Monday, November 12, 2007

DeLong posts an insulting rant directed at Bob Herbert. I post a comment, which DeLong responds to by inserting bracketed [ ] text
As often happens, Prof. DeLong sees error as absolute, evil literally incarnate.
[But errors committed through either moral or intellectual bad faith *are* evil. It would have been easy for Bob Herbert to inform himself so that he correctly informed his readers. He didn't. That tells you something.]
Not only is he sometimes wrong, but his manner is such that it makes it difficult for him to accept that he's misread either fact or implication. This attack is bad logic and lousy politics. Here's how Duncan Black handled the same question
And DeLong calls himself a social democrat?
I responded
"[But errors committed through either moral or intellectual bad faith *are* evil. It would have been easy for Bob Herbert to inform himself so that he correctly informed his readers. He didn't. That tells you something.]"

More about you than him Professor. And you continue to editorialize within others' comments as if you were grading student papers. Your obliviousness is par for the course for someone so willing to question others' motives.
Herbert's a political writer. He makes technical mistakes and logical errors but he isn't a hypocrite. He doesn't change his tune to hide his inconsistencies as Brooks does. You know that, or you should. Maybe you just ignored it, but Duncan Black didn't.

You pretend not to be a political writer. The phrase "reality based" is used without irony, yet you've removed comments for content that didn't fit in your definition of the real. The fact that they were verifiable, and verified, meant nothing. Empiricism and reason lost out to something. To what? It would be annoying on any blog, but you make claims for intellectual impartiality. That's the problem with your silly attack on Herbert. The issue's no longer whether or not he was wrong but whether you can tell the difference between an intellectual failure and a moral one. Sometimes it's a tough call but the inability even to understand the question is an intellectual and moral failure on your part.
DeLong removes most of it and leaves
"[But errors committed through either moral or intellectual bad faith *are* evil. It would have been easy for Bob Herbert to inform himself so that he correctly informed his readers. He didn't. That tells you something.]"
More about you than him Professor. And you continue to editorialize within others' comments as if you were grading student papers.
[Yep. Comments on the comment policy are welcome in their proper place, which is not here.]
I reposted the comment, removing the reference to his editorial habits and leaving only the discussion of his post, and it was gone in five minutes.
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From the post at Eschaton:
"And the most popular measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, does not include the cost of energy or food, “the two most significant aspects of the increased cost of living for the American people.”
This isn't true. The CPI does include food and energy; the "core inflation" measure does not. It seems increasingly likely that the Fed puts its hands over its ears and says "NA NA NA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" when it comes to the CPI and focuses almost entirely on the core inflation rate when thinking about its monetary policy decisions, and because of this press accounts tend to focus on the core inflation rate as the only thing that matters.

But the CPI does include food and energy costs, and it is the CPI, not the core CPI, which is used to calculate things such as cost of living increases for Social Security benefits (well, specifically a slightly modified measure called CPI-W is used, but it too includes food and energy).

Whether or not the index is calculated appropriately is another question, but it doesn't exclude those things.

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