Vox, derp, and the intellectual stagnation of the Left

[Wilikon]

“explanatory journalism”

[...]
Meanwhile, two things are particularly striking about the current Democratic agenda. The first is that it’s so tired. Raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on high earners, tightening environmental regulation — these are all ideas from the ’60s. The second is that nobody on the left seems to be aware of it.

One of the most striking examples of this epistemic closure among liberal writers are their forays into “explanatory journalism.” The idea that many people might like clear, smart explanations of what’s going on in the news certainly has merit. But the tricky thing with “explaining” the news is that in order to do so fairly, you have to be able to do the mental exercise of detaching your ideological priors from just factually explaining what is going on. Of course, as non-liberal readers of the press have long been well aware, this has always been a problem for most journalists. And yet, the most prominent “explanatory journalism” venture has been strikingly bad at actually explaining things in a non-biased way.

I am, of course, talking about Vox, the hot new venture of liberal wonkblogger extraordinaire Ezra Klein. It was already a bad sign that his starting lineup was mostly made up of ideological liberals. And a couple months in, it’s clear that much of what passes for “explanation” on Vox is really partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise. …

Increasingly, liberal writers have been drinking their own kool-aid. They really believe they are the “reality based community.” When they talk about conservatives they respect, they qualify their praise with “The smart conservative so and so…” — with such “he’s one of the good ones” asterisks betraying the wholly unwarranted assumption on the left that the vast majority of conservatives are crazy, stupid, or both.

And yet, liberals themselves are very rarely capable of passing an Ideological Turing Test. They believe not only that an honest evaluation of the world lines up with their worldview (everyone does, to some extent), but have also forgotten how to differentiate between the honest evaluations and their worldview, or that doing so is even possible, or that their worldview is based on very idiosyncratic moral priors.


http://theweek.com/article/index/263711/vox-derp-and-the-intellectual-stagnation-of-the-left

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[Chef Ramsay]

Most of these doctrinaire liberal koolaid writers and drinkers are so against certain elements on the right that they fit their arguments (or whatever) around their perceived hate. When they know they have the lower hand on an issue, they immediately start talking about the Koch Bros and the money that they donate to Tea Party/Liberty republican types/PACs. And yes, the left is a phony mental disease society that plays down to the lowest common denominator w/o giving the real world facts to their minions to understand the big picture, hence destroying their premise to raise the min wage and tax the producing class more. Problem is here, the left has so destroyed the job market over past 6 years that untold millions are out of work and likely won't make it back anytime soon unless policy changes and the market loosens up. Formerly productive people are now unfortunately advocating for expanding entitlements just to get by in life and that's before we take into consideration all the illegals being shipped in and allowed to vote. If the traditional dem voting block (black folks) don't show up like they did in '08, then you get republican takeovers (US House) of 2010 and keeping it in 2012. The GOP is likely going to take back the Senate and keep the House here in 2014 despite the typical class warfare tactics of the left that has nothing else to run on...last of which is their party's current record on policy which has brought to where we are.

Finally, just think of all the drones in society that are just expendable parts of the bigger and bigger govt experiments and how if they knew anything about Bitcoin that they'd be much better off personally and also shutting down that which is strangling them.

[DooMAD]

Whatever intellectual stagnation they're writing about in the article pales in comparison to the intellectual stagnation of a "left" vs "right" argument to begin with.  Ideas are generally more complex than something that can be simply pigeonholed as either a left wing or right wing idea.  Anyone who attempts to pin one particular topic down to one particular "side" is either trying to dumb it down because they can't grasp the concept well enough, or lacks the nerve to draw their own damn conclusions about the subject without some parrots to agree with them and back them up.  Herd mentality at its finest.  It's time we moved past vague generalisations like left and right in politics and focus instead on the tangible benefits and drawbacks of any given proposal.

Aside from the fact that the article sounds like a circle jerk for like minded people, the fact that it's also a puff-piece for a book they're trying to sell means I'll take it even less seriously.