Ah yes, Niall Ferguson again. The West and the Rest, Edmund Burke etc. Ferguson is to history as a Nascar mechanic is to NASA. We live in different worlds but I've lived here longer and know more about it than he does.
I'm really tired of people moving into my space and then claiming they know more about it than I do. It began with the visiting anthropologist who hired somebody from the local bar to be an informant, spent a few weeks looking around and went home to write a book. One guy named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft married one of our women but when he found that he couldn't learn the Ojibwa language he got religion in the local revival, divorced his "heathen" wife and went home to NYCity to start the Museum of Natural History and become the national "Indian Expert." His teacher, Louis Cass oversaw the death march of my ancestors, to Oklahoma and invented the term Hunter/Gatherer. Ferguson is just another Englishman who couldn't see straight. Thank God I had Dame Eva Turner to show me that they aren't all like that and that going home was much better than making a mess here. She changed the face of English opera and was beloved here. I don't know where they get the people like Ferguson. REH PS. Interesting post Viggo Krugman, Others Slam Newsweek's Ferguson Newsweek's eyebrow-raising cover story on President Barack Obama, headlined "Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President," is coming under fire from writers questioning conclusions reached and facts presented. Author and historian Niall Ferguson has been savaged in postings by Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in a lengthy fact check by the Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan and writers from Slate, Salon, and Mother Jones among others. Krugman wrote in a blog post that "there are multiple errors and misrepresentations" in the Newsweek cover story and cited the line that the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the president's healthcare law "will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period." "Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit - because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for," Krugman wrote. The Atlantic magazine did a lengthy fact check of Ferguson's piece and wrote that rather than make a "straightforward case against the current administration, Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again." The article then examines a dozen "of the more factually challenged sections of Ferguson's piece." The sections deal with such things as private sector job creation, household income, the numbers of citizens paying taxes and the stimulus. "In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can't get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids," the fact check concludes. "But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative - a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it's a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly. "It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn't deserve re-election in the real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty - counterfactual history." Ferguson's lengthy rebuttal, posted on The Daily Beast, characterized the criticisms of his article as "a storm of nit-picking and vilification" by "liberal bloggers." "My critics have three things in common," he wrote. "First, they wholly fail to respond to the central arguments of the piece. Second, they claim to be engaged in 'fact checking,' whereas in nearly all cases they are merely offering alternative (often silly or skewed) interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only if I had argued that, say, women's bodies can somehow prevent pregnancies in case of 'legitimate rape.'" He concluded, "Has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent's most ideologically committed supporters?" C 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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