Using Insults Effectively to Talk About Fiscal Responsibility
August 2nd, 2008 . by economistmomA combative visitor to this blog has recently commented that I can be insulting, but no, he misunderstood me. I would never attempt to use insults to talk about fiscal responsibility. Not when I’ve seen how the professionals do it in the U.S. House of Representatives. Here’s what has to be my favorite floor speech on fiscal responsibility (from November 17, 2005), by one of my favorite members on the House Budget Committee (my former workplace), Blue Dog Rep. Marion Berry (D-Arkansas):
Marion Berry on Adam Putnam’s fiscal irresponsibility
(Rep. Adam Putnam’s website is here, if you’re wondering if he really does look like… you know, who Rep. Berry says he does.)
Turn about is fair play though…even between politicians of the same party. Here’s an excerpt from a very recent National Journal interview with House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wisconsin), who doesn’t seem very fond of fiscal hawks, which would certainly include the Blue Dogs like Marion Berry (…I’ll help you out with emphasis added):
…Looking ahead to 2009, Obey said in the interview that he foresees using the power of the purse to address longstanding national problems. He belittled the politician who focuses solely on the budget deficit as a “one-dimensional bookkeeper with a cardboard heart.”
“This country has neglected for a long time so many of the basic investments that we need to make this country strong,” Obey said. “Green-eyeshade actions aren’t going to fix your long-term debt or deficit situation. Making the right investments that will help the economy grow will help do that.”
The interview goes on with Congressman Obey discussing a few different deficits he feels are more important to focus on than the budget deficit. I’ll follow up on that in a later post.
possibly i am the combative contributor.
only i don’t think i said mom can be insulting. i think i said something closer to she doesn’t recognize when she is being insulting, or more, when the contributers she likes are being insulting.
mom is a much nicer person than i am. but i have been paying more or less serious attention for fifty years to the ways people fool themselves. and i do lose my patience.
actually
having read Obey’s “insult,” I think I am reminded that the devil insists upon good manners. It’s a way of keeping the good guys off balance. There is a huge difference, in my mind, between “has a cardboard hart” whiic is less an “insult” than a colorful way to describe the effect if not the motivation of a policy..
and the deliberately nasty ad hominems of someone like jim glass, who combines the schoolyard insult with the sophisticated torturing of facts of the real professional.
but it all depends which side you are on…. whether them things look like sharp stones incoming or little feathers outgoing.
using insults effectively:
the visiting lecturer come in and states that red is blue and we are all going to die.
so the old profesor gets out his spectroscope, and his color samples, and his textbook, and starts to set up a demonstration
the visiting lecturer gets a nervous look and jumps up and shouts “yellow is black!”
the old professor, no doubt thinking about the difficulties of getting a spectroscope of “black”, says, in some annoyance:
you are changing the subject. are you trying to distract attention away from the demonstration that red is not blue?
the visiting lecturer gets all huffy, “are you insulting my motives?”
so the “debate” turns into an argument about manners, and the people turn away, thinking the professor never did show that red is not blue. we are all going to die.
“…the deliberately nasty ad hominems of someone like jim glass, who combines the schoolyard insult with the sophisticated torturing of facts of the real professional.”
~~
“jim glass … the real professional.”!!
coberly, someone wrote a song about you:
I hate to lose an argument (by now I should be used to it).
I wouldn’t know a valid point if I were introduced to it.
My learning is extensive but consists of mindless trivia,
Designed to fan my ego, which is larger than Bolivia.
The comments that I vomit forth, disguised as jest and drollery,
Are really just an exercise in unremitting trollery.
I say I’m frank and forthright, but that’s merely lies and vanity,
The gibberings of one who’s at the limits of his sanity.
If only I could get a life, as many people tell me to;
If only Mom could find a circus freak-show she could sell me to;
hi mom
i wonder if i need to call attention to Sullivan above…since you clearly missed Glass’s nastiness in earlier posts that you called “brilliant.”
the trouble with insults (mea culpa) is that they quickly become boring and they don’t get us anywhere.
i felt driven to what you called insults because the vague but suggestive posts that were coming in were not getting us anywhere, lacking anything i could recognize as connected thought.
now that is either an insult, or a desperate plea.
your choice.
Sullivan
back in the day i studied something like this. so there is always a corner of my heart where i can believe the world really looks this way to you. i think Hans Christian Anderson wrote a story about it called The Ice Princess.
the problem for me if not for you is that the human brain is really quite limited, and it is possible for someone to construct a model of reality that only has enough points in contact with real reality that they can stay out of jail and keep a job. i am sure you see people in your own life that you belive are delusional… me, for example.
of course, my other possible interpretation is that you are simply evil and after a lifetime of lying and desiring to hurt people it comes so automatically to you that you believe in it yourself.
i ask you to construct a connected (”logical”) argument that can actually be evaluated by patient people of good will. i even recognize that “logic” is itself subject to what those people of good will are mutually willing to accept.
but you can’t do this… no real shame, i taught undergraduates for two years and i don’t think i ever saw anyone who was really capable of it… so all you can do is come back howling and gibbering about my “insults.”
i think some of you must have gone to those new schools where they never tell a child he has got his sums wrongs… that would be damaging his self esteem, be insulting… instead they give him a passing grade for being generally agreeable to the teacher. hell, i did that myself… give passing grades to people who didn’t have a clue.. because i didn’t want to hurt their job prospects. ah, well, the rewards of kindness and all.
Don’t like waxing poetical? How about psychology:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL
————–quote————-
There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
“I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn’t know it,” Dunning said.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.
————–endquote————-
Ever know anybody like that, coberly?