Blip Thinking

From The Baffler:

For God’s Sake, Do Nothing

Blip thinking is also exculpatory; it exempts its users from thinking too deeply about how we got into this mess, what their own role may have been, and the difficult work needed to get us out. What gets lost amid all this is the obvious contribution that the old order made to the emerging catastrophe. The global “populist” moment did not arise in spite of liberal capitalism, in defiance of the global rules-based order, but because of them. The situation today is not the parenthesis of progress but its product. And this is what is truly deranging about blip thinking: by mistaking entropy for a fleeting moment of collective madness, it ensures the political establishment’s comfort in doing nothing to address the real problems besetting the world today. It is a call for only the most superficial form of action—which is to say, an excuse for inaction.

 Link.

 Propaganda as a form of inoculation only goes so far.

The Baffler is back!

After several years, a new Baffler has finally found its way to my mail box. Thomas Frank is back to his old style with Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly:

But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and resignations; taken together— and given that a good percentage of the pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic storylines—themy mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs.

But that’s not what happened. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of late, but the ones responsible for deluding the public are not among them. Neocon extraordinaire Bill Kristol won a berth at the New York Times (before losing it again), Charles Krauthammer is still the thinking conservative’s favorite, George Will drones crankily on, Thomas Friedman remains our leading dispenser of nonsense neologisms, and Niall Ferguson wipes his feet on a welcome mat that will never wear out. The day Larry Kudlow apologizes for slagging bubble-doubters as part of a sinister left-wing trick is the day the world will start spinning in reverse. Standard & Poor’s first leads the parade of folly (triple-A’s for everyone!), then decides to downgrade U.S. government debt, and is taken seriously in both endeavors. And the prospect of Fox News or CNBC apologizing for their role in puffing war bubbles and financial bubbles is no better than a punch line: what they do is the opposite, launching new movements that stamp their crumbled fables “true” by popular demand.

The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.

It's not too shocking that he can't publish something like this in a book, since that particular industry is responsible for these hacks.  The Age of Mediocrity is still chugging along just fine.

Anyway, as a reader since 1995, I highly recommend this journal.  Bashing business culture is lots of fun.