Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

My biggest gripe so far with the Obama administration, which is one I've had with politicians of all stripes, especially the alleged liberals for years, is their complete failures of imagination. There are times when incremental technocratic moderate change is important, necessary, or the only option. And there are times when the status quo has failed so badly that there's room for big imaginative changes. And if you let yourself get circumscribed by the "necessary", you ignore the possible.

But here, let me turn the mic over to my man Franklin Delano, and his four freedoms speech. (Wikipedia) in 1941. The Great Depression and the onset of World War II, and instead of aiming for small ideas circumscribed by the "necessary" or the "possible", he managed to still think big, and act big, and keep trying different things till they worked. Not half-assed bank bailouts without any oversight, not a maybe kinda half-assed possible public health option, but Social Security, no pandering about "glad to have jobs" (more from pundits than pols), but the National Labor Relations Act, Works Project Authority, Civilian Conservation Corps, and FDR directly took on the banksters and their bought minions in government.

It'd be nice if those we elected as leaders could show some leadership, the kind that won FDR landslide elections.

I'm so proud of our President, in no more than five minutes, he gave me the need to find the proper word.

Actually, there were two things President Bush said that struck me. The first I know the words for, it was outright lies and bullshit. NPR had a soundbite of him trying to calm Russia's fears about the push for "missile defense" by saying it was aimed at "rogue regimes" in "areas such as the Middle East" who could "hold us all hostage".

In other words, we need missile defense to protect us from Iranian nuclear missiles (not North Korean ones any more, even though North Korea actually HAS nukes, and was what we were supposed to be making missile defense for before). Except of course Iran doesn't have nukes, nor do they have missiles that could reach the US, he's just bullshitting and lying and waving around the "IRAN SCARY NUKES NUKES SCARY!" flag. The reason he's pushing "missile defense" doesn't have anything to do with Iran, or North Korea, or even Russia, really, it's just one of those absurd things that the Republicans have been in love with since forever, even though it's not really likely to work like at all.

But back to the original thing. What do you call it when somebody says something that's true, but their actions show they obviously don't believe it or just don't give a damn if it's true or not? I suppose that could fall under the realm of bullshit as well, because that's when somebody says something without caring about its truth.

Maybe I should give the example. But, I can't find the quote online. So, from memory and notes, "I we let up the pressure, terrorists will establish camps across the country (Afghanistan) and threaten us all." There is some truth to this, though like every single thing George W. Bush says about terrorism, it's exaggerated and presented as if terrorists in caves are more of a threat than the Soviet Union with nukes was. The bit of truth is that if we do cut down on troops in Afghanistan, and divert our resources and attention, there's a good chance the Taliban will come back, or at worst, it'll turn to a completely chaotic state.

How do I know that's true? Because that's exactly what HAS happened since we diverted our resources and attention from Afghanistan to the fiasco in Iraq, years ago. Which we did at the bidding of the exact same man who was just now saying how important Afghanistan is.

So, what do you call it when somebody says something that's technically true, but show they don't actually care about it, and it's actually largely their fault, too? Is that just bullshit, or is there a better word?

The following is the text of an email I sent to NPR's Marketplace show today, after they had a hack from the WSJ editorial page spouting nonsense straight out of the "Fairtax" book. Here's the article in question.

And my letter:
This morning, on the Marketplace Morning Report, you had Stephen Moore on, praising the benefits of a national sales tax.  His ideas and numbers come entirely from the book "FairTax" by Neal Boortz and John Linder.  And unfortunately, most of what he quoted is inaccurate or false.  A 23% sales tax would not replace all of the government income, the percentage was picked as near the maximum amount people would tolerate as a sales tax.  A national sales tax, despite his claim, would be extremely regressive and complex.  Most families who are out of the top 1% spend most of their income each year, which would make their net tax rate at LEAST 23%, plus the increases in cost that would come from this kind of tax.  Whereas the richest few don't spend all their money, which would make their net tax rate far below the 23% the rest of us would pay.  That hardly qualifies as "fair" by any stretch of the imagination.  And his idea of a $20,000 rebate for the sales tax spent?  That would be at least as complicated as the current income tax.  The rest of the work of tax collection would then be pushed on to the companies who sell products.  It would require just as much work, and we would still require the IRS to investigate cheats and other things.

His entire presentation was misleading at best, and outright false at worst.  The entire idea of a "fair" national sales tax is snake oil, designed to cover up for a gigantic tax cut for the rich and a tax hike for the rest of us, not any kind of serious policy suggestion.

...is to write a self-help book and fleece a bunch of people who need help out of their money.

Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.

Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.

So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.

So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.