Tuesday, January 7, 2003 
I got to wondering why the voices raised in opposition to Paul Krugman's series of columns about the Bush presidency always seem to go for the ad hom argument, at times resorting to coordinated smearing and so rarely seem to engage with the substance of his (coherent, by way of contrast) lines of argument.
When I saw the URL for Krugman's column Monday on the political opportunism of the administration team in a friends's IM status message, we had this conversation:
xi: have you noticed that right-wing talking points always attack krugman personally, or question his biases, or nitpick about some fact-checking or matter of tone...
xi: but they never address the underlying "emperor has no clothes" analysis
btb: yeah...i like him...he is left leaning, but my god...i just can't get over how blatantly and patently stupid the bush plan (for everything) is
btb: it's embarrassing...for bush, and for us citizens that this can go on
btb: i mean, at least with reagan, love him or hate him, there was some underlying cohesive concept (supply side) behind his madness
btb: with bush, it's just grotesque pandering passed off as compasionate conservatism (aptly described by robin williams as being like a volvo with a gunrack)
xi: he leans left given these times, sure, but he has very traditional economic viewpoints about trade, macroeconomics, etc.
xi: what is the saying about "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"
btb: i would argue that krugman is slightly left regardless of the times...which is ok...actually, left and right really don't apply to economists i suppose, there are schools of thought (fix/float; monetary/fiscal; demand side/supply side) that get taken up by pol parties at any given time to sharpen the ax in need of grinding at the moment, so then, yes, i guess you're right, at this time krugman's pov seems left cuz the right is so f-in dumb
xi: yeah. it's not like he's for socialism or collectivism or even protectionism. i'd say he is a "Libera
xi: l"
xi: oops
btb: yeah, but in today's bizzarro world a lot of bush's policies -- huge farm subsidies and steel tariffs-- seem like out-dated lefty protectionism, but so much so that post-clinton not even leftists would dare stand up in favor of tariffs and subsidies for dying industries..strange then that rove, uh, i mean bush, got those things thru
xi: yup. it's the ascendancy of marketing and PR. The salesmen have taken over.
categories: x-syndicate
3:17:54 PM 
say what []
This August, 2000 Austin Chronicle article (The Candidate From Brown and Root) connects the dots on Brown and Root, LBJ, Halliburton, and Dick Cheney.
[Bite Media via the Well]
categories: x-syndicate
1:18:05 PM say what []
William Gibson, influential writer of speculative fiction (sci-fi to the genrists), has a somewhat ironically neo-Luddite reputation but added a blog to his official site yesterday and promises to post there nearly daily.
For some reason, the main page currently shows the first entry and not today's, the second, in which a discussion of his choices and intentions about grammar and diction for his narrators and character segues into this interesting discussion about the publishing busines:
re those advance reading copies (ARCs) of Pattern Recognition that have been popping up on eBay for the last little while.He's using Blogger.
Those are "uncorrected proof copies", which means that they are (1) absolutely riddled with errata, and (2) in the case of this book, to some extent a variant text. There is, in particular, a completely annoying failure on the typesetter's part to keep the email sections in the font allotted to email. This has (I hope) been thoroughly corrected in the actual book, though too late to impress any of the reviewers who had to struggle through the ARC. Why does this happen? Well, novels, these days, have to be scheduled long in advance, as to production and date of initial sale, and you could say that it all springs from that. Publishing today encourages a certain lamentable "hurry up and wait" factor. The ARC's were gotten out before I would have wanted them to, before I'd had sufficient time to "sit with" the manuscript, and then I was able to make another pass (actually two more) taking whatever time I needed. I won't go into the changes, else I enter spoiler territory, but you can take my word for it that the ARC is not at all the finished text.
[via die puny humans]
categories: Agent7 bloggerz metablog
1:08:38 PM say what []
Instant Message chronicles the rise and fall of an extramarital affair. It's crack for voyeurs.
7:57:55 AM say what []
