson presidency:

Then the Republican base embraced Sarah Palin, and all the same people who mocked Obama’s celebrity enthused about her star quality. One step forward, three steps back. Gene Healy’s book The Cult of the Presidency (magazine version here) is a great first step in pushing back against this trend. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the right second step is.

I do!  If Conor and Marc (Ambinder) think Johnson would be a good president, and a suitable tonic to the cult of Palin or Obama, they should do the same things everyone else does when they find someone they think would be good for the job.  Start a website advocating for him.  Write articles on their blogs describing his wonderful policy points.  Talk to their contacts in Johnson’s party about him.  Show how he’s better than the other candidates.  Do all the things Ambinder mentions in his post:

Johnson has plenty of tools available to build a grassroots following.  Doing so requires creativity, work, charm, and a bit of luck, but it does not require the media.

Marc and Conor could help do that.  And finally:

People vote for politicians who sparkle, or who harness their anger; politicians who make them proud to be Republicans … or proud to be Americans.

Agreed.  So, for people who prefer Johnson to the alternatives: get to it!  Show how much he sparkles.  Show how voting for him will be an expression of anger at, well, whatever things anger you.  Show how his policies exemplify what America stands for, so a voter could be proud of their choice.  Sure, this all sounds tacky and formulaic, but if it’s works in today’s politics, then go for it.  While you’re at it, play up the non-visceral qualities that appeal to the same people who dislike Palin.

There is a sizable group of people in this country who don’t like Obama or Palin that much — and even more who might be convinced that the parts of those two they do like could also be accomplished by a different candidate.  Maybe a candidate named Gary.  Get to work!

I randomly stumbled across this critique of reviews for the latest Michael Cera movie.  I don’t really care about the movie itself, since I haven’t seen it, but this jumped out at me:

NPR’s Linda Holmes dissected reviews from the film’s harshest critics and discovered something interesting: negative critics don’t hate the film per se, they hate its target audience. Scott Pilgrim, you see, is a tale in which Michael Cera must defeat his love interest’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. It’s loaded with geeky gamer jokes and comic fanboy humor. Is it right for critics to denounce a film based on the audience it caters to?

Now that is something that exists far beyond movie reviews: disliking something because we don’t like those who already like it.  I’d actually go so far as to say that this mechanism, more than any other, drives our political beliefs — and it makes sense that it would.  Our brains are finely tuned mechanisms; but they are not tuned for the goal of analyzing policies for their pros and cons.  What they are really good at is social politics — determining who is on our side and who isn’t, and furthermore, figuring out which beliefs or ideas represent them or us.

In the debate over ending birthright citizenship, Will Wilkinson describes the same thing:

Part of it, I’m afraid, is just knee-jerk opposition to policies their political enemies favor. Of course, the fact that bad people with bad motives support a policy does not mean it is therefore bad policy.

Now, I’d like to believe that I’m above all that, and my opposition to Will’s idea of ending BC is based solely on my reasoned, objective analysis of the situation, but I’m not sure I can justify that.  After all, I certainly have paid the idea a lot more attention since Will proposed it, because I respect his motivations (and on a basic tribal level, consider him “on my side”) a lot more than most of the other people who have proposed the idea.  I’m still opposed to it, but I’ve softened my opposition to “I don’t think it would achieve very much, and would be more difficult than alternatives that I consider to be superior.”  I would not have granted that to the average proponent of the idea.

Michael Moore’s new movie: “Capitalism: A Love Story,” advocates for the idea that capitalism has failed. Since I haven’t seen the movie yet, all I have is this Larry King interview:

King: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?

Moore: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don’t have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it’s failed. All the basic tenets of what we’ve talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout — for welfare, for socialism. And I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it’s a sink-or-swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don’t run their business the right way, then they don’t do well.

So Michael Moore believes that the primary principle of capitalism is the Darwinian part (I would debate this, but he has a right to believe it): good businesses succeed, bad ones fail.  Yet, isn’t that precisely what happened?  The investment banks who said “oh, those credit default swaps are a bad idea, I will not purchase as many” are doing much better than the ones who did.  The car companies that made efficient cars people wanted are doing better than the ones that didn’t.  It seems like things are going exactly as Michael Moore’s imaginary capitalist might want.  Well, with one exception:

And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?

Michael Moore, upon hearing about the debate (that he himself described this way) between the capitalist method of letting a company “sink-or-swim” or the non-capitalist method of “bail[ing] them out,” he declared that he felt we shouldn’t choose the latter.  Which side is he on?  Similar misunderstandings persist:

I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people’s money — people’s pension funds, people’s 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance — the credit default swaps.

Suddenly we’ve forgotten the entire “sink-or-swim” mentality.  The only thing I can glean from this is that Michael Moore believes that pension funds and 401k’s are not “capitalist,” because he implies that they shouldn’t be used as “bets.”  Michael Moore’s imaginary capitalist would approve of the failure of those who invested their 401k’s poorly.  It’s fine to say that people’s retirement funds should not be subject to the whims of the stock market and should be guaranteed somehow, but if capitalism is all about “sink-or-swim,” you can’t blame it when things, well, sink.  Michael Moore can’t even make his case against a strawman.

And here’s why I know it’s a strawman:

Moore: It didn’t change in terms of what I was looking at, but it did, obviously, offer probably the best example of why this is a system that is really corrupt at its core — corrupt because it doesn’t, it isn’t run with democratic — small “d” — democratic principles. There’s no democracy in our economy. You and I and the people watching have no say in how this economy is run. The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they’re the people that control this economy.

I think lots of people oppose capitalism for exactly the same reasons I oppose more central control economies: because they have this concept that a shadowy cabal of Wall Street corporate executives sit in a dark, smoky room and chart the course of our economy.  And so the logical response is “hey!  we should have more say in how this goes; if this is capitalism, it must be bad!”  But this is just people’s limited understanding of complex systems — in the same way that a religious mind immediately jumps to “creationism” when they see the immense complexity of biology, someone like Moore says:  ”I do not understand this, therefore someone must be controlling it.”  Yet all those shadowy corporate execs were unable to prevent the destruction of so much of their wealth.  Those at GM were unable to stop customers from fleeing their brand like the plague.  It’s almost like something else is controlling the system.

And this is where Moore’s “economic democracy” is very scary.  Yes, sure, accuse me of communist fear-mongering, but what else is he proposing?  Right now our economy is “controlled” (using Moore’s terms, because he’s not going to get the reality) by the economic decisions of billions of people.  I say “I want a Ford, not a GM!” and if enough people agree with me, Ford succeeds and GM fails.  It’s easy to get behind the idea of snatching the reins of power away from greedy CEO’s, but if democracy is going to rule our economy, it’s going to get to vote whether or not I get a Ford or a GM too.  Is this me exaggerating a slippery slope?  What else does Moore imply?  It’s precisely what our democratically elected government is doing right now with tariffs on tires, bailouts of GM and so forth — they are actually, democratically, influencing the economy.  Yet Michael Moore doesn’t like these bailouts because he (accurately) sees this as (for better or worse) taking our money and giving it to powerful corporations.  Does he want more or less economic democracy?

He really doesn’t get this:

Moore: I’ll tell you why. Because your employees are your biggest success. And, as you’ve noticed in the last few months, as the unemployment rate has gone up, so has the Dow Jones. Now, you’d think, you know, that Wall Street would respond with “Oh, my God, unemployment is going up, you know, this is bad for business.” But the reality is, is that Wall Street likes that. They like it when companies fire people because immediately the bottom line is going to show a larger profit.

King: Are you saying the investor is more important than the employee?

Moore: Yes. The investor — and the investor, these days, they want the short-term, quick profit and they want it now.

But as Moore just pointed out, the investor and the employees are not separate groups of people.  Most people think “shadowy guy in a suit” when they think investor, but Moore was kind enough to point out that they are really pension plans and 401k’s — owned by you and me, employees of other companies.  So if a company lays off a worker and splits up their salary amongst the investors, they were actually doing something Moore wanted: making the 401k’s and pension plans succeed.  Which do you want?

A final insanity:

Moore: And General Motors, that year [20 years ago, when Moore made Roger and me], made a profit of $4 billion. And yet they had just laid off another 30,000 people. Now, why would you lay people off when you’re making a record profit of $4 billion?

I mean that was totally insane. But they thought, well, you know, we can make a bigger profit. Maybe we can make $4.2 billion if we move those jobs to Mexico. And so they’re always, you know, we can make a little bit more money if we do this. By firing those workers, Larry, they got rid of the very people who buy their cars.

Yes, the reason GM went out of business was because their laid-off employees weren’t buying enough of their cars.  Does Moore seriously believe this?  Even if GM were purely a company that made cars (it isn’t) it’s hard to imagine that even if every single person who had ever been laid off by GM over the last 20 years used that experience to decide to never buy another GM car, that it would’ve had the effect on GM that we see today.  Ford was pretty damn aggressive with their workforce awhile back, but they seem to be doing much better than GM.  It’s almost like there are other factors at work!

Is this really the best anti-capitalism can muster?  A guy who thinks things actually work like this?  I’m accusing Moore of attacking a strawman of capitalism, but I kind of feel like I’m cheating because he’s a strawman for anti-capitalism. The sad part is, he can’t even show that the evil thing he’s imagined capitalism to be is wrong.

And we haven’t even really explored the” everything else” that is capitalism.  If you think it’s only CEO’s in dark rooms of Wall Street, then again, you’re an idiot.  Every day that food shows up on your table, you go see a bad documentary at your movie theatre, or buy gas at the station, all of these things are capitalism not failing.  It’s funny that he chose the last 20 years as the setting for his statements, especially when those 20 years have seen a billion people in China and India escape poverty as a result of adopting more capitalist systems.  It is fine to say “I feel like we should do more to mitigate the times that capitalism results in crises” but you can’t condemn the entire system without analyzing the benefits as well — at least not without stating why you feel like those billion people are worth sacrificing for your more equitable financial system.  And I’m not exaggerating — it’s Moore who said that the financial crisis was a condemnation of capitalism as a whole — as opposed to just a call for minor tinkering of our financial regulation, while leaving the rest intact.

A final cheap shot, and no, it’s not because he stole my last name: is anyone really going to listen to the economic advice of a guy who hangs out with Hugo Chavez?

Everything Scott Sumner writes is good, but this is some of the best:

[...] the obvious choice for most successful prediction [of the past 20 years] is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

Good news is never news.  No one ever wants to hear about how things are getting better.  Who would we blame?  What political goal would this serve?

This essay by Robert Wright is very good (via Will Wilkinson):

So a machine that was designed to serve our interests is misfiring. The moral imagination was built to help us discriminate between people we can do business with and people we can’t do business with—to expand or contract, respectively. When Americans fail to extend moral imagination to Muslims, this is their unconscious mind’s way of saying, “We judge these people to be not worth dealing with.” Yet most of them are worth dealing with.

And for most people, “dealing with them” really involves dealing and wheeling.  Sure, politicians will engage in state level diplomacy, but I imagine many Americans would just rather sell them stuff, and vice versa.  This might even be more productive!  

The one point I disagree with:

Technology is warping our perception of the other player in this non-zero-sum game. The other player is a vast population of Muslims who, though perhaps not enamored of the West, don’t spend their time burning flags and killing Westerners. But what we see on TV—and what we may conflate with this other player—is a subset of Muslims who truly, and perhaps irreversibly, hate the West. We accurately perceive the stubborn hostility of the latter and our moral imagination contracts accordingly, but in the process it excludes the former.

Technology may have negatively warped the perceptions of some, but by and large, technology has without a doubt been a net positive for convincing people of the non-zero-sum nature of this game.  For every broadcast of flag burning, there have been thousands of other interactions (informational, business, cultural) made possible by technology that have improved our relations with the average inhabitant of the Middle East.  Now, it might be that our more obvious interactions with the region, such as a series of wars over the last 20 years, have swamped any positive effects — but compare to places we are not currently invading.  By Wright’s own logic, it’s hard to sympathize with people we don’t understand or know about — certainly technology has helped on that front.

Technology will enable the endgame of “the war on terror.”  For the next few decades, we’ll continue to have state level interactions with the Middle East: terrorist attacks, invasions, sanctions, condemnations.  At some point, even despite these things, citizens in both areas will realize they are far more alike than different, and this whole stupid period of history will be over.  We’re already a long way down that path — and no offense to Mr. Wright, but the main drivers have not been eloquent essays, but rather music, movies, food, tennis shoes, iPods, immigration, comedy shows and everything else.

With additional commentary by Unqualified Offerings and Sadly, No!, we get Ralph Peters ranting like a lunatic:

Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. 

So — Ralph Peters, acting as a journalist, is disdaining certain freedoms held by the American people in opposition to the established (as he himself states) viewpoint.  And as we see from his statements, journalists supporting groups that are in opposition to our society are enemies as threatening as armed soldiers.  So if, according to Ralph Peters, we also need to attack the journalists who espouse their nasty ideologies, what does that mean we should do with Ralph Peters?

While I certainly disagree with this part of Peters’ piece, he actually says a few not-crazy things in it.  It just makes you wonder when a guy comes out and says “two plus two equals four,” to which you nod approvingly, and then he follows up with “and therefore two plus three equals TABLE.”

CNN never thinks to ask themselves:

Commentary: Why Swine Flu Scares Us

[...]

Throughout human history, illness with no easy cure has been, in and of itself, the very definition of terror.

Also, cable news networks constantly hyping the terror doesn’t hurt either.

When the first cases of swine flu were reported this month, there were people who, even though there was no evidence pointing to such a thing, asked: Could this outbreak be related to some form of organized terror?

And despite there being no evidence at all, we breathlessly reported it!

Call me when this becomes even remotely as dangerous per individual as hearing about it on the radio while driving to work.

Update: To their credit, CNN has also run these on their front page:

Regular flu has killed thousands in 2009

Face mask demand surges, but do they work?