Off The Deep End
This morning BoingBoing posted this, a fun game called “Hitler or Fallwell,” where you look at quotes and try to figure out which of these two men said them. I don’t even know what to make of the guy, because he was just that out there. He was like a culmination of all of the worst kinds of bigotry and hate ever perpetrated in the name of American Christianity. The Wikiquote page on him has plenty of icky quotes.
Also, yesterday at Borders I made the mistake of looking at the new releases section (a mistake in that there are lots of political books mixed in with the rest), and I saw a book called “Freedmnomics.” The book presents itself as a rebuttal to Freakanomics. I thought “fair enough,” but then the bullet points inside the book’s jacket were ALL standard Republican talking points, except for “Why the controversial assertions made in the trendy book Freakonomics are almost entirely wrong.” Lott’s main specialty has been putting together research (which many, including the authors of Freakonomics have questioned) that indicates that higher gun ownership leads to less crime. (Though according to this blogger, Freakonomics’ citations of such aren’t quite right). The fact that Freedomnomics came out after his lawsuit against Levitt makes it even more suspect. The real problem, however, is that it’s part of a huge genre of books that are written to be read only by people who are firmly at one side or the other of the political spectrum. I know these books make money, so the problem is not so much the books themselves as the cultural factors that allow them to exist, but either way it’s a problem, and the profitability of publishing these books leads to more and more of them coming out.
