More theistic special pleading

There's an interview up at Salon that starts off well enough, from a seemingly-intelligent person, that veers off into mush about halfway through.

The interviewee, Karl Giberson, has a new book out called "Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution." I should note as an aside that evolution isn't really something that requires belief in the same way that religious dogma does... but given the current culture-wars climate, that's often the way it's spun. Giberson, by the way, is a professor of physics... at a Nazarene college. So that probably explains a lot about where he's coming from.

The promising beginning:

Why does Darwin need to be saved?

He has been vilified in American evangelical culture and even more broadly than that. Yet his important contribution to science reaches into theology and religion....

Why do misconceptions about Darwin persist?

Because in the latter part of the 20th century, evolution became identified with negative social agendas, and some very effective polemicists like Henry Morris and Ken Ham convinced people that evolution was responsible for the breakdown of the family and drug abuse and all manners of evil... In their eyes, Darwinism destroyed belief in God the creator.

Darwinism became associated with repugnant beliefs like Nazism and eugenics. But...evolution doesn't make judgments, it merely describes.

Right. There's an important distinction between a theory that tells us the way the world is and a theory that tells us the way it ought to be.... Conservatives don't want homosexuality to be perceived as something natural because that would force them to reevaluate the way we treat it from a moral perspective....

Aren't some people threatened by evolution because they can't reconcile biblical literalism, or "young-earth" creationism, with the fact that the earth is not 10,000 years old but billions?

Yes, but young-earth theory is an interpretation of Genesis that requires that you bring a certain set of suspect assumptions to the text. The early chapters of Genesis do not read like history.... They have a different sort of character to them. People who read Hebrew and understand the ancient Near Eastern worldview, and the cosmology that informed it, have given us ample reasons why you would not read Genesis that way, even if you weren't worried about reconciling it with a billion-year-old planet.

Yet Americans do.... You write that the strength of creationism in the U.S. "has more to do with American culture than biology or Christian theology." What is it about our culture that has led to creationism's popularity?

In short, intellectual laziness. We're not prepared to do the hard work to make our culture more sophisticated....

Many Christians insist the Bible is the literal word of God.

Yes, that's widespread and again it's because of a certain lack of sophistication from a literary point of view. Many people translate "the word of God" into the "words of God." They don't recognize that when you talk theologically about the Bible being the word of God, you mean that it contains an important message.... But it's a distortion to say the Bible contains the words of God as if God had dictated these things....We can't just pull all of this into the 20th century as if it was just recently written down by God for our benefit.

So far, we're discussing religion as a historical phenomenon. And I'd tend to agree with much of what he says. When you take the King James version as the ultimate correct version, believing that God dictated it to a secretary and ignore issues of translation (the oldest versions of the gospels, the versions in Aramaic and Hebrew, describe Mary as "a young woman," not necessarily a virgin, to take just one example), then you get all sorts of screwy interpretations. People understood the world much differently 3000 years ago than we do today; the scriptures aren't written as literal history, they weren't intended to be an objective record of facts, etc.

Notice that he's bringing the tools of modern scholarship to bear on problems of authorship, translation, intention of the authors, etc.

He also has little time for creationists or so-called "Intelligent Design:"

I don't think the intelligent design movement does anything useful. Its poster children for God's intervention are things like the clotting of blood or the propeller on the back of a bacterium. These aren't interesting features of the world, and the fact that they seem complicated and hard to explain through evolution doesn't suggest for one second that we ought to invoke the supernatural finger of God.

And actually, they're not as hard to explain as some think. The Dover trial demonstrated that.

Unfortunately, having laid down the law and said we don't need to invoke God to explain things, he then starts laying the groundwork to do precisely that:

I think there's a reckless extrapolation from what we know about evolution to an all-encompassing materialism. Evolution has so much of its data missing in history that to look at the whole thing and say we know for sure that despite all the stuff we can't find, and have never seen, has purely naturalistic causes -- and we know this with such certainty that we insist the knowledgeable buy into this idea -- goes way too far.

Pay attention, now. The ID crowd makes a mistake in invoking God to explain complicated things because it's completely unnecessary. BUT, because we don't know soooo much stuff, we CAN'T say it's all materialist. There MUST be a magic sky-fairy behind it all somewhere!

Is that what he's really saying? After all, he goes on to say, we can't use the gaps to argue God (even though he just did):

But I think the difference is that we need to know more than we know to make certain claims. And I would claim that what we know historically about the closing of these gaps suggests that we are always going to be able to close them. That we have gaps now in our understanding of how the blood clotting mechanism arose doesn't puzzle me at all. I just say, OK, there's more work to do.

So... we don't need to invoke God. But we do. Isn't that a contradiction? Why, yes. Yes, it is.

But you reject the idea that God tinkers and has his hand in day-to-day processes, so how do nature and God interact?

That's the tough question. You should rewind the tape and erase the question because I don't really have a good answer....

He tries at one, though. You see, we're different:

We don't know how we interact with the world. Somehow you got it into your head that you were going to call and talk to me about this book. Some kind of vague intention, purposeful agenda emerged in your mind, and it got translated into a whole set of actions, and now we're talking on the phone. We don't understand that.

[sigh] Yes, we're back to the ghost in the machine argument. He then goes completely off the rails:

Consciousness is a very deep mystery. All of our models say consciousness shouldn't be possible, that it should just be atoms and molecules in your brain randomly doing things. Nothing that we've developed for a model of how human intentionality works makes sense of our own experience of the world.

Actually, the models we have say more than that. Are there parts of it we don't understand? Yes. But before, we said we were sure the gaps would be filled in. There's work to be done. But now, suddenly, nope, it doesn't make sense, it can't make sense, we know now that we can never ever figure it out without invoking invisible sky-men.

How do we know there isn't some similar mechanism by which God interacts with the world, that God can be understood as a spirit, that God is more like consciousness than a material object?

This would get a failing mark in a freshman-year intro-to-philosophy course. "How do we know it isn't there?" is MUCH different from saying "there it is." But he doesn't see that, apparently. He's posed a rhetorical question, noted the absence of a soundbite answer, and declares himself the winner of the debate; said debate only existing in his own mind in the first place. He's the one postulating the existence of God; he has the burden of proof. Saying "You can't prove there isn't one" is no proof at all.

So I'd say to Dawkins, until you explain to me how human beings interact with the world, don't tell me that God couldn't interact with the world in the same way we do.

This is incomprehensible. He obviously means something by "interact with the world" that goes beyond things like eating, sleeping, thinking, observing, enjoying, having families, etc. What, precisely, does he mean? He never says. I wonder if even he knows. Or maybe he does mean just that... Again, falling back on consciousness as some magic property that can't be explained materialistically, because, well, it just can't, because he said so.

Now, God doesn't have to step in to make consciousness occur, but something that we don't understand at all is occurring. I don't think it's supernatural. I think that someday we may understand this. There's something going on that when the neuronal networks reach a certain level of complexity, something appears that maybe is brand-new and that is consciousness. But that's just a guess about how we'll eventually be talking about that phenomenon.

No, I guess that's not it. Consciousness can be a natural phenomenon after all. So what are we left with?

You criticize the creationists for questioning the gaps in the fossil record and call it a "fool's errand" because over time, scientists usually find evidence that fills these gaps in. But aren't you engaging in the same sort of intellectual maneuver, by saying that because there are some aspects of nature and evolution that we don't understand, therefore God exists?

Right. That's an extremely fair criticism.... You're absolutely right.

I think we will never have some sort of model that says, "OK, here's how God gets his agenda across in the natural order. Here's how the will of God gets realized in nature -- we won't ever have that. But we might have insights into possibilities about how we could think about that. These insights will be rich enough that they will accommodate religious experience and some of the things that have long been a part of religion.

Okay...so... we won't have a model that directly includes God. But we may have insights into possibilities about how we might have models that include God. And those insights about possibilities will include God.

Okay, then. God as a hypothetical counterfactual. Maybe I'm in agreement after all.

But you can see why people like Dawkins and Dennett say that science seems to be functioning perfectly well on its own and we don't need to fall back on an explanation of God?

Yes, absolutely. And that has never been the way that people come to God.

Okay, so now we're back to non-counterfactual. God is now being accepted axiomatically. On what basis? None that's presented... though jumping back up a little, we find this:

But I believe in God, I believe God is personal and that God exists and cares about the created order. I think it's a very reasonable belief that God interacts with creation and that experiences people have of interacting with God are profound and deeply meaningful.

Well, you believe it. Because....? Oh, right. When we're talking about magic sky-fairies, no proof is needed, simply saying "I believe it and I think it's reasonable" is all that's necessary. Actually stating those reasons isn't.

People are far more likely to have certain experiences that overwhelm them and don't seem like conclusions of rational arguments, but seem like a kind of momentary contact with something genuinely transcendent. You say there's something more to the world than the atoms and molecules. Out of that experience comes a religious commitment. And that has characterized human experience forever.

And, once again, the feelings of the heart trump any sort of evidence or experience. People do experience altered states of consciousness, and sometimes feel the subjective experience of merging with something much larger than themselves; they often interpret this experience in religious terms. BUT. Those states are associated with certain specific electrical states in the limbic system of the brain. The subjective FEELING of being Touched By An Angel doesn't mean there's anything actually there. We're back to special pleading (all the rules of logic and evidence should be held in abeyance when we're talking about my beliefs) and the fallacy of crowds (lots of people have these experiences, so they must be right, even though many many more people DON'T have those experiences or anything coming close to them).

I used to think Dawkins went too far, that he was intemperate and exaggerating. But I'm beginning to think he got it right. Religion really does poison everything it touches. If I were to say I believed the moon was made of green cheese, I may be asked why I believe that. In response to that question, I would be expected to produce facts and reasons why.

But if we're talking about religious belief, saying "I believe it" is supposed to settle the question. Reasons can be incoherent, facts can be cherry-picked and inconvenient facts ignored. Because, well, religion is just different, and that's all there is to it.

Feh.

"Manners," Microsoft style

Microsoft has filed a patent on something euphemistically called "digital manners," which will restrict the behavior of mobile devices in areas where it's being deployed. No more annoying cell phone calls in the middle of a movie! No more worries about some creep with a camera phone at the gym locker room! What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, it also means your cell phone will politely refuse to take a picture at a concert. Or during a police raid. Or your iPod will politely refuse to transfer music to or from any computer other than yours.

But we're not supposed to notice that. Does anyone really think end users will be able to set "manners" policies? Or that it won't be implemented for the convenience of the media companies?

Weakest rationale ever

The usually-thought-provoking Peggy Noonan has a piece up that baffles me a bit. Or maybe it's just the standard media love affair with their BFF McCain, who does a good enough job of schmoozing reporters that they're very reluctant to ask him tough questions. But in this particular mash note, Peggy seems to be swooning for what she sees as the "real" McCain, cut-up and jokester:

Mr. McCain had taken the lead in the primaries and had gone from being "one of the most disruptive forces in his party" to someone playing it safe. In an airplane interview he said things like, "There is a process in place that will formalize the methodology." Then he couldn't help it, he became McCain:

"[He] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, 'has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands' and that she earned it by 'dealing drugs.' Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as 'Pat Buchanan's illegitimate daughter,' 'bipolar,' 'a drunk,' 'someone with a lot of boyfriends,' and 'just out of Betty Ford.'"

That's my boy. That's the McCain his friends love, McCain unplugged. The fall will be dead serious. At this point why not be himself, be human? Let him refind his inner rebel, the famous irreverent maverick, let the tiger out of the cage.

Sure. That's just what we need. A dose of towel-snapping frat-boy humor. Because, you know, we haven't had anything like that in a long time. And a President who cracks jokes with the press corps, well, so what if he doesn't answer inconvenient questions? He gave me a nickname!

Peggy's usually sharper than this. But this column shows why she's part of the problem.

Addendum: There is one thing Peggy gets spot-on:

The way it used to be is you ran and lost and either disappeared or pitched in. Mrs. Clinton continues making Mr. Obama look the dauphin to her embittered and domineering queen.

Hillary steps up

After all my snark about Her Hillaryness, fairness compels me to recognize that she's taking action, right from the start, and supporting the presumptive nominee.

Perhaps I misjudged the depth of her calculation. Perhaps she's doing it for the most cynical motives. I don't really care... She's doing the right thing.

Current rating

For some reason, though all I've been talking about is politics lately, this blog is currently rated:


Apparently I used the word "hurt"... Um, still need to work on the algorithm a little...

Double-Talk Express, part 27...

Word got out a couple of days ago that McCain had met (off the record, of course) with the Log Cabin Republicans... well not really met with them, just sort of stopped by while they were meeting.. no, met with them, but privately, not on his schedule, not so anyone would find out about it. So naturally, now he has to reassure the base that he really does hate teh gayz as much as they do and supports a federal amendment after all, even after saying he didn't, because he stands by his principles, and his principles tell him to do whatever the base wants!

"Straight Talk," my ass...

It never stops, does it?

And yet again still more agonizing over whether Obama has suffered enough for his sin of beating Her Hillaryness...

Obama hailed his former rival and her backers. "I recognize that this room shared the same passion that a roomful of my supporters would show. I do not expect that passion to be transferred. Senator Clinton is unique, and your relationships with her are unique." But he added: "Senator Clinton and I at our core agree deeply that this country needs to change."

Really, there are a few bits that are almost surreal...

He also sought to lead the move to unite by example, announcing that he had personally written a check for $2,300, the maximum he can give, to help retire Clinton's more than $20 million in campaign debt and that he had urged his biggest supporters to follow suit.

Well, that's great, and I suppose a relatively low-cost way of defusing the situation a bit, but really.... After Kerry beat Howard Dean in the primaries, Kerry didn't do much to help Dean retire his debt. Nor did he rush over to hire many Dean staffers. No one thought this was odd or rude or inconsiderate... Why should he have been expected to in the first place? BUT, as usual, the Clintons play by their own special rules.

At one point, an attendee told Obama that if he wanted to be seen as a true leader, he needed acknowledge that sexism had played a role in the demise of Clinton's campaign. Obama agreed and said that the issue should be addressed.

Did it play a role? Perhaps. It was definitely there. But did it ultimately make the difference? If not for sexism, would she have won? Not likely. Given the complete lack of planning for anything after Super Tuesday, the bad advice she ran with, the out of control spending... It was a botched campaign. And any male candidate who got teary-eyed the night before a big primary would NOT have received a boost from it... so it's not like Hillary wasn't ready to take advantage of sexism when it worked in her favor.

Obama and Clinton will travel to the town of Unity, N.H. -- which gave each candidate 107 votes in its January primary -- this morning for their first public appearance together.

Oh, how precious... >gag< >choke<

Some former Clinton advisers expressed irritation that Obama seems to believe that he can win the election without them or her supporters.

That's probably because he can. Sorry about reality being irritating and all, but this is politics, not group therapy.

The former president has told acquaintances that he is still upset by the tone of the campaign, particularly the way the media covered it.

Yes, that awful nasty media that kept playing his words over and over again, even when it wasn't convenient. Actually, an article I read yesterday may have been onto something: that Bill didn't successfully navigate the transition from presidential candidate (which he knew how to be) to presidential candidate's spouse, which he's never been before, and has much different expectations. I'm not entirely convinced, but there may be some of that in play.

"Everyone has checked their egos at the door."

A sentiment directly contradicted by several paragraphs directly above it.

My Continuing Political Education

I actually find myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer, in broad outline if not in all the details. The last week or so has been educational, if painful, as Obama reversed his position on FISA and now agrees that the government should have vastly expanded wiretapping powers and telecom companies should be granted retroactive immunity (isn't amnesty a better term?) for illegally turning over private customer information without a warrant. After promising to filibuster any such proposal. And worse, Barack's statement explaining his new position starts right out with the rhetoric of fear, about how dangerous the world is and we should all be afraid. Greenwald's got all this documented; here's a good starting point.

I thought Obama was about change, not about more of the same be-very-afraid, we-have-to-take-away-freedom-to-protect-liberty rhetoric we've been hearing from the GOP for years.

I shouldn't have been surprised; not really. After all, he is, at the end of the day, a politician. One who came out of Chicago, where politics is a full-contact sport. And one who has to run to the center. But DAMMIT, in an election where 80% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track as a nation, giving the Republicans 90% of what they want is NOT necessary!

Is he still a better candidate than McCain? Yes. Am I going to vote for him? Probably. Am I going to contribute, to enthusiastically talk him up, to go the extra mile? Um, that's a bit more problematic.

There's an article up at Slate today about Obama's strategy to minimize evangelical opposition to him. It recognizes he probably can't get their votes, but he can reduce the likelihood they'll organize against him as a threat to the republic.

It works the other way, as well. He hasn't lost my vote, yet. But he's lost a lot of my respect, and some of my trust, and a lot of my enthusiasm. "Better than McCain" isn't much of a rallying cry.

Stereotypes for Yuks and Laffs

Sarah Bird has a supposedly-amusing piece up at Salon about how she's been coming to grips with the fact that her son's not gay:

I guess I've suspected the worst for a long time. Certainly the signs were there from a fairly young age: He invariably chose "Power Rangers" over joining me in marathon viewings of the work of Stephen Sondheim. He preferred to thickly carpet his bedroom floor with castoff clothing rather than use the color-coded, padded hangers I put in his closet. Worst of all, he evinced a disturbing interest in Grace's bare, bony chest rather than concentrating on absorbing Will's snappy -- yet ultimately supportive -- patter. If he didn't pay attention, who would I have to call me "girlfriend" in my old age? How would I keep tabs on Britney, Carrie Underwood and that creepy kid from "High School Musical" without my very own Rex Reed 2.0?

It goes on like that, for far too long.

In Bird's world, you see, gay men don't exist as men. Nor as independent beings, apparently. Rather, they're a Will-and-Grace stereotype (she says flat-out, that's the sort of gay man she wants her son to be): Someone who exists for the sole purpose of meeting the emotional needs of lonely middle-class women in a non-threatening way.

Before you write those ALL-CAP LETTERS WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! informing me that you are a proud, stereotype-defying homosexual stevedore, soccer hooligan, whatever, that you are unabashedly clueless about fashion, décor and hygiene, let me just say, if that is you: Don't apply to be my gay son. I already own that model. No, please, submit a résumé only if you are an old-school homosexual with all the traditional old-school homosexual values and interests. Particularly if those interests include knowing how to add fullness to thinning, middle-aged hair.

And in fact, when a friend of hers calls her on her shit, she laughs it off:

Rudy is a brilliant, handsome (and single, he would like me to add) theater director here in Austin, and he is also one of the leading candidates to be my gay son. "You get to have the closeness that you imagine you would have from having a gay son without any of the, you know, finding your son's gay porn that he downloaded from the Internet. The joke is that you can get all the fashion and musical theater and closeness without homosexuality, and that joke is on me and mine. We have to deal with a lot of 'Can't you just, you know, help me pick out my clothes without, you know, kissing in front of me or hitting on my brother?'"

Excellent point. This is exactly the kind of sensitive, informed, insightful comment I'd expect from my gay son. Thank you, Rudy, I will be moving your application to the top of the pile tout de suite. As for what goes on in my grown child's bedroom? Not my business. Unless, however, it's to confer with me about whether frosty blue and chocolate brown is a color combination for the ages. Or if that expensive duvet and sham set I'm contemplating will be dated faster than you can say "teal" and "mauve."

She doesn't want a gay son. She wants a girlfriend. And OF COURSE, gay men are eminently suited to be girlfriends, and should be FLATTERED that she feels that way about them!

As the earlier quote makes clear, she really doesn't get it. She can't see beyond her world of straight privilege; rather, she assumes that being her girlfriend is such a privilege that any gay man--well, not any gay man, but the right kind of gay man--would be happy to serve that role. And wouldn't kiss in front of her or any of that icky stuff--the only time they'd talk about boyfriends, apparently, would be over mimosas while commiserating about what pigs men are.

Gay man as fashion accessory.

The pathetic thing is that she thinks this is all amusing. That demeaning and infantilizing gay men is something that, well, some of them are going to get hissy and send irate emails with LOTS OF CAPITALS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS about. (Aren't they cute when they stomp their little feet?) But nothing there's any real reason to be upset about. Their anger, their frustration, their feeling insulted and put down--well it's certainly not legitimate. But you know how those queens are, someone's always getting pissy about something. And shouldn't they be grateful that they're being allowed to participate in her world at all? The price is only following a stereotyped role, or be kicked out.

I suppose by posting this, I've burned any bridge I may ever have had into being any part of her smug, self-satisfied world.

I've never enjoyed a bonfire more.

Politics at the Justice Department? Say it isn't so!

In a report that surprises no one, the inspector general at the Department of Political Retribution Justice has found that politics played a part in selecting candidates for their honors and summer internship programs, with qualified candidates being ruled out because they had past connections with Democratic causes.

Why should anyone be shocked by this? The Bush II Regime has made it clear from the beginning that in their view, the "unitary executive" trumps everything, and that government and politics are inseparable, that the mechanics of government are rightfully put to use by the political party in power. Of course, that wasn't their position when Democrats were in charge. Like John Yoo criticizing Bill Clinton for making excessive claims of executive power, claims that "undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law," then giving Bush legal cover to shred the Constitution, because, of course, when a Republican does it, it's fine.

Counting the days until the thugs are out, scared of how much damage they can still do....

Now it's their ox that's being gored

China has a history of taking a, well, somewhat casual approach to intellectual-property law, particularly when it comes to counterfeit foreign goods. Sometimes they're so obviously fake as to be laughable (you'll occasionally see a hilariously-mangled brand turn up on Engrish.com), sometimes they're actually rather good.

There's nothing new in this, of course. The United States didn't recognize any foreign copyrights or patents while it was a developing economy. It wasn't until we had more to gain by enforcing our own than by ignoring everyone else's that "intellectual property" became a serious concern. The Chinese are developing their economy, and copyrights, an artificial, government-imposed monopoly, are economically inefficient.

Until, of course, there's more profit to be made by enforcing it than ignoring it.

For years, China has been known as the leading exporter of fake goods, from Louis Vuitton handbags and Patek Philippe watches to auto and jet engine parts. The underground economy, which according to U.S. trade officials costs American companies $3 billion to $4 billion annually, has been allowed to flourish by a Chinese government that seldom prosecutes intellectual property violations.

But the Olympics have mobilized China's piracy police like never before. Beijing, the host city, stands to receive up to 15 percent of all revenue from Olympic merchandise, a figure expected to easily top the $62 million raised in Athens four years ago. Aside from the mascots, China is also reportedly collecting up to $120 million each from Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Adidas and other companies that have qualified as the highest-level Olympic sponsors.

With the world's gaze on China in the run-up to the Aug. 8-24 Games, officials have moved to make sure counterfeit goods don't reflect poorly on the festivities. Fake Adidas clothing that was widely available at popular Beijing markets a year ago is now hard to find.

Officially, of course, it's about protecting China's image and putting their best foot forward for the Games. Unofficially?

"They have moved some of the market more underground than they have before, but that hasn't stopped the activity," said Marc S. Ganis, chief executive of Chicago-based Sportscorp Ltd., a sports marketing firm. "It proves that China can do something about the problem when its own interests are aligned with the crackdown. . . . The reality is, just like in the U.S., people are going to do what they're going to do, which is make money."

And with the government getting its cut of royalty payments, it's suddenly in the government's interest to enforce the laws.

It's also nice to see that in some ways, the Chinese government isn't that different from our own:

"The Chinese government usually only manages during a crisis," [an import-export trader] said. "When things reach a peak and they have to deal with it, they will."

If you ignore the bad news, everything's fine.

Washington Post:

The inflation rate shot up in May at the fastest pace in six months, pushed higher by soaring costs for gasoline and other types of energy.

But don't worry, it's not that bad! Really!

Core inflation, however, which excludes energy and food, edged up a more moderate 0.2 percent in May. That increase was right in line with expectations and should help relieve worries that the big increases in food and energy could be breaking through to more widespread inflation.

See? Once you exclude unnecessary luxury items like food and gasoline, it looks much better! And it's not like those are things regular people ever buy... And really, if you can't cut a few unnecessary luxuries out of your household budget during a nonrecession, you're just not trying.

I understand excluding the volatile components if there's been a one-time event... When Katrina shut down Gulf Coast refining, there was a spike in gas prices but everything else was pretty much unaffected. Likewise, it helps to look at the less-volatile components if we're swerving back and forth between "OH NOES THE SKY IS FALLING" and "Nothing to worry about, things are great, in fact some more inflation wouldn't hurt."

But to pretend that we can just exclude things that are rising consistently, repeatedly, and pervasively, for reasons having much more to do with market fundamentals than random fluctuations, is disingenuous at best and useless otherwise.

And businesses are getting squeezed by fuel costs, meaning anything that has to be shipped by truck is going to go up. Airline tickets are already going up (same story), and the Wall Street Journal reports that some businesses are no longer outsourcing, but returning production to the US because of transportation costs. The only reason they haven't raised prices is that the market won't bear it yet. The grocery business runs on razor-thin profit margins, so higher costs had to be passed along almost immediately. Higher-margin businesses have a little more breathing room, but not much, and they're running out of space. But hey, that's only if you actually, you know, need to eat.

Dismal science, indeed.

Of Gin, Gilligan's Island, and Wikipedia

Clay Shirky has an excellent essay up about the social capital of surplus time, and how we're just now figuring out what to do with it. I've had it bookmarked for a couple of days and have been meaning to comment, but events have conspired against that... In the meantime, go read it.

Quote of the day. Possibly the week.

One other word I must criticize in all these defenses of religion: imagination. I often hear that religion is all about using the imagination to see something beyond the literal and mundane, and imagination becomes a virtue in itself that is presented as something special to religion. It is not. It is also overrated. Imagination is essential, don't get me wrong; we need this kind of cognitive randomizer that pushes our thoughts beyond what we already know. However, one thing science has taught us is that our imagination is pathetic. The universe is more vast, more complex, and more surprising than anything our minds can conjure up. Imagination is not enough.

Here we sit in our comfortable little spot, snug and reassured that our butts are firmly planted. Imagination is the tool we use to reach out and fumble about and make guesses about our local neighborhood, and religion is the part that enshrines guesses as absolute knowledge and reassures us that the rest of the universe is just like our little niche.

Science is imagination equipped with grappling hooks. We toss them out, we snag new and interesting bits of our environment, and we use them to haul our butts out of those well-worn hollows to something new … and we anchor the lines so others so inclined may follow. Thus does the limited reach of paltry human imagination become a greater endeavor that explores farther and farther still, leaving behind the delusions of those incapable or unwilling to use their imagination as a tool to explore the world, rather than as a masturbation aid.

--P. Z. Myers

Link of the day

Biblical literalism or low IQ. Which Came First?

Timothy Egan Nails It

...by pointing out that Hillary's vaunted win in WVA probably won't matter in the fall, as it's fairly solidly Republican and trending more so, as is Kentucky.

In Oregon, voters’ surveys show Obama essentially tied Clinton for the blue collar vote while running up a big victory.

And Oregon, unlike West Virginia and Kentucky, may actually be in play for the general election. Al Gore won it by barely 7,000 votes in 2000, a margin that went up to 60,000 votes in 2004. McCain’s advisers say he’s a perfect fit for the state – independent, somewhat maverick.

So, from a purely strategic point of view, the ability to win white blue-collar voters in an open-minded swing state is certainly more important than a solid red state. I would include Pennsylvania in that equation. Just weeks after all the talk of Obama’s problems in the Keystone state, most polls now show him beating McCain in the general election.

What happened in the last few weeks is that Appalachia, in a 24-7 media hothouse, skewed perception. We stared at it far too long, parsing it for meaning beyond its historic range and its hard prejudices.

What he said.

Quote of the day

I have a theory concerning committees. A committee may have different states, like water has gas, liquid or solid phases, depending on temperate and pressure. The same committee, depending on external circumstances of time and pressure will enter well-defined states that determine its effectiveness. If a committee works in a deliberate mode, where issues are freely discussed, objections heard, and consensus is sought, then the committee will make slow progress, but the decisions of the committee will collectively be smarter than its smartest member. However, if a committee refuses to deliberate and instead merely votes on things without discussion, then it will be as dumb as its dumbest members. Voting dulls the edge of expertise. But discussion among experts socializes that expertise. This should be obvious. If you put a bunch of smart people in a room and don't let them think or talk, then don't expect smart things to happen as if the mere exhalation of their breath brings forth improvements to the standard.

--Rob Weir
An Antic Disposition

This is scary...

I actually find myself agreeing with Roland Martin, who can usually be counted on to present weak rationalizations for absurd ideas. But this time he's actually come to a "right" conclusion, i.e. one I agree with. And his reasoning is pretty much on target.

With everything that's going on in the world, the question of a flag lapel pin is about the weakest of all possible rationales... and of course, there's an incredible ridiculous double standard.

I've watched this debate reach the levels of absurdity this year because journalists and commentators have raised the question to Sen. Barack Obama, "Why don't you wear a flag lapel pin?"

I really got a kick out of that one during the ABC debate last month because not one person on stage -- Sens. Hillary Clinton and Obama, along with moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos -- bothered to accessorize their attire with a flag lapel pin.

Sen. John McCain has been traveling the globe as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and this former soldier often doesn't wear a flag lapel pin.

I wonder why John McCain hates America so much?

Those who will criticize me will say, "Well, Roland, if it's no big deal, then why not wear one?" And the reply is the same: "If it's no big deal, then why do you make it a big deal?"

Because, as he points out, that's what zealots do. They pick a small issue, declare it to be the side of all that is right and virtuous and true, and demand that everyone else conform to their narrow vision, ignoring everything else.

[I]f there are members of Congress who wear a flag lapel pin but refuse to shore up our borders, don't do enough to stop the flow of drugs into our neighborhoods, or don't help to eradicate the gaps between the haves and have nots, then are they truly fighting for the concerns of Americans, or playing on the emotions of people by what's on their lapel?

What he said.

Useful link of the day

How to secure your Windows computer and protect your privacy online.

A very useful compendium aimed at the non-expert, describing the most common threats to security and privacy, and listing a wide variety of software tools, most of them free, for avoiding and fixing problems.

Good stuff.

WTF is he blathering about? Does he even know?

David Brooks has a meandering, self-contradictory column up at the Times today that makes me wonder if he's capable of rational thought at all.

Here we go:

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

That's right. Back in the 60's, those awful materialists suggested that religious experience may be the result of specific states of the brain, that it can be mapped and measured materially. Oh, how silly! How foolish those arrogant materialists were!

Fast forward a few years....

The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

Let's work through this. The brain does not work like a machine, but consciousness emerges from neuron firings. Emotions play a role in thinking (which says nothing about the physical mechanism underlying either.) Genes are not merely selfish--well, I'm not sure what that bit of anthropomorphism is supposed to mean, other than the suggestion that natural selection may have selected for those traits in social species such as ourselves, due to a survival advantage gained by them. Nothing mystical there.

And transcendent experience can be identified and measured in the frontal lobe. Sounds pretty materialist to me. His statement that the mind has the ability to "transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real" describes the subjective state of feeling merged with the universe, with God, whatever, that is frequently described by meditative practitioners of various faiths. In other words, the mystical experience can be linked to specific brain activity in specific brain regions. Again, very materialist. The subjective feeling of something larger being there doesn't mean there is something there, but he overlooks that.

So, to summarize: Back in the 60's, the bad materialists said that religious experience was probably a function of brain activity. Today, the good scientists are finding that it is, and describing it objectively. This is a repudiation of the earlier view.... how?

But wait, it gets better.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.

In his mind, maybe.

Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me.

The last sentence, at least, is correct.

The "profound insights" Brooks cites, evidence that science is "proving" that a quasi-buddhist mysticism is objective truth, is a rehash of second-year philosophy:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

The first has been known even to materialist social-psychologists for years. The second 'insight' is still a matter of some debate and not considered proven. Third, yes, people can feel something, they can experience something... and we know what parts of their brains do that. Which he railed against in the first few paragraphs, then trotted out as profound later on. The fourth? Well, define "God" however you want. That definition is one that's been bandied about. His point that there's no evidence for a personal, biblical, magic daddy in the sky, is of course correct. But in an act of moral cowardice, he refuses to carry that thought through. Why should we believe in any god at all, even one that is more process than personality? Indeed, if we can show that the experience of god is just a function of brain activity, doesn't that suggest the lack of anything non-material undergirding it? Doesn't that reinforce the "radical atheism" he deplores so much?

Conversation with a friend

An email exchange with a friend of mine, regarding this article, and this reply. His comments are in Times Roman, mine in Arial.

A midwife for one's thoughts; another for whom one can provide the same service: Basis of a good conversation.

--Nietschze

Here's my major beef with the article (and it's a point that the replier gets to as well, at least obliquely). The article writer says:

"Above all, these changes would require looking with fresh eyes on the landscape of academic disciplines, and noticing something surprising: The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it."

To which I say: funny that your idea about walking through the science/humanities wall involves turning the humanities into a science. I don't mean to sound all boundary-policing for the sake of boundary-policing here, but I do think the article is guilty of arguing for a merger of science and literary criticism where the exchange of methods seems to be entirely one way: from science, to the humanities and never the other way. He makes a good case for WHY we should study literature (one I totally agree with), but he doesn't really say what -- if anything -- the study of literature might offer scientific study.

I'm not sure how much of it is just that that's not the point he's making right now, i.e. is that another article for another day. And he led off with the observation that hmmm, the sciences seem to be obtaining new knowledge, new insights into our nature and condition, and moving forward in a way that literary criticism isn't; what are they doing that we're not?

And going a bit beyond what he said... If literary criticism is barely surviving on its own, if it doesn't have much to offer itself, well...what DOES it have to offer scientific study? (Though you touch on some of this below.)
==================
His basic point about how most lit. critics view the human brain is true to. This, I think, is the biggest current divide between humanities and the "hard" sciences. (Or at least it's what my nueroscientist friend Stephen and I end up screaming at each other about over drinks every few months . . . ) The sciences now favor an almost entirely biological account of human coginition/development/ability ("It's biological, it's genetic, it's physiological, etc."), while since at least the late 60s forward, English speaking literary academics have generally favored a social constructionist approach. (The middle ground here would be the 70s feminism articulation of the difference between biological sex [do you have a penis or a vagina?] and socially constructed gender [Having a vagina means you must wear dresses and play with dolls . . . ], while the extreme of this position, an extreme which I myself am uncomfortable accepting, is Judith Butler's explosion of the sex/gender binary, where she argues that nothing exists before or outside of language and that EVERYTHING is gender, EVERYTHING is socially constructed and there is no biological "sex" that's not already caught up in culturally constructed meanings.])

If she's going to make that argument, then she has to explain why the vast majority of societies throughout history have associated having a penis with physical strength and aggression. Is a preference for blue rather than pink culturally constructed? Almost certainly. Does it therefore follow that NOTHING is biological? I, for one, am far from convinced.

Part of the reason for the biological emphasis is that with advances in technology, we can answer questions we couldn't even ask a few years ago. So yes, it seems like everywhere you turn around there are new biological insights. Look at what happened after Darwin published. His central idea was that species could develop and change over time, through a natural process of selection; that the environment could make the same kinds of decisions familiar to any livestock breeder; and the implication that all life descended from a common ancestor.

This was a revolution in biology, and there was a rush to apply Darwin's ideas EVERYWHERE, including places they didn't apply--thus Social Darwinism, etc. With time, the excesses were worked out, and scientists recognized that this application is valid, that one is just silly, and the other is a useful metaphor that shouldn't be taken too far.

We're currently in the early explosion stages of a biological revolution. There are things we've thought of as social that may turn out to have very strong biological components. There may be some things that go the other way. But we haven't mapped out the limits of the new knowledge yet.

(At one time, 'everyone knew' that ulcers were caused by stress....until the role of heliobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the gut, was discovered. Stress still has an effect, but only because stress tends to weaken the immune system, and in America, stressed-out people are more likely to eat foods that H. Pylori thrives on, and smoke too much, thus producing plenty of extra stomach acid to irritate already-irritated tissue, etc.) Likewise, 'evolutionary psychology' has given us some useful insights into how seemingly anti-survival traits such as self-sacrifice, altruism, generosity, etc., actually lead to better chances of group survival. It's also made some risible claims that can't be taken seriously, and aren't, even within the field.
==========================
And for me? Personally? I've been struggling most of this year with Butler's position, the full adoption of which is still very much in vogue in literature departments. I think Butler's wrong. Mostly because I don't think that my friend Stephen is an idiot. And I don't think that the advances or observations of Stephen's field are entirely bunk. That said, I am ENORMOUSLY suspicious of strict, biological (or genetic) essentialism. This gets us back to that other article that Sullivan linked to that we discussed recently, which you said (and which I agreed) veered a little close to "some people are simply, inherently unfit to learn, so let's not let them go to college and oh isn't it funny how all the people who are fit to learn and go to college all look white and male, just like me."

I agree with you here. Yes, biology influences us, in ways we're not aware of and don't fully understand. That doesn't mean biology is destiny, though. Antidepressants affect the levels of serotonin in the brain. But SO DOES COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY. Yes, ultimately it's all encoded in the physical matrix somehow (otherwise you're postulating a source of thought external to the body), but that doesn't mean the physical level is the most convenient (or ethical) place to intervene. Perhaps love can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and neurons firing--but as anyone who's been in love can tell you, it's not *just* that.

=================
I think biological essentialism (the body or someone's physiology or genetics being read as their unalterable, inescapable fate) is a bad, bad, bad, super scary thing. And me thinking that isn't based in namby-pamby, soft humanities psuedo-science. It's based in the empirical evidence of history. I mean, slavery comes to mind ("These dark skinned people have smaller brains and therefore smaller mental capacity, oh and they also have higher pain tolerance, so obviously they were meant for heavy labor . . . ") as does the Holocaust ("These people have the wrong eye color/hair texture/skin color/nose shape/whatever and are therefore deserving of elimination.")

The problem is, simple indicators have been used to stand in for other traits, or generalizations have been applied without regard to the possibility of exceptions. Suppose we do extensive research and find, lo and behold, that the IQ of the average black person really is 2 points lower than the average white IQ. Do we therefore stop giving scholarships to blacks, since "they're not as smart as whites?" Of course not. Group averages say nothing about individual talents or temperaments, and (as in this example) the magnitude of the difference is insignificant. The relationship between brain size and IQ is poorly understood, if it exists at all. Not only has there been an overreliance on science, there's been an overreliance on BAD science. In the long run, science is self-correcting--but in the short run, can be misused as much as anything else.
==========
And so science's hard turn to serious biological essentialism scares the fuck out of me. (As Eve Sedgwick, one of those evil postmodern namby-pamby literary scholars that the article bemoans says, You ever notice that there are all these scientific studies to find the 'cause' of homosexuality? But none to find the 'cause' of heterosexuality? What else do we try to find the 'causes' of? Hmm . . . the common cold, liver cancer, lukemia, ALL THESE THINGS THAT ARE PROBLEMS, THAT WE WANT TO ERADICATE.)

Then explain, please, why so many psychologists (particularly those coming at it from an analytic viewpoint) working on the origins of homosexuality are themselves gay. Do they want to eradicate themselves? Is it the stereotype we used to joke about in social work, that you become a therapist because you want to figure yourself out? You're right to point out the effect of heteronormativity, that the default normal state of human beings is hetero and anything else is a deviation from that, so we should find out what causes that divergence. I'm not quite as willing to assume the motives are hostile, though the effects can be just as pernicious.
========================
Or, to put it another way, I guess what bothered me about the article was it's blind, uncomplicated faith in empiricism and the scientific method. And to make my case why that's a problem, I'll actually turn to a scientist, not a humanist. I'm thinking here of Stephen J. Gould's THE MISMEASURE OF MAN, specifically the part where he goes back and re-does all of that 19th century Philadelphia scientist's studies on the cranial capacity of various races, and finds out that the guy was wrong. That he fudged his data to make it fit the racist worldview that he wanted to argue for. And of course, Gould points out that he himself might be making mistakes that are fudging his own data to try and support a non-racist, multicultural worldview that's currently in vogue.

Through the 50's to 60's, ecologists & biologists looking at animal behavior theorized that aggression had a large survival payoff, that the most aggressive animals would tend to have the best survival characteristics. The field was, at the time, dominated by men. As more women came into the field, they started asking questions about cooperation as a survival strategy, about whether it might be equally valid or even superior in some cases. After all, many species show cooperative strategies: wolves hunt in packs, primates are very social, etc. And lo and behold, they found evidence to support that. The men who asked the questions earlier weren't stupid, weren't corrupt, weren't evil. Their worldview led them to ask certain questions, and as we both know, the way you ask the question has a large influence on what answer you find. Someone with different assumptions asked different questions...and found new results.

There are any number of studies from the 50's and before, comparing the various races & so forth, and finding that southern Europeans are flighty and undisciplined, Africans are a bit simple and childlike, etc., always with the amazing coincidence that the northern European or Scots-Irish (depending on who was doing the ranking) was the most advanced group, with all other groups inferior in some ways.

Today, of course, it's impolite to suggest that there might be ANY difference of ANY kind. I'm not sure which extreme is more annoying. (Is it just a coincidence, for example, that cultures in climates with a short growing season have a much greater sense of time urgency, of 'don't put it off, do it now,' than parts of the world with a more benign climate? That cultures where it's colder, so people are usually dressed in more layers, have a stronger nudity taboo? And what if it turns out that members of certain ethnic groups really are slightly more outgoing, or whatever, than some other groups. Explain how that means I should treat the person across from me any different, please.)

Over the long run, science is self-correcting. Mistakes get flushed out, re-examined, discarded. The same principle applies in the humanities as well. Case in point: The romanticized view of plantation life exemplified by "Gone with the Wind" was based largely on a scholarly historical study on the life of southern blacks before the civil war. (The name of the study escapes me at the moment...it was considered THE standard work in its day.) It wasn't a polemic, it was good, solid, primary-sourced scholarship. And it strongly indicated that most plantation slaves really didn't have it all that bad, and though there was a lot of hard work involved, they were essentially well treated.

Well. Some other historians looked at this later. And noticed that the work was indeed primary-sourced with original documents--almost all of them from slave holders or slave dealers. So they applied the scientific method and asked what other evidence there might be for that proposition, or what counter-evidence might exist. And in the process uncovered lots of other documentation suggesting the earlier view was wrong.

That was an application of the scientific method to the humanities, with good results. (More on this later.)
===============
I guess what reading Gould taught me was EXTREME skepticism, a wariness of how our cultural programming creeps its way into even what appears to be objective, detached, rational analysis.

And THAT, I think, is what the humanities have to offer the sciences. Experience in looking at the non-technical assumptions, of looking at what's being asked and what's NOT being asked, about what's being taken for granted.

===================
So do I think we need to abandon science or rationality or empiricism? No. Not at all. That way madness lies. Or at least that way George W. Bush and his administration lie. (Which is pretty much the same thing as madness, but that's another rant.) We've got to strive for empiricism and rationality . . . but we also need to be aware of the dangers of assuming that "empirically" staged experiments are perfect. Or that things conducted under the name of "science" are, unquestioningly, captial T "TRUTH."

The difference between science and fundamentalism is that science regards truth as contingent, provisional, and mediated by evidence, refuted by a single counterexample. As long as you remember that, you maintain enough humility to be careful in your conclusions and your statements about Ultimate Cosmic Truth.
=================
I think we desperately need empiricism in the world right now, and literary studies could damn sure use more of it. But the article Sullivan linked to worried me because it seemed ready to worship at the altar of empiricism without acknowledging any of the valid pitfalls/complaints that some scholars in the humanities have raised about it.

Does that make any sense?

Your comments make perfect sense, and I think we agree more than we don't. Now, if I can get up my soapbox for a bit:

I stand by my earlier statement that one of the best preparation for graduate study in the humanities would be a standard first-semester calculus course. NOT because you're going to need to apply the definition of a derivative or prove the chain rule, but because it teaches rigorous thinking and analysis, the habits of thought that you'll need later on.

Its not unlike some of my comments when you've sent me your papers and I've looked them over, and I've had to remind myself that standards of proof are different in the humanities. And the article touched on that, or at least pointed toward it. In lit-crit, it's apparently OK to say, this is what I think, and here's an example, and here's an example, and here's an example. So having established that, let's move on to the next point.

In the sciences, of course, that wouldn't fly. Do I expect that anyone will analyze and comment on Foucault with mathematical rigor? Of course not, though I'd like to see them try. But there are questions the scientific method forces you to ask, that don't seem to get asked in lit-crit:

• Are there other explanations for these observations?
• Do these observations really imply what I think they do? Or could they also be interpreted to support a different hypothesis?
• Are there counterexamples out there that imply something else? (This, I think, is the most important question lit-crit leaves unasked. My own thesis, just a lowly master's thesis at a middle-of-the-road university, spent about a third of its effort looking at possible counterexamples or other explanations and trying to rule them out.)

math training drills into you, again and again, that a set of examples is all very nice, but one counterexample makes them all irrelevant, no matter how many you have or how convenient they are the rest of the time. it teaches you the difference between a theorem and a conjecture, well enough that you never ever confuse them again, and you understand how to tear apart an argument and check it for validity.

No, lit-crit will never ever be at the same level of rigor as mathematics, and it shouldn't try. But as long as it views logical rigor as a symptom of dead white european male hegemonism (I'm sure there are much bigger words to express the same idea more snottily), it's going to be stuck in its own little backwater.

The NYT gets it half right

In a somewhat-bemused article, they note that the punditocracy has finally figured out what the blogosphere has been saying for weeks, that Hillary is farther than ever from the nomination, and that it's now effectively over.

But the impact was apparent almost immediately, as evidenced by The Drudge Report... It had as its lead story a link to a YouTube clip of Mr. Russert’s comments, accompanied by a photograph of a beaming Mr. Obama with his wife, Michelle, and the headline, “The Nominee.”

The thought echoed throughout the world of instant political analysis. “I think there’s an increasing presumption tonight that Obama’s going to be the nominee,” Chris Wallace, the Fox News host, said to Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru, who is now a Fox News analyst....

A posting on the DailyKos Web site included a mock memo to Mrs. Clinton entitled, “To-Do List Before Dropping Out.”

Speaking on CNN, David Gergen, a former adviser to several presidents, including Mrs. Clinton’s husband, said, “I think the Clinton people know the game is almost up.”

Stating it more bluntly, Bob Franken, the political analyst, told the MSNBC host Dan Abrams shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time, “Let’s put it right on the table: It’s over. It’s over.”

But, unable to completely let go of a narrative, no matter how wrong, it goes on to argue that even though it's over, it's not really over.

The instant analysts on television and on the Web have not exactly showered themselves in glory this year. They have frequently made predictions that have been upended by actual votes from actual people.

But their opinions matter as much as ever in this late phase of the primary race, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are battling to sway the opinions of the uncommitted superdelegates....

The superdelegates are a largely elite group that presumably will track the conventional wisdom of Washington’s class of political insiders as they weigh their decisions. And the big donors and fundraisers whose help Mrs. Clinton will need to continue her campaign are similarly tapped into the news media echo-sphere.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign indicated early this morning that it would try to prove the commentariat wrong once again. “Pundits have gleefully counted Senator Clinton out before, and each time they have been wrong, because they don’t decide this race -- voters do,” Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director, wrote in an e-mail message. “And as the results in Indiana demonstrated, voters are rewarding Senator Clinton with victories, even in states Senator Obama predicted victory in.”

See? The delegate lead doesn't matter, it's about perception. And as long as we're talking about predictions, let's talk about North Carolina being a game-changer, about double-digit wins in Indiana... You know, those things that were going to prove the Clinton campaign had some realistic chance. At this point, Clinton has to get over 80% of remaining unpledged delegates and most of the unpledged superdelegates. Ain't gonna happen. And perceptions, pundit opinions, and media narratives don't decide that.

Wolfson's got a point, actually. Voters decide this. And at this point, even if you count Florida and Michigan the way Hillary wants, she still trails in the popular vote, in delegates, and in states won. She has fewer donors, her campaign's broke, she can't get the Black votes that no Democrat can win without. The votes simply aren't there.

Future pundits will decide whether Obama was inevitable from the start (I don't think he was; his campaign's been skillfully run, but it's not a juggernaut), or whether the Clinton campaign took the strongest brand in Democratic politics and ran it into the ground (and there do seem to have been some key strategic missteps, beginning with the complete lack of contingency planning for anything after Super Tuesday--such hubris never goes unpunished).

From the "Gee, ya THINK?" Dept...

TIME: Is Obama's "electability" code for race?

Well, at least they're saying it out loud, even if they have to pretend it's just a wildly speculative question. I suppose that's progress. Of some sort.

The persistence of stupid habits of thought

I don't usually blog about personal stuff, but as this is what's foremost in my forebrain lately, and the purpose of a blog, any blog, is to memorialize the brainfarts as well as the deep thoughts, well, why not...

I'm dealing with a minor frustration regarding some behavior by a friend of mine that's leaving me feeling a bit neglected & taken for granted. On its face, it's no big deal. And rationally, by any sane measure, it is, truly, minor. Not worth getting worked up over, move on to something that's worth firing a few neurons about because this certainly isn't. (Other people do have lives, and sometimes, shocking though it may be to admit it, some aspects of their lives don't involve me.)

And yet. In the back of my head, there's the little voice (my friend Wayne calls his "Waldo") that would be more than happy to play the poor-poor-me game all day long.

Now this is hardly a new phenomenon. (Waldo causing trouble, I mean, not the feeling-neglected issue.) And in fact, that's what's most annoying about it. That this is far from new, in fact it's the same old crap I've fallen into off & on for years. I guess there's some progress, though. I'm not wallowing in it, I'm recognizing what I'm doing, and going out of my way to tell Waldo to STFU for a change. To paraphrase Snoopy, "It's not much, but it's something."

This is ridiculous.

Life has a way of interfering with the blogging, or something... At any rate, I'm still alive, as I'm sure my regular readers (both of you) will be pleased to hear.

We're heading into finals, so there should be a little more time in the schedule Real Soon Now.

Plans for the summer: Development work on orientation for new grad students, working with another instructor to brush up on Python (the language, not Monty) and some gaming applications.
We'll see how it actually goes.

Hillary's latest: I lied.

John at Americablog has the story. Her wording is that she "said some things that weren't in keeping with what she knew to be the case."

Most of us call that "lying."

At least she admits it.

If things were different, they'd be different

The latest spin from Hillaryland: Her (actually Mark Penn's) strategy didn't work, therefore the system is flawed. A GOP-like winner-take-all system would be better because under that system she'd be winning right now.

Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in primary states choose their nominee on the basis of a convoluted system of proportional distribution of delegates that varies from state to state and that obtains in neither congressional nor presidential elections.

And both candidates were well aware of that system, or could have been, well before the election campaign started. But at this stage, it appears to be just another attempt to provide the GOP with Obama's-not-legitimate talking points.

Is the Democratic nominating process convoluted, perhaps too much so? There's evidence supporting that contention. Perhaps it should be changed. But for the next election cycle, not this one. You don't change the rules halfway through because the current ones aren't producing the outcome you want.

Yes, I'm still alive.

Mass craziness preparing for a week-long trip, then a really good conference, now back just in time to host a conference this week and run the student programming contest. Fun, but busy. More later as time permits.

Thumbs up for the Apocalypse!

The Atheist Apocalypse (if there could be such a thing) would actually be pretty cool....

[H/T: PZ]

Why I Am Not A Theist

An occasional series, with installments whenever I feel like it.

Theism requires the following assumptions:

• That God exists;
• That God is benevolent;
• That God is able to communicate with us in a way we can perceive;
• That God is willing to do so;
• That God has done so;
• That this communication has included God's preferences regarding our behavior;
  
• That we have noticed this communication;
• That we have understood or interpreted it correctly.

If any one of these assumptions falls, maintaining religious belief becomes much more difficult. (Not impossible; a deist, for example, may posit only the first two items and deny everything else. Accepting all but the last one allows the sort of questioning that moves you from one religion to another. Accepting all including the last one is the setup for various religious wars, since if we've understood it correctly, anyone with a different understanding is incorrect--and probably needs to be shown the error of their ways.)

That's an awful lot to swallow on faith. More than any rational being should be willing to accept.

Of course, that's part of the theist/religionist dodge, isn't it? It's all got to be taken on faith and questioning isn't allowed, or is allowed only as long as your answer leads you back to obedience.

Bands Playing Badly

The saga of the Really Terrible Orchestra.... An inspiring story about amateurs. (The word amateur is based on the word "love"... An amateur does something for the love of doing it.)

Go read it, it's worth it.

Quote of the day

"Freedom of religion does not mean no one ever gets to tell you you're wrong."

--Ed Brayton

Midweek weekend update

Finishing touches on the conference paper for the end of the month, heard from my college roommate thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, heard from a former long-distance BF just because, and they're voting in 4 states today, 2 of them big. Hillary's position has kept shifting (big surprise); the latest is that unless Obama takes them all by big margins, he really lost, and she's in the campaign regardless. Looks like she's going to push it to the end, getting more negative along the way, until she's destroyed either herself or the party. Typical.

At any rate, it's been a while since I posted, but I'm not dead.

god help us all...

Nader is considering another run.

The man most responsible for the Shrub's election, right up there with Rove, is thinking about jumping in again, because his ego hasn't been stroked enough lately and the idea of these other people getting attention and him not is just soooooo annoying.

It takes a healthy ego to run for President in the first place. It takes a pathological ego to launch a vanity bid well after deadlines have passed, with the idea of generating free media with ballot-access lawsuits while piously posturing about his virtue.

Who's paying his bills? Where's he getting his funding? The timing is just too convenient.

She's not singing yet, but she *is* warming up...

Mark Kleiman announces that it's over and that he will no longer be criticizing HRC, because that would be "unnecessary roughness." To his mind, Obama's got the nomination, no further critique of Hillary is needed and would just be piling on.

Except, of course, there's still Super Tuesday, and a potentially deadly floor fight about what to do with the Florida and Michigan delegates, and who's going to control the Credentials Committee and thus make the delegate decision.

Please. You don't think the Clinton machine would launch a party-wounding internecine war rather than go quietly? I doubt Hillary would give up the nomination until it was pried out of her fingers. I could be wrong--I'd love to be wrong--but I don't think I am.

Media watch edition

So let's have a look at what's in the news today...

• Fidel Castro is stepping down after 50 years in power. Implications for U.S. policy isn't entirely clear.
• The ruling party in Pakistan has gone down to defeat in a (relatively) clean election. This is a serious blow to the U.S-leaning ruling clique, and is seen as a rebuke to the U.S. Implications for U.S. policy aren't clear.
• A group of military officers has completed a study showing our military is "stretched dangerously thin" and could not undertake another major operation. Almost half agree with the word "broken" to describe the current state of the military.
• Florida has approved educational standards requiring teaching "the scientific theory of evolution."

And what's the lead story at CNN? On a busy day like today, what did they select as what you most need to know to be a well-informed citizen?

None of the above... They're doing an uplifting puff piece on blind veterans who are learning to ski.

Feh.

Darn ear-worms

A few days ago, in this post, I linked to a couple of old campaign ads on YouTube.

Warning: It's been quite some time, and I still find the "I like Ike, You like Ike, Everybody likes Ike (for President)" ditty wafting up through my brain.

I'm hoping it's just a bizarre side effect of the cold meds or something.

Creationist "science"

Bonnie Goldstein has a must-read over at Slate showing the peer "review" process at a creationist journal that passes itself off as science. Among the helpful things in the style manual is how to cite biblical references correctly in your science papers, instructions regarding use of pseudonyms (if you'd rather your home institution didn't know about your publishing), and a reminder that the submission must support a Creation/Flood model or it won't be accepted.

Pssst. Guys? Here's a hint. If you decide on what the answer is going to be before you ask the question... it's not science.

If you want to have a journal called "Distorted Facts Forced To Fit Bronze-Age Legends," that's one thing. Not as catchy, I'll grant you.

Anyway, go have a look. It's really pretty funny.

So I'm not the only one...

It looks like someone else is noticing the increasing air of unreality coming from Camp Hillary.

Perhaps good spin is an oxymoron, moral if not linguistic. But good spin is clever and forward-leaning pitches of actual realities, facts. The word in the sense we use it today actually came into being in the early 90s and to a great degree around the '92 Clinton campaign, which had such mastery in its practice. But this Clinton campaign has been doing it in a weird parody mode. Not sharp 'spins' on favorable realities, but aggressive pitches of complete nonsense. So now you have Penn successively saying caucus wins don't really count, small state wins don't really count, medium state wins don't really count, states with large African-American populations don't really count, all building up to yesterday's gem: "Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama."

Clinton is ultimately responsible for putting her political fate in this fool's hands.

I think it's significant that we're hearing a great deal about how Hillary values loyalty in her staff, sometimes above all else. That's understandable, given what she's been through, but in this case, competence would be a higher virtue. Pretending everything's fine and she's well on her way to the nomination isn't going to work. Not when the momentum, the fundraising, and the number of wins keeps favoring her opponent. As for the strategy of getting enough superdelegates to go over the top,

The super delegates who are gettable for Clinton by loyalty, conviction or coercion are already got. And enough's been seen of both candidates for everyone to be more than acquainted with them. The ones who remain -- who make up roughly half the total -- are waiting to see who the winner is.

If they haven't signed on with Hillary by now, what's the likelihood that they're going to if Obama enters the convention with more elected delegates, more cash on hand, and better polling numbers against McCain? Not very much. If Hillary's going to salvage her chance at the nomination, she needs to do something quickly. There's still time. But the clock is ticking.

[h/t: Andrew Sullivan]

No side effects here...

So I'm on medication for whatever-this-is, my temperature is going up & down & all over the place, at the moment I feel relatively normal... And have an attention span of about 3 minutes.

Seriously, firing up The Sims feels like it would take too much effort and thought commitment. Checking the same dozen-or-so news sites and blogs every few seconds is getting old... hmmm... Oh well, I'll think of something.

Someone gets it...

I'm currently dealing with a sinus infection of some type... Just when I think I'm almost over it, it knocks me on my butt again. So either I'm going to be even more erratic than usual in posting, or I'm going to be stuck home from work with just enough energy to think that I can put two sentences together coherently.

At any rate... Misty Irons has a post worth reading on her blog.

To say that homosexual people are all about the baser impulses of sexual attraction, minus any of the nobler feelings, is essentially saying they are less human than the rest of us. In other words, it is saying they are incapable of human love.

I think the reason the idea of homosexual love makes some Christians uncomfortable is that it doesn't provide much basis for their negative reaction to homosexuality. It would seem more justified if homosexuality were about people who are of a fundamentally lower moral quality. But to say that there are people who are capable of the exact same kind of sexual attraction as everyone else, except that they find themselves attracted to people of the same sex for reasons even they can't explain, is a more disturbing idea. It turns a part of your universe upside down. How can something as sacred and sublime as love take on this orientation? How could God allow this to happen? What is he doing? What does it mean? Why am I feeling so freaked out by it?

As much as Christians like to talk about "the homosexual agenda" and their righteous anger over "perversion," at its root this is really about the deep issues regarding our own personal faith, isn't it?

Exactly. It's always about their own personal faith, and how to justify it, which is why it makes them so uncomfortable. If you're doing something that doesn't affect me much at all, I probably won't feel the need to institutionalize hatred of it. But if it's something that makes me uncomfortable regarding my own issues, I'm going to persecute it for all it's worth.

And she is exactly right, of course. To define it strictly as a matter of lust is to make gays less than, not equal to, not fully human, and thus fully deserving of whatever mistreatment they receive. Being gay isn't solely about lust any more than heterosexual marriage is just about sex.

Nice to see that at least a few people get that.

Is this supposed to help?

Andrew Sullivan calls this cringe-inducing, and I tend to agree; John Aravosis over at Americablog is pointedly not commenting, and I can respect that decision.

Let's see... Lyrics that sound like they were slammed out by an enthusiastic 15 year old in about an hour... a jazz background that's competently done but carefully chosen not to be too out there (but you just know, somewhere, a consultant insisted it was hep, and yes, I suspect that word came up in discussion)... argh.

Granted, the standards for political jingles aren't particularly high. But some, while clearly products of their time, have stood up pretty well. This one won't be remembered by November, let alone in 50 years.

Reality Disconnect

Watching Hillary's speech from last night has an oddly surreal feeling to it. It's not just that she didn't congratulate Obama--tacky, tasteless, not unexpected--but that she's inside her own reality bubble. She's in some odd parallel-universe Hillaryland, where everything is fine. There wasn't anything original there, and not much that felt reality based. Certainly based on that speech, you'd never guess she'd just lost 8 states in a row.

Listening to Bush often produces a "what world is he living in?" sensation... I'm getting that with Hillary as well, and I haven't before. I've had a variety of reactions to her speeches--some have been very good, some left me cold, whatever--but I've never before had the feeling I'm watching someone who doesn't realize they're losing.

It's not inevitable, of course. A lot can happen, Obama can blow up or melt down, a negative attack can score home, shenanigans with superdelegates is always a possibility. Standing between a Clinton and power is always a dangerous place to be.

But ignoring problems won't make them go away. And things that go away by themselves often come back by themselves.

Disregard previous post

It appears that Obama did indeed deliver a thumpin'. As of 9:10 Central, CNN's reporting at least 60/40 splits in all 3 states voting today--76/24 in DC.

And the media is starting to notably not buy into Hillary's explanation of why none of this matters (8 consecutive states since Super Tuesday is a little hard to brush off) and point out the remaining challenges from here.

But never fear--these are Democrats. They can be counted on to shoot themselves in the foot at least once during a campaign.

Drinking the Kool-Aid?

The voters are doing their thing in the "Potomac Primary," and the media is full of Hillary lowering expectations and how this is Obama's chance to pull into the lead.

Meaning, of course, if he delivers anything less than a thumpin', it's going to be a "moral victory" for Hillary.

I'm afraid the media are being played by the Clinton spin machine... Again. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Update: smell the irony

Pam Spaulding has posted on the Washington mess, and points out something quite relevant.

Gee, Huck...

If you have the 2000 general election Tivo-ed, you can refresh your memory as to how that can happen. Can I assume you were supporting Al Gore then?

I didn't think so.

How can he be so shocked, shocked, that the Republican Party can be engaged in election shenanigans?

More blatant than ever

So the vote counting has stopped in Washington State, because with a lead of 242 votes (and 1500 ballots left to count), John McCain has it so locked up there's no point in counting the remaining ballots.

I'm no Huckabee fan, but he's right to be outraged. Anyone who cares about the state of American democracy should be outraged. (They should have been outraged most of the last several years, but that's another rant.)

It's a basic principle that all the ballots are counted. Particularly when the leader's lead is narrowing as the remaining ballots are counted. Simply saying we have enough to know how it's going to end--not good enough. If the difference is greater than the number of outstanding ballots (a 10,000 vote lead and 1,500 ballots left to count), that's one thing--even if all the ballots are for one candidate, it won't change the outcome. But this isn't that situation.

It's no surprise that the power brokers of a party are willing to steal an election. (The Democrats aren't immune in this regard, of course.) But usually they at least try to cover it up. Not unlike the brave man who finally confronted Joseph McCarthy:

"Have you no shame, sir? At the end of the day, have you no shame?"

The answer: Evidently not.

It's all in the terminology

Andrew Sullivan had a link to this Beliefnet article, which poses the question that maybe Romney lost because he was too Christian.

On reading the headline, I thought it was an interesting thesis. Was he too forgiving? Too humble? Too willing to turn the other cheek? Too focused on the Kingdom of Heaven rather than on temporal power?

But that's not what it's about.

Romney believed that to win the nomination he had to win over evangelical Christians. He figured the way to do that was to get all Jesusy. So he declared, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind." In so doing, he showed a fatal misunderstanding of the attitude of evangelicals toward Mormonism.
. . .
"When he goes around and says Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, he ticks off at least half the evangelicals,'' Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention said. "He's picking a fight he's going to lose."

You see, the problem was, he used the wrong words in talking about his magic invisible daddy in the sky, using the same words other people use, implying that his magic invisible daddy in the sky is the same one as theirs, which they totally disagree with because there's, like, a different book of stories!

He had the temerity to suggest that everyone who follows Jesus is a brother in the spirit. And he used a label that didn't respect GOP identity politics. That's what "too Christian" means--nothing to do with your beliefs or behavior, everything to do with what label you use for your magic invisible sky-daddy.

Election night thoughts, such as they are

Got an email from a friend asking what I thought, here's what I told him. This is current as of post time, subject to change as late results come in.

===
The delegate count is looking good. Everyone's made a big deal about MO being a bellwether, and it looks like he's going to fight her to a draw here (12-point gap earlier, currently at 3%). Exit polls show the Latino vote is breaking heavily for Hillary, which is going to be a problem in CA. But all in all it's about what people expected... Neither is going to land a knockout blow, he's actually beating expectations (and the margins for Obama are huge in the south) and doing well in delegates. (In fact, the delegate counts so far look like it's going to be almost a draw.)

She's going to keep arguing she's inevitable, but the numbers don't really support that. She's trumpeting her wins in OK & AR, that she really can win something midwestern/southernish... meanwhile, in the *real* south, Obama's kicking her butt.

Romney's gotta be hurting. Speculation at one blog [can't find the darn link now, drat] that Huckabee's going to get the call from McCain about a slot on the ticket... Usually that sort of thing carries a "...provided you drop out of the race now" contingency. In this case, it may be "...provided you stay in until the end and keep sucking votes away from Romney."

And the BBC seems vaguely amused by it all.

So all in all, not the blowout I'd hoped for, not the trashing I'd feared. Not a bad night. And MA's not a surprise, in spite of Her Inevitableness's bloviating. She's been ahead there for weeks--by 14 points a week ago. So there wasn't anything unexpected about it. Yes, a bigger bounce from the Ted-loving would have been nice. Oh well.

Leaping to (probably wrong) conclusions

CNN has already decided that there's going to be a jobless recovery, "again." You remember, just like that last jobless recovery? The one that turned out to add lots and lots of new jobs?

Yes, it did. It wasn't really jobless at all. The employment statistics are mostly estimated based on what's happening at large companies. Smaller companies and new companies tend not to get sampled sufficiently; that's why the early numbers are always subject to revision, sometimes as much as a year later. And the later revisions showed that the "jobless" recovery wasn't jobless at all; it's just that most of the new jobs were added by smaller businesses, those with 50 or fewer employees, so didn't show up in the early statisitcs; it wasn't until the numbers were revised with more complete information, much after the fact, that the truth became known. By which time, of course, it was (literally) last year's news, so was ignored by the media.

I see no reason to expect any current "jobless" recovery to be any different. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but in this case using the latest statistics is actually one of the weakest arguments.

Oh, by the way, welcome to post #200.

OK, even we Yanks aren't this out of touch...

Apparently many Brits have trouble telling where reality ends and fiction begins...

Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll which shows nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth, while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

The survey found that 47 per cent thought the 12th Century English King Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 per cent thought World War II prime minister Winston Churchill was made up.

Hmmmm..... I can't help wondering if there isn't a whiff of a setup in this, much like the poll about 10 years back showing more Gen-Xers believed in UFO's than believed that Social Security would be there when they were 65. (Moral of the story being, ask 2 widely-separated questions, make sure the wording on one is heavily slanted, and you can get whatever results you want.)

Still... Even assuming there's a modicum of truth in this. But what were the actual questions? That Richard the Lionheart existed? Or that he actually did all of the various things attributed to him? (After all, there was a Saxon warlord named Arthurius...but that hardly makes the grail-quest legends historically accurate.)

[h/t: Paddy, at Cliff Schecter's]

The scourge (and stupidity) that is postmodernism

Sometimes it's not just academic follies, sometimes it spills out into the real world. Seems there's a recent law review article posted that makes the argument:

• The government is required by the constitution to be neutral on matters of religion, and therefore to treat all "ways of knowing" as equal;
• Science (specifically evolution) focuses on natural causes, rejecting supernatural causes out of hand, without even considering them, and is therefore itself a belief system, a type of religion;
• Therefore for govt to endorse science, particularly evolution, is to forcibly indoctrinating students into the "religion" of secular humanism, and compelling them to undergo religious instruction;
• while instead the constitution clearly requires government to remain "neutral" and teach "alternative" theories, explicitly including supernatural ones.

Yes, the fundamentalists are adopting the language of postmodernism to "prove" that creationism should be taught in schools.

See, this is why us geeks make such a big deal about rigorous logic, clear definitions, etc. It can be shown (relatively easily) that if a logical system has a contradiction anywhere, it is possible to prove anything in that system, no matter how absurd. Of course, there are several problems with this argument, including weasel words, non sequiturs, and so on; it's not a solid argument. But why didn't the law journal catch that? Don't they review articles? Doesn't anyone notice such leaps of logic? I was under the impression lawyers were trained in such things... Perhaps I was misinformed.

Fortunately, in this particular case at least, there's a blistering point-by-point rebuttal... But the fact the original article ever got published in the first place is scary.

[h/t: Ed Brayton]

Out of control?

I suppose, in good blogosphere fashion, I should congratulate Greg Mankiw for saying what I did already. On the other hand, he has actual data to back him up, and so has some claim to actually know what he's talking about. So instead I'll just make the standard "Yeah, what he said!" post:

A rise in expected inflation is not consistent with the conventional wisdom that the economy is on the verge of a serious slump driven by inadequate aggregate demand. It is, however, consistent with the hypothesis that policymakers are overreacting to some bad economic news with excessive monetary and fiscal stimulus.

If the problem with the economy is that we're coming off an asset bubble caused by too much easy money (i.e., too low interest rates) for too long, lowering interest rates isn't going to fix it. We can have a mild recession now, or a much worse recession later, possibly combined with inflation. Yes, recessions are uncomfortable. Runaway inflation is worse. (Recessions make it difficult to accumulate more capital, due to sluggish economic activity; inflation takes away capital you've already accumulated, via erosion of purchasing power.) Of course, the inflation won't hit until after the election. Could that be it? Naw, I'm just being cynical.... not.

Memo to new president: do what you have to, to get the economy under control early in your term. If you have the recession early, the voters will forgive you by the time you're up for re-election.

[h/t: Andrew Sullivan]

Am I reading too much into this...?

The Times has an article about Kennedy's endorsement of Obama. This line jumped out at me:

Both the Clintons and their allies had pressed Mr. Kennedy for weeks to remain neutral...

And all I could think of was the passage from The Prince where Machiavelli explains that if two nearby states are in conflict, the one asking for your armed support is your friend, and the one asking for your neutrality is not.

For some reason, watching the Clintons lately has brought Machiavelli to mind quite often the last few weeks.