MetaFilter posts tagged with technocrat

"Conspiracy theorists and technocrat pundits"

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:22:35 -0800

The New Inquiry: Just The Facts

With its emphasis on the empirical, conspiracism is uncomfortably similar to the technocratic mindset of mainstream political discourse. Technocratic pundits — typified by the likes of Ezra Klein, a journalist and blogger who runs the Washington Post's Wonkblog — are likewise driven almost exclusively by data sets and empirical studies. As Bhaskar Sunkara suggested in this piece for In These Times, such pundits operate under the assumption that the facts are so powerful that they might lead people of all ideologies to embrace a particular array of ideology-free policies.

When technocrats disagree, their debates are supposedly over strictly factual questions rather than ethical ones: Do restrictions on firearm sales actually decrease gun violence? Will running continued deficits destabilize the economy? Does raising the minimum wage increase unemployment? This is not so different from conspiracy theorists, who ask questions about the long-term effects of certain policies (e.g. water fluoridation), and whether historical accounts of past events are consistent with the available evidence, and what will happen if certain groups acquire political power.

The New Republic: Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy

That Klein has achieved this kind of success by age 28 is a fact that thrills his fans and rankles his detractors. (Wonkette once referred to him as a “child typist.”) It also puts him in the pantheon of hungry young men who have moved to Washington and shape-shifted, whether consciously or not, into something that’s more palatable to the city’s establishment. The blogger who, in 2008, tweeted, “fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick,” now styles himself as the evenhanded, empirically driven adult in a room of squabbling, stubborn children. Even his critique of Washington, grounded in data and charts and graphs, is establishment to the core: This place, he says, is not like it used to be.

Brad DeLong reacts: Julia Ioffe of the New Republic Takes 5000 Words and Turns Ezra Klein into a Mere Personality Charles P. Pierce: Ezra Klein Gets It Very Wrong

Ezra, dude, all of journalism is not the op-ed page. Most of the people you cite above couldn't cover a one-car fatal on 128 on a Sunday night. Somebody has to do the grunt work that involves calling the cops or the coroner, or the drunk high-school baseball coach, and not whoever is on call at the Center For American Progress that day.

Naked Capitalism: Blinder Leading The Blind - "Joe Scarborough, Ezra Klein and the Washington Post editorial board are among those springing into action on behalf of deficit worry, and against the dangerous movement of calmness and sobriety breaking out all over." Via, via.

A little apple pie goes a long way

anigbrowl — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:33:16 -0800

Hu Jintao, premier of China, is in the middle of his first state visit to the US, whose pomp and circumstance reflects China's growing economic stature and role in world affairs. Due to the linguistic and political differences between the US and China, few Americans know very much about Hu. Many of them will have had their first real look at him during an extended and surprisngly candid joint press conference held with President Obama and lasting well over an hour - something which never happens in China. Fears (or possibly hopes) of a trade war between the US and China a year ago have faded, and instead a trade deal involving $45 billion of American exports was announced, to mixed reactions. He was received less kindly by Congress, whose members expressed disquiet about everything from trade deficits to human rights and whose leaders declined to discuss matters over dinner - perhaps because they did not wish to be lost in the high-powered crowd of attendees. New to the political stage, but picking a perfect time to arrive: the recently elected and appointed (by vote of the board of supervisors, following the departure of Gavin Newsom to be Lt. Governor of California) mayors of Oakland and San Francisco, Jean Quan and Ed Lee, who are the first Asian-Americans to lead major American cities. This was probably not lost on Hu, given that 115 years ago San Francisco was the scene of a court battle whose outcome still echoes today, over the American citizenship of Wong Kim Ark. Sadly but predictably, some prominent Americans decided to skip the complexities and stick with the time-honored tradition of mocking foreign languages. Like many Chinese leaders, Hu has an engineering background - a contrast with the US, which tends to elect lawyers (Hu's likely successor, Xi Jinping, is also an engineer). In keeping with the Chinese government's revolutionary heritage, Hu summed up his outlook soon after becoming the country's leader with a compact manifesto known as the Eight Honors and Eight Shames. In practice, Hu is regarded as less of an ideologue than a technocrat, whose ideas referred are generally referred to as the 'Scientific Development Concept (pdf). For an extreme example of China's rapid economic growth: Shanghai has changed a lot from 1990 - 2010.

Technocrat

four panels — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 08:07:00 -0800

The best political speech I have ever watched (Real media) - [WMV] - Howard Dean talks politics at Johns Hopkins on Thusday October 11, and does so using intelligent, complex ideas and later responds to questions with long, detailed, complicated answers.

The revolutionaries will wear Prada.

IshmaelGraves — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 21:33:43 -0800

Marginwalker — MetaFilter for the technocrat elite.