"You useless piles of bland flesh" [*]

The problem with ideologues is that they tend to be half right and half wrong, and hence reliably unreliable, lacking even the usefulness of philosophers who, according to Leibniz, are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.

"You've combed the galaxy and all you've come up with is mono-colored trash, bleeding hearts and do-gooders. You're dead, you half-white."

If you cycle between the New York Post and the New York Times, esp. during periods such as the current tax hike brouhaha, you can see that they both position themselves as the “friend of the little guy,” the liberal arguing for soaking the rich to fund the little guy, the “conservative” arguing for “freeing” the rich to thereby employ the little guy, etc.

This may be a just a marketing strategy -- the little guy paper buyers being more numerous, like voters at election time; if it is sincere, I suppose the Conservative seems to think the poorer orders respond best to discipline while the rich need incentives and bribes, viz, lower taxes lest they become lazy, while the Liberal, elite division, seeks to save his rank and privileges by buying off the poor, lest they revolt. As Mark Ames observed, the lower ranks tend to upset this neat scenario, since they reject the blandishments of the elite in favor of spiting them.

Thus we see the role of the Marxist as the friend of Capital; the theory needs the “immiseration” of the poor as the spark of revolution; thus opposing all “reformist” efforts on the part of the more practical post-FDR moneybags.

Comes now Paul “Nobel” Krugman to point, aghast, at the verbal legerdemain of the Accursed Republicans:

[A]ccording to reporting at the Huffington Post,

all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

I really do wonder how this country can remain governable, when one party insists on creating its own reality.

You can be that Krugman would not even notice, or would even applaud, a parallel Liberal study that banned the use of “illegal immigrant” in favor of “undocumented refugee” or “marriage” in favor of “non-gender specific partnership.” Or take this example from another current debate among the chattering classes: the Administration calling its compulsory health insurance a ‘mandate’ rather than a ‘tax’ when lobbying for it, then, when in court, arguing that it’s not a constitutionally wonky ‘mandate’ but rather a “tax: see the 16th Amendment.“

One man’s “we’ve made so much progress in our understanding” is another man’s -- ideology.

I suspect that what fuels Krugman's Capt. Renault level of outrage lies in the fact that, for theoretical reasons, such solving problems or winning arguments by renaming the the terms is a Liberal specialty; see: "African-American" or "Global warming? No, I said 'climate change.'"

And notice his go-to example of irrefutability: the “theory” of evolution! A mere biological theory at best, and hence far from the level of certainty accorded physics or chemistry; to say nothing of such logical truths as A=A. Of course, “America’s greatest philosopher,” Willard Van Orman Quine, spent most of his career indefatigably arguing that such “logical truths” were merely “highly confirmed” or just arbitrarily placed at the center of our “web of belief”; to doubt them merely required a lot of re-arranging, but hardly madness or stupidity. And where would that put the so-called “theory” of evolution? Pretty far out there, I’d say, and quite easy to doubt without any apparently lapse of sanity or efficiency.

Oh, but WE know why the Krugmans always choose it; its entirely non-scientific role in their elite war against … the little people. So he wants to pump up a rickety biological theory not just to silence other biologist, but to provide gilt-backing to the whole absurd farrago of materialistic metaphysical claims about man, God, and the Universe. All this based on some supposed observations of finches. Holy category mistake!

And this from a man whose supposed expertise lies in -- economics! The very model of a pseudo-science with pretensions of, get this, explaining not just the price of chips but all of human behavior! [There's that materialistic metaphysical inflation again] The charlatanry of which is epitomized by cobbling together for themselves a phony “Nobel” prize, and whose theoretical disarray is shown by the fact that half the winners of said “Nobel” think that “Nobel” Laureate Krugman is an idiot.

And of course, that's true.

[*] Star Trek, "Let that be your last battlefield" (1969)