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Showing posts from January, 2019

In defence of wonks

The most recent contribution to The Baffler , ‘Eat Your Chart Out’ (Jan 2, 2019) by Jon Greenaway, highlights a phenomenon I was not in any way aware of, namely the prolific use of dubious charts and graphs by online right-wing commentators. These are used without much statistical nuance to demonstrate that the positions of Trumpian demagogues have scientific validity. One embarrassingly awful example outlines that reading fiction more than non-fiction leads to people to vote Democrat, while reading non-fiction over fiction leads to voting Republican. The piece is entertaining for the most part, but towards the end Greenaway highlights another group that is overly fond of the use of charts: centrist liberals. The wonkish liberal crowd loves information, and devoutly fetishizes facts and smart graphs that can reduce the complexities of political reality into banal platitudinous data points. In this narrow compass of wonkery, matters like survival under the pressures of late capital