Lawrence Kane's new book comes highly recommended by Dr. Helen

He has excellent thoughts on how to defuse potentially violent situations. Dr. Helen's interview with Kane is here.

The book: Little Black Book of Violence: What Every Young Man Needs to Know About Fighting.

ACORN pimp videos: the most troubling response from a Yale alum (4 of 5)

[Previous]

The rudest response to my ACORN post on the Yale listserv didn't bother me as much a private* email from another alum who I'll call "Healthy Discussion." Here's the body of her email in full:

"Your [listserv] email does not provide much room for debate or healthy discussion, and therefore I do not see the merit of your posting on this listserve,
unless your purpose is to offend those who may disagree with you."

The central problem with this email lies in the word "offend." Humor columnist Dave Barry explains what I mean in a video made by the folks at FIRE. He begins (at 1:55) with this observation:

the one place where you'd think free thought and free speech and conflict of ideas would be most encouraged [, the University,] has somehow become the most restricted and constricted and most intellectually constipated area of American life.

Then (at 2:32) he performs a wonderful riff on the O-word:

Any time anyone says that he or she is offended by anything, that's all you have to say--that's the magic word--"I'm offended"--and everybody just backs down and says "Oh my god, we don't want to offend anybody." . . . At some point the right to voice your opinion got trumped, at least in the universities, by the right not to be offended . . . Which makes a complete joke out of the concept of intellectual diversity and intellectual freedom.

Here's the thing about important and difficult topics: you can arrive at a healthy discussion from almost any starting point. But you can't have a healthy discussion if the fear of even mildly offending anyone stifles the discussion before it starts.

TOMORROW: ACORN, Yale and the double standard on free speech


*It was not part of the public listserv conversation.

Ryan Mauro to political Right: Don't overdo criticism of President Obama

One key point that Mauro doesn't mention: overdoing it devalues one's criticism it and often makes it less effective.

He points this out:

The Nation Brands Index now ranks the United States as the most admired country around the world* . . .

“What’s really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009,” said Simon Anholt, the founder of the NBI.

Mauro's opening paragraphs resonated strongly with me:

I can remember the disgust I felt between 2001 and 2008 when so many critics of President Bush couldn’t bring themselves to applaud anything he did, instead only grinding their teeth as they mentioned his name. If boxed into a corner and forced into commending something, such as the overthrow of the Taliban, it would not be said without hateful prefaces and postscripts about how evil, dumb, incompetent, radical, etc. he is.

This pride-filled childishness, intellectual unfairness, and overall resistance to acknowledge any success propelled me to promise myself that I’d never adopt the same attitude, would remain as independent as possible so as not to be seduced by the partisan rage, and would take pride in supporting my president whenever I felt comfortable doing so.

Bush Derangement Syndrome was counter-productive for the country **, and so is knee-jerk dumping on President Obama. Criticism of President Bush's environmental record is a good example of exaggeration from the Left. The Right needs to avoid this kind of thing.

Well done, Ryan.

via Instapundit


*A dubious achievement, perhaps, but notable nevertheless.
**It damaged the credibility of the Left as well

Advice from Irving Kristol

Passed on by Mary Eberstadt:

About editing: Always just cut the text if you have to, he advised, never add to what's there.

About responding to critics en masse in a published venue: When answering letters written in response to something you've written, don't use the authors' names. Just lay out their common themes. That way you won't get caught up personally and can just stick to the ideas.

Much more in the WSJ. Kristol died a week ago.

On having your ideas attacked . . . clues that you're winning the debate . . . and the common fate of dissenters

In The Black Swan--which was published in 2007 and foreshadows/explains the economic meltdown of 2008--Nassim Nicholas Taleb has strong opinions about some well-known professors of finance & economics including Myron Scholes, Stephen Ross and Martin Shubik.

This bit is from page 280:

It was symptomatic that almost all people who attacked my thinking attacked a deformed version of it . . . . Some even had to change my biography. At a panel in Lugano, Myron Scholes once got in to a state of rage, and went after a transformed version of my ideas. I could see the pain in his face.

Once, in Paris, a prominent member of the mathematical establishment, who invested part of his lifeon some minute sub-sub-property of the Gaussian, blew a fuse--right when I showed empirical evidence of Black Swans in markets. He turned red with anger, had difficulty breathing, and started hurling insults at me for having descrated the institution, lacking pudeur (modesty); he shouted "I am a member of the Academy of Science!" to give more strength to his insults. (The French translation of my book was out of stock the next day.)

My best episode was with Steve Ross, an economist perceived to be an intellectual far superior to Scholes and Merton, and deemed a formidable debater, gave rebuttal to my ideas by signaling small errors or approximations in my presentation, such as Markowitz was not the first to ..." thus certifying that he had no answer to my main point.

Later (on page 283) Taleb points out that, as always, critics of conventional wisdom face plenty of hostility:

The insightful scholar Martin Shubik, who held that the degree of excessive abstraction of these models, a few steps beyond necessity, makes them totally unusable, found himself ostracized, a common fate for dissenters.

How to be bi-partisan

Peggy Noonan describes how Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan bridged the aisle.

The art of apology

Tom Peters interviews John Kador on how to make and effective apology. According to Kador, executives who apologize are more success than those who don't. And they make more money.

The five elements of an apology:

1. Recognition
2. Responsibility
3. Remorse
4. Restitution
5. Repetition

I made one a few weeks ago. In retrospect, I only covered the first three. Next time I'll try for all five.

[Webtool note: Peters links to the book using a site called LinkBaton.]

Civility and political epithets

Enough of this "Democrat party" nonsense.

I like -- and vote for -- many Republicans in Maryland. The state would benefit from a Republican resurgence. One of my dreams is to live in an honest-to-goodness two-party state. But hearing Republican politicians talk about the "Democrat party" really grates on the ear.

If I hear a politician use it, my brain automatically slots him in the "nasty & ineffective" pigeonhole. he is likely to lose my vote.

I'm no fan of Hendrik Hertzberg, but in this case, he's right.