Is This Like Phalanx vs. Legion in the Second Century B.C.E.?
My view is that of commenter Monty: as at the Battle of Kynokephelae, it all depends on the terrain--in the flat, grassroots areas where they can maintain their order, the squadrons of venom-unleashing command-lambs drive all before them; in rocky terrain where fiscal cliffs are found, it is the lemming choirs' siren songs that are decisive…
Henry Farrell: Questions that are just a little too long to fit into 140 characters:
If a devoted choir of lemmings were to go head-to-head against a squadron of rabid, venom-unleashing command-lambs, which would win?
The command-lambs might look at first like the obvious choice, but I can’t help feeling that the mysteriously compelling harmonies of the lemming-choir’s deadly siren song would give the crafty rodents a decisive strategic advantage.
The context:
John Cochrane: "No one but the devoted choir of lemmings is paying much attention to Krugman's mudslinging":
Paul Krugman… has been lambasting those he disagrees with by trumpeting their supposed "predictions" which came out wrong…. The sudden narcolepsy of Times fact-checkers any time Krugman steps in to the room…. I don't think science advances by evaluating soothsaying. You make good unconditional predictions with very badly wrong structural models, and very good structural models make bad unconditional predictions. The talent of predicting and the talent of understanding are largely uncorrelated….
I also can't see that anyone but the devoted choir of lemmings is paying much attention to Krugman's mudslinging any more. But it is nice that Niall and Ken are taking the effort to ask the great doctor if perhaps he also doesn't need a bit of healing; perhaps they will force Krugman to go back to actually writing about economics.
And:
David Brooks (2006): "Markos Moulitsas Zuniga… commands his… squadrons of rabid lambs to unleash their venom":
They say that the great leaders are gone and politics has become the realm of the small-minded. But in the land of the Lilliputians, the Keyboard Kingpin must be accorded full respect. The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow….
The Kingpin is not surprised by such betrayals. Sounding like Tom DeLay--who is his moral doppelgänger--Kos says that those who crash the gates and take on the establishment are bound to be attacked. But the truth is that the new boss is little different from the old boss--only smaller. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats bow and scrape. He has managed to spread the gospel of Kossism far and wide, which is not really about ideas and philosophy. "I'm just all about winning," he has said.
Let me just note that for somebody who has spent an awful lot of time voting for candidates endorsed by Tom Delay and none for those endorsed by Markos Moulitzas Zuniga, Brooks works awfully hard to establish moral equivalence--"both sides do it"--between the two.
And let me just note that Cochrane's take on the methodology of positive economics is truly astonishing.
