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Good Arguments Leading to Bad Conclusions

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Granting that is was only half-serious, the below-discussed d-squared post on Budweiser reminds me of Kelefa Sanneh’s arguments about rockism. Sanneh’s underlying points are often quite correct: there’s no particular reason to privilege white guys playing guitars, worrying about whether artists in question are “poseurs” or whatever are tautologies that are irrelevant to the quality of the music, there’s nothing wrong with production or hooks, “authenticity” is not a useful criterion of value, etc. The problem is that his perfectly valid premises lead to such appalling conclusions (“Mariah Carey is better than Nirvana!”) that it tends to undermine them–his judgment can be so bad that it reinforces rockism rather than undermining it, although the latter would be a useful project. Similarly, Dsquared is certainly right that we have no evidence that Budweiser isn’t “traditional” beer–for all I know in the olden days beer was an insipid, watery brew with virtually no hops in it–and mass producing crappy beer is perfectly “traditional.” The mere fact that beer isn’t mass-produced by a huge corporation does not make it good (cf. Gordon Biersch, Red Hook blonde, etc.), just as the fact that music or film is independently produced doesn’t guarantee its quality–indeed, I don’t understand the whole concept of saying one is a fan of “indie film” (as opposed to particular directors, genres, etc.) at all. The problem is that the meaninglessness of tradition, which is a bad argument against Budweiser, is also a bad argument for it–traditions of producing watery, insipid beer with virtually no hops in it are not worth preserving. (Although I suppose it should be noted that Budweiser has apparently gotten more tasteless and insipid over time to appeal to the palates of people who don’t actually like beer.)

But now I see that Yglesias is actually defending d-squared’s post without irony, claiming that Budweiser is in fact a fine beer vaguely malt-flavored water. (I would strongly advise the switch to a union product, given that taste is apparently not a criterion.) I have no idea which microbrews he has in mind that are much worse that Budweiser, but one fears that he may consider the (exceedingly mediocre) Brooklyn Brewery paradigmatic.

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