“I have nothing to declare except my genius" — said Oscar Wilde.

Or maybe he didn't say that, but, whatever. It's one of the best-loved Oscar Wilde sayings.

So I wouldn't be so sure I knew "How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves." That's the title of a piece at The Atlantic by James Fallows, who's implicitly talking about himself, implicitly assuring us that he is a smart man who knows the smart people. That is, he is one of the elite who got snookered in the last election.

But the people Fallows talks about in his article are scientists and computer people. Wilde was a brilliant humorous writer, famous, especially, for short, hilarious sentences. Trump is much more like Wilde than like Bill Gates and that guy who won the Nobel Prize in medicine when he was in his 40s.

Here's Fallows:

Virtually none of them (need to) say it. There are a few prominent exceptions, of talented people who annoyingly go out of their way to announce that fact. Muhammed Ali is the charming extreme exception illustrating the rule: he said he was The Greatest, and was. Most greats don’t need to say so....

Once you admit there's an exception, you've got to say Trump is not like the exception. But Trump is like Muhammad Ali. He's making his reputation in large part by speaking entertainingly to the public. And, like Oscar Wilde's declaration of genius, Ali's proclamation of greatness felt like exuberant, extroverted fun to those who loved him. What Trump is doing feels like that too. If you hate Trump, you'll balk at that, but you need to know that there were many people who reacted negatively to Ali's "I am the greatest." I remember it very well, because I loved "I am the greatest" at the time, and I remember why I loved it. It was liberating. You could throw off your inhibition and proclaim your greatness.

"I’d forgotten a reality of the world of Twitter. It’s a different audience, an unknown-by-the-author audience..."

"... especially as a message gets passed around. Over the next few hours, outraged responses poured in by the metric ton. All of them were self-righteously outraged about my closed-mindedness, and old-style thinking, and 'major fail,' and so on. I have never before received anything close to this volume of response on Twitter, and it has never been more vitriolic. And all of it from people taking obvious (to me) sarcasm right at face value."

Writes The Atlantic's James Fallows in "Why Twitter Doesn't Work with Sarcasm, Chap. 823."

His cry of pain boils down to the old Don't you know who I am?

It's supposed to be already understood that he's a good liberal who would never seriously align with Trump and Cruz.



In his natural habitat, he's free to use sarcasm. No one would ever take him for a bad person. But out in the wild world of Twitter, where endless names flow by, he's not free anymore. Sads!

James Fallows regrets "5 Signs the United States is Undergoing a Coup" as the title of his attack on the Supreme Court.

It's now "5 Signs of a Radical Change in U.S. Politics."

Using "coup" in the headline implies things I don't mean. Through the past decade, there has been a radical shift in the "by any means necessary" rules of political combat, as I describe. Previous conservative administrations have nominated previous conservative Justices — but not radical partisans, happy to overthrow precedent to get to the party-politics result they want. 

Fallows' piece is embarrassingly hysterical, with or without the new title.

James Fallows: "I shouldn't have called Gov. Rick Perry's reference to Galileo during this week's Republican debate 'flat-out moronic.'"

"That's mean talk that I shouldn't use about anyone, and I'm sorry." He's saying that after "reflection, and in response to a torrent of near- identically phrased outraged mail...."

Not much of a backtrack. Here's where we talked about him yesterday. I don't know if I'm responsible for any or much of his "outraged mail," but if you feel like going over there now and telling him off, please word your email in a manner that displays the unique person that is you.

James Fallows says it was "flat-out moronic" for Rick Perry to bring up Galileo.

Perry was opining on science and climate change:

The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet, to me, is... nonsense. I mean... just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

What's stupid about that? Fallows says:

[U]ntil this evening's debate, the only reason anyone would use the example of Galileo-vs-the-Vatican was to show that for reasons of dogma, close-mindedness, and "faith-based" limits on inquiry, the findings of real science were too often ignored or ruled out of consideration. And Perry applies that analogy to his argument that we shouldn't listen to today's climate scientists? There are a million good examples of scientific or other expert consensus that turned out to be wrong, which is the point Perry wanted to make. He could have used IBM's early predictions that the total world market for computers would be a mere handful, or the "expert" resistance to public-health and medical theories by Pasteur or Lister, or anything from the great book The Experts Speak.

The reason I think this stings over time is that it's like someone who tries to fancy himself up by using a great big word -- and uses it the wrong way.  Hey, I'll mention Galileo! Unfortunately in mentioning him, I'll show that I don't know the first thing about that case or what an "analogy" is. It's better to be plain spoken.

You know, when you're calling somebody "a flat-out moron," you'd better be sure you're not missing something. It's extremely common to portray environmentalism, as practiced in present-day America, as the equivalent of a religion. Just the other day, for example, I wrote: "enviromentalism is the religion taught in public schools, and it's the kind of religion done with shaming young people." Here's a World Net Daily article from back in 2008 called "The Climate Change Religion." The Freakonomics blog had an item in 2009: "Is Climate-Change Belief a Religion?"("Actually, yes..."). Here's a piece in Forbes from last April: "Climate Change As Religion: The Gospel According To Gore."

In this context, Perry's invocation of Galileo makes perfect sense, and if anybody's a flat-out moron here, it's Fallows.

"[I]is striking to come back — from the world of controlled media and not-always-accurate 'official truth' in China..."

"... and see the world's most mature democracy, informed by the world's dominant media system, at a time of perceived economic crisis and under brand new political leadership, getting tied up by manufactured misinformation. No matter what party you belong to, you can't think this is a sign of health for the Republic."

With a chilling reference to state-controlled media in China, James Fallows bemoans free speech.