This is CNN

The current headline on the CNN website reads, "Giant lizards kill unsuspecting fishermen."

By contrast, the current headline on BBC - which, I will remind you, is a British news agency - is, "US to boost Mexico border defence."

I've had it with CNN. They limit their headlines almost exclusively to US news, no matter how trivial - except, of course, when they hear of a couple Komodo dragon attacks in Indonesia, which they parlay into a banner headline exaggerating the phenomenon to Godzilla proportions.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "I think, therefore I am"

"The proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
- Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II.

"Ego cogito, ergo sum..."
- Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Part 1, Article 7

"I think, therefore I am," is perhaps the most famous quote from all of modern philosophy. When the quote is taken out of context, however, it may seem that Descartes is magically thinking himself into existence, or that he's making some snooty statement about the philosopher's raison d'etre - that the meaning of life is to think.

This latter misinterpretation is spread further by witty slogans on t-shirts and bumper stickers advertising all sorts of hobbies - e.g., "I ski, therefore I am."

But Descartes wasn't talking about how much he liked thinking. He was actually trying to establish the foundations of knowledge - what we can know with certainty.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes's project is to find some fundamental proposition that is beyond doubt, and then use it as a starting point from which to derive everything that we know. Descartes writes:

All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. (Meditations, I.)

Descartes goes on to point out that everything we perceive is subject to doubt, because we could be dreaming, or our thoughts could even be subject to the manipulations of an evil demon (think a 17th-century version of the Matrix).

So given that our senses always can be deceiving us, can we know anything with certainty? Yes, Descartes says: we know, with certainty, that we are thinking. Even if we are dreaming - even if we're trapped in the Matrix and don't know it - we at least know that we are thinking. And because we know we are thinking, we know that we - in some manner or form - exist. I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.

Philosophers since his day have split a lot of epistemological hairs over the Cogito and whether it actually proves what Descartes wants it to prove. But his radical project of doubting everything, and applying mathematical logic to problems of knowledge and reality, still makes Descartes the father of modern philosophy.

A Sad Case

BBC: Vatican backs abortion row bishop

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

"It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated," [a Cardinal of the Church] said.

"Life must always be protected."

And the nine-year-old girl? Is she not an innocent person? Why doesn't her life deserve protection?

This girl was raped, and trying to carry the pregnancy to term clearly would have threatened her life and compounded her psychological trauma.

And yet, the Catholic Church, that model of moral probity, insists that the right thing to do - the will of a just and beneficent God - would have been to force the nine-year-old girl to risk her life birthing the fruit of her rape.

Where in the Bible does it say that a person's life should be subordinated to the preservation of a fetus? For that matter, where in the Bible does it talk about the 'rights' of the unborn at all? Oh, right - Thou Shalt Not Kill. Even though the Man Upstairs Himself likes to kill people according to divine whim.

This is why religion is dangerous. It takes faith to consider oneself an ethical role model while arguing that a raped nine-year-old should die giving birth to her stepfather's child.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: "God is Dead"

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III

God is dead. - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. - God
- Bumper Sticker

This is one of the best-known of Nietzsche's aphorisms, and is one of the strongest statements of atheism in history. Nietzsche's contempt for religion is infamous, and this is simply the most pithy among many atheistic statements he made in his writings.

But pronouncing the death of God seems like a contradictory way to assert atheism. After all, if God is dead, that means that he used to be alive, doesn't it? And therefore Nietzsche seems to be shooting himself in the foot - in declaring God's death, isn't he implicitly acknowledging God's existence?

It's this mistaken reading that's reflected in the bumper sticker above. (Although Nietzsche himself probably would have gotten a kick out of that joke, he probably would have retorted with something like, "How convenient to believe in someone who doesn't exist - you can put whatever words in his mouth you like!")

The problem with the popular interpretation of "God is dead" is that it takes Nietzsche's aggressive rhetoric literally. Nietzsche is as famous for his rhetorical flourishes as he is for his atheism, and although this makes him enormous fun to read, it also can lead to misunderstandings like this.

By "God is dead," Nietzsche means to call attention to a cultural fact: that like the gods of ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian God has lost his ethical power and philosophical importance. Since the Enlightenment, science has replaced religion as the only responsible way to explain worldly phenomena, and ethical systems have become less and less dependent on religious imperatives. Although Nietzsche criticized the Enlightenment values too, he was firm in asserting that the vestigial worldviews of religion are an obstruction to personal, intellectual, and cultural growth.

In another section of the Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the story of a madman who proclaims that "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" We have killed God, because we have rejected - or perhaps outgrown - the worldview into which God and religion fit. Now that God is dead, our challenge is to replace him with a worldly, human ideal, and to supplant religion's conventional morality with a new, personal ethic that makes no claim to objectivity.

So "God is dead" should be understood as a powerful metaphor, not a literal claim about theological mortality. And although Nietzsche is physically dead, it's he who has the last laugh: in the world of ideas, he remains as relevant as ever.

Philosophy Quotations Explained: Introduction

Because most people do not read philosophy, a philosopher's popular reputation - if he or she has one at all - is usually based upon one or two famous aphorisms. Too often, those aphorisms are torn from context, and the original ideas behind them come to be distilled or distorted.

In this series of posts I will reexamine some well-known but frequently misunderstood philosophy quotations, using careful reading and consideration of context to explore what the philosopher really meant.

For starters, here's an incomplete list of quotations on which I plan to post.

Aristotle: "Man is by nature a political animal."
Descartes: "I think, therefore I am."
Rousseau: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."
Hegel: "What is real is rational."
Hegel: "The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only with the falling of dusk."
Darwin: "To suppose that the eye... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the people."
Marx: "Workers of the world, unite!"
Nietzsche: "God is dead."
Nietzsche: "What does not kill me makes me stronger."
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Sartre: "Everyone gets the war that he deserves."

Recommendations for additional quotes are welcome!

Choice, Responsibility, and Death by Cigarette

BBC: US chain smoker's widow gets $8m

A US jury has ordered tobacco giant Philip Morris to pay $8m (£5.6m) to the widow of a lifelong smoker who died of lung disease.

The jury in Florida decided in favour of Elaine Hess, whose husband Stuart died of lung cancer in 1997 at age 55. He had smoked for 40 years.


As much as I hate cigarettes and the people who produce them, I disagree with rulings of this nature. If you smoke yourself to death, it's your own fault.*

Information about the dangers of smoking are now so widely disseminated that only the most braindead (among them, not surprisingly, Rush Limbaugh) can doubt that smoking is one of the most unhealthy things you can do to your body.

No one forces you to start smoking. And once you're addicted, many methods of quitting are available, ranging from the chemical (nicotine patches) to the subconscious (hypnosis). Millions of people have gotten off cigarettes and stayed off them. It takes willpower to suffer through withdrawal, but that's the price you pay for getting hooked on something so manifestly stupid in the first place.

If smoking deaths can be blamed on the cigarette industry, then the same logic can be used to award lawsuits to obese people who, ignoring all personal accountability, blame the bloated state of their bodies on the fast food industry. Both industries use aggressive marketing, and cigarettes and junk food both have addictive properties, but if you choose to put crap into your body, you have only yourself to blame for the results.

So although I enjoy it when Phillip Morris or McDonald's loses money, I don't like that it's at the expense of properly assigning responsibility. If we blame obesity and lung cancer on unhealthful industries instead of the people who support those industries, we will view people as passive victims instead of active consumers who got exactly what they paid for.



*The subject of the lawsuit discussed here started smoking in the fifties, when cigarette companies still used flagrantly false advertising (4 out of 5 doctors prefer Camel!), and when no one appreciated the full extent of the damage tobacco wreaks on the body. So it should be noted that he and the others who started smoking back then may have a warranted complaint.

February 12, 1809

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

- Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1 December 1862


"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871


Happy 200th to two of the greatest minds ever to benefit humanity!

Monks

BBC: Free Trial as a Monk

Religious orders are advertising for people to try being a nun or a monk for a weekend in an attempt to slow the decline of new vocations.

In 2007, Catholic orders had just 29 novices in England and Wales, down from over 200 in 1972.


Imagine a god who wants a select number of his creatures to become professional sycophants - cloistered ascetics who kiss His Ass from sunrise to sunset and make entreaties of which He, in his omniscience, is already aware. What arrogance! What massive insecurity! What a petty little jerk!

If god did exist, and was as great as everyone thinks he is, I think he'd want you to do something constructive with your life. Become a nurse. Join the Peace Corps. Give to charity. Coach Little League. Find something more imaginative than living a repetitive life of self-denial and prayer.

As far as I can tell, the last worthwhile things achieved by monks were the brewing of beer and the preservation of ancient texts during the middle ages. Other than that, monasticism has been perhaps the most systematic and successful waste of time in human history.

The Patriot

Rush Limbaugh in 2006: "I'm getting so sick and tired of people rooting for the defeat of the good guys."

Rush Limbaugh in 2009: "I hope Obama fails. Somebody’s gotta say it."

And to think they called John Kerry a flip-flopper.

Ungagged

BBC: Obama lifts ban on abortion funds

For the eight years of the Bush presidency, the global gag rule was in place. No federal funding was given to foreign family planning agencies distributing information about abortion.

This hindered the ability of such agencies to work in third world countries that need sex ed and family planning information the most: countries where people think HIV is caused by demons, countries where access to contraception is limited or nonexistent, countries where children starve to death as a matter of course.

Thus the president known for 'family values' kept people ignorant about the whole subject of family planning rather than risk them learning about one controversial part of it.

In his first week on the job, President Obama has overturned this detrimental ban, so has promised women more control over their health and poor countries more control over their populations. As Planned Parenthood wrote in a statement praising the move, "No longer will health care providers be forced to choose between receiving family planning funding and restricting the health care services they provide to women."

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. Obama comes to Washington

"Let me say it as simply as I can. Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency. Our commitment to openness means more than just informing the American people about how decisions are made. It means recognizing that government does not have all the answers, and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know. And that's why, as of today, I am directing members of my administration to find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans, scientists and civic leaders, educators and entrepreneurs, because the way to solve the problems of our time as one nation is by involving the American people in shaping the policies that affect their lives. The executive orders and directives I'm issuing today will not, by themselves, make government as honest and transparent as it needs to be, and they do not go as far as we need to go towards restoring accountability and fiscal restraint in Washington; but these historic measures do mark the beginning of a new era of openness in our country, and I will, I hope, do something to make government trustworthy in the eyes of the American people in the days, and weeks, months, and years to come. That's a pretty good place to start."

- President Obama, 21 January 2009

A president who talks to the American people like adults. A president who will lend his ear to those who have "knowledge and experience". A president who views government as inherently neither good nor bad, but as a tool that, if wisely employed, can be used to fix problems.

In a word, a president who is smart.

This is the change we needed. This is the man I voted for. This is a Chief who's actually worth Hailing.

It's a pleasure to see you get to work, Mr. President.

The Atheist Bus Campaign

New York Times London Journal: Atheists Send a Message, on 800 British Buses

LONDON — The advertisement on the bus was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, looked on the Web site in June, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to “spend all eternity in torment.”

And then she thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones?

And so were planted the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign, an effort to disseminate a godless message to the greater public. Supported by the scientist and author Richard Dawkins, the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the British Humanist Association, among others, the campaign raised nearly $150,000 in four days. Now it has more than $200,000, and on Tuesday it unveiled its advertisements on 800 buses across Britain.



Hear, hear! It's encouraging that so many Britons want to spread anti-superstitious arguments with as much zeal as the religious spread their nonsense.

If your reaction is like that of the woman quoted in the article, who objects, “I think it’s dreadful... everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I don’t like it in my face,” that's a valid point. It can be uncomfortable when viewpoints you disagree with are shoved in your face. Like, for example, the cross, the most ubiquitous symbol in the western world. Or the notion of salvation, tirelessly proselytized by Christian churches through the ages, which holds that without irrational belief in an ancient carpenter's divine status, you're in for an eternity of postmortem suffering. How's that for 'in your face'?

I also like the American advertisement:



Many believe that religion is a precondition for ethical behavior. Given the amount of immorality perpetrated in this world despite - and often because of - religion, it's amazing people still can argue this with a straight face, but the notion persists. Being "good for goodness' sake" is not only possible, it's much more fulfilling and meaningful than acting ethically only out of fear of being sent to a make-believe lake of fire.

The strongest feature of these ads is their uplifting tone. "Stop worrying and enjoy your life!" "Be good for goodness' sake!" This is a far cry from the bleak, desolate nihilism that is usually attributed to the faithless. These ads show that atheism is not merely about tearing down the old idols; it is about replacing them with rational humanist ethics, and a genuine embrace of life that backward and destructive ideas like sin render impossible.

I encourage you to read the deft and witty article by Ariane Sherine that sparked this campaign. Now stop worrying and go enjoy your life!

Mistakes Were Made

According to the BBC, Josef Stalin is a contender in a Russian poll for greatest Russian of all time. Out of almost 4 million total votes, about 400,000 have gone to Stalin. BBC reports further that:

The fact that Stalin has been doing so well comes as no surprise to members of the Communist Party, which remains one of the biggest political parties in the country.

"Stalin made Russia a superpower and was one of the founders of the coalition against Hitler in World War II," says Sergei Malinkovich, leader of the St Petersburg Communist Party.

"In all opinion polls he comes out on top as the most popular figure. Nobody else comes close. So for his service to this country we can forgive his mistakes."

His what? His - mistakes? You mean, his genocidal extermination of millions was just a mistake? The anguish of those who withered and died in Siberian gulags was just a result of a forgivable error in judgment on Comrade Stalin's part?

Surely this supasses every record in the invention of euphemisms.

I wonder what Sergei Malinkovich would think about those mistakes if he had to spend even just one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.

Come on, Russia. Your country has produced leaders like Catherine the Great and Peter the Great, deathless literary titans such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Bugalkov, and Solzhenitzen, and legendary composers like Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. And none of them had to resort to exterminating their own countrymen to achieve what they did!

Царство Американское

CNN: Biden to be working families czar

Why this recent penchant for czars? Last year there was talk of a war czar, and now Biden's a working families czar? Couldn't the media find a term that doesn't make it sound like we're living in Muscovite Russia?

Боже, Царя храни!

Their President Too

I detest Rick Warren. I think him a bigoted ass who furthers the damage he has done to this country every time his flock grows by another imbecile.

That said, I am delighted with the President-Elect's decision to have him deliver the invocation at January's inauguration.

This may appear to be a contradiction - a blasphemous one in the eyes of some liberals, apparently. But look back to Obama's acceptance speech from November 4: "And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too."

Obama wasn't just saying that. He wants to show conservative Christian Americans - the people who most gravely doubt his morals, his religion, and his patriotism - that they, too, have a role to play under this administration. And elements of the left are scorning him for it!

Isn't this why we elected the man? To unite the country? To listen to all Americans - not just one or the other side of the political fence? Change under the Obama administration doesn't mean simply exchanging which half of America will be listened to and which half will be ignored. Like it or not, Rick Warren and his congregation are also Americans. And what will make Barack Obama different is that, despite his disagreements with them, he will be their President too.

The Reason for the Season

Although "Happy Holidays" has become the vogue, P.C. way to greet people this time of year, I harbor no compunction about wishing others a "Merry Christmas". But it's not what you think. I am not a Bill O'Reilly fighting the war against the forces of secularization; it's just that I think the war is over. And we won. Christmas is a secular holiday.

Granted, not for all. Some people still desperately cling to the Christian roots of the holiday. Despite that those roots are planted in pagan dirt - the winter solstice festival that predates Christianity by thousands of years - such people insist that "Jesus is the reason for the season."

They are wrong. Santa Claus is the reason for the season.

Santa has dethroned Jesus. The shopping mall is his church, the elves are his saints, and fruitcake and egg nog are his holy communion.

Only a powerful capacity for denial can allow one to believe that the man who put the Christ in Christmas still matters at this time of year. Whatever the religious history of the holiday may be, look at it now. It is not about God or Jesus or your eternal soul. It is presents. It is Christmas trees. It is food. It is traveling hundreds of miles to see family. It is egg nog and mistletoe, a fire in the fireplace, and Christmas-movie marathons on TV. It is hyperactive children on Christmas morning dragging their bleary-eyed parents out of bed.

It is wonderful.

Not all of it, of course; Christmas as we know it also glorifies consumerism to a perverse extreme and encourages the exchange of material goods as the only valid expression of love. But I contend that even this is an improvement on the old model. Whatever vandalism consumerism commits on the human spirit, it's nothing compared to the epic guilt produced by the idea of sin.

There are many who still go to church on Christmas, but I wager that the percentage of the population who choose to waste an otherwise beautiful morning in this fashion drops every year. And manger scenes are still ubiquitous, but they look more and more quaint next to all the pretty light displays and iPod advertisements.

So atheist though I may be, I see no contradiction in wishing people a Merry Christmas. To my mind it is no more indicative of reverence for the Messiah than yelling his name when I've dropped a hammer on my foot. Christmas is a holiday that celebrates being with friends and family, eating good food, and exchanging presents. It is a lovely tradition in its purely secular form, and the inclusion of the superstitions whence it came contributes nothing of value.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good, godless night!

The Blind Guide

"In dunkeln Zeiten wurden die Völker am besten durch die Religion geleitet, wie in stockfinstrer Nacht ein Blinder unser bester Wegweiser ist; er kennt dann Wege und Stege besser als ein Sehender - Es ist aber töricht, sobald es Tag ist, noch immer die alten Blinden als Wegweiser zu gebrauchen."

"In dark times the people were best led by religion, just as in the dark of night a blind man is our best guide; at such a time he knows the ways and byways better than someone with sight - But it is foolish, once day has dawned, to keep using the old blind men as guides."

- Heinrich Heine, Aphorisms and Fragments

Happy Thanksgiving!

Some intriguing facts about this holiday that are often ignored, obscured, or misrepresented by tradition and school pageants:

The Pilgrims did not wear black-and-white clothing and buckled hats and shoes. They wore colorful clothing, and buckles wouldn’t emerge as a Puritan fashion for at least another fifty years. They are contemporaneous with the Salem Witch Trials, not the first Thanksgiving.

Of the 102 people aboard the Mayflower, only 35 were actual Pilgrims; the rest were simply common people who wanted to start new lives in the New World and make money from the fur trade.

We do not know if the group wanted to settle in Massachusetts or if they arrived there by accident, but when they arrived in late 1620, they did not find a pristine or unforgiving wilderness. Instead, they found empty villages and crop fields. Over past years, 95% of the native American population had been decimated by smallpox and other diseases introduced by Europeans. The Pilgrims appropriated the empty towns and cultivated land for themselves, and this was a key factor in their survival.

The reason Squanto spoke English was not, as some innocuous legends would have you believe, that he learned English from British fishermen. Rather, he had been kidnapped by a British sea captain and had spent about 15 years as a slave in England and Spain. After a truly Odyssean ordeal, he convinced a ship captain to take him back to New England in 1619, but when he got there, he was stunned to find that his entire village was gone. Everyone had died of smallpox two years earlier.

Squanto helped the Pilgrims plant crops and start the fur trade. A group of Indians called the Wampanoags, led by Massasoit, also helped the Pilgrims. Massasoit sought an alliance with the Pilgrims because disease had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

The Thanksgiving feast that we commemorate today probably took place in early fall instead of late November. Duck, not Turkey, was probably the principal meat served, along with venison brought by the Wampanoag, who considered it a delicacy. There was also squash, corn, and pumpkin, none of which the Pilgrims had ever seen before, as they are foods indigenous to the Americas. Cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes, two modern-day Thanksgiving favorites, were not even invented yet.

Indians outnumbered Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving by almost two to one; there were about 50 Pilgrims and about 90 Wampanoags.

Instead of a single day, the original Thanksgiving lasted a week.

Although religious days of thanksgiving to God were sometimes declared in the colonial and early American periods, and particularly in the revolutionary period by Samuel Adams, our modern, secular tradition of Thanksgiving did not begin until 1863, during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln pronounced a “National Day of Thanksgiving.” Thanksgiving was not fixed as the fourth Thursday of every November until 1941.

Proposition 8

Keith Olbermann provides an eloquent and moving response to the revolting bigots who passed California's Prop 8 last week:




If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want—a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967. The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead.

The world is barren enough. It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

The Left-Wing Media's Right-Wing Blindspots

Even before this week, conservatives have been bemoaning the notorious "liberal media" and their imbalanced treatment of the presidential campaigns. No doubt they will continue to blame the media as a major factor in John McCain's loss of the election.

The media refused to ask Barack Obama tough questions! Sarah Palin suffered constant, vicious criticism, while gaffe-master Joe Biden was almost ignored! So much bad press over Cindy McCain's and Sarah Palin's wardrobes! And so on.

But if the media lived up to their infamous liberal partiality in these respects, they fell curiously short of the mark in others.

Why so much controversy about Reverend Wright, and hardly any about the psycho, con-artist pastor who gave Sarah Palin a blessing protecting her from "every form of witchcraft"?

How did Barack Obama catch hell over a weak association with William Ayers, when John McCain has publicly expressed pride in his own relationship with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy?

Why did the media let Sarah Palin get so much press for saying Barack Obama doesn't "see America as you and I do", while hardly mentioning the Palins' cozy association with an Alaskan secessionist movement?

Isn't it curious, too, that the media reported Rashid Khalidi's ties to Barack Obama, but didn't say much about the International Republican Institute, when chaired by John McCain, giving $500,000 to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies - an organization founded by Rashid Khalidi?

Oh, and the whole ACORN thing was certainly a liability for Obama. So why didn't the media do more with the fact that John McCain was a headline speaker at an ACORN rally two years ago?

Sorry, conservatives. You can't blame Obama's victory on the media. If they really are as liberal as you say they are, then they need to get their act together.

Anti-American

For the past eight years, conservatives have denounced critics of the Executive Branch as "un-american", "unpatriotic", and even as the allies of terrorists. To such conservatives, such as Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, any criticism of the president is tantamount to anti-Americanism or even "evil" (see e.g. Hannity's work of profound demagogy, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. 2004.).

Their position has been "My President, right or wrong."

Soon, however, that president will be Barack Obama, and conservatives will find themselves in the opposition camp. Beginning January 20, we will see whether they still believe criticism of a wartime president to be anti-American.

President Barack Obama

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
-Barack Obama


A man who once would have been considered by his country to be only three-fifths of a human being has just been given the mandate of that same country's people to be its president. That is America's greatness; not that we never make mistakes, but that we overcome them; not that we are perfect, but that each generation moves us closer to our ideals.

The question now will become whether President Barack Obama can repair the economy, lift America's reputation in the eyes of the world, and bring the country together to move it forward. He will be the president, that now is certain; can he be one of the great presidents in our country's history?

Yes, he can.

VOTE

Mark Twain once remarked that the man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who can't. The same could be said about voting.

GO VOTE.

Palin as President

http://www.palinaspresident.us/

Make sure you have the sound on, and click on things in the room.

(Thanks to KW for bringing this to my attention.)

Six Degrees of Barack Obama

First Reverend Wright. Then Bill Ayers. Now another of Barack Obama's trivial acquaintances is serving as the conduit for the McCain camp's aspersions: Rashid Khalidi, a "radical" Columbia professor with reported ties to the PLO.

It speaks to the strength of Obama's candidacy that the dirtiest mud they can find to sling at him amounts to nothing more than six degrees of separation. The PLO has a tenuous link to a Columbia professor, who is a minor onetime associate of Barack Obama; therefore Obama is... an anti-Israeli terrorist sympathizer? These attacks don't sully Obama's name as much as they advertise the desperation of the McCain campaign.

Throughout their lives, politicians shake a lot of hands. Those hands belong to many people with different viewpoints, some of which are bound to be unconventional or objectionable.

A few years back, John McCain had glowing words for Jerry Falwell, an intolerant beast who blamed 9/11 on homosexuals and the pro-choice movement. Palin and her husband have a cozy relationship with an Alaskan secessionist movement. I'm sure if the Obama campaign wanted to, they could dredge the seafloor of McCain's long career and bring to light even more unsettling associations than these. But Obama and his campaign have demonstrated a cool, mature confidence that rises above that kind of dreck.

In the last debate, John McCain sternly reminded Obama, "I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." McCain could use some similar advice himself. Senator McCain, Barack Obama is not everyone he has ever met. You can use the last few days of your campaign articulating your vision for America, or you can keep thumbing through Obama's Rolodex. Your call.

Scott McClellan's Secret

Colin Powell's support of the Obama campaign was deservedly big news this week. And Rush Limbaugh's analysis thereof was predictably asinine.

Limbaugh clearly felt threatened because Powell, a duly respected military man and former member of the Bush administration, is changing teams. So Limbaugh shrugged off the news by asserting that Powell is supporting Obama because of race. His comments drew immediate and harsh criticism, but he didn't back down. Thinking himself slyly perspicacious, Limbaugh quipped, "[I'm] researching Powell's past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal white candidates that he has endorsed. I'll let you know what I come up with."

The problem with his breezy, fatuous analysis is its ahistoricity. To look at Powell's past endorsements is to conveniently disregard the present circumstances, to wit, a litany of Republican failures and the poor choices of the McCain campaign. Powell himself cited these factors as reasons for his endorsement, but Limbaugh, as usual, prefers a fantasy world in which apostate conservatives can be motivated only by ulterior, irrational motives.

This poses a problem regarding Scott McClellan, who formally announced his support for Obama today. He's also a former member of the Bush administration who's almost certainly never endorsed a candidate like Obama before. So what's that all about?

I predict that tomorrow, Rush Limbaugh, cigar clamped between his fat jowls, will announce on his radio program that Scott McClellan is secretly black.

Christopher Columbus

Columbus Day. The day we celebrate Columbus - according to the popular imagination, a visionary explorer who proved the Earth was round and discovered the New World.

It's just that he didn't prove the Earth was round. And of course he wasn't the first to discover the Americas. Oh, and he oversaw genocide, pimped little girls out as prostitutes, and got the transatlantic slave trade underway. But sure, great guy.

Columbus did not prove the Earth was round. In fact, the ancients understood the shape and size of the Earth better than Columbus. Eratosthenes, a 3rd-Century BC Greek librarian at the Library of Alexandria, not only knew the Earth was round, but calculated its circumference to within 10% of its actual value. No one with half a brain in 1492 thought the Earth was flat.

Another misperception - or perhaps poor choice of words - is that Columbus "discovered" America. He was the first European to make extensive explorations and to bring his findings back to Europe, but let's not give him more credit than he's due. After all, we don't say that Neil Armstrong "discovered" the moon.

Fine, you say. He didn't prove the sphericality of the Earth, and he wasn't the absolute first to discover the Americas. But he was still an intrepid explorer, right? He still did great things for civilization, right?

There's no doubt that he changed the course of world history. But even with so much celebration surrounding Columbus's voyage to the New World, people rarely learn about the wretched things he did once he got there.

On Hispanola, Columbus implemented a program of genocidal slavery: he demanded that each native bring him a certain quantity of gold every week. Those who missed the quota had their hands cut off. Anyone who refused to participate in the program was killed. In two years, Columbus managed the systematic extermination of 250,000 Arawak Indians. Over the next few decades, countless millions would die under the genocidal policies instituted by Columbus and passed on to the other thugs in his family.

Columbus was the first to see the potential for slaves in the native peoples of the Americas; he sent back about 5000 slaves to Spain, setting in motion the transatlantic slave trade that would cause incalculable suffering over the next 350 years. He also encouraged sexual slavery; as James Loewen notes:

"As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape. On Haiti, sex slaves were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, 'A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.'"

Columbus was a rapist, a slavedriver, and a genocidal fiend. And the USA has a holiday named after him, placing him alongside such genuine luminaries as Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King! Can't we give the day to someone who deserves it - like, for instance, the hundreds of thousands of people who were raped, mutilated, killed, or sold off under the supervision of this great historical figure?

Judicious Ignorance

Sarah Palin proves yet again that she would be over her head in even a high school civics class:

Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions [other than Roe v. Wade] do you disagree with?

Palin: Mmmmm. Well... let's see. There's... Of course, in the - the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and... there are those issues, like, again, Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there, so you know, going through the history of America, there - there would be others, but um...

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I would think of any, again, that would best be dealt with on a more local level, maybe I would take issue with, but you know, as a mayor, as a governor, and even as a vice president, if I'm so privilaged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things...

Wrong, governor. You would be in a position to change those things. See, as a member of the Executive Branch, you would participate directly in the appointment of new Supreme Court justices. That's kind of a big deal. See the Constitution, Article II, Section 2.

So not only is this woman clueless about the Supreme Court and American legal history, she also still hasn't quite figured out the responsibilites of the office for which she's running.

One thing's for sure, though. She sure is an average American - average, in that she knows nothing about her own government. The problem is she might actually get elected to lead it.

Oh, Me of Little Faith

The following is a transcription of a conversation I had with two American missionaries on a busy street in Duisburg, Germany.

Missionary 1: Guten Tag!

Me: Tag.

M1: Wir kommen aus Amerika und wollten mit Ihnen reden über...

Me: I'm American.

M1: Oh, no way! Where are you from?

(Small talk ensues.)

M1: So, you can probably tell what organization we're with...

Me: Well, judging by your nametags, I'd guess the Church of Jesus Christ.

M1: Exactly! We're also better known by the name of Mormons.

Me: Yes, I know who you are.

M1: Great! So basically, we're on a mission here and today we're just asking people what their beliefs are. So, what do you believe? Do you follow a certain religion, or...

Me: I'm an atheist.

M1: Ok. How long have you been an atheist, your whole life?

Me: No, actually, back in middle and high school I still believed in god, but then I started questioning things. For instance, there's a plurality of religions in the world, and many claim to be the only true faith, and I reject that one is true and another is false, because there's no external standard by which to judge the veracity of any religion. I also learned about the history of religions, and how religions came about, and I concluded that frankly, they're all false.

M1: Yeah, well it's interesting what you said about there being many religions. Personally, I think that people have their own relationships with God, and that different religions might have different views of it but it's really the same experience. But I used to be an atheist too, actually. When I was younger I thought 'No way, I don't believe in God, I don't see any reason to'. But then my father and I started talking - I was raised in the Church, you know, but we all reach that point in our lives when we doubt things like this - my father and I talked and he and I prayed together. And my father told me to pray for an answer. And when I did, I had this great feeling, like God was talking to me and saying, I'm here and I love you. And then I prayed about the books - the Bible and the Book of Mormon. And again, I just got this great feeling. Like God was really there for me, like He knew what I was going through and He had the answers.

Me: I see. But for me, that's not enough of a reason to believe in god. Frankly, I don't put much stock in prayer. There's no way to prove anybody's listening. You spoke of a 'feeling', but - you know what the placebo effect is? I think it's a lot like that. You pray because it comforts you and makes you feel good, but you really end up believing whatever you want to believe. And also, I think prayer is, in logical terms, an ad hoc fallacy - something that's tailored to be true no matter what. For instance, if my mother has a terminal illness, and I pray to god to heal her - if she lives, I say, praise the Lord, he answered my prayers! But if she dies, I say, well, god has a plan, and he knows best. You see? It's perpetually self-verifying - no matter what happens, it's assumed that prayer works.

M1. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. In fact, I had a cousin who died, and he was about my age, and he and I were very close, so I know exactly what you're talking about in terms of praying to god. But at that time, when I was mourning for my cousin, what I really needed was comfort. I needed to be comforted. And I found that comfort in God.

Me: I find it interesting that you used the word comfort, because I think that that's really the foundation of all religion - the fear of things beyond our control, the fear of what we don't understand, and I think the comfort of religion caters to those fears. If you don't understand something about the world, you can explain it away by saying that god made it happen. And if something terrible happens, you can tell yourself that god has a plan, and you'll feel better. But that doesn't make it true. I think people have many sources for comfort, and many people find comfort in their religions, but I don't think it's necessary. I think there are other ways to find strength and comfort.

M1: But look, I wasn't saying I found comfort in my religion, I was saying I found comfort in God, and in my prayers to God and my relationship with Him.

Me: Well, exactly. I don't see how finding comfort that way is any different from having an imaginary friend. Suppose right now I created an imaginary friend named George, and I unburdened my heart to him, and told him all of my fears and hopes. I would probably experience the same relief and comfort that you did praying to god, and I don't see what the difference is.
Look, I've got to run, but it's been nice talking with you guys.

M1: Nice talking to you too! Would you like a Book of Mormon? It's in German, you might find it interesting!

Me: I think it would be wasted on me, but thanks.

No Ordinary Republic

The USA is in fact not a democracy. In a strict democracy, such as that of ancient Athens, citizens vote directly to create laws and enact policy.

We don't do that in the United States. First of all, it is a logistical impossibility to have all American citizens vote on every law and issue. But there's another reason, too, why we don't practice strict democracy. The founders of the United States realized that the average American citizen simply would not know enough about many issues to make informed, rational decisions.

Two perfect examples of this are the current mortgage lender crisis and nation-building in Iraq: these are tortuous problems that require specialized knowledge for even a solid understanding of the subject, let alone productive analysis.

So the founders created not a democracy, but a democratic republic. In a republic, citizens elect leaders to represent them in government and those tough decisions for them. These leaders can have qualities and qualifications that the average citizen lacks, allowing the ship of state to be steered by the best and brightest.

This throws a different light on the current disparaging use of the term 'elitist'. The founding fathers were, undoubtedly, elitists - men of property, wealth, and vast knowledge. They wanted elites like themselves to lead the country, backed by a mandate of a free people. Frankly, they didn't trust the ordinary citizens themselves all that much; they thought them too influenced by frivolous issues (for instance, lapel pins and who can field-dress a moose) and the sophistry of demogogues (like, for example, Rush Limbaugh).

Fastforward to 2008, when Barack Obama comes under fire for acting smarter than other people, and an unimpressive person like Sarah Palin can become the Vice Presidential candidate precisely because of her ordinariness, which is, bizarrely, viewed as a virtue.

The strength of our republic has become its weakness. The leaders we choose to represent us, instead of embodying the best qualities our country has to offer, embody the average, the unexceptional, the mundane.

I understand why people want average people like themselves to lead them. They are intimidated by those with superior qualities, and think that people who share their mediocrities will better represent them in government.

But the past seven years have taught us the price of electing an average schmuck to the highest political office in the land. Average people get you average results. Stupid people get you even worse results. We elected George W. Bush, a trust-fund baby without an achievement or original idea to his name, and seven years later we find ourselves burdened with a gigantic deficit, an economic crisis, and an ongoing misadventure in Iraq. Does no one see this connection between electing an unexceptional leader and getting poor results?

We live in no ordinary republic. We shouldn't elect ordinary people to lead it.