Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University
of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games. Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all you have to do is commit to a criterion for testing. It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
In the first ever Spanish-language Presidential debate held on September 9, 2007, remarks by candidates were translated into Spanish. The ground rules for the debate were that candidates had to answer in English even though two of them spoke fluent Spanish. The stated reason was "to make sure that no candidate had an advantage in appealing to the Spanish-speaking audience." The two Spanish speaking candidates were New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Hispanic and Senator Chris Dodd, who learned his Spanish in the Peace Corps. (Former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska pointed out that he speaks French.)
This incident shows one of the biggest problems ailing the United States, and I am not referring to broadcasting a debate in Spanish. The big problem here the idea is that it's unfair to use skills to your advantage, that if you have skills, it's not because you worked hard or took advantage of opportunities, it's because you were lucky or got special treatment. Why shouldn't candidates who speak Spanish have an advantage in such a debate? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are smart people who have had access to the best educations money can buy. They, and for that matter, French-speaker Gravel, have had every opportunity to learn Spanish and chose to invest their time in other ways. Those may have been perfectly legitimate alternative investments in time and energy, but that's no reason to penalize candidates who took advantage of opportunities to learn Spanish.
On Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008, voters went to the polls in primary elections in many states to do their sacred civic duty. They went in Illinois, California, Utah, New York, Georgia....
And they went in Wisconsin, which scheduled its primary two weeks later, on February 19. And they went in Virginia, which scheduled its primary a week after Super Tuesday. And they went in Florida, which held its primary a week before Super Tuesday. The Florida voters were particularly indignant about being turned away. These may be the same people who demanded another election in 2000 because they couldn't follow an arrow from the candidate's name to the proper hole in the card. (As Dave Barry pointed out, the problem was not the ballot, it was expecting people who drive in Florida to understand what arrows mean. I can vouch personally for the fact that absolutely everything Dave Barry says about Florida drivers is true. "Oh, wow, man. The light is so green! What do we do now?")
In Illinois, twenty voters whose ballot marking pens had dried out were told the pens had "invisible ink" and the machines would still read the ballots. (The voters were contacted and told to come back and cast ballots with working pens.)
Some of these people will vote in November 2008.
Barack Obama ran into some flak (if you spell it "flack" you're too illiterate to be reading this [1]) over some racially incendiary comments made by his pastor. If the worst anyone can pin on him is comments made by somebody else, he's in pretty good shape.
What's so breathtaking about all this is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. First of all, the stuff Obama's pastor said was no worse than what Malcolm X said back in the 1960's, so any aging radicals who once cheered Malcolm X are automatically disqualified.
But even worse are the conservative Religious Right types. When the Baptist Church expels Fred Phelps and his congregation for cheering U.S. combat deaths as punishments from God, then they can say something. Until then, Baptists have no credibility. And all the James Dobsons and David Wilkersons and Pat Robertsons out there who warn that America is doomed for pornography and homosexuality? It's okay to hope that God punishes America for sexual sins but not for racism? To his great credit, Mike Huckabee, of all people, came to the pastor's defense.
As of late May, Barack Obama has been zinged for saying his grandfather helped liberate Auschwitz (it was actually Buchenwald) and for praising "our fallen heroes, many of whom are in the audience...." The sheer triviality of the criticisms is striking.
Not Hillary, not Bill.
Chelsea Clinton is taking flak from the media because she told interviewers that how she felt about her father's affair with Monica Lewinski was "none of their business."
Imagine if every public figure did things like that. Soon you'd have gaunt journalists begging on street corners with tape recorders in tin cups and placards reading "Help! I'm starving. I haven't had a sound bite in days." Then you give them a kick and snarl "Get a job, you bum!" Wouldn't that be great?
Okay, de plane is here to take us home from Fantasy Island. Wipe the saliva off your keyboard and get back to work.
Seriously, a great start to creating a more informed society would be for every public figure to demand to know how any question will serve to inform the public, and answer "none of your business" to any questions that can't be proven relevant. Yea, Chelsea! You go, girl.
A Web page at VoteFromAbroad.Org, titled "How Good Are Experienced Presidents?" cites data collected by David A. Levine and plots the historical ranking of Presidents against their years of political experience. There is no correlation whatsoever.
In the high ranking, high-experience corner we find Washington. His nearest rivals are LBJ and Madison. In the high ranking but low experience corner we find Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Woodrow Wilson. In the low rank, low experience corner we find that eminently forgettable gaggle of post-Jackson presidents, with Hoover, Carter and Harding representing the Twentieth Century.
In the high experience, low ranking corner we find James Buchanan far removed from anyone else. If this guy had died or lost the election in 1856 he would be remembered as a great public servant: Pennsylvania state legislature, U.S. House of Representatives, ambassador to Russia, Senate, Secretary of State, and Ambassador to England. Everything but the Supreme Court and saving humanity from giant killer robots from the future. But it was Buchanan, not Lincoln, who failed to avert the Civil War. Seven of the Confederate States seceded before Lincoln ever took office, and Buchanan tried to wait it out. The first shots fired at Fort Sumter were fired in January, 1861 when a resupply ship sent by Buchanan was driven off. Buchanan merely hunkered down and waited for his term to run out.
The most average Presidents, the ones nearest the center of the plot of ranking versus experience, are John Quincy Adams and William McKinley.
Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has raked in campaign funds hand over fist and has kept his campaign afloat after far better known candidates folded. He managed to do so through Internet activists. Yet all his Internet support failed to translate into large numbers of votes in the primaries.
There could be no clearer illustration of the lack of connection between campaign money and outcome. While it's guaranteed that a candidate with little money won't get very far, large amounts of money don't guarantee success. Steve Forbes, a Presidential aspirant with far more money and better ideas than Ron Paul, failed to gain much traction in 2004. John Kerry raised more money than George Bush in 2004 but still lost.
Paul's supporters complain about being excluded from media coverage and debates. The reality is that Paul is marginalized because he's marginal. A man who may be a constructive force as a gadfly in a group may not be such a good idea for a leader. That's how a lot of people viewed Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater was a far more mainstream politician than Paul. Goldwater went back to Congress and served worthily for many more years (among other things, leading the group that finally convinced Nixon to resign), and Paul may do the same. But who can take a candidate seriously that puts things like this on his campaign Web site?
The 2008 Republican race came down to Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Huckabee was a Baptist minister and a proponent of Intelligent Design. When he dropped from front-runner status, the Religious Right was left with nobody even remotely acceptable to them.
The reason the Religious Right never overturned Roe vs. Wade, never legalized prayer in school, and never decisively banned gay marriage is simple. They weren't players. They were played. Candidates gave lip service to the Religious Right agenda without having the slightest intention of enacting it. Why should they? As long as Roe vs. Wade remained in force, prayer was banned in school, and gay marriage remained a force to be reckoned with, Religious Right voters could be counted on to remain inflamed and turn out in force to vote for right-sounding candidates. Abolish Roe vs. Wade, legalize prayer in school, and ban gay marriage, and the Religious Right no longer has an incentive to vote. Worse yet, they may decide that corporate corruption, job security or health care are important issues and vote for a liberal.
We have various far-right pundits announcing pompously that they will switch sides (Ann Coulter) or sit out the election (James Dobson). We haven't seen this level of large scale political hallucination since the late 1960's when the Woodstock generation thought they were really capable of mounting a revolution. A year or so later, when they suffered four fatalities in a confrontation with the military, these revolutionaries couldn't believe that anyone would actually shoot at them. (True story: Following Kent state, we had riots at Columbia University - who didn't? One night a speaker was haranguing a crowd and shouted "Let's liberate Low Library," the administration building. As he turned up the steps, there was a loud "clompclompclop" and a phalanx of NYPD cops lined up shoulder to shoulder at the top of the steps. The activist took a couple of steps further, turned to the crowd, and yelled "Well, what are you waiting for?" The crowd drifted off to the far end of the quad and began smashing windows. One plastic pane took several heavy hits before someone yelled "Let it live!" At that point I decided the Revolution was probably not going to happen. Another true story: when I applied for a security clearance in the Army in 1970 I was asked if I knew anyone who advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Four years at Berkeley and a year at Columbia. Duh. I asked if they wanted a complete list or just the first thousand. The security interviewer said "We know that's all just talk." My estimation of the health of American society rose sharply that instant.)
What we are seeing now on the Right is the equivalent of what the Left has been doing for a long time: shrieking impotent rage that American society simply doesn't take them seriously. What the Religious Right is terrified of beyond anything else is precisely that Republicans will win without them. Then they will be well and truly marginalized.
On February 2, 2008, Vasko Kohlmayer wrote Why American Evangelicals are the West's Last Hope.
The fact that the United States has now a president who is willing to confront west-hating jihadists is decisively due to American evangelicals. They are the reason why America is the only western country willing to take the necessary steps to protect itself (and its allies) in the face of the Islamic threat. It is they that keep up America's fighting spirit and provide Bush with the support he needs to carry on the fight.
Were it not for American evangelicals, the free world would be presently without a leader. Without them America's policy would be in the hands of John Kerry and John Edwards who would likely by now have dismissed the whole idea of the War on Terror.
Not quite. It is thanks in no small part to evangelicals that the free world doesn't have a leader, that it is permissible everywhere else in the world to disregard American ideas simply because they are American. It's largely thanks to evangelicals that American scientific literacy is a global joke.
So lots of Republicans are saying “Change or Die” but like liberal denialists, most are looking only at the most superficial cosmetic changes. Try some real reform.
First, admit to being wrong about evolution.
Second, admit to being wrong on the environment. All of it. Every single major issue. Peak oil, endangered species, climate change, and especially the voodoo economics used to justify opposition to environmentalism. Trillions of dollars to implement Kyoto? Terrible. Trillions of dollars to bail out the architects of crackpot investment schemes? Meh. We can do that.
Until Republicans make those two pivotal reforms, conservatism will be a joke in academia. Who cares? You’d better. That’s where future voters get indoctrinated. Liberals espousing crackpot sociology is bad, but it takes a very special kind of stupid to deny physical reality. You don’t have a snowball’s chance of cracking the liberal academic monoculture until you stop spouting crap science.
Then there’s the masterful job Republicans have done of alienating every computer literate individual in America by trying to give away the Internet to the telecoms, the RIAA and the MPAA. Orrin Hatch is elected by the voters in one state but he’s won the Democrats votes in every state by his moonbat intellectual property efforts. Nice work, there. Repeal the DMCA, rescind the Bono copyright extensions, and stop prostituting Congress to the entertainment industry. As the Writers Guild strike plainly showed, the worst intellectual property thieves in America are the MPAA and the RIAA.
Making these reforms will entail alienating religious cultists and corporate interests, but in return you might just have a shot at selling the core issue of conservatism: individual responsibility.
My remarks on evolution and the environment are “elitist” and “undemocratic?” Hey, I’m an elitist and proud of it. So you’re telling me I’m IN THE ZONE. Facts are not democratic. You don’t get to vote on how far you can get on a tank of gas and you don’t get to vote on how long the world’s oil will last. You don’t get to vote on the age of the earth or climate change.
So you just go ahead and tell me all about Ben Stein and the latest on your favorite climate change denial blog. Keep telling yourself none of this matters. Keep telling yourself that for the next four, or eight, or twelve years.
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. - Abraham Lincoln, 1859
What's been on my mind recently is not whether McCain, Obama or Clinton will be elected so much as the tone of the debate. Both the left and right wing commentators have been reduced to screaming hysteria. Have you ever tried to wipe spittle off the inside of a computer screen?
The really bothersome thing is that on both sides we have factions demanding rights for their own side while simultaneously demanding the power to impose new restrictions on the other. This can only end in two ways.
The first is that we will live in a progressively less free society. Every time power changes hands, the incoming party will impose new restrictions of its own. Meanwhile the losing party will mostly be able to block repeal of its own pet restrictions. Neither will concede anything. It will be like a python: every time we exhale, the coils get tighter.
Once upon a time white people insisted on the right to restrict blacks. They couldn't sit in the front of the bus, go to the same schools, stay in the same hotels. Finally enough people got angry enough to demand an end to that freedom. But it didn't stop there. Soon there were restrictions on all sorts of other discrimination, then even on forms of speech. The coils tighten. Lincoln's prophecy fulfilled.
The other end state is to accept that maximum freedom for ourselves demands that we allow maximum freedom to others. This means we will have to accept things we disapprove of vehemently in order to have the freedom to do things the other side disapproves of equally vehemently. For example the Religious Right regularly circulates the bogus rumor that the FCC is planning to ban religious broadcasting, but at the same time they demand that the FCC crack down on content they deem objectionable. Maybe the way to secure freedom for religious broadcasting is to strip the FCC of the power to regulate content? Conservatives value property rights. Liberals value behavioral rights. If conservatives want freedom to use their property without restrictions, they're going to have to allow liberals minimal restrictions on behavior. And if liberals want behavioral freedom, they're going to have to allow conservatives to have maximum freedom with their property. If liberals want the right to burn the flag, they're going to have to tolerate expression they find offensive, like so called "hate speech." And if conservatives want the right to express things that come under the rubric of hate speech, they're going to have to allow liberals the right to express unpatriotic things. What part of "no law" in the First Amendment is hard to figure out? If liberals want to liberalize drug laws, they'll need to accept that they don't have the right to tax conservatives to pay for the consequences.
Maybe we could decide that every time a piece of legislation signed into law, its opponents get to have a law of their choice repealed.
I have come to conclude that the Supreme Court was right in Lawrence versus Texas 2003, the ruling that struck down most restrictions on private sexual conduct. Not that I like the Court playing fast and loose with the law, and not that I endorse the conduct in question. But it's clear that no government can be trusted with that kind of invasive authority. Even if the people who pass the law have the requisite wisdom, they will surely be succeeded eventually by people who do not. The fact that Ann Coulter threw a screaming hissy fit about it basically reinforces my conclusion.
It may even mean that conservatives will have to tolerate abortion as a necessary evil in order to prevent the state from invading other freedoms. Not accept it morally, but recognize that it may be too dangerous to allow any government to control behavior to that degree. Liberals, in turn, may have to tolerate some kinds of discrimination. The logical end point of increasing liberty is to declare that the government has no authority to restrict any liberty unless it can demonstrate a pressing need to do so. (This, by the way, is not Libertarianism - Libertarians, many of them, oppose restrictions on liberty and don't care if there's a pressing need or not.) As someone once pointed out, the most revolutionary slogan ever is "Mind your own business."
I don't see much prospect of this happening. Right now both camps seem far more interested in suppressing the rights of the opposition than in securing more freedom for themselves. They'd dearly love total freedom for themselves and total control over the opposition, but they won't get that. Not, as Lincoln noted, if God is just. That's the scary part.
We have the rightist blogosphere lambasting liberal bias in the media. We have the left wing blogosphere ranting about bias from the "corporate media." Therefore I conclude the media are about on target.
Daily Kos and Ann Coulter were cloned from the same batch of goo, except that whoever or whatever programmed them flipped the pluses and minuses on one of them. The blogosphere is the pulse of the lunatic fringe.
"This is CBS News, a subsidiary of OmniMaxiMegaGlobalCorp, and we're evil. Mwahahahahaha. Are the babies done in the microwave yet?" Maybe closing out that way would satisfy the critics of "corporate media?"
Not being satisfied with giving the election to George Bush in 2000, Ralph Nader is running again.
A number of states are passing laws mandating that their electors vote either proportionally with the state popular vote, or even according to the national popular vote. Maine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes by district, though so far neither has had split electoral votes.
If you want to marginalize your small state, this is the ideal way to do it. Most elections are not that far apart in popular vote totals, so if I'm virtually guaranteed to get one of Montana's three electoral votes, and unlikely to get more than two, why bother going to Montana at all? And tying the electoral vote to the national vote is even worse. If I can get 10,000 votes in North Dakota or 100,000 votes in California with the same number of speaking engagements, why bother with North Dakota?
If you're really all that concerned about popular representation, how about a nationwide initiative and referendum system? Or limiting the power of the courts in overturning referendum votes?
[1] "Flak" is a contraction of "Flugzeugabwehrkannone," or anti-aircraft cannon, and by analogy, any intense hostile response. A "flack" is a publicist.
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Created 30 November 2006, Last Update 28 May 2008
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