"Everybody's talkin' at me. I don't hear a word they're sayin,' only the echoes of my mind," Marc Ambinder & Company's new theme song as they recede, kicking and screaming, into the dustbin of history. Above, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Bromancer Midnight Cowboy.
Just caught a big fish on our twitter line a couple of minutes ago. Marc Ambinder himself, politics editor of The Atlantic, objecting to something we'd left in the comments of his unwittingly self-revelatory "Have conservatives gone mad?" and protesting too much that he was just "regular folks." Our comment:
Epistemic closure* is hard to recognize when one is within the echo chamber, where psychological projection is the defense mechanism of choice. It's scary when you sense that you are headed for the dustbin of history:
Tea Party 2.0: "Just be willing to work hard, and don't try to claim the credit"
Prof Jacobson of Legal Insurrection had already landed the fish and removed the entrails. They say fish is good for you. Dead, broiled and sitting pretty on your plate. Delicious!
Note: Googling for a remembered image of a fancy fish dish with the entrée's head propped up on the platter that we would have liked to use to lead off this post, we stumbled upon a William Staneski excerpt from an American Thinker piece back in September of 2008 that resonates in this Marc Ambinder moment:
It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth …
It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.
Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.
Marc our words.
*Update: A little word-wealth wisdom about "epistemic closure" from our imail correspondent:
Great post, but I'll be blunt. I would leave "epistemic" out of the title. Just say "Marc Ambinder and the echoes of his mind." Epistemic is off-putting to a luddite such as I.
You could do a Word Wealth thing within the post: Epistemic: closed minded. Look it up in the dictionary and see a picture of Marc Ambinder.
We stand corrected.
Update II: Dear Dan Riehl gives us a whack.
Update III: Prof Jacobson links:
Sissy Willis caught the big fish in her Twitter net.
Crossposted at Liberty Pundits.
Sissy, that Atlantic piece was amazingly devoid of content. After putting aside the informal fallacies (category error/false dichotomy, straw man, "no true Scotsman," appeal to authority or public opinion...), unsupported assertions, and semantic loading, I was left with the links leading to the original argument, and was then able to figure out what was going on.
At its root, the topic was Levin's book, and whether it was well-argued. From what I have seen, it is not, and Manzi nailed it. Levin may or may not be right, but he has not proven his case. Amazingly enough, Armbinder does exactly what Levin did: present his judgments without providing a basis for them.
Shorter Levin: I don't like Obama.
Shorter Manzi: I don't either, but so what? You haven't said anything that would change anyone's mind. Who do you think you are, Al Franken?
Shorter Armbinder: I don't like Levin.
Shorter Mitch: [sigh] I can't believe Armbinder and Levin get paid for this.
Posted by: Mitch | April 24, 2010 at 12:27 PM
Mitch, sorry to say it, but if you're referring to Manzi's post on the Corner as "nailing it," you've got the wrong ending:
Shorter Manzi: Levin doesn't have a Ph.D! He's an idiot!! Really! No, really! Seriously! And he doesn't have a Ph.D! I'm smart, by the way. Oh, and I love scientific consensus.
Shorter Mitch: [sigh] I can't believe actually think that that had any substance but apparently I do.
Posted by: rrr | April 25, 2010 at 12:27 AM