The Blog Bubble

[I tried to post this yesterday in response to the 3/26 entry “Listening to the Talking Heads” about the differences between hedgehoggish versus foxish weltanschauungen, but either because (cue self-pitying paranoia) Drum has joined the vast army of “liberal” journalists who pay lip but not ear service to those trapped in the pluto-spidery bonds of corporate niggerdom or, far more likely, because the security “upgrades” to his commenting software have rendered my normal primitive dialup connection inoperative (the same as the recent site makeover has replaced one set of problems -- overlapping text in the right hand column -- with another -- superslow loading times), I was unable to. So I’m trying again today. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try from the library. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll try posting to another site, like...whitehouse.gov. {Well, no. I just checked, and their site is even more fucked up than Mother Jones’s. So much for Obama’s promise to reach out to the lo- to no-tech masses.}]

As a would-be hedgehog doomed by middlebrow intelligence and laziness to foxdom at best, rabbitude at worst, I read this entry and its comments with great interest. I have three comments to add of my own.

First, Nicholas Kristof, Tetlock, and Drum’s (KTD’s) understanding of the difference between the hedgehog and the fox seems to be this: the hedgehog is a monomaniac who knows a lot about a little and mistakenly assumes that he therefore knows a lot about everything, and the fox is a generalist who knows a little about a lot who wisely realizes that doesn’t mean he knows a lot about anything. In other words, the distinction for KTD seems to be one of temperament: the hedgehog is a blowhard like Christopher Hitchens, the fox is a Mr. Magoo like Thomas Geoghegan. However, as I vaguely recall (or misunderstand) from my limited reading on the subject (almost certainly in The Atlantic Monthly in the days before it became The Iraqi Monthly, the homeland for born-again fascists), the distinction lies strictly in the degree of one’s intellectual specialization. Just as the Greek aphorism from which the distinction arises has it, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. (Thanks to kissin at 3/27/09/3:37 for the Wikipedia reference to the subject.)

Second, what made me laugh and decide to write this useless post which no one will ever see because it comes too late is the observation by Luther at 3/26/09/16:34: “I’ve noticed that when future courses are to be decided in areas where there is great uncertainty that domineering personalities who exude confidence tend to assume leadership no matter how stupid they are.” (In fairness, several posters before Luther made a similar point, but Luther’s struck me as funniest.) Adolf Hitler, as I noted in “[Heil Bushler”, my 28,000 word critique of the Bushler junta just prior to the Iraqi Anschluss, was of the same mind: “Here the folkish state must proceed from the assumption that a man of little scientific education but physically healthy, with a good, firm character, imbued with the joy of determination and will-power, is more valuable for the national community than a clever weakling. A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed they will not even be able to safeguard their existence on this earth. In the hard struggle of destiny the man who knows least seldom succumbs, but always he who from his knowledge draws the weakest consequences and is most lamentable in transforming them into action.” (“Mein Kampf”, page 408. The italics are Hitler’s, not mine.) Bill Clinton, in explaining why Americans voted for Bushler over Gore and Kerry, made the same point: People prefer someone who is wrong and strong rather than weak and right.

Though redundant, it is worth quoting the cover letter that I sent along with the White House’s copy of “[Heil Bushler”:

“Brett Landgraf, 526{7} University Way NE, #224, Seattle, WA 98105, Voicemail: {Disconnected}

March 16, 2003

Rich Chancellor Adolf Bushler, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 20500-0001

Dear George,

At first I was not going to send you this letter for three reasons: 1) You would not read it, 2) you have made clear that your respect for other people’s opinions lies only in the power to seize and neutralize them, and 3) you have filled me with your Holy Terror. But though you are on the path to tyranny, you are not there quite yet, and a decent respect for our Constitution compels me to address you directly. You are about to invade a country without provocation to enforce a United Nations resolution, but in DEFIANCE of the United Nations’s chosen course of procedure. In other words, you are about to destroy the United Nations to ‘save’ the United Nations. After 3 million deaths in Korea, 4 million deaths in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, 1.5 million deaths in Indonesia, 2.5 million deaths in the Middle East, unknown millions of deaths in Africa, and a couple hundred thousand deaths in Central America -- 11 to 15 million deaths in all -- to defend America against the advance of Russian and Chinese power in the world, it is not our moral right following the end of the Cold War to continue to wage arbitrary war at the expense of other nations’ lives and treasure. If you and your advisers take this step, in defiance of the will of the United Nations, without the justification of an honest threat to the security of the United States, in the name of a mere 3,000 victims of a criminal gang operating out of another country now defeated that lost 1,000,000 citizens fighting the Russians for us, then you and your men become war criminals, and our honor as a nation of liberty, justice, and democracy is destroyed. You turn the entire world, not just Russia and China, into our enemy. I ask you to reconsider this step, because once you take it, you launch the United States on a campaign of terror that must be despicable in the eyes of God.

Sincerely, Brett Landgraf, The Pink Nigger”

The White House’s response was to return their copy of “[Heil Bushler” a year later, apparently unread, with the dry observation that nobody by the name of “Rich Chancellor” or “Adolf Bushler” worked there. But six years later, as bob somerby at 3/26/09/11:56 and Me (not me, the writer of this post) at 3/26/09/14:50 point out, many of those who opposed the Iraqi Anschluss, despite being right, have not fared so well. While Adolf Bushler has retired to a nice house in Dallas with lifetime homeland security benefits from the Secret Service and his C.F.E. (Chief Fascist Engineer) Dick Cheney is building a third house outside the CIA’s gates to continue promoting the destruction of the Constitution, I am entering my 12th year of homelessness and economic cleansing, stripped of my 4th Amendment right to build or own any house at all in Washington State’s Martin Luther King County commensurate with my subminimum wage annual income. Two of the powerful “Democratic” officials who have colluded in my niggerization, Martin Luther King County Executive Ron Sims and former Washington State Governor Gary Locke, have been nominated for jobs with the Obama administration (Sims, ironically, as Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Locke, almost as ironically, as Secretary of Commerce), and the same “liberal” journalists who have ignored and censored news of my niggerization since 1997 continue to do so. (The half-exceptions, for which I am provisionally grateful, are the comments sections of Salon.com, the Political Animal blog that Steve Benen took over from Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, and Drum’s blog here at Mother Jones. The editors and writers of these right-thinking publications won’t have anything to do with me, and the putinauts at Salon insist on censoring all posts a) adapting the Declaration of Independence to fight corporate tyranny and b) showing the genocidal parallels between “Mein Kampf” and a harrowing subset of the 613 Jewish Commandments that form the ideological foundation of Israel, but they haven’t censored anything else I have written.)

Finally, a number of factors led me to a new solution of the Jewish Problem in Palestine. Isaiah Berlin, who repopularized the story of the hedgehog and the fox, was Jewish; the Jews justify their establishment of the state of Jewmany on the Palestinians’ land through the paradoxical claims that a) they won it 3,000 years ago through genocide against their Canaanite neighbors and b) the world should feel sorry for them because 70 years ago the Germans committed genocide against them (i.e. it’s ok for the Jews to commit Yahweh-sanctified genocide and ethnic cleansing against others but not for others to commit same against them); the world’s Jews have been just as if not more enthusiastic about Adolf Bushler’s neo-fascism as the Americans; talk of expelling all Muslims from Eretz Israel as a solution to the Arab Problem is all the rage in Jewmany today; I recently had to make an emergency cross-continental flight, my first venture into the icky hands of the Homeland Gestapo since shortly after 9/11, which thanks to Southwest Airlines cost me the miraculously low sum of $217 roundtrip; and thanks to this flight I chanced to read an article by Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl, in which he called my criticisms of Jewmany “hate” speech. All this got me to thinking, what would it cost to transfer to relocation camps in Omaha, Nebraska, the 80% of Israel’s Jews who I am ungenerously assuming cheered Adolf Bushler’s assault on the American Constitution and who cannot stand the thought of equal rights with the sand niggers whom they have driven out of their homes from 1933 onward? The current population of Israel is 7,282,000, 80% of whom are Jewish, and the web site www.mapcrow.info calculates that the distance from Tel Aviv to Omaha is 6,473 miles while my there-and-back flight across America was 4,653 miles. So if Southwest Airlines was in charge of the reverse exodus under its “Wanna get away?” program, it would cost $1.4 billion to fly Israel’s 4,660,480 Jewish Arab-haters to the country that thanks to Constitutionally mandated religiously neutral immigration policies saved their sect’s asses from near total extinction by the Third Reich. That’s a one-time cost amounting to one third of the $5 billion that America splits 60-40 between Israel and Egypt EACH YEAR so that those two countries don’t declare war against each other. Even a Jew could appreciate a bargain like that.

Brett Landgraf

I think Matt misses the second piece of the analogy. It's not just being limited in words. It's being limited in revenue-creating productivity. If you get paid by the amount (Hello, Victor Hugo) and the amount you can produce gets capped, you're income is going to go down. It's not just that you get to work less.

"General irregularities are known in time to remedy themselves. By the constitution of ancient Egypt, the priesthood was continually increasing, till at length there was no people beside themselves; the establishment was then dissolved, and the number of priests was reduced and limited. Thus among us, writers will, perhaps, be multiplied, till no readers will be found, and then the ambition of writing must necessarily cease."
- - Samuel Johnson: Adventurer #115

Well this goes a long way toward explaining the remarkable stupidity of most of Yglesias's output.

...is sort of like the tallness of aunts, right? Atrios is much shorter than he used to be and not necessarily better...

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