The Smug Style in American Liberalism

[Moonbeam]

I didn't read that article so much that way, as a critique of substantive beliefs of liberals. I read it as a critique of the attitudes of liberals. Particularly with respect to poor people. The author is arguing that if liberals want to profess to support the poor, they should stop having such demeaning and condescending attitudes toward them.

All contempt for others is rooted in self hate. Liberals and conservatives hate themselves. Humanity is asleep in a nightmare state from which only an individual can awaken. Humanity in all its rage against the other is hopelessly lost because we will not see that the other is us. Blaming the other is how we stay asleep. How many people can handle the fact that they have no right whatsoever to criticize anybody. All faults seen are the faults we have within ourselves. There is only love, but there aren't any lovers to be found.

The delusion we suffer is that our criticism is right but totally misplaced as to source. You can tell people they are suffering from nightmares but you can't criticize them for their dreams. It's madness to criticize a clock for going tick tock.

 

[fskimospy]

The error was corrected....with results of the study largely unchanged. The results are actually quite disturbing and I understand the Pavlovian nature of your dismissive reaction.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/measurement error.pdf

Sorry, still not true. While they corrected their programming mistake they still have several other basic mistakes that reduce their results to insignificance. For example, they chose to use total number of crimes for some reason instead of per capita crimes. That's a totally illogical choice to make, as smaller populations will almost by definition have fewer total crimes even if they have a higher crime rate. Secondly, they had serious temporal problems that were not addressed.

It could be possible that abortion has a net negative effect on crime but their paper does a really bad job of showing it. Here's the response to the paper you just linked by the people who uncovered their original coding error. Needless to say, they are unimpressed.

This is why you should look at the whole exchange instead of just trying to find something to tell you what you already want to believe, by the way.

http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf

This comment makes three observations about Donohue and Levittʹs [2001] paper on abortion and crime. First, there is a coding mistake in the concluding regressions, which identify abortionʹs effect on crime by comparing the experiences of different age cohorts within the same state and year. Second, correcting this error and using a more appropriate per capita specification for the crime variable generates much weaker results. Third, earlier tests in the paper, which exploit cross‐state rather than within‐state variation, are not robust to allowing differential state trends based on statewide crime rates that pre‐date the period when abortion could have had a causal effect on crime.

As for my 'pavlovian' response, what? I would be happy for there to be a positive link between abortion rates and crime as that would further justify a pro choice stance. The evidence simply isn't there though.

 

[interchange]

Aren't people just supposed to grow up as trained cattle to compete for resources and buy things? All those traits you mention as problems would create the bigger problem of upsetting things as they are. How do you herd people who think independently, for example. How would you get them to eat Twinkies? All the good money comes from managing the herd. We just need maybe 1% of the population with real cunning to introduce the putrefactant, dump the whey and sell the cheese.

I'd be a bit cautious, were I you, about pushing those ideas in public. Special methodologies have been developed for those with whom the programming doesn't take. A name with change in it is bad enough. Inter has a ring of socialism about it. Fortunately you didn't call yourself innerchange. That would be a red flag.

Interesting. The handle interchange is one of many that dates back to dial-up BBS days, and literally was chosen from looking at an ASCII character code chart just trying to think of random words.

Anyway, there is some truth to what you say. There are many functions of humanity, and many of the roles are compliance and defiance without real understanding of the conflict underneath. Nonetheless, a big piece of what I said is lacking is not just independent thinking but also capacity to form partnership within differences. Truthfully, there is no single mind that could be shared among all of society and have it work. From my vantage point, though, we are far too polarized, and far too often mistake a defiant role with individual thought.

 

[Jhhnn]

Some say that legalized abortion has dropped the crime rate by as much as 50%.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w8004

The error was corrected....with results of the study largely unchanged. The results are actually quite disturbing and I understand the highly dismissive reaction.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/measurement error.pdf

I think it's very important to recognize correlation is not causation. OTOH, the correlation is very strong & nobody has found any that are stronger.

It also makes sense that it would be true, unwanted children often being a difficult burden to bear. That can lead to poor attitudes among parents & poor results in child rearing.

 

[fskimospy]

I think it's very important to recognize correlation is not causation. OTOH, the correlation is very strong & nobody has found any that are stronger.

It also makes sense that it would be true, unwanted children often being a difficult burden to bear. That can lead to poor attitudes among parents & poor results in child rearing.

Correlation is never causation, it's simply evidence for causation. If you look at the other things I linked though you will see that in the end the correlation is not strong at all. There are some pretty basic errors in the paper that, when corrected, eliminate the significance.

 

[Exophase]

It would not reduce crime. It would increase crime because each killing would be another murder. How do you not understand that?

Okay, but if we just killed everybody now the number of murders over the next several thousand years would go down dramatically.

 

[Atreus21]

It would not reduce crime. It would increase crime because each killing would be another murder. How do you not understand that?

....yes, exactly. I think you've tricked yourself into getting the point. You don't commit crimes in the name of reducing crime.

 

[Moonbeam]

Interesting. The handle interchange is one of many that dates back to dial-up BBS days, and literally was chosen from looking at an ASCII character code chart just trying to think of random words.

Anyway, there is some truth to what you say. There are many functions of humanity, and many of the roles are compliance and defiance without real understanding of the conflict underneath. Nonetheless, a big piece of what I said is lacking is not just independent thinking but also capacity to form partnership within differences. Truthfully, there is no single mind that could be shared among all of society and have it work. From my vantage point, though, we are far too polarized, and far too often mistake a defiant role with individual thought.

Well, you do appear to me to practice what you preach. I look forward to reading more of your posts.

 

[Vic]

Losers always complain that winners are smug. Who cares?

 

[Moonbeam]

....yes, exactly. I think you've tricked yourself into getting the point. You don't commit crimes in the name of reducing crime.

There is only one way I can see to assess your guilt and that is to ask you what you would do if you could prevent abortion from being legal. Would you act to destroy the rights of women to have sovereignty over their own bodies, or would you turn them into slaves to an unborn fetus, make a slave of a conscious present person for your fantasy about a life that has yet no conscious existence? Are you willing to force your religiously inculcated bigotry on those who do not share it? Are you a dangerous fanatical menace?

 

[woolfe9998]

The error was corrected....with results of the study largely unchanged. The results are actually quite disturbing and I understand the highly dismissive reaction.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/measurement error.pdf

Yes, but the refutation of the refutation was refuted once again here:

http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf

I don't have any skin in this game honestly. I'm just laughing right now. It will get even funnier if you find something refuting my linked refutation of the refutation of the refutation.

Incidentally, this piece I am linking does not conclude that there is no relationship between abortion and crime. It concludes that there is insufficient empirical evidence to know one way or the other.

The causes of any increase or decrease in crime rates are many: economics, education, gun laws, TV and video games, funding for law enforcement, severity of penalties, etc. etc. So it is particularly difficult to draw firm conclusions in this area. The same goes with trying to link varying degrees of gun availability with crime. Correlation/causation fallacies abound and there are just too many variables.

Edit: I see that eskimospy beat me to the punch with this link.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

....yes, exactly. I think you've tricked yourself into getting the point. You don't commit crimes in the name of reducing crime.

What the actual fuck are you talking about? Nobody is proposing that.

 

[Blackjack200]

....yes, exactly. I think you've tricked yourself into getting the point. You don't commit crimes in the name of reducing crime.

Please take your unhealthy obsession with controlling women's bodies to another thread.

Perhaps, though after reading the entire article, I'm not so sure the author is conservative. The website - Vox - is liberal. And the author doesn't have much of a public profile which would shed light on his ideology. Then again, his intentional hiding the ball is also part of the numerous problems with the article.

Some of his observations about liberals are correct so far as it goes, but the whole thing is de-contextualized, to where conservatives are the object in the sentence and nothing more. As if they have no agency of their own. The fact is, it is impossible to understand liberal "smugness" without understanding what is happening on the other side. So the author criticizes liberals for condescension, particularly towards poor white people. What he fails to mention is that many of these poor white people have been stuffing their heads with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter going on decades now, and that this message they are stuffing into their heads is not just a conservative ideology - that is actually secondary to people like Limbaugh - but rather, a vicious and hateful de-humanization of liberals. And while Limbaugh does have some analogues on the left, the difference is that these analogues capture nowhere near the attention of liberals that the Limbaughs capture of conservatives.

I find it strange that one can write an article about smug and condescending attitudes of liberals and not even discuss the phenomena of conservative talk radio and conservative media, its popularity among conservatives, and how liberals are portrayed in said media. Any serious treatment of this subject requires a much more thorough, and bilateral treatment, than is offered by this author. If the author wants to argue that it is liberal smugness which created the phenomenon of hateful conservative punditry, much as he argues that liberal smugness has created the monster of Donald Trump, then he is free to do so. He'd be incorrect, but at least he'd be addressing the entire complexity of the issue, instead of presenting this bizarro world where liberals seem to be driving everything, and are the only ones actually doing or saying anything, while conservatives are just passively reacting.

This odd asymmetry which places liberals as the sole drivers of pretty much everything in our political culture is also what makes me wonder if the author is himself a liberal. If so, another thing he has failed to mention about liberals is that we tend to write articles criticizing each other more often than conservatives do. Case in point.

I read most of the article, and I agree with a lot of what you're pointing out. But I thought the author made some excellent observations, especially the whole Agrabah episode. I really thought the author phrased it perfectly:

"As if only Republicans covered up gaps in their knowledge by responding to what they assume is a good-faith question by guessing from their general principles."

I find liberals to be impossibly smug sometimes, TBH (not that conservatives are any less so). I hold my nose agreeing with them sometimes. But the bottom line is, if you agree with gay rights, social programs, BLM, environmental protection, etc. etc., you're going to find yourself on the same team as those smug assholes.

One other note. I think that the comedy news shows (Daily Show, Colbert, Oliver, Bee) get way too much blame for liberal smugness. They go after Democrats and people on the left way more than they get credit for. Certainly far more than any of their right wing counterparts.

 

[woolfe9998]

Please take your unhealthy obsession with controlling women's bodies to another thread.



I read most of the article, and I agree with a lot of what you're pointing out. But I thought the author made some excellent observations, especially the whole Agrabah episode. I really thought the author phrased it perfectly:

"As if only Republicans covered up gaps in their knowledge by responding to what they assume is a good-faith question by guessing from their general principles."

I find liberals to be impossibly smug sometimes, TBH (not that conservatives are any less so). I hold my nose agreeing with them sometimes. But the bottom line is, if you agree with gay rights, social programs, BLM, environmental protection, etc. etc., you're going to find yourself on the same team as those smug assholes.

One other note. I think that the comedy news shows (Daily Show, Colbert, Oliver, Bee) get way too much blame for liberal smugness. They go after Democrats and people on the left way more than they get credit for. Certainly far more than any of their right wing counterparts.

I don't really disagree. I started off my comment by saying I agree with much (but not all) of what the author says about liberals. The trouble with the article is more its incompleteness than its inaccuracy. With that, I'm not making the simplistic point that the article should critique conservatives in order to be fair and balanced. I'm saying it is impossible to understand the failings of the one without understanding the failings of the other, and vice versa, because they're directly linked. So for example, is it possible that hostile liberal attitudes toward conservatives are at least partially a response to the converse: the hostile attitude of conservatives toward liberals, as reflected in all the hateful talk radio that conservatives expose themselves to so often?

As well, has the author really taken a look at what views of conservatives may be frustrating to liberals to the point of causing many to become smug out of mere frustration at the unreason of the opposing argument? For example, the denial of global warming, in spite of scientific consensus. Could this sort of thing cause liberals to become a little smug? Perhaps this explains the smugness, perhaps not. But we'll never know if we're only looking at liberal "smugness" in isolation as this author does. The author treats liberal "smugness" as it if arises in a vacuum. Liberals are just smug, just...because. Really? The author says nothing to analyze the causes of this observed smugness, possibly because doing so might require him to say something critical about conservatives, which in turn might just make HIM all the sudden sound smug.

This author has unfortunately gotten himself caught in his own intellectual trap - that of deciding beforehand to write a piece about liberal smugness rather than the broader issue of what is really going on in our political culture, in terms of the dynamic between the two sides. Then again, that requires more work, and isn't nearly as controversial as writing a piece that blames only one side for every problem.

 

[Atreus21]

There is only one way I can see to assess your guilt and that is to ask you what you would do if you could prevent abortion from being legal. Would you act to destroy the rights of women to have sovereignty over their own bodies, or would you turn them into slaves to an unborn fetus, make a slave of a conscious present person for your fantasy about a life that has yet no conscious existence?

If not being allowed to kill your own kid makes you a slave, then yes I'm in favor of such slavery.

Are you willing to force your religiously inculcated bigotry on those who do not share it?

If religion dictates that human lives are precious and ought not be frivolously taken, then yes.

I wish my points were more religious. It'd carry much more wisdom than just rationality.

Are you a dangerous fanatical menace?

 

[Atreus21]

Please take your unhealthy obsession with controlling women's bodies to another thread.

Hey, I didn't bring it up.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Yes, but the refutation of the refutation was refuted once again here:

http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf

I don't have any skin in this game honestly. I'm just laughing right now. It will get even funnier if you find something refuting my linked refutation of the refutation of the refutation.

Incidentally, this piece I am linking does not conclude that there is no relationship between abortion and crime. It concludes that there is insufficient empirical evidence to know one way or the other.

The causes of any increase or decrease in crime rates are many: economics, education, gun laws, TV and video games, funding for law enforcement, severity of penalties, etc. etc. So it is particularly difficult to draw firm conclusions in this area. The same goes with trying to link varying degrees of gun availability with crime. Correlation/causation fallacies abound and there are just too many variables.

Edit: I see that eskimospy beat me to the punch with this link.

The latest refutation from Donohue and Levitt (2008) to Foote and Goetz's (2008) ever-changing and persistent refutations. The beat goes on.

Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz

http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/123/1/425.abstract

 

[woolfe9998]

The latest refutation from Donohue and Levitt (ala 2008) to Foote and Goetz's ever-changing (revised) and persistent refutations.

Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz

http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/123/1/425.abstract

Ah, a refutation of the refutation of the refutation of the refutation. And the saga continues.

 

[fskimospy]

Ah, a refutation of the refutation of the refutation of the refutation. And the saga continues.

From the abstract at least they only responded to one of the criticisms levied at their study, which is kind of problematic. I mean from a basic research perspective using total crimes instead of crime rate is a pretty large error.

Again, I hope their findings turn out to be correct in the end, but their research is extremely sloppy.

Edit: there is a substantial discussion of their methodological flaws on the wiki page. The authors I cited are not the only people to have found problems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

 

[woolfe9998]

From the abstract at least they only responded to one of the criticisms levied at their study, which is kind of problematic. I mean from a basic research perspective using total crimes instead of crime rate is a pretty large error.

Again, I hope their findings turn out to be correct in the end, but their research is extremely sloppy.

Edit: there is a substantial discussion of their methodological flaws on the wiki page. The authors I cited are not the only people to have found problems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

Yeah, not going to try to refute your points. But my view that parsing out the causes of increases or decreases in crime rates is extremely difficult bordering impossible remains unchanged, and is in fact supported by some of what is presented here. For example, if you look at the link we both provided, you'll see that the authors criticize not only the method used by Donohue and Levitt, but other methods which in theory could correct for their errors. So when you say you hope Donohue and Levitt are correct "in the end" I would say that there just may never be an "end" because it isn't possible to form a truly definitive opinion.

 

[fskimospy]

Yeah, not going to try to refute your points. But my view that parsing out the causes of increases or decreases in crime rates is extremely difficult bordering impossible remains unchanged, and is in fact supported by some of what is presented here. For example, if you look at the link we both provided, you'll see that the authors criticize not only the method used by Donohue and Levitt, but other methods which in theory could correct for their errors. So when you say you hope Donohue and Levitt are correct "in the end" I would say that there just may never be an "end" because it isn't possible to form a truly definitive opinion.

It's a really hard problem, yes. It's complicated by the fact that states can't ban abortion so it is hard to get good test cases. (This is good for people, bad for research!) I mean I support abortion on personal mora grounds, but this is still something I hope people are able to understand better because if true it's a fascinating finding.

My problem with these guys is that they made some incredible claims like abortion was responsible for 80% of the decline in crime and they did so on the back of a paper that could be charitably described as troubled.

 

[OrByte]

This article is hilarious I'm going to read it a few more times!!

Only thing I have to add is...us elistist, leftist, smug "coastals" and professionals are the REAL AMERICA ... right?

I mean, aren't we the ones that go all over TV and the radio spouting off about WE THE PEOPLE and REAL AMERICANS and the SILENT MAJORITY...? Aren't we on Hannity and listening to Rush and going to Trump Rallys with our WE THE PEOPLE and AMERICAN FLAGS all wrapped around our fat asses?


yeah, that's pretty smug too...you guys on the right are just as "SMUG" as the rest of the world only the rest of the THINKING world actually uses logic, reason, and facts instead of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" as the author puts it.

LOL!!

 

[theeedude]

Just distract yourself with stupid issues like abortion, guns, and other nonsense, and keep waiting for it to start trickling down.

 

[bozack]

Perhaps, though after reading the entire article, I'm not so sure the author is conservative. The website - Vox - is liberal. And the author doesn't have much of a public profile which would shed light on his ideology. Then again, his intentional hiding the ball is also part of the numerous problems with the article.

Some of his observations about liberals are correct so far as it goes, but the whole thing is de-contextualized, to where conservatives are the object in the sentence and nothing more. As if they have no agency of their own. The fact is, it is impossible to understand liberal "smugness" without understanding what is happening on the other side. So the author criticizes liberals for condescension, particularly towards poor white people. What he fails to mention is that many of these poor white people have been stuffing their heads with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter going on decades now, and that this message they are stuffing into their heads is not just a conservative ideology - that is actually secondary to people like Limbaugh - but rather, a vicious and hateful de-humanization of liberals. And while Limbaugh does have some analogues on the left, the difference is that these analogues capture nowhere near the attention of liberals that the Limbaughs capture of conservatives.

I find it strange that one can write an article about smug and condescending attitudes of liberals and not even discuss the phenomena of conservative talk radio and conservative media, its popularity among conservatives, and how liberals are portrayed in said media. Any serious treatment of this subject requires a much more thorough, and bilateral treatment, than is offered by this author. If the author wants to argue that it is liberal smugness which created the phenomenon of hateful conservative punditry, much as he argues that liberal smugness has created the monster of Donald Trump, then he is free to do so. He'd be incorrect, but at least he'd be addressing the entire complexity of the issue, instead of presenting this bizarro world where liberals seem to be driving everything, and are the only ones actually doing or saying anything, while conservatives are just passively reacting.

This odd asymmetry which places liberals as the sole drivers of pretty much everything in our political culture is also what makes me wonder if the author is himself a liberal. If so, another thing he has failed to mention about liberals is that we tend to write articles criticizing each other more often than conservatives do. Case in point.

This entire thread exemplifies what the author of that article is railing about, liberals on average come off like a bunch of pompous assholes when they go on the attack and they do nothing to be inclusive of the working class that has seen their jobs decimated by policies enacted by democrats as mentioned in the article....instead they ridicule them and suggest they are suffering from a brain defect.

I rather have to laugh at your mention of conservative talk radio...so you're suggesting its as mainstream as all of the outlets the author of that article had mentioned such as the daily show, the onion, or any host of various web sites, OP EDs in major news papers. I just don't see it, conservative talk radio while popular with those who are conservative doesn't get much exposure outside of that.

As others have mentioned Vox is a liberal site, chances are the author is liberal and realizes that continually giving people a hard time for their viewpoints isn't going to win anyone over, maybe that is why so much of the left has seemingly given up on working class white voters and is now focusing on minorities and pushing forward amnesty...they just don't want to bother.

 

[woolfe9998]

deleted