I downloaded Jonah Goldberg’s new book this morning to my Kindle — just had lunch to start it. From the intro:
There’s a kind of argument-that-isn’t-an-argument that vexes me. I first started to notice it on university campuses. I’ve spoken to a lot of college audiences. Often, I will encounter an earnest student, much more serious looking than the typical hippie with open-toed shoes and a closed mind. During the Q&A session after my speech he will say something like “Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Then he will sit down, and the audience will applaud. Faculty will nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their wings. What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge builders.
My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?
First of all, my right to speak never was in doubt. Indeed I’m usually paid to speak. Besides, I’ve given my speech already and we’re in the Q&A time: Shouldn’t you have told me this beforehand? Second, the kid is almost surely lying. He’ll take a bullet for me? Really?
Clichés like these are a way to earn bravery on the cheap, defending principles you haven’t thought through or perhaps only vaguely support. Or, heck, maybe he really would leap on a grenade so I could finish talking about how stupid high-speed rail is. But it still doesn’t matter, because mouthing these sorts of clichés is a way to avoid arguments, not make them.
I haven’t finished the introduction yet, but Goldberg trots out some other accepted tropes and summarily demolishes them with their unexpected origins.
And with many a humorous turn of phrase.
More later.
Igraduated from a liberal arts school many elizabeth warren1980’s moons ago, and
““I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it…. and the audience will applaud. Faculty will nod proudly at this wiser-than-his-years hatchling under their wings. What a glorious moment for everybody. Blessed are the bridge builders. My response? Who gives a rat’s ass?…
It is Same as it ever was..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-io-kZKl_BI
Why is it I always think, “I’ve seen this movie before”?
“Mr. Goldberg, I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
yea right ax Naomi Schaefer Riley about dat
Which is, I’m trying to say in my gin-addled state, that, I get what Jonah is saying, but he’s arguing against the same ridiculous tropes that we, i.e., conservatives, have been arguing against since my time and my father’s time before me. And yet, we preach to whom, other than the same-minded choir? Will we ever win hearts and minds? Will we ever convince the others, no matter the strength of our arguments?
Yes, but we’re going to hit the wall first.
Pablo, I guess for me, as a 55 year-old who’s been banging against that wall for 30+ years, I’ say http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhF-WQhz5u0
I spent a lot of time on campuses a few years ago and I observed a variant of this. When Q&A rolled around, the self-righteous little leftist whipper-snappers would step up and begin by saying, in the most oily and insincere manner, how glad they were that the conservative speaker had come. But this was always the preface to a digression into some lefty narrative tangential to the speech or subject at hand. And it was never a question. They could never stay on topic or respond to the speech or ask a simple question, because it was obvious they could not deal with the facts, and had to introduce new topics and distractions to drag the debate into a swamp of demagoguery and confusion.
I finished it up last week. I didn’t realize that the theme of the book wasn’t simply about the banality of political cliches, but the larger point is that liberals often pretend to be non-ideological when in fact they are anything but non-ideological. The book doesn’t quite hold up as cohesively as Liberal Fascism, but it’s still a very good read.
Ezactly so, rrpjr. Why stay on topic? Why answer any question about (their) belief? No one (media, professor, collegue, co-worker, voter) is going to question the answer. Facts? Schmacts! Analogies/smalogies!
Demagogery? Oh yes. Yes. YES!
But this is nothing new.
Lyle Lovett is so ugly that when he was born he was hit by the ugly stick and he made IT uglier.
Also, Is Jonah’s new book defensible or indefensible ? Because I don’t want to have to defend it if it’s indefensible.
Speaking of which, Radio Derb is back, baby!
I guess for me, as a 55 year-old who’s been banging against that wall for 30+ years,
He’s not talking about the wall of Leftie Stubbornness, he’s talking about the whole damn world slamming into a mountainside at full speed.
Because the Nazis have jut been elected to office in a country where the Nazis slaughtered a goodly number of them only two generations ago and the Muslim Brotherhood are appointed to the U.S. administration.
Like a dog to his vomit or a sow to her mire…
I don’t understand the first two bolds in your post, D. Am I missing an earlier joke or something?
The bold emphases are Goldberg’s, bh, converted to italics because of this damn wordpress format.
converted from I mean
Thanks, Ernst.
So far my complaint about the book is that Goldberg too readily incorporates the old high school rhetoric requirement (trick is more like it) that you seek common ground and acknowledge reasonable disagreements of opinion where they exist in order to win over the skeptics in your audience to your point of view.
Liberals aren’t going to read the book. And moderates are too busy reading that (I forget how many) Shades of Gray book and its sequel.
My complaint with Goldberg’s book is that I still haven’t read hundreds from the canon and he’s trying to tempt me with yet another easy summation.
No, seriously, that’s my complaint. Seriously.
That’s a good complaint.
I’ll say this on behalf of Goldberg: there are worse authors to take your easy summations from.
” And moderates are too busy reading that (I forget how many) Shades of Gray book and its sequel.”
Moderates want to be seen as smart, open minded, skeptical, and circumspect. They want to be known as big picture people. But they think in circles when they think at all and they are ruled by their intuition which in turn is ruled by them taking occasional temperature readings of their liberal friends to see if their opinions are right. They think Jon Stewart is a genius who should be running the country. They think BIll Mahr is hilarious for doing worse than what they automatically hate Rush Limbaugh for doing.
In my experience moderates typically read about half of “Three Cups of Tea” and immediately wonder why Republicans are such dicks when it comes to foreign policy.
Oddly they need to be regularly reminded that Democrats currently control the Presidency and the Senate and until 2010 controlled the House. Otherwise they just sort of default to Bush ruining everything with his cronies in the Congress if they are feeling unhappy about current events. I have no doubt that they could vote for Obama to get Bush out for real this time. They are THAT fucking stupid. They scarcely seem to understand that Pelosi, Reid and Obama actually made most of the recent decisions, the results of which seem to bother and hurt them.
Likewise when asked about the Tea Party one hears lurid tales of savages who want to exterminate black people and homosexuals, and legalize vigilante murders and rape like it was the 20’s. (Sometimes they say thirties or forties or even fifties. The younger ones might say 80’s. Such TOOL BAGS! )
And yet these homophobic Tea PArty demons are also a bunch of Tea bagging homos *snort*. Oh that was funny! Mercy me! I have to sit down for a minute! Wow! Give me the Nobel Prize for humor! No seriously the the Tea Party want to turn this whole country into the damned Taliban. The Taliban. Y’know…those poor people we bombed because we hate muslims and want to steal their oil for our corrupt oil companies.
Amazingly he book” Three Cups of Tea” which they like to bring up in conversations about foreign policy, implies that the Taliban aren’t all that bad and are more civilized and peaceful than we are and of course the war was entirely our fault because Shrub was so ignorant and didn’t try to make peace.
They read half of a popular book that is WRONG in its premise, and then go around lecturing people on foreign policy and end up condemning the Tea Party in the terms of the same group the book they quote portrays as reasonable, civilized, misunderstood good guys. (Who BTW happen to kill gays, rape women, and beat and disfigure them publicly in soccer stadiums, usually as a vigilante mob. )
These fucking “Moderate” cretins think in circles and get their views from the stupid bullshit books they half read.
Goldberg agrees with you Paleomarus:
Not only is Three Cups of Tea wrong, but isn’t the author a lying liar embezzeler of charitable funds, or something?
Well there was a 60 minutes episode last year that claimed he was a tax evader and his charity was pretty shady.
And I like Jonah’s example of Moderate pose of thoughtful commentary on a candidate.
“I didn’t hear enough about what they would do about education.”
That’s a great question about rather obvious political boiler plate. Candidate A will propose throwing quite a lot more money (25% more) at the education problem (a so called funding cut because the education people want and expect at least a 55% increase.). Candidate B will throw an ENORMOUS ludicrrous amount of money that the education problem (Let’s just triple last year’s budget!! LOL! Oh hai! )that will completely bankrupt the local government in four to seven years (this is called doing the right thing for the citizens, leaders, innovators, doctors, lawyers and umm..nerdy science dude things of tomorrow).
“I didn’t hear enough about what they would do about education.” = “I’m voting for candidate B because I care about the future and also I just love those silly LOLCATS! Oh Hai! Lol! Candidate A sounds like some stupid caveman jerk or something. He probably beats his wife and molests kids. Right guys? HA HA! “
The only reason to be a moderate in these times is to be too ignorant, stupid and/or indecisive to understand what is going on or form an opinion.
There really is no middle ground.
Thanks, Ernst, for pointing out Goldberg’s rejection of “The Center” and its shallowness and hubris.
This is exactly where [especially] Republican candidates get in trouble – by trying to bribe “the middle” with some sort of watered-down left bribery and not promoting principles.
I heard Prager yesterday being thoroughly exasperated with Republican politicians who stand around gaping like goldfish when leftist journalists frame questions along “You propose cutting government spending; why do you want children to starve?” lines. Especially about social issues.
If nothing else, Newt was masterful at challenging the premise of such questions.
So much for the open and honest discussion of race in the US.
Slart
oh for heaven’s sake … that pufferfish begins his piece blasting Naomi for having her response published in “a Murdoch vehicle” … the Wall Street Journal!!
How Soviet of Leiter
As a really decent takedown of Leiter seems to me to be a near-total waste of time, I just refer to him as a giant dork. But “pufferfish” works ok, too.
I’m sure that Leiter is far more approving of media empires constructed by e.g. billionaire currency speculators.
Darleen,
You should check out the podcast on Mike Rosen page on 850KOA’s website. Jonah was on yesterday and was awesome.
Sorry, all. But fuck Jonah.
As I told somebody else last night, he seems quite willing to play the tough conservative in theory, but let Derbyshire, eg., press the issue by way of certain speech, and Goldberg is out there braying as loudly as the next jackal about the need to temper public intellectualism if it runs afoul of PC leftist “standards” that are so institutionalized that they are no longer even seen as institutionalized or even leftist.
Like I said at the time: the “conservative” opinion leaders these days like to talk about the need to fight all sort of things. But when it comes time to actually fight, they run to the other side and hide.