Quiet Declarations

John Fund (via Instapundit) reports on planted questions in the Republican debate:

Now it appears that an amazing number of partisan figures posed many of the 30 questions at the GOP debate all the while pretending to be CNN’s advertised “undecided voters.” Yasmin from Huntsville, Alabama turns out to be a former intern with the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group highly critical of Republicans. Blogger Michelle Malkin has identified other plants, including declared Obama supporter David Cercone, who asked a question about the pro-gay Log Cabin Republicans. A questioner who asked a hostile question about the pro-life views of GOP candidates turned out to be a diehard John Edwards supporter (and a slobbering online fan of Mr. Cooper). Yet another “plant” was LeeAnn Anderson, an activist with a union that has endorsed Mr. Edwards.

It seems more “plants” are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates.

In my view, so what?  This last debate was the best one so far because the candidates actually got some hard questions!  Other than letting the general in the audience have the microphone for 3 minutes – really bad idea on CNN’s part — I thought the questions were a pretty good selection overall.

The real tragedy is that the Democrats have been getting away with too many softball questions designed to let them all beat up on the current administration instead of each other.  If we really want to make these debates interesting, we should start letting the candidates from each party select the questions for the other party’s debates!

Of course, I’m also the guy who supports negative campaigning on the grounds that it provides more concrete information about the candidates, just as a disclaimer.

Wait, I’m confused.  If the mayor wants to close two dozen public schools it’s a good business decision, but one argument against vouchers is that parents might flee to better schools and result in some public schools closing.  What gives?

I know virtually nothing about Mayor Fenty’s plan to improve DC schools, but I applaud him for making the option of closing schools part of his arsenal.  It’s just that I have this other idea about this system where parental choice can easily show us which schools ought to be closing…

So far this month, the top seven search phrases for my blog are, in order: raiders, oakland raiders, raiders suck, oakland raider, raider fan, oakland raiders cheerleaders, and raiders cheerleaders.  These seven search phrases represent 39% of the total searches resulting in visits to my site.

Now, I have used the word “raider” in seven blog posts, but the most recent was in August 2005.  Moreover, when I try to search any of these phrases myself, they don’t show up in the top ten pages of search results.  Am I misinterpreting my site statistics somehow, or are there just that many Raiders fans out there?

From a great piece about how faith doesn’t just exist in religion:

[B]oth religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

This is not an insignificant point.  Whatever set of laws we subscribe to must have come from somewhere, right?  But my guess is the question is so big that even if we could access the answer our temporal understanding of the universe would be insufficient to comprehend it.  So we take a position of faith about something in order to live out our lives.

Put differently, every theory has a truth value, a probability p that the theory is actually true.  We believe something when the truth value gets high enough for us to be comfortable ascribing belief to it.  A friend recently described an agnostic as merely a weak atheist, because for the agnostic p is not close enough to zero to disavow belief but it’s not high enough to ascribe belief.  I originally objected to this definition on the grounds that believing in nothing is different from not believing in a particular thing, but I’ve come around.  It’s impossible for the truth value of all propositions to be insufficient to ascribe belief, so to have any useful purpose the term “agnostic” must really only be used to describe level of belief in God.

I came around to this general view of faith a few years ago, and for me there have been two big consequences.  First, it seems this should be very reassuring to religious persons who worry whether the quality of their faith is sufficient for salvation, because “I obviously can’t know, but I believe” ought to be an acceptable level of doubt.  Second, I believe we should take seriously our efforts to understand the truth values of propositions, but we shouldn’t necessarily worry about convincing people of the validity of competing faith-based claims unless they bear a direct, salient, harmful impact on our own lives.

And yes, I realize there’s quite a lot of wiggle room in that last statement, but I’m okay with that for the time being.  After all, nothing I assert is [knowable] truth; it’s simply belief.

It occurred to me the other day that I should create more categories for my posts, now that it’s become clear I write on a handful of preferred topics.  Unfortunately, retagging old posts has its annoyances, including:

1. When I first started blogging I had the nasty habit of using supposedly-clever mysterious titles instead of descriptive titles, forcing me to have to reopen each of those posts to figure out what in the world I was talking about.

2. I had the even nastier habit of not posting for a week, then grouping all the week’s subjects into a single long entry, making those posts impossible to categorize.

3. It seems that WordPress has a feature which auto-pings the sites I linked to each time I save the post, meaning that today about 200 of my closest friends probably received an email from my website.

I also hope that categories don’t pigeonhole my writing, though at least I have more control over that problem.  Still, I think being able to more quickly access a particular topic will come in handy to me (and perhaps readers) in the long run.  And in case you’re checking out the categories already, note that the retagging isn’t done yet – probably I’ll spread it over a few days so I don’t drive myself crazy.  Apologies for the construction.

Want Todd Zywicki’s take on university governance, using the Dartmouth case as an example?  IvyGate has a recent speech.  I have to say that I have a mixed disagreement with IvyGate’s assessment of his speech.  They’re right that it was a bit inarticulate — if I were in the audience I would have been annoyed by the seconds and thirds in all the wrong places.  I’m also a bit uncomfortable with the university-as-a-church analogy, though less so with the environmentalism-as-a-religion analogy.  But as for how a university tries to propagandize its trustees?  That’s right on point.  In fact, I would contend that a university president’s ability to steer the governing board in his direction is a defining measure of presidential power — and in this respect universities are no different than any corporation or nonprofit with a board governance.

Or should I say cursed by the boomers?  Grant McKracken suggests that boomers were “egalitarian, cooperative, spiritually experimental, counter-cultural and restless” in the ’60s, but thanks to the likes of Tom Wolfe and Milton Friedman they “embraced an aggressive individualism, upward mobility, career orientation, status competition, all of this given the patina of an ‘old money’ symbolism” by the ’80s.

But unfortunately, all generations lose their “cultural elasticity” and become overtaken by rigidity.  So here we are, for the next decade or so at least, at the mercy of all these old farts who invented a particular way of doing things and are trying to hold on to it for dear life.  The good news: something like this probably happens every generation.  The bad news: that doesn’t mean anyone likes it really… and we’re living longer.

It seems like before we start banning or regulating certain kinds of foods, we should be getting government out of the business of subsidizing less healthy foods at the expense of more healthy ones, because it turns out that’s exactly what we’re doing.  Matt has the graph and the appropriate references/citations.  Strangely though, Matt uses the graph as an opportunity to plug John Edwards’ plan for government-bought vegetables government-delivered to government-identified grocery stores in government-approved communities.

Think about the way most people shop.  The same person who spends $5 for an extra beer at the pub stands in the grocery aisle debating whether to pay for the $1.59 soup instead of the $1.29 soup because she’s more familiar with the brand — and probably the time she spends debating is worth more than the $0.30 she’s torn over.  You don’t think it will help to increase the relative competitiveness of healthy foods by eliminating the massive financial advantage we’re giving their competitors?

Anticipated criticism: wouldn’t this make healthy and unhealthy foods more competitive simply by raising the price of unhealthy foods, not lowering the price of healthy foods?  Probably so, but that’s way better than the alternative: banning certain kinds of food clears the way for the remaining producers to raise their prices without fear of competition.  Of course, if we really wanted to help out consumers, we’d eliminate tariffs and quotas on foreign agricultural products and negotiate bilateral and regional free trade agreements so we could import vastly cheaper products.  I would be simply amazed if we did this and the price of agricultural products didn’t drop significantly.

And if, absent all of these crippling restrictions on access to healthier foods, it’s still too expensive for poor families to access healthy foods, then let’s discuss more direct assistance.  But I don’t think the impact these agricultural policies have on market prices can be overestimated.  Want more dramatic language?  Our government is directly complicit in agricultural terrorism against its poorest families, and before we look to new government programs to fix the problem, first we simply have to recognize that the biggest obstacle to affordable food for low-income households is government.

Time has an interesting piece on what makes us moral, analyzing the oddity that humans seem hard-wired to help one another and yet are capable of committing terrible acts.  One excerpt:

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it’s not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it’s not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it’s also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. “He’ll respond, ‘No, the teacher shouldn’t say that,’” says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That’s the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

Here’s a research question I’d like to see addressed: does the imposition of a moral rule justified by non-moral reasons (e.g. telling a child to do something “because I said so”) aid or confuse the ability to understand morality?  It seems like the answer could have far-reaching implications on how we treat members of society, both as children and as adults.

The academic left is all over Oprah for being too conservative??  From the source cited by Andrew:

In a new book called The Oprah Phenomenon (edited by Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson), academic critics accuse Oprah of not only being a self-help snake oil peddler, but also chief salesman for an unrelentingly conservative view of the American dream.

The argument goes like this: In all of Oprah’s ventures, her message is: “If you are self-actualized and work hard, good things will come to you.” Well, that’s all great and empowering. But it begs the question: What if good things aren’t coming to you? What if, after all these years of Oprah afternoons, you’re still poor, overworked and marginalized?

First, I’ve got some news for you: a conservative Oprah ain’t.  Second, criticizing the rhetoric of empowerment simply for diminishing the collectivist case is beyond absurd: it’s irresponsible bordering on destructive.  Should we abolish private charity because it diminishes the case for national foreign aid?  How about getting rid of all churches because some people use them as a nongovernmental source of hope?

Seriously, are there really people out there spending their finite years on this earth attacking the self-help movement for distracting individuals from realizing how much government ought to be spending to help them?  Get a life.

Read about it here.  See also my previous posts on the case.  It’s been great to personally know several people involved in the case and and get all the insights on the process leading up to this point.  I’m glad that the team that conceived this case and built it from the ground up will see their efforts make history — one way or another.

[Update 11/20/07: There’s good reason, I think, to believe this could be the most important Supreme Court ruling of the past 30 years.  More opinions on the case here – Mike O’Shea’s comments seem particularly salient.]

I’m attending a two-day staff retreat, and naturally even in those friendly confines Godwin’s Law — well, technically a version of similar motive – couldn’t be avoided.  Fortunately none of my colleagues were responsible; the comment appeared in a video on the rhetoric surrounding global warming.

If you’re not living in DC, this idea might not be that helpful for you, but as a frequenter of the Orange-to-Red subway route I think a connector tunnel at Farragut would be quite the useful innovation – provided, of course, that we haven’t invented flying cars by the time the thing actually gets approved.  [hat tip: Jacob]

I spend the better part of my weekends in the fall watching football, which has its ups and downs.  This weekend was all downs.  Vanderbilt probably coughed up its chance to get to a bowl with a, well, Vanderbilt-style loss at home to Kentucky.  The Titans got absolutely manhandled by the Jags at home.  I also have three fantasy football teams whose starting quarterbacks combined for 5 touchdowns and 14 interceptions, and unless the 49ers (whose coach’s father died yesterday) improbably beat the Seahawks in Seattle I’m going to lose my suicide pool.  Not pretty.

I know this wasn’t the focus of Matt’s post, but his note on communitarianism’s success in homogenous societies is worth a bit of reflection:

Indeed, I think it’s uncontroversial, even among right-wingers, to observe that the Nordic countries have such an egalitarian policy environment largely because they’re so small and homogenous, imbuing their politics with a communitarian spirit that’s largely absent from the US. Racial divisiveness’ role in impeding social democratic policies in the United States is just the inverse of that.

This is an extremely important point, and one supported not just by policy research but also by anthropological research on successful and unsuccessful planned communities.  In my view, the takeaway from this fact ought to be that imposing blanket solutions to problems in a dazzlingly heterogenous society is a really bad idea.

J.S. Mill informs this view when he stresses the importance of “experiments of living,” which could quite easily take the form of small, localized, voluntary communitarian societies.  Allowing experiments of living, even when those experiments do not include all of the values we might prefer, is a critical element of a free society that is too often overlooked by central planners and individualists alike.