CSotD: Crowd-sourcing the zeitgeist (Thumbsucker division)
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Matt Bors notes a particularly silly recommendation on the topic of mass shootings.
It's hard to come up with a "most ridiculous" approach to the problem, but she's certainly in the running.
However, this argument ties into an issue I've got with an entire spectrum of writing and punditry, which is the mileage you can get by tapping into the Mutually Accepted Reality. Also with punditry in general.
This hit me on two different levels yesterday, and it took Matt Bors and Megan McArdle to help me put the two together into a gestalt.
And the gestalt was the realization that some people are just full of (A) themselves and (B) shit.
I do not expect credit for a new insight.
But here are some of the parts that went into the whole:
Yesterday, I watched President Obama's interview on Meet the Press, in which Obama laid out the compromises he has offered, compromises he says a large number of Republicans favor but their leadership won't accept.
But David Gregory badgered him about not having achieved an agreement, suggesting that leadership means getting an agreement signed, whatever it might be.
And Obama responded, "I think we're all frustrated. The only thing I would caution against, David, is this notion that 'Well, both sides are refusing to compromise.' That's just not true. … What I'm arguing for are maintaining tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans. I don't think anybody would consider that some liberal, left-wing agenda. That used to be considered a pretty mainstream Republican agenda. And it's something that we can accomplish today, if we simply allow for a vote in the Senate and in the House to get it done. The fact that it's not happening is an indication of how far certain factions inside the Republican party have gone that they can't even accept what used to be considered centrist, mainstream positions on these issues."
In the roundtable afterwards, Gregory dismissed the notion that "a pox on both their houses" is "lazy journalism and punditry," saying, "Here's the reality that even his advisors have to understand: The American people, Democrats and Republicans, do look at results, or the lack thereof, so it's not 'lazy punditry' when people are out there very frustrated with both ends of this."
And all the pundits agreed that they aren't at all lazy.
Later in the day, I caught a segment of "On the Media" in which Bob Garfield talked to a TV writer about how great network television has become.
And my response was, "no, it hasn't," and specifically, that I can't stand cop shows (or crook shows) in which the actions and dialogue are clearly scripted by manicured, well-coifed Hollywood dream merchants, based on what they think life on the street is probably like.
A fanciful view that they get from things written by other manicured, well-coifed Hollywood dream merchants who haven't soiled their deck shoes since they were eight years old.
It's way too many conceptual clones removed from Joseph Wambaugh, who actually knew what he was writing about, and nearly a century removed from Damon Runyon, who had actually hung out with Prohibition-era gangsters.
Yet it is accepted and embraced as gritty realism by people who also have not the vaguest notion of how this stuff works in real life but only of how it works in Hollywood fantasy.
Crowd-sourcing can create a zeitgeist but that doesn't make it accurate or valuable. And, yes, I'm aware that there is a theory of the wisdom of crowds.
It's such a damn foolish notion that its refutation was enshrined 171 years ago in the classic, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds."
Which brings us to Megan McArdle's fanciful notion of rushing the gunman, and this morning's sudden snap into focus.
Having not heard her theory, I wanted to find the context so I could judge Matt's response.
The first thing I found was her response to someone's criticism of the theory, in which she points out that she didn't say she thought it would work, only that it would work about as well as anything else.
Which brought me back to her original piece on the futility of attempting to prevent mass shootings.
Now, there is a genre of print punditry referred to by caustic Lou Grant types as a "thumbsucker," not to be confused with a "goat-choker."
So I was reading McArdle's first piece and found myself thinking, "When do we get to the part about rushing the gunman?" and I looked over at the little slider in the right-hand rail of my browser and oh dear god but it was small and high up on the screen. So when I finally got to the bottom and found the passage in question, I cut-and-pasted everything above it into Word.
Folks, I had to plow through 4,426 of her 4,584 words of thumbsucking punditry before I got to her purported solution. And her response to the criticism weighed in at 2,138 words.
All of which Matt Bors managed to summarize and refute in four panels.
Which snapped a few things into focus:
1. At least when a political cartoonist is full of shit, it doesn't take you half an hour to find it out.
2. It's okay to despise the self-important twits who attend the White House Correspondents Dinner.
3. Sturgeon's Law is true. 90 percent of everything is crap.
4. Spurgeon's Law is also true: "Shit with a piece of corn in it is still shit."
5. The only thing worse than conflating popularity with quality is assuming the critics are any more on target.
6. Megan McArdle has made me feel much less guilty for setting a limit each day of 750 words but then writing nearly 1,000.
7. The Internet acronyms TLDNR and STFU may be used more or less interchangeably.
8. The self-satisfied smile in that first panel is worth a great deal more than 1,000 words.
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