Jill Abramson Invented The Polio Vacine

Maybe not, but some of the writing about Jill Abramson reminds me of Larry David's old stand up routine about having to live next to Jonas Salk's mother.

I've haven't been using this blog for a while because most of my efforts are still being directed at The Good Men Project (you should go read my stuff over there) but I did want to comment on the whole Jill Abramson situation and so I am going to do so here. Since everyone is talking about "what it takes to be a great editor" and all those Pulitzers she won single-handed I'm going to break the tyranny of newspaper form and get to it with a listicle on why the coverage of Abramsongate is a little annoying:

• A self-obsessed press: I've always thought that the the national media, especially the national media in New York, was filled with self obsessed people, but I think I've been giving them too much credit. About 50 times more words have been written about one editor losing her job than the fact that the world's largest democracy quite possibly just went through it's biggest political earthquake in half a century, possibly even longer. Yes Abramson's dismissal touches on important issues, and yes the Times is an important newspaper but a nuclear power with 1.2 billion people undergoing a radical change in government due to the the largest election ever conducted in the history of the human race is also, uh, important.
• Please say "I don't know" when you don't: Yes it's possible that Abramson was fired because of her complaints over equal pay, or because of sexism at the Times, or any number of other unfair and terrible reasons. It's also possible that she really was hated by the newsroom staff, or couldn't get along with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. or any number of other reasons that while not being very fair result in people losing their jobs every single day. As Ezra Klein pointed out the other day since all the principles involved aren't talking nobody really knows what happened. If you don't know, say "I don't know", especially if you are writing about this in a professional capacity. Or don't, but please be aware that you are guessing at best and at worst are just churning out Derp.
• Turning a manager into a god: Yes the Times is making money and wining Pulitzers while other newspapers are struggling to stay afloat. Abramson deserves her fair share of credit for this. But so do all the other thousands of people who also wrote those stories, and sold those ads, and made sure the website didn't explode. When conservatives talk about "job creators" and such we progressives point out how unfair it is to assign success to one person and devalue the fact that other people were involved too (sometimes we call this devaluing labor). As Uncle Brecht liked to put it: "Young Alexander conquered India. / He alone? / Caesar beat the Gauls. / Was there not even a cook in his army?" Jill Abramson didn't write those prize winning stories, reporters did. She wasn't the only one to pull an "all nighter" after the Boston bombing. And she did it making half a million dollars a year plus stock options plus pension benefits plus full bennies plus the exposure to snag a book deal or launch a solo project or get a nice gig teaching basically anywhere. Good for her, but she sure as hell didn't do any of this alone.

So yeah, she might have been fired because of sexism, or the fact that Sluzberger is a dunce. But then again she might not have. She might have been fired for failing to up manage the publisher and chairman of the board and keep him satisfied. Which is the type of thing most of us peasants have to deal with throughout our miserable lives. Indeed all these things could be true at the same time, but that's no excuse for people to dive to the lowest common denominator when it comes to writing about it.

The Problems With The Bechdel Test

Over at GMP Allan Mott had a good piece about the so called Bechdel Test, a feminist critique of the film industry when it comes to the portrayal of women in movies. It’s a good piece and I think you should read it, but if anything I thought that he was a little too forgiving (and yes this piece is largely based on the comments I posted over there). 

For people who don’t live in online-debate-world or feminist-theory-world the Bechdel Test is based on a 1985 underground cartoon where one female character points out to another that:

I have this rule…I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. ONE, it has to have at least two women in it, who TWO, talk to each other about THREE, something besides a man.

It’s a valid criticism of how gender roles and such are treated in a lot of movies, but as Mott points out it’s pretty terrible at actually judging an individual film. For example last year’s Gravity fails it, while Ilsa She Wolf Of The SS (uh, you probably shouldn’t play that trailer at work) passes with flying colors. 

I’d take the criticism even further, a lot great movies, like Vertigo, (one of the greatest movies ever made) fails while even worse movies than Ilsa (The Human Centipede, of which the less is said about the better) get through. Which has led me to want to make a new test for tests, the Anderson Test. The Anderson test says, “If Vertigo fails your movie test, your movie test sucks.”

Furthermore it seems to me that a lot of movies that nobody would call sexist or bad fail it as well. Is Fargo sexist or wrong-headed? Well there some gore and violence, but it’s pretty funny and at the end of the day Marge, the main character, solves the crime through smart police work and catches the killer (and fend of the advances Mike Yanagita to boot!)

To add to these problems there’s a lot of pretty good movies out there that if they were re-written to pass the test would lose a lot. How would you make Platoon pass the test? Or The Shining? Or To Live AndDie In LA? All three of which hallmarks of their respective genres. You really can’t, and while it might be better if there were more movies like Concussion or Monster, that doesn’t mean that The Shining is somehow a lesser film because Wendy talks with the pediatrician character about her husband Jack (a man) and son Danny (also a man). Indeed having Wendy talk with the pediatrician about something other than her son (how the Nikkei is doing, Reagan’s new tax plan) would be pretty silly. 

But even worse a lot of movies that obviously fail the Bechdel test make arguments that proponents of the test would presumably agree with. Take Glengarry Glen Ross, now I wouldn’t call David Mamet a feminist or anything but it’s really notable how all the salesmen define themselves through a tough male machismo (“Whoever told you, you could work with men!”, denigrating Jack Lemmon’s character as “Shelly”, Al Pacino manipulating his mark by pitching dodgy real estate as a way to reassert his manhood over his wife who has vetoed the idea). But as A.O. Scott points out in a great review the end result of this quest for man as macho bread winner is a world with, “no love, no family, no joy, no respite from the endless, pointless selling.” And, “despite all the bluster and bravdo of these men, there world is small, static, desperate.” In other words the socially constructed gender role of men as warrior/bread winner who “does what it takes” to Always Be Closing has, in its own way, denigrated these men just like it has denigrated the women who are excluded from it. Which hardly strikes me as the type of movie Bechdel was criticizing.

In the end I think the whole Bechdel Test problem arises because a lot of smart people took a general point from a 30 year old cartoon and decided to apply it literally and universally to the world. That might tell us something about modern feminism as a social movement (also see here) but it doesn’t tell us much about movies. Movies have a lot of problems, how they deal with gender is one of them, but that doesn’t mean Vertigo isn’t a great film. In fact it’s one of the greatest ever made.

Some Thoughts On Debo P. Adegbile

Jonathan Bernstein had a good piece on the defeat of Debo P. Adegbile who Obama nominated to head up the Justice Department's Civil Rights Department. Basically six Democrats joined the GOP in shooting down the nomination because Adegbile has links to the to the lawyers that overturned the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal. 

Personally I think it's a great cometary on a lot of the arguments that progressives have been making about race and Obama over the last few years. I think it's a great example of the false promise of "twice as good"  that Ta-Nehisi Coates has been talking about for the last year or so:

I've spent the past couple of years thinking about the "twice as good" notion in the black community, and the bindings that we put on young black boys so that their country will not kill them. Of course "twice as good" ultimately means half as many arrive, and those who do receive half as much. Let us dispense with self-congratulation and great men. The question is not, "What did Jackie Robinson achieve in spite of racism?" It is, "How much more would he have achieved without it?" An ethic of "twice as good" divorced from any complaint, divorced from history is "Go for self" and can have no effect whatsoever upon a justice system, upon voter ID laws, upon asset forfeiture, upon Wells Fargo. The masses of the plundered will never be respectable to those who plunder them. The essence of plunder is disrespect. They can never respect you. They hate you, sir.

That is Adegbile can come from a single parent home, pull himself up by his bootstraps, pass his peers on the career track (who have far greater advantages than he ever did), and basically do everything right and be "twice as good" only to be disqualified for public service because he dared argue that John Adam's, Clarence Darrow's, and the Constitution's principle that everyone is entitled to a robust defense in our criminal justice system actually has meaning.

Meanwhile as Bernstein points out, this was a defeat for Obama! The correct move all along was never to fight the battle in the first place and find a palatable person who wouldn't rock the boat with his crazy ideas of equality before the law and working pro bono on death penalty cases (which by the way is what law students are taught is what folks in the legal profession should do with some of their spare time.)

I think Coates is right to point out the false promise of "twice as good", but where I differ from him is that he would like to shelf it for the more radical idea of race based policy itself. I just don't any reason how this could possibly work if so many people won't even accept "twice as good" at times. In short "twice as good" might be flawed but Obama might embrace it because it remains a radical concept even today, which is pretty disheartening to liberals, but might just be reality when it comes to the issue of race.

Maybe Policy Matters?

MinnPost has a pretty annoying article up about disagreements and conflicts on the Minneapolis School Board. I say annoying because it's indicative of a lot of whats wrong with political writing these days. That is rather than focusing on the structural realities that drive political disagreement over issues like partisanship, incentives, and interests it treats disagreements on the school board as being caused by "conduct":

Specifically, a majority of the board had opined that its members and the superintendent do not trust one another, work as a team or engage in joint problem solving. To add to the discomfort on display, they also gave each other low marks regarding “demeaning verbal or nonverbal communication.”

But here's the rub. Just a few paragraphs latter the article describes how the board is divided between a largely status quo majority block and a reformist minority block. But rather than explain what these differences are and why they might cause political disagreement the author of the piece goes on to talk about the idea of having everyone taking the, "Myers-Briggs personality instrument" as a way to learn about each others personalities or something.

Well maybe that's the problem, and maybe a round of hand holding and affirmations would help too. But maybe, just maybe, these politicians have different ideas about how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, what district priorities should be, and whose interests should be considered in decision making. Maybe since they don't all agree they come into conflict not because of a lack of personality tests, but because as Bonnie Honig once put it, "To take difference -- and not just identity -- seriously in democratic theory is to affirm the inescapability of conflict."

To put it another way, if you have a school board of two people where one likes charter schools and one thinks charter schools are evil, you are going to have conflict. Even if both people take personality tests before you try to reach an agreement.

Yes I understand that shouting at each other isn't helpful, and civility is a good thing in public life. But conflict is inescapable in a democracy and it's presence isn't necessarily evidence of poor "conduct" or general dysfunction. If you want a system where disagreement is rare go to Westeros, but you probably wouldn't like it there.

Paul Krugman's Stimulus Errors

Paul Krugman has a blog piece up going over (yet again) the legacy of the 2009 economic stimulus. This is ground that has been covered extensively before but I still think Krugman makes a few major errors in his analysis. Basically Krugman think that the stimulus's  legacy is mixed because while it helped the economy in the short term, it also caused major political harm to liberals and Democrats, "...mainly from the fact that the ARRA was too small and too short-lived to do the job, but partly also from a serious mistake in the way the administration sold it."

He's said this a lot over the years, but I think this type of analysis has some major category problems that people like Krugman have never really addressed. First of all Krugman assumes that making ARRA bigger was something that was easily attainable, but unfortunately Obama just didn't do it. To be blunt there really isn't a whole lot of evidence for that, most of the evidence I've seen over the years is that the size of the ARRA that passed was very much on the large size of any potential stimulus. Indeed it was almost twice as big as the initial proposal rolled out by the super liberal Nancy Pelosi. So maybe a more aggressive strategy by the White House Office of Legislative Affairs could have gotten another 20 billion for infrastructure projects or whatever, but Krugman and people like him have never presented any credibly evidence that say a 1.6 trillion dollar stimulus was possible.

Indeed I'd argue Krugman gives away the game later in the post when writes, "You can argue that there was no way the administration could have gotten a bigger plan. Actually, they could have used reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote hurdle; but that was considered too radical." Sorry Paul, the Senate could have passed a different bill via the reconciliation process but there is, and I can't stress this enough, no actual way the President can make the Senate do this. If you have a problem with that take it up with Harry Reid. And setting that (major) problem aside doesn't deal with the fact that it's Congress that has to actually vote for this thing. Christina Romer can write any number down in her briefing materials she wants, but that's doesn't automatically translate into Congress passing it. Even FDR faced considerable Congressional restrains on what the New Deal could and could not do.

Again maybe Obama did leave some money on the table, but there's no evidence that the stimulus could have easily been doubled in size.

Furthermore Krugman really fails to deal with the very real possibility that going for a massive stimulus could have backfired resulting the Congressional Democrats abandoning the plan and running for cover. Majorities seem ironclad until they aren't, and there was always a real threat that asking for a 2 trillion dollar stimulus, as some liberal bloggers have demanded over the years, could have been met with laughter putting the Obama White House in a more difficult position and ultimately getting an even smaller stimulus. How likely was this? I don't know, and neither does anyone else, but ignoring potential downsides is pretty foolish when making political decisions.   

In addition to these errors I think Krugman is really thinking about how voters react to the economy in the wrong way. He seems to think that they would be hyper-rational about the talking points Obama rolled out in selling the stimulus in the lead up to the 2010 mid-terms. But there's no real evidence that this is how voters think. It's very possible that they just ignored the talking points from 2009 on Election Day and voted against the Democrats because voters historically vote against the party in the White House during bad economic times. I, and most political scientists, would argue that this is what probably happened. To put it another way; there's no particular good way to "sell" the economic disaster that befell the world in 2008 and 2009 and a world with a larger stimulus and better talking points would have probably resulted in major GOP gains in 2010 anyway.

There aren't always easy technocratic solutions to problems. Even in hindsight.

Politics Is The Art Of The Possible, Or Something

Ross Douthat recently wrote a long blog post in which he expressed frustration that liberals aren't freaking out over the fact that guaranteeing health care to more people  might allow them to quit jobs they would otherwise have to keep working in if they wanted their health care. Fair enough, we really aren't. But where I think the post goes off the rails is when Douthat starts complaining that in addition, liberals aren't willing to accept a big overhaul of the welfare state in general with the goal of turning the big basket of direct and indirect subsidies that the poor and working class get into just a few large targeted programs:

"But it means that we should think seriously about what else we should be doing, and whether we should be spending as much as Obamacare spends on insurance when there are other transfers that might not offer as many work disincentives, might give a stronger boost to upward mobility, and might do more long-term good."

As a liberal I don't necessarily disagree with this statement, although I would add to it that it might make even more sense to fund transfers that help the worse off not by solely cutting their less helpful transfers but by also cutting the subsidies and transfers we give to the middle class and wealthy in forms of mortgage deductions lower capital gains tax rates etc. as well.

But the problem I do have is that this sort of argument is that it's parameters and prescriptions just don't exist in our political reality at all, not because liberals are saying no to it, but because conservatives are still obsessed with magically taking us back to the health care system we had in 2009 when every thing was great, or something. If conservatives were actually willing to compromise with liberals, over things like short term economic stimulus in exchange for long term entitlement reform or whatever, Ross would have a point. But since they as a movement and the GOP as a party has consistently said "no, no, NO!" to any kind of compromise about basically anything, there really isn't much to discuss.

So yeah, I'm not opposed to a hypothetical idea like this in principle but it's a bit like wanting to solve the various political problems in HBO's Game of Thrones with a UN sponsored peace keeping force. It makes sense from an abstract argumentative standpoint, but it has no bearing on reality and thus is a pretty pointless political argument.

Ideological Orthodoxy And Saint Elsewhere

Matt Ygleisas made a great point earlier today when he highlighted a throw away sentence from a Washington Post piece about how difficult it really is for the modern GOP to actually enact new policies. As the piece inadvertently points out basically their ideological orthodoxy is hemming them in:

As they cast about for ideas, Republicans are struggling to find policies that match the simplicity and gut appeal of such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage without violating core conservative principles by increasing spending or interfering with market forces.

As Yglesias then quips, "Many of us in America are struggling to find weight loss strategies that don't require us to spend more time at the gym or eat less food. It turns out to be challenging." This is precisely right. As long as the GOP refuses to spend money or "interfere with market forces" (whatever the hell that's suppose to mean) they aren't going to have much success coming up with economic policies that appeal everyone not in the 1%.
The logical solution here is to dump those orthodoxies, but I don't real see any evidence of that happening at all. Oh well.


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My writing over at the Good Men Project has been taking up most of my blogging time as of late, so if you want to read more of my stuff I'd suggest heading over there. I'm not planning on shutting down Longwalkdownlyndale in the near term however and I hope to be able to post more in February. In the meantime here's three of my most recent pieces:

Obamacare is actually not going away.

Hillary Clinton is conintuing to pick up major wins in the invisible primary.

And my take on why the coverage of the State of the Union is often so bad.