Soundbites.

Obama does a great job beating back McCain at the VFW, but what's it worth when no one is listening? The captive audience was receptive, but as with any good, well-defined policy commentary it took too long to get out and, if anything, will be chopped into criticizable bits before airing on any news. It's a shame that in order to make a point and be heard you need to do it in two sentences, but that's the reality. Obama absolutely needs to go on the offensive, an this speech shows he's well prepared to do it.

Darwin Day is Coming!

Collin Purrington is giving away temporary Darwin tattoos to promote Darwin Day.

Trust us.

In the run-up to the Iraq war I felt like the whole Congress was with me in feeling that they reeeeally didn’t believe the administration’s justifications for war but that it was inconceivable for a president to do what we now know he did. Now, the administration wants us to trust in the staff of federal regulatory agencies to do the right thing by us and by the Endangered Species Act. Riiiiight.

If the ESA is wrong, then we should end it, but to simply undermine it and say that it’s meant to benefit us? They’re just attempting to take us all for suckers…again.

Are biased books the newest best form of discourse?

I just came across the Green Party 2000 Speach by Joel Kovel which I thought was worth watching. This guy seems to have his finger on a bunch of nerves that people don't like touched. From being branded an anti-Semite (he's Jewish , mind you) for his book Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine to redirecting the blame for global warming to the Clinton-Gore administration and capitalism in general in A Really Inconvenient Truth, he really likes to take an alternative stance on things. Is he a rationalist contrarian? Maybe. Why does anyone feel the need to be a contrarian? Because most people don't look beyond the immediate self-serving truth, and someone needs to provide an alternative perspective.

I think the reviews of his book on Amazon are telling. Half the folks are Zionists and argue the poor quality of his writing. The other half are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist and thought it was well worth reading. The degradation of public debate, the purpose of which is to be a rational and progressive dialectic exchange, into televised screaming matches and the deterioration of common communication skills necessary for anyone to communicate, and ultimately, think about any issue openly with reason have created the field upon which rational discourse about any issue is replaced by biased discourse. In this new discourse speakers conform to Column A or Column B and the "truth" outcome is whichever position, A or B, with the most supporters--not the "truth" as discovered through reason. The owning of our democracy by the highest bidder rather than collectively by all of the interested parties as a whole is perhaps an economic analogue of the same phenomenon. The claim of a "mandate" by the administration after winning a slight majority in 2004 similarly illustrates how neglect of the search for truth and the alternative, the embrace of the "loudest" point of view, can materialize in a way that truly undermines democracy.

How far have we come that the President of all people will embrace tyranny of the majority as a principle of democracy rather than as an obstacle to democracy? Since we can no longer debate much less converse about opposing ideas, it seems the only forum for “debate” is in opposing books where ideas can be expounded completely and presented. Maybe this is better than nothing, but maybe its a way of feeding the monster. Maybe we could have less polarized discourse on policy, if we all made the personal effort to converse about ideas and discover “truth.” Reason served civilization pretty well for the last 500 years. But, if individuals can’t simply speak rationally amongst themselves about anything that matters, what can we expect for the country or for civilization?

Real conservativism

Having been lacking inspiration I started jotting notes down about ideas for essays a month or so ago most of which I readily lost. But, I came across one under a pile of paperwork the other day referencing this brief article in the Times which neatly depicts Obama’s infamous “guns and God” comment as being fundamentally wrong. The author, Larry Bartels, makes a brief but powerful statistical case that Obama’s assumptions are grossly inaccurate. I suppose Obama’s incorrect assumptions are representative of what a lot of, if not most of Americans seem to think—that the rural working class is the conservative base of the Republican Party and that this group is strongly swayed by so-called wedge issues such as gay rights, abortion rights and gun control. The fact appears to be that they are in fact much less likely to be swayed by wedge issues than educated, well-to-do urbanites. One underlying message here seems to be that it is the relatively well-to-do urbanites who can afford to be distracted by such wedge issues, while less well-to-do people have bigger fish to fry. The point of it all is that Obama has embraced a misleading stereotype of a big segment of the population, and that could really hurt his chances of appealing to (or serving the needs of) those people.

Also, I thought this was a really interesting article, because I saw in it a parallel to the perception of “pagans” and “heathens.” Pagans (literally "rural dwellers") and heathens (possibly "dwellers of uncultivated land") became marginalized for their religious beliefs as radical new religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) overran the cities. While these terms were pejorative and were intended to disparage the subjects for deviance, the pagans and heathens actually clung to older, more traditional beliefs and values. That is to say, they were socially conservative, and their cosmopolitan detractors were the real deviants.

Maybe, in the same way, "middle America" is a storehouse for the values our country supposedly has historically embraced. Few would argue with this, but their assumptions about what traditional American values are would vary widely and would often be in sharp contrast to one another. I think Bartels’ article makes it pretty clear what they are not.