I just put up a long winding post on Lott and a bunch of other things, published it, and decided it was incomprehensible.
I’ll go eat dinner and see if I can edit it into something that makes sense and repost it.
Sorry ’bout that…

The usually annoying David Shaw pulls off an interesting article in last weekend’s LA Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) on the social end economic gap between newly professionalized journalists and the ‘average reader’ they are trying to connect with.

The median annual salary for “experienced reporters” working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation — the 40 largest papers in the country — was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for “senior reporters” — and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers — is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

In other words, many big-city journalists — especially those who set the agenda for what gets covered in the rest of the media — have moved away from much of the largely middle- and working-class audience they purport to serve. At best, they’re out of touch. At worst, they’ve become elitists.

The natural sympathy that most journalists feel for the underdog and for the downtrodden prevents the media from ignoring the poor. The fascination that the American public has with the rich and famous prevents the media from ignoring the upper strata of society. But newspapers seldom write about the middle class, the working class — white- or blue-collar.

“We don’t write about them because we no longer live like them,” says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe. “We live in other neighborhoods, and we don’t visit theirs. And I fear that there is a subtle disdain for their lives, their lifestyles, their material and spiritual aspirations.”

Today’s sophisticated, well-paid, well-educated journalists often have more in common with their sources — government officials, university scientists, high-powered lawyers and businessmen — than they do with their readers. In a sense, that’s not surprising. As the world has become more complex and more specialized, the better news organizations have tried to hire their own specialists — reporters with law degrees to cover the courts, reporters with medical degrees to cover medicine, reporters who attend seminars and write books on various other specialized topics to cover those fields.
…
Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian, recalls a newsroom discussion at the Oregonian this year about a state law requiring tax refunds to individuals, even though the state was in “dire financial shape.”

“The refund would amount to several hundred dollars per family,” Rowe says, “and our journalists were sitting around saying, ‘Why doesn’t the state do something about this law and balance the budget instead? A few hundred dollars isn’t that much.’ But to many of our readers, several hundred dollars is a lot of money, and we have to make sure our coverage isn’t biased in that way.”

The growing gap in income and education between journalists and most of their potential readers — and the difference in values and lifestyles that often derive from that gap — is a problem for newspapers already weakened by competitive pressures and declining public confidence, especially in a weak economy, with a rapidly growing immigrant population.

He looks at it from a media marketing point of view, but it is also another piece in the puzzle I’ve been playing with lately.
The overall picture isn’t clear, but I’m thinking that the disconnect between the people who think and write about stuff for a living and those who make and do stuff for a living is fairly large…and that the impacts of that disconnect, in politics, economics, and social development are even larger.

Acidman Mars gets his rant on in a big way. The topic: race.
You want ballsy honesty, you want the truth?? Yeah, you can handle the truth, and here it is.
There are more Acidmans in the world than we recognize. Not nearly as many as I wish there were…
I have to piss on his feet just a little bit though (hey, I yam what I yam). For every Richard Mack who walked through a brick wall of prejudice and came out the other side, how many didn’t?
I’ve had the honor of meeting one of the Little Rock 9. He and I actually disagree on a number of things, and I was happy to wrestle with him as we talked over the dinnertable.
But I looked into his eyes as he talked about what it was like…damn. Any words I use are inadequate. I can’t imagine it, and I have a really good imagination.
We’ve come a hella long way, and I’m proud of what we all have done…of my dinner-mate, and of the Acidman too.
Doesn’t mean we’re done yet.
(added link to Little Rock 9)

I finally got some time to scan the Blogverse today, and found a gem over at Matthew Yglesias’ &ltirony&gt although Matthew seems to mistakenly feel that putting blogs in alphabetical order on blogrolls is a Bad Thing &lt/irony&gt

…All together, it’s worth taking note of a certainly historical naivete that undergirds a lot of libertarian approaches to property rights. The patterns of ownership and wealth that currently exist in the US have been profoundly shaped by the government’s decision over a period of about 100 years to recognize and enforce property holdings that took the form of ownership of other human beings. One might want to add that the wholesale expropriation of North America’s indigenous inhabitants played a significant role as well. The point is that it’s not as if whatever property folks own nowadays came down to them through a series of morally pure transactions that would be desperately tainted by government interference. The state and coercive appropriations are the roots of property ownership all the way down.

The conservatives share the libertarians worship of property rights as-they-are, and somehow take them as handed down on stone tablets, rather than as evolving social constructs (which they are).
(Note: I’ll have more to say on containing contradictory positions sometime soon)
Having said that, I’ll switch sides and note that while property is an evolving social construct, a respect for property rights is nonetheless a critical part of what I would see as a just society. Because it’s mutable doesn’t mean it’s anything we want it to be.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be nice.
But actually it does, because you get to sleep at night in the warm comfort of a good conscience. And even better, sometimes people go out of their way to make a point for you.
I’ve talked in the past about the ‘liberalista’ (I’m looking for a word for the high-profile liberals who I believe have hijacked the leadership of the liberal movement and the Democratic Party…that will do until I come up with something better) attitudes, and the underlying position of obnoxious superiority.
Avedon Carol posted a couple of times a response to my MESS OF CRACKPOTTAGE post below; I noticed that there were multiples, and that she had clarified her point and wasn’t trying to link me to Ann Coulter (ick), and thanked her.
I was too quick on the ‘send’, because this is the email that crossed mine:

I tried to post a response in your comments (twice) but they don’t appear to have gone through. I said something like this:
———-
My post wasn’t about yours – everything I had to say about that I said in my original comments to you. MY post was about Tom Scott appearing to believe that if Alec Baldwin says something stupid, it means Ann Coulter is not a crackpot. I posted the full exchange because I wanted to make it obvious what a non-sequitur his response was to mine.
Oh, yeah, and while “our” crackpots are a few scattered individuals in the entertainment industry, the Republicans elect theirs – not just to Congress, but even to Senate Minority/Majority Leader status.
———-
BTW, if the kind of support I was getting for my writing was of the caliber of the comments you got to this post, I’d definitely ask myself what I was doing wrong.
Avedon
(emphasis added)

Gosh, there are so many things to talk about here…
…the first is that my team, the Democrats does in fact elect fools as well.
Cynthia McKinney, anyone?
…the second is that marvelously perfect tone of self-righteousness in the last paragraph.
See, here’s the deal. I’m a liberal because I respect pretty much everyone. I was taught this by my father, who was always as polite and respectful to the poor and low as he was to the rich and powerful (in fact, maybe a bit more so). I think that the poor and powerless are typically pretty good human beings who are on the wrong side of circumstance, and that part of the job of government is to make that condition bearable, and to make sure that it isn’t structural…that you’re not on the wrong side of circumstance because your parents were, or because of your color or sex. That way their kids will have a chance at living in big houses and spoiling their children into insensibility like I do.
But at root, it comes from a feeling that the least of us are as human and worthy of dignity as the best.
But somehow, we have managed to raise an intellectual class who believe in liberalism in no small part because it allows them to feel superior to others.
I think Avedon has pretty much declared on which side of that divide she stands.
(Embarrassingly forgot basic blog etiquette and link to the blog discussed. Corrected.)

Ann Salisbury uncorks on the California Legislature as they duck and cover to avoid the hard choices the budget crisis is going to require.
Hard to choose a favorite line, but I’ll settle for this:

…although all these legislators begged the voters to elect them, they appear to not be interested in tackling the difficult problems. They are seriously considering turning budget issues over to the voters (again). What, exactly, are these folks getting paid to do?

You go Ann!!

So I was stuck in traffic riding my motorcycle to the client site today, which meant that the ride was more contemplative than usual (if I’m riding through traffic, I can’t think about anything but riding).

And I was thinking about Avdeon Carol’s post, and what it is that I find so grating about many people (not including her at this point, since I don’t know her well enough) who share the general “attitude space” I’m trying to talk about.

And I had an idea I just had to try out on you guys.

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting – that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem: I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s “‘Dirty Hands’.”

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

In case you’re wondering if our tax dollars are actually doing anything about terrorism…

(from the JAMA via Course of Thought)
Police Detainment of a Patient Following Treatment With Radioactive Iodine
To the Editor: We recently treated a 34-year-old man for Graves disease with 20 mCi of iodine 131. Twenty-four hours after treatment, his radioactive iodine uptake was 63%. Three weeks after treatment, he returned to our clinic complaining that he had been strip-searched twice at Manhattan subway stations. Police had identified him as emitting radiation and had detained him for further questioning. He returned to the clinic and requested a letter stating that he had recently been treated with radioactive iodine.
This patient’s experience indicates that radiation detection devices are being installed in public places in New York City and perhaps elsewhere. Patients who have been treated with radioactive iodine or other isotopes may be identified and interrogated by the police because of the radiation they emit.
…

Well, that’s good news…

Avedon Carol has sent some traffic over, so I went to take a look.
Sigh. It’s frustrating to me. I feel like some kind of linguistic hermaphrodite, because when I talk about things like patriotism (and in her case earlier, the Pledge issue), I feel like people who I’d probably somewhat agree with – on many things – look at me like I’m speaking Aramaic.
Carol has a long, discursive post, where she starts with my comment about liberalism and patriotism, and drifts onward to a general comment about ‘the Right wing folks (the Ann Coulters etc.) are crackpots’, with what I take as the clear inference that I’m on Ann’s side.
Well, here’s what I’ve said about Ann Coulter…
THE WOOSH OF CREDIBILITY FLYING OUT THE WINDOW and COULTER’S ROOMATE … IN HELL
Yeah, I’m, a fan alright…
She then defends a bitter joke about Kathryn Harris (the one where someone watched the coverage of the Ryder truck bring in the ballots in Fla and hoped OJ had murdered her) by explaining

This is more of a joke about the famous slo-mo car chase than anything else, but considering the nightmare that Harris had subjected America to at the time, the real outrage is that the woman isn’t in jail right now. Having committed significant crimes, she then ran for Congress and was elected by Republicans.

Right. That makes it OK, then…
I just don’t get it. And, obviously, she doesn’t get me.
That doesn’t matter much to either one of us, except…
…that her group is closer to the seats of liberal power than mine, and they keep getting their butts kicked (yeah, yeah, I know Gore won the popular vote, and this election was close…but the Constitution doesn’t give the popular vote winner the Oval Office, and most Presidential parties lose seats mid-term).
Perhaps this snippet of dialog will help explain why:
From LiveJournal (via A Small Victory) in response to a post on Pearl Harbor…(note that the bold comments are from Chuck Simmons, the blog author)

remember what happened to a nation that attacked us?
yeah, ‘civilized’ america dropped two nuclear bombs and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, in addition to causing untold environmental damage. Real noble of us. Many things make me proud to be an american; our ultimate response to pearl harbor is one that definitely does not…

The commenter goes on…

There is a moral distinction between us and them (Germans and Japanese). They made war on us and any suffering they had was due solely to their actions. They made an immoral choice and it caught up with them.
Again, it’s not so cut-and-dried as you’d like to think. Judge, judge, judge. “It’s all their fault.” It’s so easy to say.

And on…

Why aren’t you proud to be an American?
I AM proud to be an American, I’m just not proud of some of our history, and some of the present-day things our government is done. I’d have to be crazy not to be proud. Unfortunately, those things that I am not proud of are things that put me in jeopardy in other parts of the world. If I were to travel outside North America, I’d sure as hell try my best to pass as a Canadian. Not because I don’t like being American, but because I don’t want anyone killing me because of my government’s actions.
And finally, if America were power hungry, as you imply, demonstrate our empire. Who are we subjugating? Whose lands do we rape and pillage for our own benefit?
The world is our empire. Look at all the places where we have troops stationed (granted, some of those places want us, but others do not). We are the superpower–what responsibility comes with that is what we’ve given ourselves. The European Union is rather strong these days–what would happen if we take a little step back and put ourselves on EQUAL ground with those nations? Would the world fall apart? I think not. There are plenty of places in the world (SE Asia and Africa are good examples) who need plenty of help of the non-war variety. Food and medicine would be a good start. Where are we? Doing some, but not nearly enough to make a dent. What if we spend all the money we’re putting into this Iraqi “war” on HELPING instead of KILLING? Sure, it sucks to live in Iraq now, but at least they HAVE a fairly stable government. At least they HAVE money. People are starving to death everyday, people are dying from easily cureable diseases and we are spending billions cranking out weapons of destruction and getting ready to cause MORE death in the world? Not too honorable of us.

Get my point?? This is how mainstream America sees liberals…because the cutting edge of liberalism in America is dominated by voices like this.
We can blame it on the big bad media. We can blame it on the conservatives who set the agenda. We seem to be blaming it on everyone but ourselves.
When we do, maybe we can get some liberal things done in this country.
(edited for spelling)
(formatted for clarity)

Sunday, my old training partner from cycling showed up with her husband. (Hey, before you accuse me of being a wimp, note that she’s twenty years younger than me and was a pretty competitive collegiate racer – not that I’m insecure or anything.) He’s Iranian, came here after the Revolution like so many others, and was just back from Iran where he visited his family.
We visited for a while, and I unsurprisingly started asking him about what things were like right now.
He said that even the rank-and-file fundamentalists are disgusted with the current regime and are looking for change. There is a core, however, who he believes will not just step aside is politely asked. And unlike the last revolution (in which I gather that he participated in Phase I, deposing the Shah, but not Phase II, bringing in the mullahs), the ‘street’ appears to have not yet developed a taste for the fight he believes will be needed to actually make a change.
So he describes a country where things are slowly grinding to a halt as more and more people wait for something … anything to happen.
The religious police are suddenly timid…he typically gets interviewed and harassed every time he goes back. This time they called his mother, asked for a number where they could call him that night…and never called back.
And then he described going to the airport to come home, and the difference between out two societies was made clear to me. As he approached and then entered the airport in Tehran, we was thinking the whole time about how far he could go before he couldn’t run away…at what point in entering the airport he would be unable to escape the security police and would, if they wanted to arrest him, be theirs.
I’ll think about that the next time I get annoyed at the TSA folks for swabbing my laptop.