It may have gone to their heads a little bit; they may have forgotten about radio's idiosyncrasies as a means of communication. The failures of the Bush administration have woken the country up; conservatives now need to find a way to communicate with people who are actually paying attention.This is a follow up to Nate Silver's hilarious interview with John Ziegler, which was posted on Tuesday.
JZ: Misinformed? You're a piece of work! You are never going to have the guts to post a representative transcript on your website! I thought you actually ran a legitimate website!Ziegler is a conservative radio host who is currently promoting an upcoming documentary on how the media downplayed negative stories about Obam and Biden, and how this contributed to Obama's victory. The interview was pretty shockingly uncivil. Ziegler was totally out of line, although after reading the beating he took in the comments thread for the post, I almost feel like taking his side. Nate Silver did make some strong criticisms of Ziegler's work without really doing his homework first.
NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.
This is in contrast to a post that he made in early October, in which Nate accused RealClearPolitics.com of cherry-picking polls to make McCain look stronger in crucial states. In this post, Nate's accusations, while perhaps over the top, were based on numbers and evidence.
The conclusion to Nate's (people call him Nate...) latest post seems off base to me. While he's raises some good points about the limitations of the talk radio format, I think he foolishly takes for granted that extreme conservatives are particularly more dogmatic than extreme liberals. While in recent years, Republicans have aimed their appeals towards the fringe of their base, this doesn't mean that the fringe represents the whole. This post sparked an interesting discussion in the comments thread. For me, the low point of all this was one poster (dubbed 'pixel' - read into that what you will) remarking that "Every group is defined by their extremists."
Maybe every group is reduced by critical outsiders (in this case, our beloved Mr. Silver) to their extremists. I would rather believe that extremists are defined by every group's extremists - that beyond the facade of their particular views, extremists have more in common with one another than with the mainstream of the movements that they supposedly epitomize.
The complement to Nate's argument was raised by various sources during the election and primaries, none of whom I can cite offhand. In particular, extreme liberals believe that their political views are the gospel of academia - that anyone 'of intelligence' who thought deeply about the issues would eventually come to the One True Path (sinistralism). But at stake in politics is more than just the right or wrong way to get things done. At stake is a true difference of values. And if we (the sinistralists) are the Cultural Relativists that we purport to be, then we should acknowledge the values of libertarians and fiscal conservatives, if not old school conservatives, are valid and defensible too. (Okay, I won't start in on the neo-cons.)
We all have a responsibility to examine our own views a little more critically, and to try to separate differences of values from differences in approach. Otherwise we come out looking like this little guy.
2 comments:
Yeah, I also thought Nate was weirdly out of line with that interview. He was more polite with his, but, in the end, more of an asshole than Zeigler:
NS: Who are the two senators from South Dakota
JZ: Thune and, uh, Johnson.
NS: Very good. South Carolina?
JZ: Go fuck yourself. I'm done with this interview if you're going to ask me stupid questions like that. Obviously I know who Lindsay Graham is.
I don't think anyone actually aspires to be a cultural relativist, though (and particularly not with capital letters). With the possible exception of Richard Rorty, who took particular pleasure in almost absurdly radical positions.
But here's my question: why can't values be right or wrong (as far as anything can be right or wrong)?
I certainly agree with you about dogmatism, and have therefore avoided Richard Dawkins for the last few years and have been reading a great deal of Andrew Sullivan so as to gain insight into non-crazy conservatives.
But there's a difference between dogmatism and extremism – just because people can have the same attitude towards their beliefs doesn't mean that there aren't substantive differences in those beliefs. And shit, it is the explicit aim of fundamentalist Christians to bring about Armageddon (and thus, The Rapture and the return of Christ). To utterly condemn that sort of thinking is just plain sanity, and there isn't anything remotely that insane on the other side. Yeah, people like Richard Dawkins are assholes and would fuck things up in their own way, but at least they're not trying to blow up the world.
Re Nate being out of line: yeah, completely. But to be fair, I think he was pretty enraged, and was goaded to that point by his interviewee.
Actually, I kind of am a cultural relativist. Maybe not capitalized, or in any particularly pure sense of the term. But I do aspire to understand other people's values or views, so that (among other benefits) I might question my own.
6.54, it's weird for us to even have this discussion, since I can barely imagine that our views on cultural relativism would be substantially different. But somehow it seems that by the same logic we reach different conclusions. It's a bit mysterious.
It's embarrassing to even have to state this explicitly, but: Yeah, some values are better than others. But I think we too rarely question our own values. Or at least I do, so I'm implicating you by extension. And in a related vein...
Tying down the whole right, or even Christian fundamentalism, to the will to hasten the Armageddon is like equating the left to radical Communist guerrillas. Achieving Marxist bliss via violent overthrow of the government is comparably crazy to trying to bring (back) Christ by killing off the human race, and arguably crazier: it's been tried repeatedly, to no avail. And one of those groups I mentioned causes more bloodshed than the other.
I know you're not saying that everyone on the right wants to destroy humanity, but you're (on some level) implicating them by association, which we both know is BS. What - our extremists are better than yours?
There is a difference in dogmatism. It's the difference between not carrying an umbrella and getting wet.
I think that it's much easier to see the absurdity and danger in one group from the outside. To view the whole group as represented by a caricature.
So I don't want to say that the values of 'Armageddonists' are valid, or even necessarily the evangelizing values of fundie Christianity. But I do want to acknowledge that many fiscal conservatives and libertarians are just as smart as me, and have thought longer and more diligently about most issues than I have. So I imagine that their views are not untenable.
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