"A scientist defamed can publish a thousand peer-reviewed articles in the effort to clear his or her name, but when scientists and lawyers join forces, disinformation can more readily be defeated."

"What’s disheartening is that it took more than a decade and countless hours by a team of lawyers to win a jury verdict in our case when the verdict on human-caused global warming was rendered decades ago...."

Writes climate scientist Michael Mann, along with lawyer Peter J. Fontaine, in the NYT op-ed "We Don’t Have Time for Climate Misinformation." 

"The climate scientist Michael Mann on Thursday won his defamation lawsuit against Rand Simberg... and Mark Steyn...."

"The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer. The jury also found the writers had made their statements with 'maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,' and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same."

From "Michael Mann, a Leading Climate Scientist, Wins His Defamation Suit/The researcher had sued two writers for libel and slander over comments about his work. The jury awarded him damages of more than $1 million" (NYT).

I'm very sorry to see this. I've been following the trial through the "Climate Change on Trial" podcast.

"The grand perception of psychoanalysis, for the dramatist, is that all actions are performed FOR A REASON..."

"... and that one may reason backward from the action, however absurd or self-destructive, to a cause. The determination may be arbitrary, or indeed wrong, but it may be made. Further, that, for the dramatist, the process may be reversed, the cause postulated first, and its development to a conclusion graphed—at which point (in the tragedy only; and in the drama previously) the cause of the progression is clear." 

Writes David Mamet, in "Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood" (commission-earned link).

I'm interested in the thought processes of psychoanalysts and dramatists, but that discussion of the study of causation made me think of the testimony of Abraham Wyner at the ongoing Mark Steyn trial. 

Let's listen to Episode 7 of "Climate Change on Trial" — "Mann & Ann."

Are you listening to the podcast "Climate Change on Trial"?

I am! Highly recommended. Here.

Prominent climate scientist Michael Mann is suing writer and broadcaster Mark Steyn alleging an article by Steyn defamed him and his research. Mann is perhaps best known for producing the Hockey Stick graph alleging that global temperatures were basically stable for 1500 years until human industrial activity led to an ongoing spike in temperatures. Steyn claims the graph is fraudulent. Climate Change on Trail is a verbatim podcast using re-enactments based on trial transcripts. Tune in every day to hear the clashes, the lies, and the truth.

I started with Episode 3, and that one is especially good, with reenactments of the opening statements (and Steyn is acting as his own lawyer, so his unique style is on display).

Understanding Goldstone.

On Tucker Carlson's show last night, Mark Steyn laughs and laughs at this Goldstone character at the center of the Don-Jr-gate story. Go over there and watch the clip of Steyn's sustained comic riff:



One approach to getting President Trump away from this problem is to portray it as too absurd to mean anything. And yet the Goldstone-is-a-clown defense will not work on anyone who's inside the mindset that the entire Donald Trump phenomenon is a giant clown show. In that view, the arrival of another clown makes it more of a clown show. That's the problem. It's a nightmare!

And The NYT has its effort to soberly process Mr. Goldstone. Excerpt:

He is currently on what he has termed a “gap year,” during which he is traveling around the world. So far, according to his Facebook page, Mr. Goldstone has made stops in Venice; Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Montenegro, among other places, and posted images of himself with young men — “muppets,” as he calls them — in each one. The last item he posted on Facebook was a photo of a sign for the Bathhouse of the Winds in Athens on Sunday....

That article reveals that Goldstone — among many other things — wrote an essay that was published in The New York Times. Here it is, from 2010: "The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat." Excerpt:

In China, traveling while fat turned farcical. I had been in Beijing less than 48 hours when I started to notice small children running up to me and touching my stomach before scurrying away in fits of laughter. Day and night they continued to approach me, poking and prodding at my belly.

On a walk through the Forbidden City, a local guide explained to me what was happening. “The kids think you are Buddha,” he said, “and they are rubbing your belly for good luck. You are Happy Buddha.”

Tip: Do not rub Rob Goldstone's belly for good luck. It doesn't work.

That doesn't mean you should attempt to pop that belly. You know what I'm talking about? Watch the man sitting between Trump and Goldstone:



ADDED: Does that excerpt from the NYT article have a homophobic whiff? I had to look up the Bathhouse of the Winds in Athens. It's a public bath dating back to the first period of Turkish rule (1453 – 1669). It "functioned as a bathhouse until 1956" and is now run by The Museum of Greek Folk Art as a tourist attraction. And I had to look up "muppet" in the Urban Dictionary. It means "A person who is ignorant and generally has no idea about anything."

Scott Adams — on Tucker Carlson's show last night — makes the argument that the Russia story is good for Trump.

Adams loves to say what's counterintuitive to everybody else and to say it with a delightful combination of straight-faced confidence and distanced bemusement.

Meanwhile, Tucker excels at doing his Tucker Face while the other person is talking. That's often quite funny.

These 2 guys work well together, but maybe Fox News should give Scott Adams his own show. Here, take my poll:

Should Fox News give Scott Adams his own show?

Yes. It'd be so much better than the other talking heads shows. I'd watch all the time.

Sure. It would be good. But give Mark Steyn his own show too.

Yeah, but Adams is probably better in smaller doses and might be bad interviewing guests.

No. Adams works only as an occasional guest and in his own smaller website domain.

No! Adams is awful — a ridiculously conceited and often absurdly wrong bullshitter.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Their cleverest scene together is the one in which Benjamin asks Mrs Robinson if they can't, for once, talk about something."

"Conventionally, that would make him the 'sensitive' one - the one who wants a meaningful relationship, rather than just uncomplicated rutting. But it comes across as cruel and heartless: He's too insensitive to sense her vulnerability, and too uncaring to try to figure it out. So, even in the New Hollywood, Benjamin is a traditionalist - opting for romance and conversation over sex and compartmentalization. Mike Nichols' genius was in finding the sweet spot where edgy sells, providing you smooth out all the rough stuff."

Writes Mark Steyn (on the occasion of the return of "The Graduate" to theaters on its 50th anniversary). (Can you see it in Madison? Yes. But only at 2:00, and it's a beautiful, warm day here. To go to the movies this afternoon would be like taking Elaine to a strip bar, no?)

Mark Steyn goes to a Trump rally.

A nice write-up. Funny... so I'll excerpt the part about Trump's comic talent:

He's way funnier than half the stand-up acts I've seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing.

Steyn compliments Obama for his comic timing, then:

"Not much annoys me more than the stereotype that to be liberal is to be full of guilt."

"To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others. On the basis of that compassion we choose to make lifestyle choices (taking public transport, boycotting Nestle, going vegetarian, donating to charity for example) and do our bit. But given that humans are full of contradiction between what they should do and what they want to do, there is always some conflict."

Wrote Sunny Hundal in a 2007 Guardian article titled "The guilt-free liberal." I'm looking into the topic of "liberal guilt" after my post earlier this morning in which I rejected Power Line's "liberal guilt" theory of why Brian Williams lied. I said:

I've spent decades deeply embedded among liberals and guilt just doesn't seem to be the central force in their psychology. "Liberal guilt" is some kind of meme among conservatives, and it doesn't resonate for me.

Meade questioned "Is 'liberal guilt' a conservative meme?" That got me searching. My report from decades of embedding amongst the liberals is that liberals think they are good, not bad. They feel like repositories of virtue — "mindful of compassion and empathy for others," as Hundal put it. They tend to guilt-trip conservatives, who are regarded as lacking compassion and empathy.

Meade and I also got into a conversation about the difference between "guilt" and "shame," which would take me a long time to pursue in a blog post, so I'll just quickly recall the anti-Walker protesters who endlessly shouted "Shame! Shame!" Conservatives were supposed to be ashamed of not caring enough about the plight of the unionized public employees. These protesters evinced no shame or guilt about themselves. They seemed to feel ultra-righteous.



That photograph of mine first appeared in a March 2011 post titled "Shame, shame, shame. Where is the shame?" ("Is it in wearing a gray hoodie under a tailored blazer, a little black derby hat, and a smelled-a-fart expression while carrying a pre-printed 'SHAME' sign when the guy marching after you is wearing a windbreaker and carrying a handmade 'TAX the RICH' sign?..."). "Shame!" — by the way — was #5 on my 2012 list of "Top 5 Wisconsin Protests That In Retrospect Sound Like Pro-Walker Protests Against the Protests."

Anyway, back to "liberal guilt." If you Google "liberal guilt," the top hit is a Wikipedia article, but it's not an article titled "Liberal guilt," it's an article titled "White guilt." And the second hit is a 2008 Slate article titled "In Praise of Liberal Guilt." The subtitle says a lot about what made the term "liberal guilt" go viral among conservatives: "It's not wrong to favor Obama because of race."

If you Google "liberal guilt" and "Obama," among the nearly 32,000 hits you get are a syndicated Charles Krauthammer column under the headline "Obama's Speech Plays On Liberal Guilt" [dead link, but this might be the column]; a Mark Steyn post [dead link] on the National Review Online that describes "a Democrat nominating process that's a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions" ; a column by self-styled "crunchy con" Rod Dreher, who suggests [dead link] the mainstream media coverage of Obama indicates that "liberal guilt will work [on them] like kryptonite." Even liberals make fun of liberal guilt. A couple of years ago, Salon coyly proposed [dead link] supplementing the Oscars with the Liberal Guilt Awards and awarding political dramas with "Guilties."

My working theory is that "liberal guilt" got traction as a race-neutral way to accuse people of voting for Obama out of "white guilt" and that the term metastasized into a way to impugn any liberal policy with the idea that it is not rational but emanating from someplace emotional. Of course, those who recast liberal guilt as compassion and empathy are conceding that their predilections come from an emotional place, but they are proud of that, not guilty (or ashamed). Many conservatives react to this prideful confession of emotion by asserting that conservative ideas come straight from the rational mind unclouded by emotion. In my view, that's the most emotive position of all, and I would recommend that conservatives present their ideas as grounded in compassion and empathy, as — obviously — some of them do.

Mark Steyn on the militarization of the police.

Here. Excerpt:

So, when the police are dressed like combat troops, it's not a fashion faux pas, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of who they are. Forget the armored vehicles with the gun turrets, forget the faceless, helmeted, anonymous Robocops, and just listen to how these "policemen" talk. Look at the video as they're arresting the New York Times and Huffington Post reporters. Watch the St Louis County deputy ordering everyone to leave, and then adding: "This is not up for discussion."

Really? You're a constable. You may be carrying on like the military commander of an occupying army faced with a rabble of revolting natives, but in the end you're a constable.

Mark Steyn tweeted me!

Althouse on "Cultural aggression" http://t.co/hOahQLlGLk

— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) December 26, 2013

Mark Steyn writes about "de-normalizing" — being put "beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture."

And he's sorry his editor at National Review "does not grasp the stakes" in the "Duck Dynasty" flap.

Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group... decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal.

Via Power Line, which says:

As to the terms Steyn used, I understand [National Review editor, Jason Lee] Steorts’ point. I too would have liked the column better without the unfunny Rat Pack joke. And I agree with Steorts that courteous disagreement, devoid of insults, is usually preferable to lack of courtesy, even when one is disagreeing with the dangerous and the uncivil.

The point of the Rat Pack joke — “How do you make a fruit cordial?”/ “Be nice to him.” — wasn't that it's funny. It's that not too long ago junk like that was the norm. It was probably considered sweet, gentle and even gay-friendly. Steyn is paying attention to how cultural norms change. This is something I've been talking about too, and I am confounded by what a hard time people have understanding this subject. (Read my posts and the response in the comments here and here.)

There's "a line between rhetorical hyperbole and defamation."

Said the court that let the climate scientist Michael Mann — he of the "hockey stick" — to continue with his lawsuit against the National Review. 

The court...  pointed to terminology such as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the [tree]-ring circus” and “cover-up” as “more than rhetorical hyperbole.”

The linked article miscorrects the joke "tree-ring circus" to "three-ring circus." Here's the blog post  that drove Mann to file a lawsuit — Mark Steyn calling attention to some football-and-hockey bad-taste humor.

"Americans are overly deferential to bureaucracy, but, in my observation, they are uniquely fearful of the state’s tax collectors..."

Mark Steyn writes:

I am an immigrant to this great land, and I love it, but I will make a small observation from my years in the United States which I hope won’t be taken the wrong way: Like citizens of almost all Western democracies in the 21st century, Americans are overly deferential to bureaucracy, but, in my observation, they are uniquely fearful of the state’s tax collectors to a degree I have never seen with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs in London or equivalent agencies in Paris, Ottawa, Rome, Canberra. The IRS has, in American terms, extraordinary powers.... Americans are fearless if some guy pulls some stunt in a shopping mall, but an IRS assault is brutal and unending. Many activists faded away, and the media began writing stories about how the Tea Party had peaked; they were over; they wouldn’t be a factor in 2012. And so it proved.... [T]he plan worked.

"Right Wing News emailed more than 204 right-of-center bloggers and asked them to rate 75 prominent people on the Right."

"51 of them responded."

I responded to this poll, even though I didn't like that the middle category — between "admire"/"greatly admire" and "dislike"/"greatly dislike" — was "no opinion." I was forced to check "no opinion" for a lot of people that I had an opinion about. My opinion was I'm in the middle. (But then, am I "right-of-center"?)

By the way, the most admired person was Clarence Thomas, followed by (tie) Thomas Sowell and Mark Steyn. The least admired is Megan McCain.

"Net Numbers (Positive - Negative) For 2016 Presidential Contenders":

12) Chris Christie (-11)
11) Jeb Bush (4)
10) Marco Rubio (21)
9) Jan Brewer (25)
8) Condi Rice (31)
7) Rick Perry (33)
6) Paul Ryan (37)
5) Sarah Palin (39)
3) Rand Paul (40)
3) Scott Walker (40)
2) Bobby Jindal (43)
1) Ted Cruz (45)

Even if Obama thought first — or even only — about reelection, how could he have chosen to lie the way he did about Libya?

Mark Steyn writes:

The State Department has now conceded that there was no movie protest at all. and that it was, in fact, one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facilityBoth these very obvious points were surely known to Washington by 6 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday September 12, by which time the surviving consulate staff had been evacuated to Tripoli. Yet Ambassador Rice, President Obama, et al., were still blaming the video days later. Obama and Secretary Clinton always refer to Ambassador Stevens as “Chris” — Chris this, Chris that — as if he were a treasured friend or intimate. Yet they and the sad hollow men around them dishonor their “friend” in death.

Quite aside from the wrongness of lying, generally and specifically, in this case, and quite aside from the motivation to lie — I'm going to presume, without more, it was campaign politics — why did Obama think he could get away with this lie long enough, and why was he not daunted by the risk entailed in going on and on, doubling down on the lie, and even lying in a U.N. speech? How did he have the nerve to co-opt our U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, and subvert her credibility and honor? How did he get this millstone around the neck of Hillary Clinton, who has such a strong interest in her independent career and who knows a thing or two about the devastation of getting caught lying? (And this lie can't be waved away as as lie "about sex." It's a lie at the very heart of our trust in the President.)

Now, I have a few more questions, focusing on the choice to construct the lie out of that "Innocence of Muslims" video. Here's a montage of statements that were made about the video:

OBAMA:  I don't care how offensive this video was, it was terribly offensive and we should shun it.

HILLARY:  This video is disgusting and reprehensible.  It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose, to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.

CARNEY:  Let's be clear.  These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region.

OBAMA:  You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character, an extremely offensive video.

CARNEY:  The unrest we've seen has been in reaction to a video.

OBAMA:  A crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.

RICE:  It was a spontaneous, not a premeditated response, a direct result of a heinous and offensive video.

OBAMA:  I know there are some who ask, "Why don't we just ban such a video?"  The answer is enshrined in our laws.  Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

Was this just the nearest lame excuse, like the dog ate my homework? The President must have known that the truth about the attack on the embassy would eventually emerge. He couldn't have assumed that those called to testify in congressional hearings would commit perjury. Even if everyone would be willing to commit perjury, how could they think they could credibly pull off lies about protests — vivid public events — that never took place? Maybe Obama's only concern was that the truth not emerge before the election, but given the risk that it would, why wasn't he afraid of how bizarre and outrageous the video story was?

The video story, moreover, put Obama in a position where he had to present caring for the feelings of violent foreigners as something that challenges our commitment to free speech, as if it were a difficult matter to brood over. He made it sound as though he would ban the video — or take the proposal to ban it seriously — if only the Constitution didn't stand in his way. Was he interested in making a show of respect for constitutional law? It didn't come off as too respectful, especially when they arrested the filmmaker (who was, conveniently, on parole and thus arrestable). This was the worst sort of scapegoating. Obama called this man — this erstwhile nonentity — "a shadowy character."

And this inane and unnecessary display of concern for the feelings of Muslims depended on thinking about Muslims as a bunch of idiots and criminals. It wasn't respectful at all to promote this caricature of Muslims as people who look at a stupid video and lose their minds, take to the streets, and work themselves up into a murderous rage. The video story could only work as a cover for the truth if it could be leveraged on an offensive stereotype of Muslims. It is the story about the response to the video — far more the video itself — that has "a deeply cynical purpose, to denigrate a great religion"! Why didn't Obama care that he was insulting Muslims in this weird charade about caring for Muslims?

Why was any of this worth doing, even cynically? Even if you assume Obama put his own reelection first, how could he possibly have selected this lie and thought it was a good idea? Yes, the planned terrorist attack in Libya hurts the image he would like to have as the vanquisher of al Qaeda, but the truth about that has already come out, with 3 weeks left to go before the election. By handling the matter the way he did, we have — on top of the damage to the vanquisher of al Qaeda image — a glaring lie and plain evidence of extremely poor judgment.

"The official line — that the slaughter of American officials was some sort of improvised movie review that got a little out of hand..."

"...  is now in the process of modification to something bearing a less patently absurd relationship to what actually happened. That should not make any more forgivable the grotesque damage that the administration has done to the bedrock principle of civilized society: freedom of speech."

Writes Mark Steyn.

"So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets."

"Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that's too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast.... Too crude, too telling, too devastating."

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in."

"That's the America I love."

Said Mitt Romney according to Doonesbury, which made fun of it, and Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum was initially inclined to mock, and then thought about it, and realized he agreed with it.

One thing that gave him second thoughts is that his co-blogger Mark Liberman had already processed the quote, using the sublime technique of sentence diagramming. Which is nice.

But the more important basis for second thinking is that when you get to Liberman's old post, you find out that Romney didn't even speak those words. Mark Steyn did, and he was purporting to paraphrase Romney, for humorous effect. Pullum found out he was laughing at Steyn and Steyn was trying to make us laugh, and suddenly the quote wasn't funny anymore. Pullum, the liberal, was initially enjoying laughing at Romney — and his vapid dorkiness — and then he found out he was laughing at something a big right-winger — Steyn — had intended as a joke. Hey, that's not funny!

Pullum regains his sense of self-liberalism and goes into 4th of July mode:

It's nearly the 4th of July.... I love being back in America. It's like slipping into an old pair of shoes that really fit.... I don't think I can find anything mistaken in the passage. I think I believe in that America too. God bless it, anyway.

His post ends with a note that it's completely rewritten, because he apparently had originally assumed Romney did say those words, hadn't seen Liberman's old post, and went the mockery.