Freedom of Choice (of Breakfast Meats)

This morning I heard an ad on the radio which struck me as a poignant commentary about the United States. It is increasingly obvious to me that our values and institutions are centered on commerce, and commercial interests dominate decisions which are supposed to be dictated by principle and concern for the "public good." While I have been aware of this state of affairs for upwards of a decade, recent developments have for some reason rekindled my interest in the questions of why America looks like it does, why we Americans act as we do, and how the public policies that determine these things are set.

I plan to research and write a series of posts dealing with these questions and how they relate to America's place in the world and particularly how they shape the presidential race. For now, I want to get back to the radio ad.

McDonald's recently introduced a breakfast sandwich called the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit, which true to its name consists of a fried chicken patty on a biscuit. It accompanies a number of other greasy, disgusting biscuit-based items which have reportedly been added to McDonald's menu in the years since I stopped eating there. Some consider the new sandwich remarkable in that it has moved chicken onto the breakfast menu, but as Joel Klein of TIME notes, this is not an unprecedented coup. Furthermore, there is no coherent reason why pork should be included in our morning meals while chicken is categorically proscribed. If there ever was some sanctity of breakfast, it was long ago defiled by the introduction of cereal shaped like waffles and sausage on a stick wrapped in pancakes, corndog style.

The radio ad for McDonald's new arterial calamity began by extolling the US's hallowed freedom of speech. How lucky we are to live in a nation where each person can express his ideas without fear of repression by his government! All manner of divergent opinions are tolerated in this nation of courage and integrity. No personal opinion or taste is grounds for ostracism, the ad continues. (Let us ignore the fact that you can't even see the truth from where you have to stand to be able to say that.)

What should we do with this precious freedom of expression? The radio told me that the proper course is to start eating chicken for breakfast, which was somehow not the first thing that came to my mind. I never had any inclination to include poultry on my breakfast menu, but then again, my tastes are so distant from where the ad industry would have them that I may qualify as a bad American on that count alone.

Isn't this appropriation of patriotic concepts and imagery in the name of selling a breakfast sandwich a form of sacrilege, to be decried and deplored by Americans from sea to shining sea? No. No, it isn't. What I find distressing about this ad is that there really isn't anything unusual about it. It's perfectly acceptable to use patriotism and America's purported ideals to implore consumers to buy your product. No one sees that as a debasement of what we stand for. This is a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that consumption is really what we're all about. What's the point getting upset about it? People who supposedly hold America dear to their hearts don't really want to impede commerce, so they never raise their voices in objection to this kind of thing.

This state of affairs reinforces my conclusion that most or all of the patriotic talk we put up with in American is entirely for show. Somehow, our politicians are excoriated for the mere omission of conspicuously patriotic (and Christian) rituals. Every lapel is adorned with a flag pin, every speech closed with "God bless America." Politicians never venture anywhere near vocally diluting or devaluing our shibboleths (which says nothing about what they do with their actions rather than their words). When a corporation suggests that the happy providence of the First Amendment should be utilized to eat chicken before 11:30am, that's business as usual.

Once again I find myself devoid of any obligation to participate in any of this- the patriotic pageantry, the consumerism, the greasy breakfast. I must be in the minority, though, or no one would pay to make those ads.

My dogma is bigger than yours

In a footnote to chapter nine of Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett alerts his readers to a piece written by Cristoph Cardinal Schörnborn in which he clarifies the views of the Catholic Church toward evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," in which he spoke about evolution. His main point was that the emergence of the human spirit (for my money, "spirit" is the Fergie of meaningless buzz-words, being both the most despicable and the most ubiquitous) could not be located on an evolutionary timeline and therefore weighed toward divine intervention. Let's just elide over the fact that the soul has never been scientifically demonstrated in the first place. John Paul and Schörnborn don't worry much about that, so neither will we.

In "Finding Design in Nature," Schörnborn attempted to remedy false notions about Church doctrine which had cropped in the nine years since the papal address. John Paul mentioned evolution but did not condemn it as false, so it's perfectly reasonable for any reader to assume that he accepted the fact that evolution is a real process. The important distinction, for Schörnborn, is that Christian teachings are fundamentally incompatible with "Neo-Darwinian doctrine," which he criticized as ideological rather than scientific. Neo-Darwinism denies the supposedly abundant evidence of design in the universe.

With formidable indignation, he quoted a1985 writing by John Paul in which he touted the "finality" of life on earth. So far as I know, finality is not a scientific concept. How would one test an organism to determine whether it is "final"? Does it have something to do with cell structure, anatomy, observed mutations? Is there a finality gene? Presumably John Paul's address was given in Italian; the Italian finalità may have some connotation or scientific application of which I am unaware. More likely, though, it's just jargon made up by JPII to make a case for something that just isn't so.

The late Pople continued: "To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us." This is a baffling role reversal. The merest thought reveals that divine intervention is the bankrupt explanation in this discussion- what Dennett would call a "skyhook," a device which purports to do the work of a crane absent any actual superstructure to support it. Claiming that God is responsible for any observed phenomenon is intellectually lazy. Scientists have studied processes of differential replication for 149 years and have learned much about how random, stepwise processes can carry a system from simplicity to complexity. Positing divine intervention does not require any tests or observations, or even any thought. Pointing your finger at someone else and saying, "No, you're the one who refuses to use your brain," is worth 0 points. Sorry.

Schörnborn goes on to defend the new pope, Benedict XVI, from the scurrilous neo-Darwinists who would warp and corrupt his pronouncements for their own wicked ends. He doesn't cite any of these nefarious materialist rogues, so I have to doubt their existence. Who would make such a claim? I wouldn't go out of my way to get Benny on my side of the Beatles vs. Stones controversy, much less something meaningful like the origin of life. Furthermore, who believes that the pope doesn't think God had anything to do with the development of life on Earth? XVI is just as wrong as I expect him to be.

The Cardinal concludes by reiterating that design is plainly visible in all of nature. Again, no scientific work is cited to support this claim. It is a bare assertion. It's not that I expect Schörnborn to publish articles in a biology journal. He has better things to do; if he's anything like American bishops, that includes protecting child molestors. In any event, there is a sizable catalogue of supposed scientific work in support of the design theory. That body of work is rejected in toto by respectable scientists, but if the Cardinal is going to try to use science to support his Stone Age ideas, the least he could do is bring some science into it.

Imperialist and Reagan ally dies on the Fourth of July

The National Review has decided to host a circle-jerk in memory of the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative from North Carolina who died Friday (The Nation speculated, I hope facetiously, that he planned to die on Independence Day). This kind of hero worship bothers me no matter the alignment of the idol; I was far from pleased when The Nation and MoveOn.org uncritically extolled the virtues of Sen. Barack Obama a few months ago, notwithstanding the fact that he somehow became the standard-bearer for the progressive movement in this country. I won't be happy when The Nation holds a sad symposium reflecting on the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, either. I know they're not going to be honest about it.

Does anyone really need talking heads from their own little ideological buddy list telling them how great some politician is (or was)? Can't said politician just put an ad on TV talking about how great they are? Why waste energy and print space on that kind of redundant applause? We rather need to know what's wrong with our politicians. Remember, these folks are trying to screw us.

Once you get past the fact that the entire post-mortem exercise is worth about the same as tailpipe exhaust, you have to start thinking about who Jesse Helms actually was. For one thing, he was a friend and political associate of Ronald Reagan, possibly my least favorite person in all of history. Helms was a stalwart opponent of civil rights, a virulent homophobe, and a prominent defender of the Reagan administration when it was caught funding Nicaraguan death squads. Helms is praised in NR for standing up to various presidents when he disagreed with them. But when it was discovered that a friend's cronies had armed terrorists in the Middle East and used the proceeds to fund terrorism in South America, he stood by his man. So what the hell good was he?

The folks at NR pour accolades on the late senator for his incessant crusade against the liberal elites of Washington. He filibustered to block their unqualified judicial appointments (!?!). He wanted to reform the United Nations (really glad he pushed that one through, huh?) and the somehow inherently anti-American State Department. He fought to reform anti-AIDS programs so that they would actually prevent the spread of the disease. It's not clear where the NR yackos got that last one. Helms was opposed to any funding for those programs, and he made no bones about why: homosexuals deserved to die for having ebil, ebil buttsekcs.

Helms also hated modern art and was a nemesis of the National Endowment for the Arts. Some egghead wants to give Keith Haring a grant so he can do his doodles on the walls of subway tunnels? That guy should be out on his ass. Caspar Weinberger sold M-16s to the Ayatollah? Well, that's so important, I can't see why it's illegal. He needs a pardon. See where Helms was coming from?

There is only one underwhelming mention of Helms's racial prejudice in the crop of eulogies, and it is phrased as follows: "I don’t know that he was completely innocent on race." The crowning element of this exuberant echo chamber is good, old exceptionalist nationalism. Helms knew what America was all about, so his support for our brutal and anti-democratic foreign policy was justified. After repeating that suggestion, David Rouzer closes the symposium with a masterful amalgamation of insipid supersition and saccharine patriotism: "It is only fitting that he joins two other great patriots, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in exiting this world on the Fourth of July — and not by coincidence."

George Carlin, 1937-2008

I was saddened to read this morning that comedian George Carlin has died. In my opinion, the greatest thing about Carlin was his appreciation for language and his Orwellian understanding of its distortion. His comedy was vulgar and irreverent, but it was always tinged with erudition. He was pretty much uneducated, but he had a far greater understanding of the world than most Americans.

Carlin was acerbically critical of the American political system and religion ("Three out of four people now believe in angels. What're you, fuckin' stupid?"). His assessment was insightful, and his explanation of how language is used to manipulate public opinion was as eloquent as that of George Orwell. He dismissed religion as mind control and had a similar view of the consumerism so pervasive in this country. Any form of orthodoxy or attempt to craft a "received reality" was suspect. Carlin ridiculed politically-correct euphemisms as ruthlessly as he attacked the owning class in America. He was a free-thinker and one hilarious motherfucker.

Some responsible YouTuber posted a piece from his most recent stage show about death:

What if you're wrong about the Great Juju at the bottom of the sea?

I love this video of Richard Dawkins owning a theist:



This speaks to one of the early questions that drove me away from Christianity. How can I know that my religion, I asked myself, is true, when there is just as much evidence for all the other religions (that is, none)? This is a very important question that religious people need to ask themselves if they are at all concerned about being intellectually honest.

Why I am not fundamentalist

Over the past week I have witnessed a series of flame wars in the Religion and Theology forum at Democratic Underground, where I wasted an exceptional amount of time last month. For five or six successive days, people who don't know each other traded insults and fallacious arguments, diagnosed each other with various neuroses, and squabbled over who was the bigger crybaby. The protracted flamefest started over the suggestion, not unknown in those parts and rarely well-received, that atheism is a religion. Two posters, both themselves atheists, spent days antagonizing other atheists while proclaiming their good intentions. In all, it was an effective demonstration of one of the strongest criticisms of atheism (which nonetheless falls victim to the fallacy of suggesting that atheism is a unified movement, but I will address that shortly): many atheists have a vicious contrarian streak and need to feel superior to others. If there are no believers around, other atheists will do. I have gone through this stage at least once, so I am acutely aware of it in others.

I didn't see much to gain from getting involved, so abstained from the argument for the most part. One intercession that I made was to observe that there were three definitions of "fundamentalist atheism" at work. Generally speaking, a fundamentalist is a person who adheres to a strictly literal interpretation of a religious scripture. Since atheism is not itself a philosophy but merely the condition of lacking belief in a god or gods, there are no central tenets for atheists to adhere to. The term is generally applied to vocal atheists how don't feel obligated to show respect for the supernatural beliefs of others. Beyond that common thread, the term is amorphous and serves different users in different ways, shifting as necessary to apply to many thinkers and positions.

The variation of the definitions I encountered intrigued me. I delineated the them as follows:

1). A fundamentalist atheist is one who will not acknowledge that atheists such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot committed atrocities. Also,they dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that fundamentalist atheism exists.

I think the person who advanced this definition meant to say that fundamentalist atheists refuse to admit that Stalin et al. were motivated by their atheism in their atrocities, which is the usual construction of that particular meme. I don't think anyone, at least at DU, had ever claimed that Stalin's purges or the Cultural Revolution didn't happen, but I checked carefully, and that was indeed the accusation made by the poster in question.

I also like the catch-22 couched in the second half of this definition. All you have to do to be a fundie is claim that you are not a fundie. It's artful, if pedantry is considered an art (as it is on some Internet boards). The gist of this person's concept of fundamentalist atheists is that they refuse to accept any criticism of atheism and form a quasi-religious clique to reinforce their delusion. It is convenient for use against anyone who defends atheism against attack, because they seem to tacitly acknowledge that they are part of a larger movement.

2). A fundamentalist atheist stubbornly asserts that no benefit has come from religion and that religion must be eliminated, usually be violent means.

As Carl Sagan once said, "Also pretty vague, but, also pretty different." While there is some commonality between this definition and (1), namely the tendency to ignore evidence, the distinction here is that (2) treats atheism as a philosophy with a set doctrine about the destructive nature of religion, whereas (1) treats atheists as a cohesive group that defends its own members.

A major problem with (2) is that many of the people labeled "fundamentalist atheists," including Dawkins, et al., don't actually make that claim. In particular many of the atheists labeled as part of the "clique" on DU do not agree with this position. I read the claim many times that most of the atheists on that discussion board advocate putting the religious in mental institutions, but it was always unsubstantiated. One user posted a thread in that forum explaining how most atheists enjoy religious music, holidays, cathedral architecture, and so forth; the main advocate of (2) was shocked, shocked at the fact that most of the atheists on the board had positive things to say about religious culture. I'm not sure whether the incident changed his conception of "fundamentalist atheism."

There are people who can accurately be named "anti-theists," but I'm not sure Dawkins and his colleagues ascribe to that label. I would place the four so-called New Atheists on a continuum, starting with Christopher Hitchens, the most vituperative critic of religion, followed by Sam Harris, Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, the most objective and scholarly. Both Hitchens and Harris are apologists for neoconservative foreign policy, arguing that Muslim fanatics are a unique threat to Western civilization which can only be eliminated by force. Their position is perhaps the origin of the misconception that many atheists advocate violence against the religious. Dennett and Dawkins are strongly critical of American imperialism and violent coercion of any kind. Not even all of these four consider violence justified; to impute that position to a majority of atheists is an egregious exaggeration.

3). Fundamentalist atheists are those who insist that the only proper reading of a religious text is a literal reading and that all believers must adhere to such an interpretation.

This definition cemented in my mind the notion that the three posters who provided the definitions were merely drawing them around grudges and appealing to past experiences on the board to provide content for the chimera that is fundamentalist atheism. (3) happily eschews the common factor between the two preceding definitions, effectively depriving all three of any credibility. The practice of denying counter-evidence is tellingly absent from this definition; if there was any legitimate basis for the term I would expect that to be a universal component.

I understand the argument which gives rise to this definition. It was in fact instrumental in my own transition away from belief in God. When I was a child I believed everything in the bible was the literal truth, but the Cosmo Kramer that is reality inevitably imposed itself on my little bubble. The stories of the Flood and the Creation are simply contrary to fact, and when I abandoned them I couldn't settle on a liberal interpretation of Christianity. The New Testament, with all its miracles, is no less fantastic than the Old Testament. Without the story
of the Fall, the Resurrection narrative doesn't make any sense. Once the Old Testament myths are suspect, the New Testament miracles must fall under the same scrutiny. If the miracles are discounted, what is the rational distinction that can be made to assert that some parts of the New Testament are historical, while others are mythical or allegorical? Any standard that might be applied to distinguish between the two is, as far as I can see, completely arbitrary. The only cohesive readings of the bible are a literalist view (which must contend with a mountain of evidence against its veracity) and an allegorical view.

The above reasoning is either misinterpreted by a believer or misapplied by a disbeliever to create the negative interactions of the kind which lead to (3). This seems a rather personalized definition of "fundamentalist atheism," but then, all three definitions seem highly personalized. Regardless of the definition, though, I only ever see the term used as a pejorative. It is applied as a catch-all for anyone who steps out of line and expresses their ideas about religion. There is only one fundamental of atheism: not believing in God. You don't even have to make the claim that God doesn't exist; all you have to do is refrain from making the claim that He does. There is no central atheist authority, and no foundational creed to subscribe to. Out of such a non-contiguous group, the "fundamentalist" label tends to fall upon anyone whose behavior is judged impertinent.

Moving the goalposts

Today the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee is meeting to determine the status of primary election delegates from the states of Florida and Michigan. Those two states were stripped of their delegates after their state Democratic Parties went back on their agreement to hold primaries no earlier than February 5.

All of the presidential candidates agreed not to campaign in the two states, and the voters in those states were told that no delegates would be seated. Before Michigan held its primary January 15, four of the candidates removed their names from the ballot, leaving only Hillary Clinton, who declined to do so, Chris Dodd, who did not have the resources to withdraw his name, and Dennis Kucinich, who presumably thought he would have received the same number of votes either way. There was relatively low turnout compared to the number of Democrats who voted in other primaries, which is understandable considering that everyone knew at the time that it wouldn't mean anything. DailyKos urged Democrats to vote in the Republican primary and rejuvenate the floundering campaign of Mitt Romney to disrupt Republican campaign. The contributors to that blog were not happy when Republicans did the same to the Democrats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. At any rate, 56% of the Michiganders voted for Clinton, while 31% marked "uncommitted."

Florida held it primary on January 29. Hillary Clinton won 50% of the vote, Barack Obama garnered 33%, and John Edwards barely missed winning a delegate with 14%. It was accepted by all parties that the primaries would not count because they violated the schedule set by the DNC. The Clinton campaign did not care, for the most part, because they believed that they would have a lock on the nomination by Super Tuesday. Unfortunately for them, Obama performed well that day and won a series of 12 victories thereafter because Clinton had no campaign infrastructure in any of the subsequent states. Clinton began to push to have the primaries from Florida and Michigan legitimized.

The RBC has a number of options before it after it hears testimony from the Obama and Clinton campaigns. It could refuse to seat any delegates, seat all of the delegates from both states but allow each only half a vote at the convention, or seat half the delegates from each state. The Committee does not have the authority to grant either state more than half its votes at the convention. It might split Michigan's 108 delegates evenly or it might assign 69 to Clinton and 56 to Obama, giving him the uncommitted delegates.

If the DNC has any integrity, it will not seat any delegates from either state. Everyone was explicitly notified in January that the votes would not count. The Clinton campaign has no respect for the rules, and the Obama campaign doesn't have much to gain by standing up for them, so they are pushing for a compromise. This fiasco is a major blow to the credibility of the Democratic Party, if that party can be said to have any credibility to begin with. Not only is their selection process arcane and antidemocratic, allowing high-level party officials to weigh against a candidate with popular support in their role as superdelegates; the DNC also tolerates relocation of its goalposts at the very end of the primary game.

None of the proposed solutions provide any remedy for the people in both states who sat out the vote because they were told it would not count. Clinton loyalist Howard Ickes insists that Obama should not receive any delegates from Michigan, essentially punishing Obama for following the rules. This is the level of hypocrisy that I have come to expect from her and band of inept crooks. Michigan was completely expendable to them until Obama pulled ahead of them. Now they are pushing to change the rules in hopes of surviving.

As a registered Democrat, I feel slighted by the attempt to count invalid votes. My vote in the Pennsylvania primary was valid, as far as I know, and now it will likely be debased by the inclusion of votes from a pair of sham elections. This is precisely the kind of behavior that made me resist registering with this party in the first place. If democracy mattered to these people, they would have pushed for another set of primaries so that every Democrat's vote could be counted. Instead they are left with a bitter and divisive episode which will necessarily disenfranchise someone.

The RBC will likely seat at least some of the delegates from the two states, placating the bitter supporters of the losing candidate. The best possible outcome for Clinton still leaves her
chances very slim, so this abrogation of the party's rules will have little meaningful effect. Come to think of it, many of her supporters will still refuse to vote for Obama once he wins the nomination, regardless of what concessions are made to them.

The notable exception might be Clinton's installation on the bottom half of the Democratic ticket. This would unite the party, but it would lose my vote. Obama's political brand, built upon the notion that he is separate from the Washinton politics that have flourished under Bush and Clinton, already strains my suspension of disbelief. Taking Clinton, whom he has decried as an exemplar of that kind of politics, under his wing would dramatically undermine that image. Almost nothing could persuade me to vote for Clinton in any capacity.

No historical understanding necessary

I like this cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Ramirez. In particular, I like the way it casually eviscerates its own point. The bust of Lincoln is included to demonstrate that far more qualified presidents would be baffled that someone so inexperienced as Barack Obama could hold the highest office in the land.

While Lincoln is indubitably one of the greatest presidents in American history, his example is inapt because he had about as much government experience when he was elected president as Obama does today. Lincoln served eight years as a member of the state legislature in Illinois, equal to Obama's time there. Lincoln taught himself law during his early years in the legislature and eventually became a distinguished attorney. He was elected to a single term in the House of Representatives, where he was a vocal advocate against the Mexican War, but was not a prominent or successful legislator. In 1858 he ran unsuccessfully against Stephen A. Douglas for the Senate seat now held by Richard Durbin. Douglas and Lincoln ran for president two years later; the Electoral College was split among them and two other candidates, but Lincoln had a commanding plurality in the popular vote and a solid bloc of victories in Northern states.

Anyone who follows presidential politics is familiar with Obama's résumé. He graduated from Columbia University, worked briefly for a publishing company, then moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. After graduating from Harvard Law school in 1991, he worked as an attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He served eight years as a legislator before defeating carpetbagger and all-around embarrassment Alan Keyes in what was essentially a bye election for the Senate in 2004. He has served for three years and, while not a star legislator, I submit that he has been more successful than Lincoln.

Obama's is far from the most impressive curriculum vitae to show up in this year's crop of presidential candidates, but the parallels between him and Lincoln should be enough to demolish the "lack of experience" meme. While there is little to indicate that an Obama presidency would be as historic and Lincoln's, a lack of executive experience should not automatically disqualify a presidential candidate.

It is surprising that Ramirez chose Lincoln as the president who, presumably, would be most offended by an Obama presidency. He might have chosen Ronald Reagan, who remains a conservative icon to this day and had served two terms as governor of California before ascending to the Oval Office. That might neuter the right's criticism of Obama's fanatical supporters, who are no less enthusiastic than the Cult of the Deified Ronald. At least a Reagan bust would have allowed the cartoonist to avoid decapitating his own argument, though. Critiquing the Obama brand could be the work of other cartoons, so the contradiction would be less obvious.

The aesthetics of science

I wanted to respond to a comment that Maddie left on my second Templeton post, but I couldn't fit in all I wanted to say, so I'll use this post to cover all the ground I couldn't in my response.

Maddie wrote about the standards of evidence that would be necessary to justifiably believe in a god. The only thing even approaching positive evidence would be a demonstration of some phenomenon that cannot be explained by any natural cause. Even then, attributing any specific characteristics to this hypothetical supernatural force is completely baseless. The human race has learned enough to graduate beyond that level of thinking.

When I was a child, I struggled to reconcile the stories in the bible with things that I knew to be fact- stories like the creation (I didn't realize at the time that there were two mutually exclusive stories in Genesis), the Noachian Flood, the sun standing still in the sky so Joshua could complete his genocide against the Amorites, etc. The more I thought about those stories, the clearer it became that they could not have happened. I was pulled in both directions, but I had always found the science more compelling than the myths. Everything I learned about science made sense. To borrow a phrase from physicist Brian Greene, the universe is elegant. The stories in the bible, with all of their contradictions are other various absurdities, never came together in the same way.

That is an aesthetic judgment, I guess. Based on that judgment, though, I can't figure out the appeal of pseudoscience. It isn't enough that we, a horribly limited species in an insignificant little corner of space, have found a way to reach out across the universe and determine with a very high level of precision how it works? We also need to look at the planets moving through the sky and come up with a way that they supposedly affect our daily lives? Science is so much more proactive, using our own faculties to reach out into the cold beauty of the universe and snatch a little piece of it for ourselves. The notion that our personalities and the details of our lives are dictated by some hazy astrological mechanism is so much less life-affirming.

I see the same glaring discrepancy in homeopathy. The growth of our medical knowledge is perhaps more astounding than our progress in astrophysics- it roughly doubles every two years. The exponential gains of medical science are not merely an inspiring display of the human capacity for discovery- they mean advances in the human condition on a daily basis. The fundamental changes that medicine promises in the coming decades are startling in their scope and brilliance. Medicine is a branch of science that should generate awe in every human being. And yet some are not impressed- they insist on buying into homeopathy, which operates on the principle that water 'remembers' the properties of past solutes, so that medicine diluted to absurdly low concentrations retains its beneficial effect. This seems to me an obscene abdication of reason.

Are we somehow not packaging the truth properly? Surely, the comforting appeal of homeopathy and other myths must pale in comparison to the inherent beauty of the truths that human endeavor has revealed. Reality should need no marketing campaign. And yet people look askance at you if you say you don't believe in these myths. Granted, most who believe the Christian mythology wouldn't link their historical 'get out of reality free' card to the 'get out of reality free' cards others use for astronomy and medicine and so forth, but I challenge anyone to point out a substantive distinction.

What am I going on about? If all those good folks in the heartland think the world is only 6,000 years old, well, shucks, they just can't be wrong.

Superstition v. progress

The British House of Commons is currently dealing with a series of bills laying down guidelines for embryology in the UK. There are provisions dealing with abortion regulation and in virto fertilization, but the main provision at issue would allow government researchers to work with hybrid embryos, which are animal cells implanted with the nuclei of human cells and used to produce human tissue. Essentially, they are synthetic human stem cells used to make up for a shortage of human embryos available for research.

Predictably, the main opponents of the research are Catholic MPs, clergy and laypeople. They argue that the research is an affront to "human dignity," a frustratingly nebulous term used by opponents to make the case against a broad range of biomedical research. Similarly, the admixture of human and animal tissue is labeled "obscene." These are subjective distinctions which have no place in a scientific debate. Why should the sensibilities of a few Tory MPs be enshrined in law? Why would their view of dignity or obscenity be privileged over that of other Brits?

There is a parallel debate going on in this country, highlighted by Human Dignity and Bioethics, a collection of essays recently submitted to the president by his Council on Bioethics. The essays are fraught throughout with biblical references, which is not surprising given the proclivities of the current administration. The Council was assembled by the president's main adviser on bioethics, Dr. Leon Kass. Kass is the man behind the ban on federal funding for stem cell research. In his essay, he cites Genesis 9:6 as the basis for preventing murder. "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man."

He uses his view of the inviolate human form to justify his opposition to any drastic changes by biomedicine- even those that would lengthen the human lifespan or alleviate suffering. For Kass, the problem with using embryos in research is not merely that the microscopic clusters of human tissue are destroyed in the process- though he is assuredly offended by that- the problem is with the results of successful research. For Kass, genetic disorders are an essential part of the human condition and efforts to cure them are an abomination. I don't know which of those I find more ridiculous. The perverse fetish on human suffering is more offensive, though.

Kass retains a very biblical understanding of human life. He wrote in 1994 that all involuntary bodily functions are shameful, bestial, and indecent. Yawning, coughing, sneezing, and especially blushing reveal a subhuman susceptibility to one's impulses. All should hidden from public view. (I shudder to think how Kass would react if someone farted in his presence.) Add to that antiquated but harmless list of taboos the assertion that women exist for one teleological purpose: to procreate. There is simply no justification for allowing this man's views to be imposed on a modern, secular society. The dietary and social proscriptions of the Hebrews in the Pentateuch are of no use to us 2,800 years later. We are not the same culture. The Hebrews in the later books of the Old Testament didn't even retain the same Mosaic outlook. Imposing Leviticus and Numbers on modern America is just irrational.

Impeding stem cell research is not merely irrational but criminal. It would seem onerous to find a greater affront to human dignity than the material status granted to women in the OT, but I think allowing others to die of Alzheimer's disease fits the bill. We have a profound moral responsibility to advance medical treatments for Alzheimer's and other genetic disorders. There is simply no comparison between the interest of inanimate nucleic compounds in not being manipulated by lab equipment and the interest of human beings in living lives free of unnecessary, painful and disruptive ailments like Parkinson's and cystic fibrosis. As long as the prospect of developing successful treatments justifies the cost of the research, there should be no question whether or not it goes forward. The argument against it is superstition.

Dr. Steven Pinker argues that the meaningful standard in bioethics ought to be autonomy. Human beings should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they undergo pain for some later benefit and whether they live or die. Embryos can't feel pain, so their informed consent is irrelevant. The very idea is nonsensical. "Dignity" is far too subjective a concept to define by legislation. In my view, for instance, there is no greater expression of human dignity, no more eloquent demonstration of our ascension beyond an animal level of existence, than the ability of our species to extract from nature the means to better our own condition. It is an assault on that dignity to block human progress with primitive and superstitious mores. A book of myths written nearly three millennia ago should not dictate who lives or dies today.

Templeton Conversation, pt. 2: Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

Whenever I hear someone talk about God, except in the Einsteinian sense, I am reminded of the stunning vastness and elegance of the universe. The Old Testament God, which Steven Pinker dealt a few posts ago, is simply incompatible with reality as we know it today. Even ignoring the bible's cosmology and all of its problems, the character depicted as the world's author in the OT is far too small and petty to account for all the astounding things we have learned in the intervening centuries.

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn discusses the process by which Western society has advanced beyond a superstitious understanding of God and His creation. While this is partially accurate, I have to take issue with his characterization of the evolution of Western thought on several counts. First, this de-mythologization has not been uniform. Many people in the United States unfortunately maintain a very superstitious understanding of God and the universe. I would appeal to the poll I cited a while back; results are also available from the same poll a year later which are slightly more encouraging, with only 51% percent of Americans flatly denying the staggering preponderance of evidence supporting evolution. A compilation of similar polls is collected here. I submit that all of these people who ascribe to young-earth creationism are clinging to the eleventh-century-BCE concept of God.

It's not surprising that Schönborn neglects to mention the views of what must be at least a dominant plurality of Americans. As clergy members and other theists often point out in debates about God, no educated person believes those things. Pointing out that people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old are ignorant does not diminish their number; it does not render a description of their beliefs a straw man; it does not prevent them from constituting a voting majority in U.S. elections. Their ignorance has very real implications for the most powerful country in the world.

Second, Schönborn attributes the advances made in theistic belief to a movement by "Athens and Jerusalem," conflating the schools of thought which evolved in Greece and Israel over a period known as the Axial Age, spanning 800-200 BCE. While it is true that many thinkers in those two areas shifted toward a more naturalistic understanding of the world, they were not involved in a cohesive movement. The Hebrews came to question the vengeful, intercessory God of their oral tradition after an extended period of suffering and misfortune; it was not at all apparent that the deity who made a covenant with Abraham was interested in coming down and fighting battles on behalf of His Chosen People. The Greeks moved away from their earlier ontology in which melodramatic, anthropomorphic gods were responsible for what went on in the world at about the same time, but their transition was the result of a relatively comfortable lifestyle that became available to their upper classes, making the "contemplative life" possible. Their worldview changed as a result of rational contemplation rather than empirical experiences. While the Hebrews and the Greeks made this advance roughly simultaneously, it's inaccurate to describe them as part of a single movement.

Those two points really don't have that much to do with the rest of the essay, but obviously they meant a lot to me. In any event, Schönborn moves on to explain why the discovery of a rational, ordered world "fully vindicate[s]" the theistic worldview. He describes the world as a "teleological hierarchy," meaning that it is arranged in levels and that a group of subordinate levels exists for the benefit of a primary level, on which humans exist. This is a common view among theists. It demonstrates what I like to refer to as the "anthropocentric conceit."

Humans generally believe that the universe exists, in one sense or another, for their benefit. Early Mesopotamian cultures believed that the world did not extend far beyond the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in which they lived (once again, there's that Old Testament cosmology that I won't shut up about). Later thinkers such as Augustine knew more about geography but still assumed that the Southern Hemisphere was uninhabitable and that only the North had been created for human beings to inhabit. The anthropocentric worldview has gradually yielded more ground as it has been contradicted by new facts about the world around us. When Edwin Hubble showed that our galaxy is one of a vast number and that the universe has no discernible physical center, anthropocentrism retreated into the notion that humans are the ontological center of the universe. I see no reason to assume that, as we investigate further into the fundamental nature of the universe, we will not discover new details which make Schönborn's position seem as provincial as that of Augustine.

Schönborn criticizes "scientism," the notion that the quantitative and reductive methods of scientific thought are sufficient to explain everything. Scientism is not universal throughout modern society, he says; instead, most Westerners live in an amorphous philosophical zone with no solid justifications for the things they believe about the parts of existence that cannot be scientifically accounted for. Increased leisure has bred a materialistic and hedonistic society, he says; almost no one lives life as if they really believe in God. So far he hasn't really made a case for believing in God. I agree about the hedonism of modern society, but I don't how he is any closer to proving that God is relevant. Science doesn't have to prove a damned thing for the God hypothesis to be wrong, so appealing to the squishy hole in head of Joe Sixpack isn't getting us anywhere.

In his final paragraph, Schönborn talks about the human longing for purpose and a universal recognition that, essentially, something is missing from life. In principle there must be something out there, some higher meaning which a naturalistic worldview misses out on. This is a pursuit which cannot be made obsolete, he asserts. This is an old argument: the body needs food, and air, and water; we see that these things exist to meet our needs. The soul needs purpose, the argument goes, and such purpose must exist a priori. There must be some higher formative principle behind the universe, and hey presto, there's God! We found Him, guys. Good work.

In fact, our psychological need for purpose is as much a result of our evolutionary origins as any of our biological needs. There is a competitive advantage in an animal that assigns agency to everything it observes. The animal may be wrong when it assumes that a noise was made by a potential predator, but if it reacts accordingly it remains better off than one that has assumed a noise made by a predator is actually innocuous. The human sensory array is exquisitely efficient in recognizing patterns and searching for meaning. That tendency is inherent in our intelligence. An attempt to extrapolate God from that is fallacious.

Science has its limitations, no doubt. Schönborn is right in his description of the scientific method as reductive and qualitative, and in saying that mere scientific investigation cannot answer all of the "Big Questions" we have to ask ourselves. It can help us to judge whether or not our world resembles one designed by an intelligent entity, and it has increasingly revealed that that is not the case. The poverty of the scientific method does not imply that the God hypothesis is anything more than bankrupt. There's nothing here that indicates that belief in a personal God remains relevant.

The vile hypocrisy of George W. Bush

I consider myself a rational guy who approaches politics with critical thinking and a due understanding that there are few binary moral judgments involved. The Iran/Contra scandal has long been a topic which sends me into a Carrollian fantasy land of spite and unreason, but I'm going to try to talk about it and related matters for a little while without switching into that mode.

In one of the most galling displays I have witnessed in my years of political awareness, President Bush used a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding to call out Barack Obama. It was not the uncouth timing of the attack that offends me; I couldn't care any less about such propriety. It was the incomprehensible stupidity of the remark that set me off. Speaking before the Israeli legislature, Bush drew a parallel between Iran and Nazi Germany.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The remark was intended as a swipe at Obama, who has taken fire for his suggestion that the United States should open diplomatic relations with governments that it does not approve of, such as Syria and Iran. The president's obvious dearth of understanding of how diplomacy works was effectively critiqued by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) on MSNBC's Hardball last night. Bush's elision of the distinction between communicating with another power and making concessions to that power is not what primarily concerns me. Biden is right to point out that the Bush administration has communicated with Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya and Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, and that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates advocates opening diplomatic relations with Iran. But Bush's hypocrisy is deeper and more disturbing than that.

The history of the president's family makes his Godwinning of his opponents particularly hapless. Bush's grandfather Prescott, the patriarch of the Bush political dynasty and generator of much of the family fortune, was a Nazi supporter and a financier of German militarization until 1942. Documents released from the National Archives in 2004 confirmed that Harriman Bank, a company under the direction of Prescott Bush, financed the German steel company Thyssen, an essential cog in the Nazi war machine. The company's owner fled Germany after turned against the Nazi regime, but Bush did not have a similar change of heart. He continued to finance the nationalized German steel operation until his assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942. The records of the incident were sealed in the National Archives and Bush later went on to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. George W. Bush should be one of the last people who would want to elicit images of Nazi tanks rolling across Europe.

On a similar note, there was long speculation about Prescott Bush's involvement in the so-called Business Plot, an attempt by Wall Street leaders to stage a military coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Those rumors were also confirmed by documents released in 2007 from the National Archives. A group known as the American Liberty League planned to overthrow Roosevelt and approached Marine Gen. Smedley Butler to do the job. Butler had done a series of similar numbers in Latin America under President Woodrow Wilson, but those experiences had only made him a staunch critic of military/industrial juntas. He told Congress, and after a congressional committee conducted an investigation and confirmed the involvement of a number of America's leading corporate figures, the evidence was sealed in the National Archives. No one was prosecuted for treason.

Given the record of his own grandfather, the current President Bush would be well advised not to raise the charge of facilitating Nazi conquest. He still enjoys the wealth accumulated by Prescott Bush and owes his presidency to the dynasty that man established. It's astounding that, in the gelatinous mold of guilt-by-association that is American politics, more is not made of this connection. Besides Harper's Magazine the the BBC program Document, the only people who ever mention the elder Bush's financing of Nazi steelmakers are simple-minded Web denizens who insist that Bush is a modern-day reincarnation of Hitler. Plainly, George W. is not culpable for what his grandfather did in the decade before he was born, but the unbroken lineage from the Nazi financier to current president renders W.'s ostentation of moral superiority disgusting. I don't expect of him enough maturity to frankly discuss the source of the wealth and influence that made his ascension possible, but the least he could do is abstain from accusing others of moral equivalence with Nazi appeasement.

All of this says nothing of the Iran/Contra affair, which I mentioned above. The connection here is more direct: a number of George Herbert Walker Bush's colleagues in the Reagan administration were convicted of lying about weapons deals with the Iranian government (the same regime that Bush yesterday labeled the "world's leading state sponsor of terror") and used the funds to train right-wing death squads (the Contras) in Nicaragua. Apparently it was acceptable to negotiate with the Iranian regime 22 years ago, because W.'s father pardoned six of the I/C convicts when he succeeded Reagan as president. The weapons deal was justified, he wrote in part, because it had stabilized the political situation in the Middle East. This is true only in the sense that it helped Iran to balance the power of Saddam Hussein, then a U.S. ally (this shit gets crazier the farther down the rabbit hole you go, and it's all true). Many recurring Bush allies are close associates of the I/C pardon beneficiaries. Anyone familiar with the history of the neoconservative movement must recognize the hypocrisy of their cherry-picking moral indignation.

The preceding barrage of more-depressing-than-fiction shenanigans reveals the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Bush and his clique. And yet the most damning thing you'll find the media in the wake of the Bush speech is Biden's explanation of why diplomacy is a good idea. It is with rapt anticipation that I await the termination of Bush's tenure in office.

Down the McMemory Hole

John McCain made an embarrassing mistake during the speech that I just posted about. When I read the transcript of the speech at his Web site, I noted a conspicuous omission: he did not refer to Kelo v. City of New London (2005), a rallying point for self-proclaimed strict constructionists. In a surprisingly pro-corporate decision, the liberal justices, as well as Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the state of Connecticut could use eminent domain to seize private property and sell it to a developer who would pay more in taxes than the original owner.

It turns out, however, that McCain did mention the case, but displayed an unfortunate misunderstanding of the Fifth Amendment, which led his campaign to edit the comment from the video on his Web site and scrub it from the transcript. He claimed that "Not only just compensation" is required during the exercise of eminent domain, "but also, private property may not be taken for public use."

One wonders what McCain's version of eminent domain actually entails. Eminent domain is the purchase of private property for public use, with or without the consent of the owner but always with due compensation. Since the Supreme Court has always been a strong defender of property rights, the definition of acceptable public use was narrow until the Kelo decision. I have no idea how McCain and his speechwriters thought eminent domain worked. I imagine that this was something of a Freudian slip, in which he imposed his own views on the text of the Constitution. If this is so (and I certainly could be wrong), it only serves to heap more suspicion on his
loud complaints about original intent. I certainly hope the next president knows more about the Constitution than this man.

Stupid tax policy? Count me in!

The New York Times published a piece by Bryan Caplan supporting the Clinton/McCain gas tax holiday. He concedes that the savings will be realized by oil companies rather than drivers; in fact that is his main reason for advocating it. The holiday will placate the ignorant voting public, he writes. For only $9 billion, the government can get Joe Sixpack off their backs and not do any real harm.

The government's response to the '70s gas crisis was counterproductive, says Caplan, so we should be happy with a policy that doesn't really do any good (or harm) but appeases the misguided public. This kind of cynical public policy really shows how stupid Washington thinks the public is. While I'm increasingly convinced that the average American really is that poorly informed, my inclination is to try to remedy that ignorance (silly liberal that I am). Caplan seems positively excited about wasting billions of dollars accommodating the public's ignorance.

Caplan then moves on to the most disturbing part of his argument: we owe the oil companies big time for what we did to them in the last gas crisis. I shit you not. Caplan says that the obvious solution is to let Big Oil invest those profits in expanding capacity. The free market got us into this mess, and it will get us out, he says. Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect that oil companies are going to expand their capacity to produce gasoline. Big Oil posted record profits throughout 2007 and continues to enjoy generous federal subsidies, but still has not seen fit to build more refineries. In fact, numerous government studies have found that gas companies have worked to restrict supply and maximize profits since the 1970s. Large companies have used their market power to drive smaller companies out of business, further restricting supply.

There is no impetus under the free market to expand refining capacity. Yet again we see how ridiculous it is to talk about the free market as if it's Winston Wolf coming in to dispose of the blood-stained Cadillac of a gas crisis. The long-term solution is to invest in alternative energy sources; we could expand our refinery capacity in the middle term, but that will not account for the rising price of crude oil. The sooner we kick the oil habit, the better. Handing Big Oil another tax cut isn't benefiting anyone but Big Oil.

Templeton conversation: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

If you are familiar with the Templeton Foundation, you know that they are in the business of addressing the "big questions" through scientific investigation. This usually boils down to the Foundation giving a million dollars every year to a scientist who "finds God." This morning I found a collection of essays on the Foundation's Web site about whether scientific advances have made belief in God unnecessary. While there's not really any chance of any of these essays changing my mind, I find the topic endlessly interesting, so I'm going to read all of the essays and comment on them here.

The first is by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist. He argues that, defining science broadly as a process of empirical investigation, it has answered many of the questions once accounted for by belief in God. Pinker writes that, while science cannot directly explain what is right or wrong, the notion that theism has anything useful to say on the matter is fallacious. The origin of morality is a really intriguing question, and I enjoy Pinker's take on it:

It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The fact is that even people who believe in God exercise some individual judgment over what they think is moral. Almost no one purports to believe every moral dictum in the bible, not least because it contradicts itself in several places. When one resolves one of those contradictions (i.e. rationalizes which one God really meant), one appeals to some standard other than the word of God. If theists are allowed to do that, why not atheists? If it's acceptable on some questions, why not all?

I look forward to reading the rest of these essays, and some of the comments on the left side of the page are worth a look as well.

Clinton claims effervescent victory

As things stand right now, Hillary Clinton has claimed victory in the Indiana primary, though the New York Times considers the race too close to call. Her lead is less than 2% with 91% of the precincts reporting their results.

I expressed hope in my last post that Clinton would give up and go home after tonight, but her untimely declaration of victory seems to preclude that possibility. I could dig through some amateur number-crunching right now if I wanted to, but I'd rather wait until the professionals make their rounds in the morning. Suffice it to say that Clinton has very little chance of pulling off this nomination. As long as Obama's name is on the ballot in the remaining primaries, he's virtually guaranteed 15% of the pledged delegates. That puts him within striking distance of the 2,025 he needs to lock up the nod; it looks to me that Clinton can only win if the infamous superdelegates decide she deserves to be the Democrats' horse in the 2008 race. And even that seems less likely by the day.

BBC Radio is putting an interesting spin on tonight's primaries. Barack Obama has "claimed victory" in North Carolina, they say, while Hillary Clinton "says she won" Indiana. That really doesn't convey the difference between Obama's 14-point lead in the final results in NC and Clinton's 1.8-percent lead in IN, which is not yet final. I guess she has the power of suggestion working for her.

Menendez disses economists

It seems that everyone from the Clinton campaign and all of their surrogates now disavow the field of economics. Defending the campaign's embarrassing gas tax proposal, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey expressed his newfound disdain for anyone who understands how taxes work. Asked by an anchor on CNBC this morning to name one economist who supports the proposal, Menendez replied, "Thank God that we don't have economists, necessarily, making public policy." Never mind that a lot of economists do make public policy.

I want to point out one more time that the opposition to the tax holiday is not motivated by contempt for the poor. It is motivated by the fact that the scheme won't work. It isn't going to do anything to help poor people; the potential savings under the plan are minuscule, and the harm it would do is considerable. Clinton and her retinue are smart enough to know how this works. The whole proposal is predicated on the assumption that the public is too dumb to understand what's going on.

I have no problem voting for someone who thinks highly of their own intelligence; in fact an intellectual president is precisely what this country needs. But Clinton and her camp have demonstrated the height of anti-intellectualism. With any luck, Clinton will be forced out of the race soon and the left in this country can start dealing with facts again.

Clinton disses economists

In an interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos, Sen. Hillary Clinton defended her proposal to suspend the federal gas tax this summer by dismissing the opinions of economists, who universally agree that the idea is bogus. You can see the video here- she says at 3:55, "I'm not going to throw my lot in with economists,"as though they were some cult that would ruin her electability if she were associated with them. She insists that her policy will work if we just do it right. Barack Obama knows better; he voted for a gas tax holiday when he was in the Illinois State Senate. It was a dumb idea then as now; it didn't work and, like an adult, Obama admits his mistake.

Obama derides the tax holiday as a measure which will save the average consumer $30, or the price of half a tank of gas. Even that is generous. The price of gasoline is at a national average of $3.60 a gallon because that is what the market will bear right now. If we lifted the 18.4-cent federal gas tax, companies could sell the same volume at the same price and pocket the extra $9 billion which the tax is projected to collect this summer. If Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) knows what he's talking about, oil refineries in America are operating at 85% capacity right now. To me, that says that oil companies have projected what amount of gasoline is going to maximize their profits, and that's the amount they're going to put on the market. Lifting the federal tax is no incentive for them to lower prices and forgo a larger potential profit.

So far as I have heard, the unanimous opinion of economists is that there is no chance the tax holiday will work. Faced with the opposition of people who know what they are talking about, Clinton went into full-blown W-style denial. In her interview with Stephanopoulos, Clinton justified her flat-earthism by complaining about the Bush administration's pro-corporate elitism. She is disturbed by their disdain for the average person, but she embraces their disdain for facts. She contends that our government has relied on "elite opinion" which cares nothing about the little guy. I have to wonder whether or not the elites she is talking about include the economists who have long agreed that "trickle-down economics" does nothing to help the poor or the scientists who have warned with increasing urgency about the danger global warming poses for the world's poor. She can talk all she wants about helping the less fortunate, but if she plans on continuing the White House aversion to facts, she's not going to do anyone any good.

What really surprised my about this whole episode was how quickly Clinton threw Paul Krugman under the bus. Krugman, a New York Times columnist, Clinton supporter, and economist, argued last week that the tax holiday is a ludicrous proposal, though he focused more on Sen. John McCain's support for it and soft-pedaled his criticism of Clinton. When Stephanopoulos pointed out Krugman's dissent, it elicited a wickedly supercilious dismissal.

Clinton's no-facts-necessary style is most disappointing in view of the larger themes of her campaign, which bear a stultifying resemblance to the imagery and tactics employed by Republicans in recent years. It's dangerous for Clinton to cast Obama as an elitist who is out of touch with working-class voters and as weak on national security. Along with the lack-of-experience argument, these are the lines McCain would advance against her in the general election if she won the nomination. As things stand, she's making his case for him. Obama may not be great, but at least he will be somewhat different from the disaster we have now. And at least he has some grounding in reality.

Just how racist is this state?

On April 30, embattled State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (D-Philadelphia) won some more attention for himself by impugning his fellow state legislators. In a hearing held by the Appropriations Committee, Fumo was questioning Gilbert Coleman, Jr., a Philadelphia pastor who was testifying in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the state. In order make the point that no constitution should deprive a minority of certain rights, Fumo said that, given the chance, the PA General Assembly would vote to reinstate slavery.

Those who understood the nature of his remarks were offended at the suggestion that Pennsylvania is a racist state. Surely, no one in our proud commonwealth harbors that kind of primitive racial antipathy. Unfortunately, an exit poll conducted after this state’s primary April 22 showed the 13% of white voters admit that race was a determining factor in their vote. Of those voters, 75% voted for Clinton. The only possible conclusion is that 9.75% of the voters in PA admit that they voted against Obama because he is black. And those are just the voters who admit to it; it’s impossible to say how many persuaded themselves that they were voting against Obama because he went to Harvard or because he doesn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel every day.

A trip through rural Pennsylvania reveals more Confederate flags than one would ever expect to see north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Pennsylvania is home to Neo-Nazi groups, Skinheads, and at least two Ku Klux Klan chapters. These all sound like people who would like to reinstate slavery. The question is not really whether or not there are white supremacists in this state; it is what percentage of the population harbors that kind of sentiment. Those who were offended by Fumo’s comment really seem to have trouble with the very idea that that level of racism exists here.

Those are the people who understood what the senator was trying to say. There is another group, unsettlingly large, which completely fails to apprehend what he said. Many have insisted on saying he came out in support of slavery. Fumo used slavery as an example of injustice visited upon a disfavored group by the majority. Taken in context, his comment could only be interpreted as a condemnation of slavery.

Fumo admits that he was exaggerating. When I first heard his remark, I thought it was hyperbolic, so I’m not surprised at that. It didn’t strike me at first just how insulting the remark was to his colleagues in the Senate chamber. I wouldn’t begrudge the other senators if they asked for an apology. I have no doubt that some of the men and women voted into office by Pennsylvanians are closet racists, but I have a hard time believing that racists constitute a voting majority. Fumo has been in the Senate for a long time (he would have to be to rack up 139 federal criminal charges) and must be a fairly accurate judge of his colleagues, but I can’t see 26 of the 50 senators making that vote.

From an economic standpoint, slavery doesn’t make sense in today’s society. After World War I and especially World War II, the American economy has depended on the ravenous consumption of an increasingly affluent population. Rolling back the property rights of a chunk of our society wouldn’t shore up the system. I might be giving too much credit to the type who would actually consider bringing back chattel slavery, but there is no rational reason to go that route. After all, capitalists are the ones who make rational decisions for their own benefit; racists know only illogic and destructive impulses. The whole issue is moot, though. The ignorant and bigoted in our society currently have their attention directed elsewhere.

Well, I finally started a blog

People have been telling me for a long time that I should have a blog, and now that I am out of classes and don't have a job, I have time to write one, so here it is. I don't expect anyone to read this, but I frequently find myself wanting to write something, and now I have someplace to publish stuff. I know I'm excited. Are you?

I guess I'll take this opportunity to explain where I got the title for this blog, my user name, and the url. "Pleonasm" is an obscure word referring to a redundant phrase or an unnecessary word; examples include "true fact," "PIN number," and "depressing news." I like the name because it is a pretentious display of vocabulary, and I think it applies, because in truth I'm probably not going to say anything here that no one else has said.

The word "appanage" in the url is just a cool word I came across. It refers to a privilege or birthright. I used it because "pleonasm" was taken. Nothing has been posted there in four and a half years, but I still can't have the domain name. Oh, well.

My signature, H. Lewis Allways, was one of four pseudonyms considered by author Eric A. Blair and his publisher before they decided upon George Orwell. I love Orwell and suggest everyone read as much of him as possible. Keith Olbermann doesn't like the name, but I do.

Well, I guess that about wraps up my first post. If anybody reads this, check back often. I'll update this frequently, at least throughout the summer. Or don't come back, and I honestly won't be that offended.