Peddling is arguably the most favorite way for contrarians to lob factoids behind enemy lines. Once a door opens, peddlers block it with their foot and dispatch their sale pitches. Peddled talking points seldom matter to the topic at hand, i.e. they’re red herrings, or as I prefer to call them squirrels, because “look, squirrel!,” because the verb squirreling, and because Rachel.
Responding to the peddler’s talking point only opens other doors. A flurry of squirrels get thrown on the field, exchanges go in many directions at the same time. At best we get constructive brainstorming, at worse a food fight. In any event, the Gods of ClimateBall (tm) rejoice.
Since language is a martial art, peddling can start anywhere and about anything. I recently experienced one with Freedom Fernando, after I dared to retweet a tweet telling that food was burned in Brazil. Fernando’s peddling move was his famous “but Venezuela”:
My response abides by the principle: A Squirrel for a Squirrel. It also conveys that I don’t mind discussing the historical reasons why many South American countries became allergic to the Washington Consensus. I could have pointed out that famines correlated more with mismanagement and political conflicts than ideology, but baiting Fernando with a Marxian source was too tempting. At least twenty-seven tweets followed. There could have been more, but I decided to write this instead.
Fernando doubled-down his peddling by denying that Venezuela had economic sanctions. In return, I cited an official webpage of the US Government describing these. Then it got interesting.
A Think Tank Tie (see the mug face below) chimed in to say that the sanctions did not target Venezuela per se, but individuals. My first response recalled that this point was an ignoratio elenchi:
As if warning against doing business in Venezuela wasn’t a most effective way to put economic pressure on a country. (Many hold that official sanctions are inefficient at best.) As if the Iran sanctions couldn’t affect Venezuela. As if there wasn’t any underhanded ways to expand one’s country’s influence. As if any of this was relevant to my point anyway.
Then it gets surreal: Fernando accuses me of backing up a genocide. A genocide, no less. Qui ne dit mot consent, I suppose, so I reject his accusation and call him on his peddling. Instead of owning it, Fernando doubles down by blaming me for having provoked his peddling!
To show Fernando that I could not care less about ideology, I showed him the historical prices of oil between 2008 and 2014. The correlation between low oil prices and increase in Venezuelian suffering should be obvious to anyone. Our Think Tank Tie resurfaces, moving the goalpost using a “what about question.” I remind him of whataboutism while clarifying that the chart wasn’t meant as an explanation of the crisis:
Our Think Tank Tie then gets personal, which backfires quite quickly since he can’t commit to the crap his think tank peddles. Nevertheless, Fernando’s peddling succeeded. Squirrels were thrown. Nothing got resolved. Everybody left happy.
THE END? No, not at all. Like auditing, peddling never ends.
...and Then There's Physics 
By some ClimateBall magic, Fernando was still peddling as I was writing this:
Mission accomplished:
Ah, this is dumb. Venezuela’s economic problems are of their own making, by rejecting a market economy.
> this is dumb
What is “this”?
***
> by rejecting a market economy.
If only things were as simple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracazo
Freedom Fighters have a short memory.
> Peddled talking points seldom matter to the topic at hand, i.e. they’re red herrings, or as I prefer to call them squirrels, because “look, squirrel!,” because the verb squirreling, and because Rachel.
Shortly after this posted, I obtained my own example:
Not exactly the sort of response one gives when attempting to pass a Turing test.
> What is “this”?
Your post.
[My post was about peddling, not Venezuela. – Willard]
>> by rejecting a market economy.
> If only things were as simple
Alas, it really is. V’s problems today are not caused by events from 1989, other than by the way they politically conditioned V itself. V’s present day problems are caused by its current economically-idiot govt.
[Before Maduro there was Chávez, before him there were Freedom Fighters who became as autocratic as what we’re witnessing, and you now switch from responsibility to causality, which might deserve a bit more than invisible hands waving. – Willard]
Anthony Watts is begging for money again. I don’t get it. He claims that he gets millions of hits and his site is full of ads. He should be making a pretty penny. Watts Up With That?
W,
I’m amazed that you didn’t invoke the most visible exponent of this art at present when the whole world is playing PotusBall®
Compared to that Fernando is an amateur, and it was nice of the Stoat to drive by and give his example.
I hadn’t heard of “peddling” before, but it sounds just like the “rabbit holes” an MBA friend once told me about. Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly was a master.
Ah, William makes it appear so simple. Economic mismanagement. Expunges any US culpability. I am sure he would have said the same thing back in the early 1970s when the US was desperately pushing for regime change in Chile. As we now know, Nixon famously instructed Kissinger to ‘make the Chilean economy scream’ because Allende was seen as a threat to US hegemony in Latin America. Similarly, William would claim that the 6 decade long embargo waged by the US on Cuba has not harmed the Cuban economy, or the siege waged on Nicaragua by the Reagan administration did not turn a ‘model economy for Latin America’ (the words of the Inter American Development Bank) into a disaster. Heck, I will bet that William denies that the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s by the global hegemon and it’s proxies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the country, despite the views of the two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck who both resigned over what one of them called ‘genocide masquerading as policy’.
Let’s cut the nonsense. Of course the US is sabotaging the Venezuelan economy. Anyone who thinks otherwise I believe is in serious need of medical attention.
=={ Alas, it really is. }==
No doubt. Life in a libertarian utopia is simple indeed. There, all dilemmas are binary.
The real world tends to me somewhat complicated. But that doesn’t have to interfere with Internet economic theory.
I wouldn’t say our Stoatness peddled much of anything, RJ. It may have been clearer if we witnessed some libertarian claptrap with his dismissiveness. Anything from Hayek would do. Fukuyama, maybe. My favorite would be a friedmanism:
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/Why+Nations+Fail+1a9028
***
Martha’s not really peddling either. There’s no pretense to connect with anything. It’s more of a drive-by.
I’m fine with both.
WC:
Oh come on. What society has not rejected a “market and nuthin’ but” economy? Somalia, maybe? And what ought Venezuela, and the USA for that matter, to do about externalities?
I’m pretty sure you know what’s fact and what’s rhetoric when you type either, William. Which do you think your comment is? You don’t usually grind your Libertarian axe so frankly.
Jeff,
I wouldn’t go so far as to claim real sabotage, but would suggest that it takes two to tango, more so when the tango lasts a century or so.
You might like this analysis by Branko Milanovic:
http://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-hidden-dangers-of-fukuyama-like.html
There are many studies that seriously try to understand why oil fields and autocracies are so often seen hand in hand. There are also studies that tried to explain the emergence of anti-imperialism rhetoric. There are so many things we could do in a discussion than to shout “but communism!” like Fernando did.
That being said, I don’t blame Fernando for trying to help resolve the crisis. What’s happening there is awful.
Dennis,
As I see it, peddlers don’t run their own shows. They’re on the road. Here’s an old comment that recalls some of the history:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/sometimes-all-you-can-do-is-laugh/#comment-30959
I vaguely recall of coming up with the concept of peddling when BarryW was around. So the meme must be older than that. If you appreciate peddling, make sure to follow him on the tweeter.
#ClimateBall strawmen are as resilient as zombies:
Peddling, by my understanding of past Willard comments, is a sub-species of tangential (at best) arguments often used (by design?) to derail a discussion with the additional constriction that the tangential argument is of a topic near and dear (or at least often used) by the peddler. Fernando and Venezuela is of course a perfect example. WC and regulations or some other facet of libertarianism likewise.
All roads lead to Rome. In the peddler’s universe all roads lead to the topic of their obsession.
Fernando’s ‘but Venezuela’ might carry more credence if one has forgotten relatively recent history: Prof. Anthony Spanakos writing in his review of Venezuela Before Chavez: Anatomy of An Economic Collapse
Fernando’s is old enough to remember the previous economic collapse so he has no excuse.
I still find it hard to predict what you think constitutes peddling, Willard. For example, would it be peddling to point out that the tomatoes were dumped rather than burned? I’d put that down as tedious nit-picking myself but there’s no telling with you.
Or what if I said that, prior to dumping his toms, the evil capitalist tomacrat had given three tons to local good causes and allowed local people to take as much as they liked for animal fodder and that, judging by the photo, even the starving poor wouldn’t have found the remaining 20 tons very appetizing? Peddling or just more quibbling?
Or how about saying that under the previous, socialist administration the price of tomatoes rose so high that most Brazilians could no longer afford them and that even upmarket Italian restaurants took them off the menu, so that in some ways this story about ‘burning’ excess tomatoes is actually good news (for the masses, if not for evil capitalist tomacrats)? Peddling?
Your peddling shtick strikes me as being more about closing down debate than saying anything rigorous about debating tactics. [But SkS. -Willard]
How charming, dear Vinny. In return, please rest assured that I don’t find it hard to predict that you’ll play dumb every chance you’ll have. Note that JAQing off may not go very well with opening up debates and saying rigorous stuff.
But you’re right: some 3 tons were donated to local charity and livestock. Some 20 tons thrown away. The reason why tomatoes were thrown away is, according to the article, because producers would have lost money processing them. With the current low prices, selling them wouldn’t even cover the fret and man hours required to ship them on the market.
Which goes on to show that the Reds who scare you to death don’t hold a monopoly in mismanagement. What they do have a monopoly of, in comparison to the bloody socialists, is the lack of means to borrow money if need be, or to go bankcrupt and shovel their problems to otters.
Your “but SkS” is definitely peddling, and your “but socialist” is more of a tu quoque. Thanks for asking.
> in the early 1970s when the US was desperately pushing for regime change in Chile
Oh, look! A squirrel.
> What society has not rejected a “market and nuthin’ but” economy? Somalia, maybe?
Another squirrel. Or perhaps a badger. No-one runs a pure market economy. But methods of economic management that don’t involve a major market component end up in Venezuela.
> I will bet that William denies that the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s by the global hegemon and it’s proxies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the country
You lose. Will you pay up?
> Similarly, William would claim that the 6 decade long embargo waged by the US on Cuba has not harmed the Cuban economy
You lose. The US embargo is stupid. See Timmy: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/06/17/trumps-cuba-mistake-we-want-to-trade-them-into-being-rich/
> the US is sabotaging the Venezuelan economy
[Chill. -Willard]
> methods of economic management that don’t involve a major market component end up in Venezuela.
It’s more a matter of diversification than involving a major market component, whatever that might mean. For comparison’s sake,
Without diversification, you end up with an economy that can’t sustain economic shocks very long. But then when natural resources is what you have and all your trade partners want is your oil, it’s hard not to focus on that. Hence the well-known resource curse.
Being able to borrow money is also a good way to deal with shocks. The Venezuelan government refuses to default its 3 billion payment (i.e. three times less than the deficit of the wealthiest of Canadian provinces) and its population suffers. Again for comparison’s sake, the subprime mortgage crisis was absorbed with a bailout that goes from 700 billion to more than a trillion.
This should put into perspective the efficiency of invisible hands.
While I underlined the USA’s century old foreign policy, it’s actually China and Russia that are “partenering” with Venezuela nowadays: both are already owed 50 billion in oil, and Venezuela can’t even have a decent tanker to ship it. The same should be expected to happen with them as any such previous relationship. Nothing pretty should come out of this.
‘The Reds who scare me to death’?
Jeez, Willard. How squirrelly is that?
(Are you going to let my innocent comma self-correction through or is self-applied Grammar Nazism somehow another proof of my being a right-wing Red-
haterfearer?)> How squirrelly is that?
You tell me, Vinny: how squirrelly were your “evil capitalist tomacrat” and “but socialist administration”?
Your self-correction has already been edited.
Thanks for (and sorry about) the comma correction.
My ‘evil capitalist tomacrat’ is a far-from-squirrelly encapsulation of the January tweet that got this whole thing going, to wit: ‘Yet again as prices fall, capitalists burn edible food due to lack of profitability while millions starve.’
WC:
Nuh-uh. You introduced the squirrel by taking the opportunity to tell a Just-So story blaming Venezuela’s economic problems on its “methods of economic management that don’t involve a major market component”. You did that to peddle your “libertarian” ism.
Every actual economy is a unique mix of invisible and visible hands, along with multiple geographic, historic and other random (WRT management goals, that is) causes at levels from proximate to ultimate. Venezuela’s economic policies may have contributed to its woes, but you have hardly shown they were the sole factor.
“Millions of protesters flooded the streets of Sao Paulo and other cities, holding signs like “Less Marx, More Mises.””
http://reason.com/reasontv/2016/08/03/how-brazils-libertarian-movement-helped
So we have capitalists burning food because of low prices. Supply exceeds demand and people are starving. I don’t think they are starving because the price of tomatoes is too high. There’s a breakdown somewhere perhaps with the weather. A real capitalist is going to be against trade sanctions most of the time. A fake one will try to prevent tomatoes being shipped to the U.S. as he grows them in California. I want to blame the politicians in both countries. If the price is too high, it’s the capitalists fault, if it’s too low, it’s the capitalists fault. If the price is just right, they’re not paying a living wage. The capitalist is the punching bag of the left, and the government is the punching bag of the libertarians.
Someone mentioned Cuba. You made your point. It’s over. Make Cuba great again.
> My ‘evil capitalist tomacrat’ is a far-from-squirrelly encapsulation of the January tweet that got this whole thing going, to wit: ‘Yet again as prices fall, capitalists burn edible food due to lack of profitability while millions starve.’
And my “red scare” is of course a far-from-squirelly encapsulation of pick-just-about-any-of-Fernando’s-tweets.
But you underline an important ingredient of peddling, Vinny: any hook already present in a discussion is good for peddling.
Nobody makes a peddler peddle. If everyone owned their peddling, that’d be great.
If you think my retweets are full endorsements, you should see how many Freedom Fighters I retweet. Fernando did not even took the time to check why I retweeted that tweet. He jumped on me. The Think Tank Tie did not even bother to understand why I mentioned historical sanctions or why I cited Caracazo – he simply went full Tol mode.
During the days of Chavez a major US newspaper editorial page had an editorial expressing moral outrage that Chavez was building baseball fields – and the nerve… actually equipping them with baseball equipment – so kids of al backgrounds could play baseball.
Kevin,
Thanks for your understanding and your link.
Your comment got caught in spam. If this happens often, you’ll need to contact Akismet:
https://akismet.com/contact/
Hope you don’t need to do so.
I didn’t mean to say Watts is peddling. I just don’t get why he is pretending to need money. Youtubers with far less traffic are getting rich. It just doesn’t add up.
Martha,
I don’t think there is anything wrong with asking for money. The real problem with WUWT is not that he’s asking for money, it’s that he runs a site that promotes misinformation about an important topic.
It is probably just as well if the Journal of the society doesn’t get off the ground, as I suspect it would just end up as another “Pattern Recognition in Physics” etc. as they would be unlikely to attract reviewers from outside their readership (and hence pal-review).
”
If everyone owned their peddling, that’d be great.
”
One Mann’s peddling is another man’s treasure.
Peddling, ax-grinding, rabbit holing, squirreling, Sean Spicer – these are all taxonomic subsets (whose intersection is not the empty set) of the Great Fallacy of Irrelevance…
Now if we could all agree on what’s relevant, that’d make ownership great again.
I’d argue that all informal fallacies carry irrelevant information one way or another, Rev. Many valid inferences do, hence paradoxes of implication. As I see it, fallacies are infelicities of reasoning, while lobbing (thus peddling) may go beyond argumentation as we usually undertstand it. Classification of fallacies is still an open problem.
Philosophers of law had to think hard about relevance, because evidence E is evidence of some fact F only if E is relevant for establishing F:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence-legal/#RelA
There are many other things to say about relevance, but that should suffice to explain the following.
***
I reminded Fernando of Caracazo because it provides evidence of an autocratic regime that wasn’t chavist. Even if Venezuelans kicked Maduro out, the remedy is far from clear. They just don’t have any money left. Furthermore, the relationship between oil states and democracy is thin:
Michael Ross had to revise his previous conclusions regarding the causation of his claim that oil hinders democracy. The strong correlations on which his work was based are still there, however.
So as I see it, Fernando’s “but communism” conflates at least two questions: one about democracy, and one about economic efficiency. His peddling trick also omits that not all autocracies are left leaning. There are many examples of autocratic states that are somewhat economy efficient. China holds too much US bonds to dismiss fiscal discipline lightly.
This exchange shows Freedom Fighters not paying due diligence to the flow of money.
Why *did* you retweet the burning tomatoes, Willard? I scrolled back through your Twitter timeline and the reason wasn’t obvious.
Re peddling, here’s some peddling fodder:
The tragic fires in Portugal are in an area where 90% of the trees are eucalypts, highly combustible exotics that are apparently known to their opponents as ‘fascist trees’ or ‘capitalist trees’ (though I can find only a handful of examples of the various Portuguese variants of those tags being used online), this being, it is said, partly because Salazar planted and harvested them to pay for his colonial wars and partly because Portugal’s accession to the EEC coincided with a glut of olive oil, triggering a rapid and still ongoing conversion of agricultural land to eucalypt plantations, which are mostly owned and managed (mismanaged, some say) by a handful of large pulp-suppliers, some of which aren’t wholly Portuguese-owned.
If somebody was tasteless enough to package the still-burning Portuguese tragedy as a story about one of the following…
(a) climate change
(b) bad forestry
(c) fascism (or corporatist nationalism)
(d) the EU
(e) multinationals
…in which circumstances would it be ‘peddling’ to mention one or more of the others?
For example, if someone said it was an example of climate change when would it be OK to mention forestry or fascism or the EU or multinationals?
> Why *did* you retweet the burning tomatoes, Willard?
Because I know people who try to help feed the poor in Brazil.
> For example, if someone said
It’s been what, three years now that you’re playing dumb with this, Vinny?
Here’s my favorite example:
If Doritos are less evocative to you, replace “Doritos” with “but SkS” or “but alarmism.”
Peddling?
Buy bitcoin and hodl.
Being Australian, and particularly fond of them I find this: fascist trees’ or ‘capitalist trees’ A bit sad…
Eucalypts are beautiful and floribund:
my favourite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_erythrocorys
There’s also a ridiculous variety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eucalyptus
But yes the larger ones used for paper pulp can burn very easily. However, I think care should be taken not to smear all Eucalpytus species…. Most don’t explode like the Blue Gum (E. Globulus).
This eucalypt is not so prone to fire…
http://www.florabank.org.au/lucid/key/species%20navigator/media/html/Eucalyptus_salmonophloia.htm
And is quite pretty.
Nathan Tetlaw: Fair point. My bad. Not all eucalypts are incendiary fascists. Some are quite cuddly.
Another correction: These days the big pulp companies own only about 20% of the eucalypt acreage. The rest is mostly owned by farmers or ex-farmers.
Peddling: The expansion of eucalypt plantations has been encouraged and subsidised by the EU since before Portugal joined the bloc, initially to shrink the EU’s olive oil glut and pulpwood shortage, later to help Portugal meet (massage, some say) its climate change targets.
Tin-foil millinery: Is it then a coincidence that Euronews, to which the European Commission pays at least £20 million every year to put a ‘European’ (pro-EU, pro-European Commission etc.) spin on world news, was the first news outlet to ascribe the Portuguese forest fires to climate change? (Er, probably, yes.)
Advertising: Pssst! Wanna buy a tin-foil hat?
https://beneficialenvironments.co.uk/product/shielding-hat/
Underpants also available.
Is that peddling, Nathan?
That‘s peddling:
Your Aussie tree reminds me of Lew.
Did I say Lew?
Then C13.
Which reminds me of Inhofe Cheeseburgers:
And Shakespeare leads us by some serendipity to Freedom Fighters:
Freedom Fighters. Got to love ’em.
Thank you for the hard sell , but while Brazilian vegetables smolder, the flames in London have a green tinge as well:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2017/06/green-fire.html
The cold flames of Very Serious Freedom Fighters may never contain much more than the superstructure of their own liberal mind, dear Russell:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-blathering-superego-at-the-end-of-history/
Bernie would have saved London.
“Is that peddling, Nathan?
That‘s peddling:”
ohhh Hoges… What a guy…
Willard, the disparity between Emmet Rensin’s fave German philosopher and the last generation to think that way recalls something I said a long time ago- in the NY rather than the LA Times.
CF Bottom of front page 11-5-1991
“He jumped on me.”
Huh.
Looks like he butted in on a thread to make a point he judged to be relevant or illuminating.
We need more conversational controls.
Twitter is the worse place to have a conversation or dialog. As a medium it has limitations and a reward system that encourages thread jacking, trolling, stealing focus.it’s design to prevent dialog and discursive thought. It’s focused on grabbing attention and redirection..
No good thinker or writer would try to swim against this stream.
I don’t know who’s Emmet’s favorite philosopher, Russell, but I don’t think any German philosopher has been harmed in the making of the following post:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crisis-liberalism-part-ii-policy-no-power
Since he doesn’t believe that Bernie would have won and he doesn’t even mention Venezuela, his point should be taken with a grain of salt.
> Looks like he butted in on a thread to make a point he judged to be relevant or illuminating.
There was no thread when he peddled, and he “jumped” later on.
Fernando has a knack for doing this on my tweets every two months or so. When I want to make sure I get another two months of peace, I play squirrel with him until he stops. He usually does – good peddlers try to optimize their peddling time. Once “communism” has been injected, his work was done.
***
> No good thinker or writer would try to swim against this stream.
As you may have already witnessed at Judy’s, I can hold my own in squirrel throwing matches. Also note how I didn’t bite at Vinny’s examples – it would have amplified his “but CAGW.”
The best way to meet peddlers is to keep your eye on the ball. Peddlers are boringly focused on their talking points. So should any good ClimateBall player, minus the boring part, it goes without saying.
“> Looks like he butted in on a thread to make a point he judged to be relevant or illuminating.
There was no thread when he peddled, and he “jumped” later on.”
Sorry It doesnt look that way to me, given what you pointed at, But if you retweeted or peddled a tweet that’s how this universe works. You peddle a tweet for whatever reason and others peddle their wares. Its HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS, its a feature, the whole purpose.
“The best way to meet peddlers is to keep your eye on the ball. ”
the whole point is that a scene can have many balls, sometimes the glint on the ball is more interesting than the ball, sometimes the shadow the ball casts is more interesting, sometimes
who threw the ball or who is catching the ball is more interesting. In fact one of the most delightful things about conversation is that it is more than just talking about the ball.
Put another way. If you want to have dialectic aimed at uncovering a mutually agreed upon version of the truth, twitter aint the place to have it. It’s more like a digital version of the dozens, or a college bull session. Only killjoys would analyze it to death. Dont be that guy.
> But if you retweeted or peddled a tweet
The two ain’t the same, as my RT wasn’t in response to another tweet. Peddling happens in response to other tweets. Threading matters.
***
> the whole point is that a scene can have many balls
Of course. I should have said “one’s own ball”. One might have more than one, I suppose. But I won’t write “ball” in plural in that sentence.
A ball is simply a communication objective. We all have our communication objectives. They conflict. Exchanges have more than one topic too. They too conflict.
The important point, here, is to be able to recognize how an exchange can become dominated by an adverse and repetitive technique that exploit these traits. How to defuse peddling depends on this.
***
> Its HOW THE DAMN THING WORKS, its a feature, the whole purpose.
Indeed.
***
Should have reminded me to check back GBTC yesterday.
“The two ain’t the same, as my RT wasn’t in response to another tweet. Peddling happens in response to other tweets. Threading matters.”
Sorry a RT is by definition a response to a tweet and it had an ambiguous conversational objective..don’t be alarmed if some jumps on you. Repetitively pointing out the repetitive tactics of others is not an innocent move in the game. In fact it’s right up there with spell checking twitter. Almost spergy.
Here’s the Emmet Retsin money quote Willard left out :
When history is meant to be over and a single political faction begins to conceive of itself as the permanent manager of a static world, then that faction ceases to be political in the ordinary sense. Politics, in its classic incarnation, is the art of deriving an is from an ought; the point, as Marx famously said, is not to describe the world but to change it. But if the world is as it ought to be already and the essential task is to maintain it — that is, to police the circumscribed boundaries of permissible behavior and ideas — then those tasked with that maintenance must conceive of themselves as acting above politics itself. They become a superego, beyond the libidinal whims of any faction and dedicated not to some alternative vision of the world but to resisting all impulse toward alternatives.
> Sorry a RT is by definition a response to a tweet
Not in the sense of being a reply to a tweet.
Don’t be sorry for conflating stuff on purpose.
Heh. Foxgoose and BarryW mentioned in the one breath by Willard up-thread. Been a long time since those handles surfaced in these parts. Must be no Stephan L papers needing retracting nowadays.
Have to say while I’m here… a lot of stuff in the Mintpress News article regarding Venezuela rang true. But holding up Russia as an an example of a country that has stamped out their oligarchy problem rings more than a bit hollow. Isn’t Putin the richest person in the world by a longshot with money he stole from his own people? The only reason he’s ostensibly clamping down on the oligarchs there is because he already got his, and he’s trying to make sure no one else does the same.
> [H]olding up Russia as an an example of a country that has stamped out their oligarchy problem rings more than a bit hollow. Isn’t Putin the richest person in the world by a longshot with money he stole from his own people?
Of course it rings hollow. For starters, it misses the idea that somehow, petrodollars and power change people, e.g.:
Francisco Rodríguez was very well placed to see that chavism’s doctrine and actions did not always reconcile.
I love the Wondermark comic.
Wow, I heard Corbyn likes the Venezuela model and thought he was just a misinformed outlier. But that lack of knowledge seems to be widespread here. We’ve had Venezuelans selling donuts or cakes or washing windscreens for years here in Quito, as have many South American countries, and they ain’t here because of US sanctions. A hint: if you ever come across a country that has multiple official exchange rates (plus black market), you know it is being mismanaged.
> But that lack of knowledge seems to be widespread here.
“Here” being where, LenM?
In exchange for your hint based on misreading:
http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/ius-venezuela-relations-1990s-coping-midlevel-security-threatsi-javier-corrales-and-carlos
Here being this thread. Did I misread something? Quite possible, I only skimmed. I don’t see the relevance of your long quote. I did get the clear impression that various people disagree that V is the author of its own misfortune from the reaction to WC’s comments.
> I don’t see the relevance of your long quote.
It addresses the meme that “V is the author of its own misfortune,” assuming it correctly represents our Stoatness’ position, a position that isn’t directly related to peddling, but that indirectly illustrates how peddling works.
No, it doesn’t really. There’s no economics there at all.
> There’s no economics there at all.
Economics may not suffice to produce an explanation as to why V is the author of its own misfortune, LenM. It’s quite clear that economics alone doesn’t suffice to explain why Freedom Fighters focus on Venezuela when so many other countries (like Finland) escape our Stoatness’ usual “leftward, lulz.”
Paraphrasing, of course.
Though we appear to be using the same nominal language, Willard, I continually get the feeling that in practice we don’t. Nevertheless, please explain how the US made Venezuela adopt multiple official exchange rates, preferably using standard forms and expressions. Just the existence of such exchange rates should be enough to prove mismanagement, whether you hang left or right, or, like me, in the pragmatic center.
I usually find it hard to find a “pragmatic centrist” that is not a libertarian, LenM, bleeding heart or not. Most libertarians I know often assert I don’t make any sense. The main problem with that ClimateBall move is that it’s a losing one in the long run.
The Internet is forever.
In return, please note that your “please explain” looks a lot like sealioning to me. I don’t usually comply to that kind of thing when it is irrelevant to any of my commitments. And you bet I won’t after being the latest one in having done some work.
My dictionary gets a workout when talking with you. From what I can see, the term libertarian, unqualified, could make me an extremist of either right or left. I support Keynes over Hayek, Cable over Corbyn or May, Frank Fields and Stella Creasy over Mogg and the Vulcan, The Economist, FT and Guardian over the Telegraph and Britain’s crap tabloids. Judge for yourself whether that makes me a ‘libertarian’, whatever that means to you.
Sealioning? Again after looking it up, such a term seem useful if you want to throw an insult while appearing reasonable. As you object to my wording let me rephrase. Did the US, Venezuela’s biggest customer, make the Venezuelan government adopt multiple official exchange rates, create hyperinflation, nationalize private industry, throw opponents in jail, use thugs/militia to control the population? Or was that down to Chavez and the bus driver?
> Again after looking it up, such a term seem useful if you want to throw an insult while appearing reasonable.
I hope you don’t mind if that’s how I take all of your comments so far on this website, LenM, including your apology on the other thread.
No need to ask me to do any homework for you by way of rhetorical questions that force an open door. If you have a point, make it. At the very least, distinguishing Chavez and Maduro might help improve it.
Here’s a little something I just saw this morning:
I’m not asking you to do my homework, Willard, but for you and others to do your own homework before taking a position on a country of which you know and hear little. Find out something about the policies they implemented, some doubtless well meaning, others ignorant or repugnant. Listen to some of their speeches. You can’t listen to the buffoon bus driver without doubting his ability to run a country in such economic trouble.
“I hope you don’t mind if that’s how I take all of your comments so far on this website, LenM, including your apology on the other thread.”
Yes, I do mind. I have no reason to insult anyone here; it is my home, in a manner of speaking, in as much as I have read it as my go-to site for good information for years and that I agree with what ATTP writes and the way he writes it. I rarely comment or read the comments beyond the point when angech or Turb. Eddie turns up as I have little to add when the other commenters are generally smarter and better informed that I am. You are the only objectionable entity I have encountered here, with your accusations of supposed epilogues that are not epilogues containing ‘villainy’ (a ‘joke’, yeah sure) and unidentified ‘gotchas’ and your assorted insults via obscure names and terms gleaned from comics (sealioning for heaven’s sake) that I’d guess few others understand.
You even have the gall to think you can analyze a political position from a few comments or even to think you can summarize non-extreme political positions using selective quotation that some idiot tweeted. [Playing the ref, once more. -W]
I haven’t really been following this discussion all that closely (I don’t get directly notified when I’m not the author of the post), but maybe we can try to resolve it amicably (if possible). Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect it’s more related to a misunderstanding of what is being said, than an actual disagreement about what is being said.
> I’m not asking you to do my homework, Willard, but for you and others to do your own homework before taking a position on a country of which you know and hear little.
Of course you’re asking me to do your homework, LenM.
You haven’t even identified the position you attribute to me and “others.” If you wish to burn down a strawman, at least have the courtesy to identify it. Or even better – quote it.
Nor have you presented any argument except by way of rhetorical questions. If you claim that poor management explains what happens in Venezuela, then the onus is on you to provide some evidence. As I already said in the post, I’m no fan of simplistic explanations, and this looks like one to me.
Coming here and simply asserting that “the lack of knowledge seems to be widespread here” doesn’t entitle you to any room service.
***
> I have no reason to insult anyone here […]
I’m not sure in which world you live, LenM, but I assure you that in mine “the lack of knowledge seems to be widespread here” can very well be considered insulting.
More examples on demand.
Was that insulting? Maybe I’ve become inured to insults, but I don’t think it was, any more than “libertarian claptrap” or “libertarian utopia” were in reference to WC. If anyone was insulted, I am sorry.
I thought it was clear that I was referring to the attitude that Venezuela’s plight is the result of interference by outsiders. This is the line that Maduro throws of course. It is nonsense, as the power of a government far exceeds that of outside actors, even the US. If the US had such capabilities, the neighbors of Iran and Russia would long ago have closed their borders to desperate Iranians and Russians, as Colombia has in recent days.
You say that the onus is on me to show that it is mismanagement and not US malfeasance that has done for Venezuela, but it isn’t. Mismanagement is the null hypothesis, the alternative – an outside power forcing hyperinflation on a sovereign issuer – has never happened. Anyone who thinks it happened in this case needs some strong evidence.
ATTP, probably my fault. I’m too used to winding up skeptics.
> Was that insulting? Maybe I’ve become inured to insults, but I don’t think it was, any more than “libertarian claptrap” or “libertarian utopia” were in reference to WC. If anyone was insulted, I am sorry.
Since you insist with a second non-apology in a row, LenM, I’ll bite. Let’s take your burden of proof reversal:
That’s not exactly what I’m saying – I’m saying that the onus is on you to provide evidence for your own claims. Replying “but it’s a null hypothesis” doesn’t protect you from that requirement in a rational inquiry, e.g. I could as well state that God’s existence is my null hypothesis. This escape clause is at best legitimate where you could defer to an authoritative body. Take AGW. There are reasons to take it as the null – we have mountains of evidence condensed in the IPCC reports. Where is yours? It’s not my job to search for it, yet your rhetorical questions burden me to do so. That’s why I say you’re giving me your own homework.
It’s not even clear how “government mismanagement” can fit as a parameter in a hypothesis testing setting. It’s way too broad to test. Also, the explanation would need to explain heterogenous cases such as Haiti, the city of Detroit, or (soon) the province of Newfoundlands going South while governments relying on oil, from Alberta to Russia, and Saudi Arabia are still far from being bankrupt by very low oil prices. Azerbaijan isn’t going great these days – is it really because of mismanagement? Of course it can be a factor, and most probably is one. The evolution of Venezuela’s GDP follows the whims of the price of oil. Chavez had fairly good years, while Maduro had basically none.
That’s clearly not enough. My own null hypothesis is that it’s multifactorial, i.e. it’s complicated. Which means I’m very skeptical of simplifications like Friedman’s first law of petropolitics. What looks like a truism hardly fits the data. A recent study reanalyzed two famous studies on the relationship of oil revenues and democratization and found that the oil curse is a function of geopolitical dynamics, not just international market conditions.
So I’m really not sure where you got the idea that I think “that Venezuela’s plight is the result of interference by outsiders.” That I remind you and Freedom Fighters such as FernandoL that there’s some more layers to reality than ideology or economics doesn’t mean I discount them. BTW, where’s the economics in FernandoL’s or our Stoatness’ interjections exactly? Quite frankly, “but management” looks more like a way to hint that Venezuela is a socialist country than an invitation to delve into questions of economics. Mentioning Crobyn’s name doesn’t dispel that impression, nor does your self-identification as a centrist. Neither is your “non-extremist,” which classifies what is opposed to your own stance as extremist.
Which brings us to the insults. Sealioning has some currency on the Internet. Even the Macmillan has an entry. Your please explain how the US made Venezuela adopt multiple official exchange rates, preferably using standard forms and expressions and your other ones could be described in a stronger manner than “sealioning.” Reversing the burden of proof indicates that this is indeed what is going on.
As for how our Stoatness has been received, please defer to his first comment. Also note that his drive-by, just like this discussion, isn’t directly related to the main topic of the post, which is peddling. One could argue that it is indirectly related for it illustrates how peddling operates. The fact that the Venezuela crisis isn’t even the main topic of this thread may justify why we’ve only scratched the surface. That I’m the lone player on the ice who skates doesn’t help either.
Reading the comment thread more closely may have prevented all this, e.g. my June 17, 2017 at 7:23 pm comment.
Mismanagement is the only possible cause for a country entering hyperinflation, with the exception of mass counterfeiting. No evidence is needed. A fundamental expectation of government is that it not allow the currency to be inflated away in the face of whatever economic conditions the world throws at it, whether hostile customers, market forces or natural disasters. Allowing hyperinflation is the ultimate failure of that obligation.
“Also, the explanation would need to explain heterogenous cases such as Haiti, the city of Detroit, or (soon) the province of Newfoundlands going South while governments relying on oil, from Alberta to Russia, and Saudi Arabia are still far from being bankrupt by very low oil prices. Azerbaijan isn’t going great these days – is it really because of mismanagement?”
Irrelevant. There’s no hyperinflation in any of those.
> Mismanagement is the only possible cause for a country entering hyperinflation, with the exception of mass counterfeiting. No evidence is needed.
Yet thy wiki also mentions stress to the government budget, such as wars or their aftermath, sociopolitical upheavals, a collapse in export prices, or other crises that make it difficult for the government to collect tax revenue. The Economist econsplains the patterns behind the 57 documented cases:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/02/economist-explains-5
Not all of these patterns seem to fall under management issues. Perhaps that’s an illusion – after all, the Treaty of Versailles could have be seen as a managerial note, and the crash of the Weimar Republic could have been prevented with a better armchair. Hyperinflation explains everything, mismanagement explains hyperinflation, and mismanagement explains itself. To prevent this economic evil, it suffices to follow the rules of perfect fiscal management from any MMT textbook.
Venezuela was going so smoothly before all that, say under El Gocho‘s first reign. Only mismanagement can explain why it wasn’t so rosy during his second. Perhaps that crisis too is irrelevant, because there wasn’t any hyperinflation back then. Bill Mitchell unsurprisingly argues that Zimbabwe is a clear case of mismanagement, but even he admits:
In any event, Goldman Sachs seems to relish the current situation, or at least TimW does.
I think you’ll find that “in the face of whatever economic conditions the world throws at it” covers all eventualities listed in your excerpt from The Economist. One might argue against mismanagement if there were only one possible response to a “shock” to the economy (but of course there isn’t) and if the actions of the government prior to the shock played no part (but of course they do – for example a government that has managed the economy well might have laid down reserves to use in the case of shocks, as Chile did).
Mismanagement is perhaps the rule, not the exception. Here in Ecuador we have a government that is struggling because its predecessor ran up large debts (payable in future oil production) but still can’t bring itself to raise petrol prices from $1.50 per gallon or to stop subsidizing natural gas to the point of almost giving it away. The US is intent on stimulating an economy approaching full employment. And that’s not to mention Brexit… I guess all that paragraph is peddling, or something worse.
> Mismanagement is perhaps the rule, not the exception.
I agree, which is why I doubt it can explain hyperinflation all by itself. Even to define hyperinflation as the result of mismanagement won’t do because not every bad fiscal policy leads to it. One could argue we rather need a cascade of unfortunate decisions, but most of the cases I can think of can be modelled as a choice between letting people die immediately or hoping for a miracle.
The markets we created are far from being perfect, and it’s far from clear that winners and losers get decided by competence alone. To me it’s like saying that one loses a Chess game because of a mistake. That’s all well and good, but uninformative. It presumes we know in advance which moves won’t lose, something we don’t really know even for Chess.
Not every digression leads to peddling. For peddling to obtain, there needs to be a recurring theme that acts as a red button. In Fernando’s case, it’s “but socialism.” BarryW specialized himself in a few, like “but Lew.” Peddling is basically what I would call an instantiation game, something I’d like to present to AT’s readers. But I dislike didacticism, and I haven’t found a way to simplify it. For starters, I need another concept than “instanciation.”
Paul riding his ENSO hobby-horse…
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