Jonathan

“bubba” in the comments forwards this photo:

There’s been some discussion on blogs about this column by one of the Anglosphere’s deep thinkers. The idea is that atheists should call themselves “brights” as a way to distinguish themselves and to intellectually one-up those benighted believers.

This is a bad idea and won’t fly. Many Americans are religious and would reasonably take offense at the clear implication of the word “bright” as used in this way: that religious people are stupid. This point, and the likelihood that even many atheists would prefer to avoid conveying such sneering disrespect for alternative views as use of this word, in this context, conveys, are going to make a lot of people reluctant to use it. And if it doesn’t catch on here it isn’t likely to become a standard term in the way that “gay” has.

But I understand why people who hate religion would try to convince everyone else to use a term such as “bright.” Its use forestalls argument by assuming a conclusion — a conclusion that it asserts up front as though it were as obviously valid as someone’s name, and how dare anyone challenge it. (Are atheists bright? Yes, they tell us so themselves.) You have to wonder about the judgment and intellectual confidence of people who try to gain adherents to their position by using verbal sleight-of-hand rather than rational persuasion.

“Bright” has been compared to the aforementioned “gay,” but I think a better comparison is to the word “liberal” as it is used in the U.S. to describe political orientation. Americans who call themselves liberals are really socialists. But socialism doesn’t sell here, so American leftists play word games to avoid defending their positions via straightforward arguments in which they would be at a disadvantage. They use “liberal” in the same way as Dawkins uses “bright” — to avoid dealing with opposing views on the merits. Ask what liberals believe, and why, and you are likely to receive a circular response asserting that since the word “liberal” implies tolerance and love of freedom, people who call themselves liberals must favor these things, and therefore (it is implied) if liberals support something it must be favorable for tolerance and freedom. Thus, for example, the American Left favors racial discrimination as long as leftists are in charge of it and do it out of self-declared good motives. This doesn’t seem very liberal to me, but they keep telling us that it is, and since they are “liberals” who am I to object? This is a neat trick, and lots of people still fall for it (though less so over time, as leftists’ increasing use of the word “progressive” in place of “liberal,” presumably in response to how their own actions have discredited liberalism, suggests).

Why do you guys keep hyping economic-data releases hours after they come out? Don’t you know that the markets discount this kind of information within seconds? Of course you know it, so stop pretending that everyone else doesn’t. Yes, I realize the other financial-news networks do the same thing that you do, but that’s because they’re clueless too.

I know that this goes against journalistic conventional wisdom, but if you want to stand out in a way that gets you more viewers, you might consider doing things that your competitors don’t do. More interviews with economists and business analysts would be fine, but your over reliance on journo talking heads promoting the story of the day and interpreting economic news they don’t understand doesn’t cut it. Neither does your heavy use of talking-head conventional interpretations of political news. What might make you worth watching would be a few simple innovations, like a listing of the day’s economic releases in tabular or graphical form comparing them to previous stats. (Hint: we don’t care what the numbers are so much as how they compare to expectations, how the markets react, and whether there are obvious trends.) And would it kill you to time stamp your headlines, so that anyone could see at a glance if that latest news item is two minutes or two hours old?

Thanks.

P.S. And while you’re at it, maybe you should drop the car reviews, golf reviews, coverage of the CNBC annual barbecue, etc., etc. I can get that kind of stuff a lot more efficiently by browsing the WSJ “Personal Journal” section when I’m in the john.

Don Luskin links to this warning about long-term interest rates.

The Fed, as the Times article points out, is plainly determined that this time nothing will get in the way (as 9/11 and Enron did in the recent past) of economic recovery. Therefore the Fed has been cutting rates and expanding the money supply. The desired results are economic expansion, which is already occurring, and a stock-market rally, which seems to be happening in fits and starts. But costs of the Fed’s manipulation include a weaker dollar, and an overvalued bond market that will collapse once it becomes clear that the Fed has finished cutting rates. Buy puts.

Somebody (Instapundit?) linked to this piece by David Gelernter, who has some interesting ideas about online newspapers. Gelernter thinks they could be radically improved by introduction of a cardfile-like user interface that he describes in detail. He also links to Scopeware, a company he’s involved with that develops and markets UI software of the type he discusses.

The Scopeware UI paradigm seems like a natural. It also looks likes an evolutionary improvement on the UI designs we use in blogs. (Which raises a question of why Gelernter didn’t mention blogs as precursors and prototypes for the new newspaper paradigm he envisions.)

I’m eager to see if Gelernter’s UI comes eventually to be used by online newspapers, but I’d be more interested in seeing it applied to blogs right now. Blogging software such as Movable Type already makes it easy to aggregate data feeds, search posts and categorize them by theme — features Gelernter says are important (and they are, though most bloggers fail to make efficient use of them). How hard would it be to create a MT main index template and style sheet to display posts as an over-the-horizon cascade of index cards in the way Gelernter suggests? Not very, I’d bet. Maybe someone will do it, and maybe then, if it becomes a popular blog UI, newspapers will consider using it. I doubt the newspapers will be the first to introduce it, though.