House of Eratosthenes

There’s just no getting around it: The Founding Fathers took the trouble to say who did this endowing, and Sam Adams, the beer company, skipped over that part.

I can certainly see the marketing department figuring it’s doing its job, pointing out that an atheist’s beer money is as good as anybody else’s money, and the atheist would be offended. Nevertheless, the words are in the Declaration of Independence being quoted, which is supposed to be the centerpiece of the ad. It’s just a fact. You know what Sam Adams’ cousin said about facts. And you know what Sen. Moynihan said about facts.

So I’m glad they’re getting in trouble. They took the long way around in order to avoid offending hypothetical people, and ended up pissing off real people.

One of the problems we’re having in our society lately, that we didn’t have in the earlier times, is that in these situations that could be summarized by way of “someone may get offended, although they should not,” the people who make decisions that actually affect things, read only up to that first comma. Someone got offended…or may get offended…and that is supposed to be the end of the discussion. We pretend to be puzzling it out by way of reason and common sense, but our “reasoning” consists only of figuring out whoever is offended, or might be offended, and doing whatever they say.

It’s rather sweet to see the episode play out with someone else getting offended. It imposes a luster of futility and pointlessness on the mindset that deserves to toil away beneath it.

My Mom saw a sultry and subtle evil behind passive-voice sentences. When she was still alive, I didn’t quite understand the rationale for this…it’s just a construct of the English language, which like any other, might make sense in some situations. With each year I see come and go, I get a little bit more wise to the true nature of her complaint. Verbs should be connected to subjects. Oops, uh, pardon me…writers should connect verbs to their subjects. The “who’s doing it” should, at the very least, exist as a common and successfully-communicated idea, between writer and reader, speaker and listener…whether or not it’s stated specifically, it should be spec’d out in some way.

To fall short of that goal, is to deceive.

My love of country and the founding documents trumps my atheism. It’s there in black and white, who am I to take offense at the brilliance of much better men than myself. They risked their lives, their fortunes and their scared honor for you and I. I can certainly find it in myself to look past a minor (to me at least) point.

Screw Sam Adams Beer, too damn sweet anyways. And the annoying founder who is usually in the commercials…it’s just freakin’ beer dude, you’re haven’t discovered the secrets of the universe.
- tim | 07/09/2013 @ 09:22
Well, if I were the CEO of Sam Adams beer and they brought the ad to me, I’d much rather fix the oversight than kill the ad campaign. I like the theme of recalling the founding principles. But I think that’s why this rubs so many people the wrong way, as it does me: What good does it do to recall only ninety percent of the founding? Why even bother?
- mkfreeberg | 07/09/2013 @ 13:16
I’ve always felt the same way about the passive. I used to think academia caused the plague of passive voice — when you’re writing a test answer, you tend to think of the answer first, then fill in the rest of the sentence around it. E.g. “Who wrote King Lear?” “King Lear was written by Shakespeare.”

But I don’t think so anymore. It’s bureaucrats, who write this way to avoid responsibility. “The program was implemented, but the results have so far been below expectations.” There’s nouns aplenty in that sentence, but no subjects. Implemented by whom? What results? Whose expectations? Most importantly: What consequences?

Passive language is one of liberalism’s chief enablers. The Fox Butterfield Fallacy (“crime keeps falling, but prisons keep filling”) is a great example of this. It’s actually fairly easy to miss the logical connection here, even if you’re not a liberal. As written, it’s just two bland, blah, factual statements linked by a comma. If you just glance at it, you see only two discrete pieces of information — crime rate falling, incarceration rate rising. You might actually feel informed, because you now know two more things than you did a second ago. You actually have to pause and think to realize that these two disjointed, only-linked-by-a-comma statements are causally linked, too.

People think it’s just a tic of a particular reporter’s reflexive bias. But while I have no doubt Fox Butterfield is as liberal as the day is long — he’s a New York Times reporter, after all — I’m just as certain he’s a good, careful, deliberate writer. He is, after all, a New York Times reporter. If he wrote it that way, you can bet your last dollar that he and all his editors know damn well there’s a causal connection between rising incarceration and falling crime…. and they want to make sure you don’t.
- Severian | 07/09/2013 @ 15:15
Sev, it’s likely true that Fox Butterfield and the Times editors are being deceptive in that instance… but it’s also likely that it isn’t meant as propaganda. I think they’re not “in on it” to that extent, so to speak. The first person Butterfield deceives with “less crime, more prisoners” is himself. He suspects that locking up criminals is a good way to prevent crime, but he’s worried about 100 other secondary consequences: disparate racial outcomes, half-baked economic theories, some sociological gobbledygook, and layers upon layers of abstraction that insulate his mind from getting to practical conclusions.

In a way it ties in with Morgan’s frequent observation that leftism forbids its adherents from drawing a distinction between “that works” and “this fails”, or “this is accurate” and “that is false.” Crime is caused by poverty and discrimination and all those things; it is NOT caused by criminals. It is therefore necessary that any link between the two be noticed only as a seeming contradiction, or better yet not at all.

And eventually you get to the belief that crime causes criminals, not the other way around. It happens to them just as much as it happens to the victim, except the victim doesn’t have to go to jail for it – and isn’t that unfair? Isn’t that cruel to this “so-called” criminal? Etc. etc. ad nauseum. That’s how their brains come around to celebrating cop killers and not those who fell in the line of duty. That’s how they think that Trayvon looks like their hypothetical sons. That’s how Tsarnaev is just a normal-seeming kid who was somehow radicalized by everything else around him.

The passive voice is necessary, but in another sense, it’s only an additional symptom of the passive thinking behind it. If nobody is actually responsible for things, then writing “X did Y” is impossible. Y just happened. Not coincidentally, Theodore Dalrymple has observed the same exact thinking among the prison populations he used to work with: they never said “I killed him” or “I raped her” or such, it was always, always “Then the gun went off” and “Then the knife went in” and “Then she stopped breathing.”
- nightfly | 07/10/2013 @ 10:30
[…] The following was originally posted by Morgan: […]
- dustbury.com » This post has been scheduled | 07/10/2013 @ 10:33
Nightfly,

I agree. There’s definitely a chicken-and-egg thing going on there. I think this, too, is why so many attempts to discuss “media bias” with liberals don’t go anywhere. They hear “bias” and they think “active conspiracy.” I really don’t think the NYT editorial board sits around discussing how to suppress truth and advance liberalism — they think they’re advancing truth, with the side benefit (if they ever consider it at all, which I doubt) of advancing liberalism.

I wrote (Butterfield-style, oh the irony, but not as well) as if Butterfield were knowingly suppressing something. But you’re right, he’s not — he’s first deceiving himself. It’s crimestop — “The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short….protective stupidity.”

It’s interesting to try to re-think such a thought process. You’re obligated to report two facts (you are, after all, a professional truth-teller; you’ve got ethics). You suspect — as you’re a fairly bright guy — that there might be some connection here. What could it be? Crime falling…. incarceration rising…. yet incarceration rising, because if crime is falling but prisons are still filling up, that must mean that cops are putting innocent people in jail, because cops hate black people. What a scoop!

A list of the assumptions underlying all that would be longer than the article itself.
- Severian | 07/11/2013 @ 06:36
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- Steynian 480nth | Free Canuckistan! | 07/21/2013 @ 16:03

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Endowed, Huh?Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

Endowed, Huh?
Tuesday, July 9th, 2013