Any Passing Similarity To Rush Limbaugh Here?

Fair and Balanced.  If you don’t quickly insert a counterclaim into your assertion, not only your claim, but you, our dear ad hominem Reader, will be shouted to pieces.

God help us if we aren’t Fair and Balanced. Nothing equals the trump power of the shrill accusation that a claim is not “fair and balanced” in sanctioning its contemptuous dismissal. Our paperwork will not be processed at all if it isn’t accompanied by the proper credential: an opposing “view.”

You, our dear Reader, know what we think of those who dismiss ideas because they are not “moderate” and “balanced” and “centrist.” And if you don’t, by gosh, you will find this essay to be well paired with our previous essay: http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/2009/05/09/when-there-is-nothing-moderate-about-the-horrors-you-oppose-how-can-you-be-a-moderate/1559

Here’s how it goes. Our assertion can only be credible if we fairly present a balancing, opposing view. In fact- no observation can be valid if we do not supply its negation (in the space provided).

“Then there’s the problem of “balance” – the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different “sides” of a controversy. When applied to science, especially in politicized areas, this media norm becomes extremely problematic. Should journalists really grant equal time to the small band of scientists who deny the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS when the vast majority of researchers accept the connection between the two? Should they split column space between the few remaining global warming “skeptics” and the scientific experts who affirm the phenomenon’s human causation? Again, experienced science journalists will know best how to cover such stories and will be aware of the scientific community’s very justifiable abhorrence of unthinking “balance.””

Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirschenbaum: “Unpopular Science”. The Nation (August 17, 2009 ed.). (Our emphasis.) http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/mooney_kirshenbaum

To be considered scientific, assertions are subject in principle to the possibility of disproof: that there is conceivable evidence that would contradict them. (We promise to supply later some proper citations of Stephen Popper and Thomas Kuhn).

The inversion of this is of particular value to thoughtful inquiry: that assertions for which there is no conceivable evidence that might disprove them are not regarded as “scientific.” This is useful: They are not  “disprovable ” (and hence not scientific). But this leads to an unfortunate shorthand reference: hence, scientific claims ARE “disprovable.” We think this shorthand is a linguistic mutilation and terribly unfortunate.

Popular usage has bastardized and perverted this. Anti-scientists seem to rely on an uncritical popular vulnerability to the idea that something can only be considered scientific if there is some evidence that contradicts it. Hence, a “thing” can only be regarded as credible -or “true”- if it is equally –and credibly- “untrue.” “Disprovable.” At will. Have been and will be disproved.

Theories. Let’s reclaim this word for ourselves so we can go back to using it in real, sober, reasoning deliberation. Overlooked in popular discourse is the condition that “scientific” theories (like evolution and climate change) that are regarded as credible -not to say “true”- do not have substantial evidence that contradicts them. They are not disproved.

Look at the injury this does not only to science, but also to public discourse (and language itself). Science, and very scientificness, are mangled and reduced to nonsensical rubble. By the way, the notional “the exception that proves the rule” is bullshit. Rules don’t have exceptions and exceptions don’t prove anything. Don’t get us started.

And who profits by this? Those who would hack away at intellectual honesty to advance ideological aims achieve this jaw-dropping perversity: nothing can claim to be “true” or valid or meaningful unless it stands there, proudly, with its arm around its own self-proclamation that it is untrue! Good god!

Science and the scientific are categorically defined as inherently contradictory and self-disproving. One cannot recruit a claim for scientific (or rational) validity for any assertion without suggesting that there is (equally scientific!) “evidence” to the contrary.

Thus- looky! we can discount, disdain and ridicule any scientific claim. Because it is… scientific. And we can dismiss science itself. Logic and rational discourse too. While we are at it. As ridiculous, naïve and stupidly self-contradictory. Woa!

That would be really perverse and insane, wouldn’t it? Any claim to truth is simultaneously and symmetrically a claim to untruth?  That, Reader, is what we have done.

Whatever else you, Reader, might do, don’t allow these people to fool you into allowing them to make claims based on “logic” or “reason” or “evidence,” or for god’s sake, “truth. They gave up claims to that kind of “truth” way too long ago for us to brook that bullshit. They have no claims to such things. We are more than justified, nay obligated, to shout them to pieces. We must save them from the embarrassment of their own screaming hypocrisy. Oh and, of course, you’ll agree that we must all applaud Bill Mahr’s film Religulous.

Please. Dismiss without evidence that which cannot be presented with evidence. Give no credence to the idea that these ideas or people operate within the realm of reason and proofs. They don’t, and it is a disservice to honest intellectual discourse to be fooled into responding. They attempt to make it look like the unfounded belief and the reasoned, supported argument have the same standing. They don’t.

By all means. Examine ideas rationally and with reason. Subject them to skepticism, contradiction, counterargument and disproof. Take seriously all ideas that claim to meaning, truth, validity, and mere usefulness. With intellectual integrity and honesty, feel free to discredit them. This our beloved search for meaning, and it is its own truth. This is the kind of truth we most admire.

But do not accept as “controversy” the shrill idiocies of extremists who challenge what we know. So many “things” are simply… uncontroversial. And so many are simply… true. Reject without argument assertions that an “opposing point of view” makes them controversial, or untrue… and vilify you, Reader, as not “fair and balanced.”

Dismiss, without reason, argument or recourse to sense, those who would deflect, dismiss and silence the obvious with refractory, schizoid and insane demands that you be “fair and balanced.”

“As In The Twenties, Voices Of Protest Were Attacked As “Subversive,” or “Un-American.”” Robert Goldston

“The New Deal reached a stalemate in 1938 and was drowned by the war. Unfortunately, also drowned was the spirit which had supported it. The years following World War II were to see a dreary repetition of the hysteria, public apathy, and return to overweening private greed which marked the years after World War I. There was to be another and even more damaging “red scare” presided over by Wisconsin’ Senator Joe McCarthy (and supported by a large segment of the American people). There was to be a return to business ethics and private morality in place of the public ethics of the thirties. Bruce Barton’s revelation of Christ as a businessman was hardly more indicative of the spirit of the twenties than General Motors President Charles Wilson’s brusque “What’s-Good-For-General-Motors-Is-Good-For-America” was of the fifties. While the newfound prosperity of America was poured into goods, services and hardware, into ever bigger and more vulgar automobiles, ever flashier kitchens, ever more clever gadgets, it was to be withheld from the public sector of the economy. The shiny new cars cluttered poorly paved city streets. The flashy kitchens were often found in crumbling public housing. Well-dressed children attended public schools whose buildings were a national disgrace; they were taught by teachers whose salaries were a national shame. And once again, as in the twenties, voices of protest against the decay of public community were attacked as “subversive,” or “un-American.””

Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

“HITLERIAN REVELS IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN:” William Goldston

“Organizations such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (SS) attracted thousands of members with a program of frank Fascism and anti-semitism. Father Coughlin… had organized the Christian Front as a Jew-baiting fascist group whose members held rifle practice weekly at their camp in New Jersey. Fritz Kuhn’s German-America Bund was able to attract 20,000 people to its Hitlerian revels in Madison Square Garden.”

Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). pp 237

KEEP YOUR HANDS AND ARMS AWAY FROM THE AISLE; Stay Inside The Vehicle.

The notion of “reaching across” some “aisle” is nonsense.

It is nothing more than notional, really, isn’t it. It is metaphor. It is an abstraction of an abstraction. Go ahead; extend the metaphor. Try to complete it so it actually makes sense: I’ll be reaching across (this) aisle and… what? Furtively handing across a tight roll of large bills? Agreeing to disagree? 

This acknowledges no relationship to real, particular issues, differences, interests or money at stake. Nothing to do with judgments about policies by people in real circumstances. 

There is an aisle, somewhere, we are told, but there sure as shit isn’t anyone reaching across it, especially at this hour of the night. Unless, we hope, it is the brown-skinned Cleaning Staff, reaching for the wet end of a blunt. I suppose there is some kind of “gallery” somewhere, though I suspect it is place where schoolteachers make public school children be quiet. There may be homeless people and stranded travelers sleeping there now…

 The Aisle is something that we will all use to elbow our way to the Exits, when the shit comes down. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Isn’t it always in the aisles that people are trampled to death? And they plunge, from the balconies… into the aisles.

 What is intended by saying “reaching across the aisle” makes more vivid sense to me as reaching from the rail of the cacophanous, tumultuous deck of one hideous, crowded ideological ship to the deck rail of another.

 The very image suggests people who have crowded their way on to these particular vessels like sheep or ungulates elbowing their way to perceived safety in the center of a herd. If agitated by rabble-rousers, cows and sheep will shove and crowd and elbow their way onto a Stock Trailer of Doom- or the deck of a ship, for that matter, I suppose. It’s just a degree of stampede, really. Fires will get these started really well, sure thing. And so, it will be one deck or another, we suppose…

 So be careful reaching across this particular imaginary “aisle.” It is a canonical rule of boatsmanship in moving water- never end up standing downstream from a broadside hull- and never, never end up getting pulled into the gap between two heaving, rolling hulls. If there is a sure way to get mashed into a thick, splintery, salty paste, this is it.

We have been fooled enough times to be skeptical that those people reaching across that “aisle” want us over there, on that side of the “aisle,” anyway. We think they may want us down there, between the hulls, as they roll and buck and grind and slam together. Doesn’t it make you a bit nauseous?

Conservative Ideals Become Crude Precepts: Jeffrey Scheuer

“The foundational principle of liberalism is the relative complexity of its intellectual and moral-political universe.
…Conversely, the quintessential feature and great polemical asset of conservatism is its relative simplicity.
…these simpler conservative ideals become crude precepts, which mask a host of uncritical assumptions and myths. Here are a few examples:

Democratic government is primarily a threat to individual freedoms, and not their guarantor…

Taxation is tantamount to theft, and public spending equivalent to waste.

Unfettered economic markets are just, and business enterprise uniformly serves the public interest.
…
Rights not expressly enumerated in the Constitution “do not exist.”
…
Dissent, especially in wartime, is unpatriotic.

“Special interests” are running the country or control the liberal media, but not the conservative agenda.

… They appeal at once to self-interest and to our thirst for simplicity: the politics of the self is simpler than that of self-and-others.”

Scheuer, Jeffrey: The Sound Bite Society: How Television Helps the Right and Hurts the Left. 2001: Routledge, New York. pp. 164-65

“Such condensation symbols are the hard currency of electronic communication, made to order for television sound bites, and for the simpler, more egocentric values and messages of the right. Precision, accuracy, and depth or complexity of meaning require that they be critically unpacked to reveal what they conceal, compress or obscure.”

Ibid. pp. 166

The term “liberal bias” is very sneaky.

“Liberal” and “conservative” have very different meanings. They really do imply and denote profoundly different orientations to our fellows and to our world. They work very differently because the beliefs and practices they entail are profoundly different. They shape and transform our relations and our planet in opposing ways.

To associate them together through the articulation of “bias” is an especially effective trick- because it works to contaminate, to degrade the “liberal,” through the unspoken (but true) implication that bias itself is bad.

Here’s a definition of bias from the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition Copyright 1934 by G. C. Merriam. It is a substantial definition.

Bias n. ; pl BIASES
2. A temperamental inclination; propensity or prepossession toward an object or view, not leaving the mind indifferent; bent; tendency; prejudice.

“Bent” indeed. In common usage, a bias, as in a biased perspective, opinion or understanding, suggests a “skewing,” a distortion, a warping. Bent. A prejudicial preconception and conviction, unsupported by fact and probably unjust.

Think of racial bias. Or economic bias. Biases against the specific interests of a groups. A categorical judgment and demonization of a group “identity.” But “liberal bias?”

Suggesting a “liberal bias” to complement conservative biases suggests that the two words,  “liberal” and “conservative,” and their meanings, converge: that they have the same value, the same relevance, the same substance, and similar relative moral weight. It suggests that “liberal” and “conservative” have common or comparable commitments to values, to philosophical integrity and to intellectual honesty. It implies that the terms function the same way in public discourse, in language and meaning.  They don’t. Don’t be confused.

This is a deception, a perversion and theft of language. It contaminates the meaning and the accomplishments of ’the liberal project’ with the greasy and sordid language of greed and fraud.

The greatest trick of all is that it does so through the poisonous linkage of the word BIAS- a word that contaminates. It is especially poisonous because it has been tainted by the greed and meanness of a panoply of self-interested, money-grubbing, power-thieving “conservatives,” fundamentalists and sundry extremists of several stripes.

These are groups that ARE “biased.“ They are highly prejudicial and discriminatory. They are groups that hate. They are overtly antagonistic to the real rights, opportunities and interests of others who are unlike themselves.

We know bias is ugly and dishonest. Why? Because we know that biases toward the rich, toward big business, toward fundamentalisms and extremisms, in general toward the interests and agendas of the powerful and privileged, are deceptive, injurious and unjust. Taken in this meaning, bias is plain, bald prejudice and discrimination. That’s what it is, and it is mean and ugly.

It seems like the very definition of bias, doesn’t it? Muddy, tarted-up “ideology” underwrites open attacks on the enfranchisement of a particular group, based on some hypocritical fundamentalism or other. Often joined with real, emotional and visceral anger and hate, toward identifiable, specific individuals.  Obviously, the injustice and the cost to the victims is real, and the benefits in the conservation and extension of power to the ideologues are all too real. These are real appropriations of power and money. Otherwise the power-hungry and acquisitive political operatives and reactionary ideologues wouldn’t traffic in this stuff.  This is greed, and this materiality alone distinguishes it from the ‘liberal’. Money changes hands. Yes, bias is ugly. And biases and their victims are particular, personal, specific and plural.

The suggestion of “liberal bias” is clearly meant to be unsavory. Influence of the benefits of public good in pursuit of what we encode as an “agenda”-any “agenda-” is naughty and undemocratic, correct?

This dishonest usage paints liberalism, and liberality itself, as avaricious, acquisitive, filthy, greedy and dishonest- and somehow covertly,deliberately and deceptively against the common good. That nefarious Liberality has been caught thieving.

To be liberal, in honest contemporary usage, is a belief in, a passion for, a commitment to liberality.

The Liberal discourse is that of liberality, and inclusion, and consensuality, and collective interests. It is about equality of opportunity, social and economic justice, equality of rights, and access tp the public institutions of democracy and justice. It is about public goods in the public trust, and defending the disenfranchised… and, well, we know what it really is. We could look it up. If you care to dig up some working Definitions for a New World Order, please post them here. Seriously.

Let’s remember that these things are real. These are real beliefs and commitments about how we think of one another and how we treat one another- liberally. They have concrete policies associated with them, and they have real consequences for us real people. They matter.
Liberalism is a commitment to the exercise and appropriation of power to… what- distribute power? Diffuse power? Empower? Throw open the gates to the City of Power?

A liberal bias would be a skewing or prejudice toward these things. This is an inherent contradiction not only in terms, but of ideas. That makes it especially hard to untangle, and an especially effective kidnap-murder of a term of reference. But we can take it back.

Let’s remember too, that “conservatism” has real people, with real beliefs and real power and real interests and Real Money, associated with it. And real policies, real “think tanks” and “pundits” and operatives, and real, concrete consequences. Maybe you share the view that these are harmful, injurious and unjust. Maybe you see them as discriminatory, or racist, or greedy, or vicious, or hugely destructive and dangerous. Maybe you just see a massive, fraudulent rip-off of public goods, the common-wealth and the dignity and livelihoods of others. Maybe not. But remember that what is at stake here is real. That is the underlying fact of “conservatism.” Real money, and real power, are at stake. And this is a real theft of our language.

We know that the “biases” of the rich and powerful –their cynical exercises of power, the policies and practices they promote and institutionalize- make them more rich and powerful. “Conservative” interests are ‘biased’ toward specifics: the concrete, material enrichment of specific individuals. Toward the accumulation and preservation of actual money and real power for the already rich and powerful.

Bias is prejudicial. It prejudges. It prejudices your opportunities and interests, and mine.

Liberalism is not a bias but an idea. It is a Project. Like the Project of Democracy. Maybe not so separable, even. Yes? Maybe it is ideological, or even an “Ideology”. We hesitate to use the term, and enclose it in quotation marks, because it too has been stolen from us and rendered dangerous and destructive to public discourse. An “Ideology” might be biased, now, mightn’t it?

The “biases” of the poor and the excluded would be… laughable? Pathetic? Would… make them more rich and powerful? Would their biases be against the interests of the rich and powerful? What kind of fundamentalism is that, anyway? Hah. You call THAT an ideology? Shit, that’s just angry, poor, brown losers talking, people.

We can’t be biased toward some folks, now can we? Especially if they have some kind of, well, defining characteristic that would easily distinguish them, like skin color or poverty or “mineral wealth” or something. Now THAT would be bias.

Liberalism is inclusion, the full expression of every voice and every interest and every truth and every experience of the world.

“Liberal bias” prejudices… equality of opportunity. It is predisposed toward… fairness. It is biased against… bias. It is, precisely, an opposition against bias! It is not-bias. It is anti-bias! Oh, and bias is anti-democratic. And to invent (and harbor and abet) the term “liberal bias” is dishonest and anti-democratic. It is a Theft of Our Language. Please don’t suffocate the clarity of your thinking by using this term, or terms like it.

The language of inclusion, of populism, of liberality simply cannot be skewed or biased in this way. It is fundamentally straightening, aligning, “truing” in its meaning and in the policies and beliefs that it attends.

Clever, huh? Using the sordid taint of conservative bias to execrate liberality.

Sick fuckers. Next Week: “Liberal Agenda.”