 I've long since stopped reading the op-ed pages in the dead tree news media delivered to this household, namely, the Star Tribune. I'm not suggesting that everybody else should stop, too; it's just that there's nothing for me, there. And that goes double for its Sunday opinion section, because of its reliance on "Heartburn and Gas." (I think that it was Spot, at The Cucking Stool, that produced those monikers for Katherine Kersten and Jason Lewis. I'm not sure which, specifically, is "Heartburn," and which is "Gas;" it all works perfectly, either way.)
A couple of days ago, though, while rummaging for the sports section, one of those "pro" and "con" features caught my eye, enough that I checked it out. The topic was what I've been thinking of, these days, as the "Poorer, Sicker, Deader Worker Amendment." The argument for passage was provided by Kim Crockett, who works at The Center of the American Experiment. Aaron Sojourner, a University of Minnesota economist, presented reasons for voting "no."
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| The reason I'm kind of glad that I read it, is that it was a particularly telling example of how farcical corporate media's obsession with "balance" has become. Crockett's article was literally irrelevant before it even got printed, because Sojourner conclusively refuted every single one of her points. It's plain as day, and if I didn't know better, I'd swear that the latter really did get a copy of the former's draft, before writing his own. It's indicative of how very stale, predictable, and facile the efforts at advocacy, on the right, have become.
One thing that's always intrigued me about conservative opinionators, is how they seem entirely oblivious to what fools they make of themselves, as perceived by thinking people, every time that they start talking or pecking at a keyboard. (I'm not just referring to the pros, either; one thing that I'm continually reminded of, on Facebook, is that when people are both very uninformed and very opinionated, that is a truly obnoxious combination.) Oh, I get the psychology behind it, cognitive dissonance theory and all that, but that they are so far gone...anyway, I need to get back on point.
I'm pretty sure that I know why outlets like the Strib believe that they have to do the "balance" thing: sticking to facts and rationality leads to "liberal bias," and could cost them subscribers that they can ill afford to lose. (That their corporate owners expect them to pitch in for the cause, is of course another factor.) What's worth noting, I think, is how deeply they have to plunge. Had they been able to find (or if one of their conservative regulars had been able to write) an article better than Crockett's, I can't believe that they wouldn't have used it. But they didn't find one.
If you want to read the report that is referenced in the pro-amendment screed, here it is. If you want my $0.02 worth, I don't recommend it. It's mostly little more than wishful thinking presented as analysis; when the authors do get around to trying to deal with some actual real-world facts, their, shall we say, "selectivity" in choosing data points is downright flagrant.* In other words, it's straight out of the Herrnstein/Murray/John Lott playbook, which is pretty much the source for all contemporary right-wing "scholarship." When your dogmas have been failing so badly, for so long, raw b.s., dressed up in academic jargon to fool the uninformed and gullible, is presumably all that you have left.
* For example, here's note 30, on page 15. We included these various variables in our statistical model because we thought they may have some statistically significant relationship to economic growth. The proportion of the adult population who are employed conceivably would be positively related to growth (that is, a state with a higher proportion would likely also have higher income growth as proportionally more adults would be working). Similarly, the college attainment variable would reflect the importance of human capital in economic growth. The state age and per capita income levels (at the beginning of the period of our analysis) are standard variables often included in economic growth models. Including the manufacturing and population growth variables allows us to control for these factors in our model. Now, that's scientific rigor for you, isn't it? "May have?" "Conceivably would?" Give me a f**king break! |
