Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

Power Line – Criminalizing Conservatism

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 John Hinderaker has made the remarkable claim that:

Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences.

The “policy difference” Mr. Hinderaker refers to is the comment President Obama made:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States lost "our moral bearings" with gruesome terror-suspect interrogations and he left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who vouched for their legality.

In other words, President Obama has acknowledged that the legal arguments used to justify torture may have been, well, wrong. And thus, arguably, illegal.

Mr. Hinderaker seems to think that torture constitutes merely a policy difference, and not an actual crime. Furthermore, as Mr. Hinderaker talks about “criminalizing conservatism”, his statement involves a conflation of torture and conservatism – that to be conservative means supporting torture.

Given that torture is currently illegal in America, illegal internationally, and there are popular conservatives who don’t support torture, Mr. Hinderaker’s conclusion seems to reach somewhat his premises.

When do you stop reading an article?

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Answer: when something is ridiculous.

Chris Peterson begins an “article” on Something Awful by referencing a “crazy college professor” (a hippie) who along with being completely crazy, sometimes dispensed words of wisdom. Because crazy people know things.

Just so we’re clear on how crazy this old professor was, Chris tells us that he lives in a shack on some property owned by a crazy rich man who believed he could take to bears. And bribed the bears with jelly donuts.

So, after establishing all that, we get to the ridiculous part. The part that makes me stop reading. The part that makes me think “you should have paid more attention in class” or perhaps “that teacher should have done a better job.”

That’s this:

As is the case with many crazy college professors, he told me many things I’ll never forget. Most of them had to do with aliens running the White House, but one thing which struck a peculiarly reasonable chord in me was his description of globalization as a mechanism for removing consequences from actions. It’s easy to comprehend the labor that goes into creating a sweater when it’s grandma knitting it in the corner–less so when it’s some kid in Indonesia.

I suppose it seems distinctly less insane, crazy, or even oddball that the rest of it. But the understanding that globalization is a mechanism for removing consequences is not new. The idea that the finished product masks the production process is not an insight shared only be crazy college professors who swan around with bears.

It’s actually Karl Marx’s Fetishism of Commodities [Wikipedia entry], and is a somewhat natural result of German Philosophy in the early 19th century and its post-Hegel focus on the distinction between the the abstract and the particular – or the real and the perceived, etc.

It makes sense, of course, that a “crazy old hippie” would be citing Karl Marx. Sort of. It makes considerably less sense that a college graduate who took a class with this professor neither understands the argument nor knows the basis for the insight. And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous enough for me to stop reading.

Newspapers Cannot Afford to Reduce Supply

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I touched over this in a previous post, but Nick Carr’s argument that newspapers should reduce supply is absurd. His argument seems to stem from the fact that multiple newspapers cover the same story – often using the same content. Unfortunately, he doesn’t consider the consequences of deliberately “reducing supply” when the barriers to entry are near-nonexistent. Bloggers will step in to fill the gap, providing news and commentary as newspapers reduce supply. If this wasn’t immediately obvious – because it’s been happening – consider that in order to reduce supply newspapers will necessarily have to cut staff. Where will that staff go? Most will enter other industries; but enough – and probably the best – who love journalism and think they can make money will self-publish. That is, they will start a blog. And they will bring domain expertise, writing experience, and so on to their blogs – which Google, as an unbiased middleman will treat the same as newspapers. Quality content will rise to the top – whether it comes from newspapers or not. Frankly, I think that newspaper companies as firms are on their way out – with the internet, inter-market transactions are cheap enough that you don’t need the economies of scale from having a firm. So, until someone figures out how to obtain economies of scale out of blogs, we’ll see a proliferation of small content-creators: journalists, analysts, etc as bloggers. But supply will never decrease. If anything, it will increase, junk and all, only to be aggregated and filtered by the middleman, Google. Trying to reduce supply will only cede the market to the bloggers.