Oct 07 2008

Why I support Barack Obama

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Politics

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Barack Obama essentially sealed the deal on the election tonight, and as someone who said in November of last year, in response to Jessica's query of who the next president would be, that it would be Obama, I'd like to detail why I think this is a good thing.

Obama can be a bit of a windbag. Yes, he is evasive on issues. When asked what he would cut, he talks about what he wouldn't cut. When asked what we should do about the financial meltdown, he is typically noncommittal, substituting an empty remark for a truly radical necessary change (which will likely be temporary nationalization of many banks).

However, there's one thing that puts Obama over for me: I think he values intellect, and I think he himself knows a lot.

McCain, frankly, doesn't. When McCain said tonight that he thought medical plans should be sold by an interstate scheme, Obama rightly pointed out that they tried that with credit cards, and all that happened was that every major credit card company moved to Delaware and South Dakota, where the state laws basically allowed any terms the banks wanted. I knew this, but Obama did too. McCain, seems not to know it. If he does know it, why would he really want such an obviously disastrous outcome? Does he genuinely want to screw people that much?

Moreover, Obama brings up things that I don't know about. He clearly seems to understand more deeply than I the Georgian dispute. McCain spews nothing but harsh rhetoric. Obama understands that Iran's young people are fundamentally against the Ayatollahs, and that we can capitalize on this only if we engage with them. Sanctions never work. Sanctions merely sow resentment among the people, who in turn continue supporting the awful leaders that the sanctions were meant to hurt. I didn't quite appreciate that until today, although I was aware of the attitudes of many young Iranians.

I also think Joe Biden knows more than me. I think, and I'm being honest, that a typical community college student knows more than Sarah Palin. Being able to name one newspaper, one Supreme Court case, and at least demonstrate that you understand what "doctrine" means, ought to be prerequisites for being in line for presidency. Stating that you represent Joe-six-pack is repellent: anti-intellectualism may play popularly, but it is disastrous for the world.

That's in essence what it comes down to. We live in a scientific-technological world, one with complexities. But also one with experts in those complexities. Obama, for his advisers, has respected and prominent economists and scientists on his team. McCain has ideologue Phil Gramm as his economic adviser, scientists who confuse embryos with fetuses, and a running mate who defies the opinion of every reputable climate scientist on the issue of global warming and thinks the world is 6000 years old.

Intellect is all that puts us at the top of the food chain. It's nice to see that someone who appreciates that fact is (probably) going be our leader.

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Oct 03 2008

Bill Maher is not the spokesman we need

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General, Science

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Thomas Henry Huxley was Charles Darwin's public face in the 19th century. He acted as the public advocate for evolution, engaging in a well publicized debate with the English bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Huxley was a prominent biologist, a scientist and great thinker, open to new ideas, though skeptical, and, so far as I am aware, relying on evidence and reason. He is a hero, and helped bring the correct idea of the origin of species into the light of day.

These days, popular advocates for skeptics abound. They litter the newsmedia, encouragingly, and are doing their level best to reverse the damage in the US that religion has inflicted since the Second Great Awakening. In particular, Bill Maher has been out plugging a movie called Religulous, a documentary film he made with the director of Borat. Maher is outwardly intelligent; he holds a BA from Cornell and appears at least to be informed of current events. His weekly liberal salon on HBO, while unabashedly anti-Republican, does produce interesting discussion.

But Thomas Huxley, he is not.

Maher recently said on the Daily Show that he is agnostic. One wonders why, then, he believes in evolution. Evolution, by way of natural selection, is inconsistent with the idea that a god created the world. In fact, evolution is a science based on evidence. If you form your opinions based on evidence, then one cannot help be an atheist. It is worthless to say that you "don't know" about whether a god exists, in the same way that it is worthless to say you "don't know" about invisible dragons living in garages. Neither of these has any evidence to support it, nor is either verifiable. In other words, they are not there.

One wonders, in fact, how Maher came to believe in evolution and decry Intelligent Design, given that he holds no opinion on the issue of god. If you "don't know" about the unverifiability of god, then why do you "know" that Intelligent Design is untrue? Both have zero evidence in support of them; they are, in fact, logically equivalent (vacuous) statements.

Right-wingers like to talk about evolutionists. By appending ists they seek in an Orwellian way to put evolution and ID on the same playing field, which is to say that they imply evolution is a doctrine, or some sort of philosophy. People like myself argue that no such suffix should exist, since, rather than being merely a school of thought, it is a science backed up with many thousands of carefully researched results. However, if you merely believe it because you think the other side is dubious, due to a commonsensical notion, then you actually are an evolutionist. You believe in evolution for exactly the reason the other side believes in god: no particular reason.

Maher appears to hold other very stupid views on scientific matters. He says "I don't believe in vaccination either.", going on to cite that Pasteur himself renounced the principle by which vaccination works on his death bed. Similar slanders are perpetrated about Darwin, and Maher here acquits himself no better. He believes "people get sick because of an aggregate toxicity" in their bodies, a nonsense principle that is only espoused by those with just enough intelligence to rise to the level of what is sometimes called pseudointellectualism. Presumably, then, he is upset about the recent chelation study being aborted due to it being extremely unethical. Perhaps he uses Kinoki footpads as well.

And yet, Maher is on the side of the HPV vaccine. Why? I don't know, since I cannot understand the pathology of a man who believes in such things. Maher comes down on the right side of issues by accident, as with the student who, in performing the division 64/16, cancels the 6s and gets 4. He gets the right answer, but he is not perpetrating good mathematics.

Similarly, someone like Maher is unlikely to be persuasive if he himself has no ability to be persuaded by evidence. Richard Dawkins, Phil Plait, and Sam Harris do a fine job spreading the word of atheism. They argue based on evidence, on reason, based on their experience in science. Atheism and evolution speak to scientific principles. A comedian, perhaps, should think twice about including himself, when the nearest he's been to a biology class is lecturing the head of the NIH on his show about matters he clearly has been misled on.

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Sep 29 2008

Products

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General

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And now for something completely different...

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Sep 26 2008

The liberal/conservative canard

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General

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It is an unfortunate fact that the word "liberal" has multiple meanings, ranging anywhere from an Enlightenment term of high praise to a modern-day epithet associated with Marxism. This is perhaps not surprising, given the English usage of, for example, a "liberal amount" of ketchup, means that you really pile it on. So, naturally, liberals (or, perhaps, Liberals) want to spend lots of money that they've taken from rich people. Conservatives, on the other hand, are supposed to be free-market, no hand outs, low taxes, no regulation.

I have no particular issue with this, except it's palpably true that the association of Republicans with conservatism, and Democrats with liberalism, is utter bunk. Conservatism means, well, conserving the status quo. We, as a society, have improved to allow gay rights, abortion rights, set up a robust economic system including institutions that prevent bank collapse and impropriety. It is the conservatives that would like to maintain this. Which party would you say that is?

The Democrats are, as near as I can tell, the true conservatives. They believe in retaining the rights we have given to people, and they are historically much better at managing an economy that is relatively unfettered to do its thing. 60 years of economic data shows that under Democrats the economy grows at all levels, the society is less stratified, and the federal deficit is low (in the most recent case, we had a surplus).

Republicans, on the other hand, are split among two groups. One is a group that seeks to consolidate massive amounts of power, which grows the government at astoundingly irresponsible rates and simultaneously does everything they can do to make sure tax revenue does not grow under their leadership. For some reason, the public is wont to have low taxes, even as the cumulative debt grows to unimaginable proportions.

However, the majority of Republicans are reactionaries. They don't seek to conserve what we have, they seek to move backward. Many of them would rescind the rights of gays to marry (many also wish to strip their other rights out, as well), rescind the right to abort a pregnancy for any reason, to eliminate the well-worn institutions that actually would likely have averted the current financial disaster had they been left alone. This is not conservatism; this is not a steady-as-she-goes mentality, maintaining a level playing field for people to operate within. It is an odious push to walk backward, backward into the same mistakes that we've made in our history, backward to a time of intolerance, robber barons, and trusts. Backwards into a time before church and state were separated.

We have it good right now, but we had it better before we began this nearly 8-year march in reverse. With luck, the public will have the good sense to vote with the party which is what embodies real conservatism.

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Sep 22 2008

The Illiterate

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Politics

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Many have made light in this political season of McCain's computer illiteracy. The man has never sent an email, checked a website, downloaded a file, watched a youtube video. "Ha ha, the old man can't use the computer machine."

Let us not make light of this. Let us take this as the serious issue that it is: in an era where the computer is the equivalent of a pen in the 20th century, John McCain is an illiterate. He cannot use the chief communication tool of our era, the sole instrument of all businessmen's correspondence, and the breakthrough upon which nearly all present technology relies. He cannot use the tool which will be the future of all technology and communication.

I realize that in this day, for some reason, stupidity reigns. People decide presidents based on which one they would like to have a beer with. 'Intellectual' is actually a slur to a common voter. But it isn't as if we're asking the man to calculate a derivative or plot a marginal profit curve. We do not wish him to program C code or debug some php. We are asking him to do what a majority of even elderly people can do: send email, watch videos, understand what blogging and RSS are.

There are clearly many things John McCain does not understand. He does not understand the difference between sweet crude and heavy crude. He does not understand what refining capacity is. He does not appreciate the difference between an embryo and a fetus, what a post-cold-war foreign policy should look like, that Muslims have two distinct major sects, or that pregnancy is not a pathological disease worth treating.

But email? Let's be sensible.

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