You might be wondering why I constantly bag on Kevin Drum and the Crooked Timber crew.

All four of you.

It’s because they represent the worst of the pseudo-intellectual left — the left that is into using “true” data they believe proves something or other, when in reality the data is (as it always is) contingent on a certain way of conceptualizing the world and the inter-relations therein. (And yes, I am using plural “data” as singular. Gaze upon my field of fucks to give, and find that it is barren.)

It might seem like I am stating something obvious. Of course, everyone has a worldview, a gestalt of understanding and comprehension, a way of making sense of the world.

However, these types don’t get this. They believe with their Excel spreadsheets and unexcelled data viz corresponds exactly to the world out there, that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would reach the same conclusions if they only knew the “truth.”

Such can be seen with Drum’s frequent and ill-informed screeds against single payer. Or the Crooked Timber’s implicit and explicit endorsement of orthodox economics at every turn.

Sure, they are better than Trump. Better than Sean Spicer. Better than Stephen Bannon. But that’s an awfully low bar. That’s like saying eating a live toad is better than eating a rotten one. Yes, it is. But…?

In other words, yes, they are preferable to the other group of clowns, but they aren’t good enough, and if that’s the best we can do, we still lose.

I call them pseudo-intellectuals because they mistake data for wisdom, an Excel spreadsheet for the truth, the scope of the extant for the limit of the possible, the map for the territory.

And since to a one they know very little about the territory, they are always fighting battles with their little Excel spreadsheets that match up very poorly to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the world and how it operates outside of whatever produces their charts and graphs.

Furthermore, they are completely unable to conceptualize that their baseline assumptions are as much myths and fairy tales (rather than the ground truths they imagine them to be) as any climate change denier’s ideas about how you can disprove mountains of verified and verifiable collective understanding with some soda bottles and alka seltzer.

That is why I attack them. They aren’t improving the world, and are in fact standing in the way of any betterment.

Their intellects are weak, their insights are poor, and their reasoning and ratiocination are deficient. Isn’t that enough?