However, I am very disturbed by one thing that Gary Alan Fine says, and mildly disturbed by two others.

I am most upset by the implication (he does not quite come out and admit this) that Fine does not drink before eleven pm — although this would explain his legendary productivity. I hope I am reading this wrong.

Then I have two quibbles. If Beck has invented a form of hate that is funny and not harmful, hats off to him. But it does not seem possible to control hatred among your audiences. And it is not just the mentally ill who react inappropriately. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin thought he was following scripture, and there is today a (albeit small) movement to free him from prison. And the man who stirred up the most hate for Rabin became Israel’s prime minister a few months after the assassination (and is prime minister again now).

My other quibble is with the concept of “nudging” people to do what is good for them by making that the default choice. Fine implies that without intervention, there are no incentives pushing choices in one direction or another. But there inevitably are, and those incentives are often the result of corporate or political campaigns to establish them. They are not somehow natural or God given. Plus, if we believe people are rational and informed enough to make good decisions for themselves, then we should believe that they could resist the new nudges and go back to the old choices if they really prefer those.

Which gets me to a final idea that Fine attributes to Beck: the old Burkean conceit that lefties wish to remake the world, while conservatives wish to keep it in its “natural” state. One problem lies in the idea that there could really be a natural state of society, unmade by strategic players promoting their interests and ideals. The other is that today, in the US, it is the right who wish to remake the world far more radically than the “left” does.

The problem is, I don’t know how many people are actually taking their forays into his bizarre and contradictory world seriously. When he tells people that “social justice” is code for “communism,” or that the current unrest in the middle east may be the beginnings of a new Muslim empire, a “caliphate,” or has a fit of Nazi tourettes, it’s hard to laugh. (But not impossible.)