The Weekend Interview with Hans von Spakovsky: The Coming Battle Over the Ballot Box. CURL: Obama picks scab off America's racial wound. President Obama, America’s first half-black, half-white president, went to the White House podium last week to address the nation’s most racially divisive case since Rodney King. PHOTOS: Celebrity meltdowns But he wasn’t there to calm the country. And he certainly wasn’t there to start some “conversation” on race — he doesn’t find those “particularly productive,” he said, what with all the listening. Instead, he came out unannounced to the briefing room to talk about “how people are feeling.” Not all people, mind you, just black people — and especially, as always, himself.
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said the half-white man mostly raised in Hawaii by two white grandparents. The president, it turned out, had come to pick the scab off America’s healing wound. But a jury, picked by the prosecutors and the defense, listened to three weeks of testimony. See, for Mr. And he couldn’t have cared less about how Mr. Forget the fact that Mr. Shelby Steele: The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment.
Law allows creationism to be taught in Tenn. public schools. But critics say the true goal of what they call “the monkey bill” is made clear by the list of subjects that could be challenged by teachers during class, including global warming and evolution. The bill is a “permission slip” for schools “to bring creationism, climate-change denial and other non-science into science classrooms,” Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, told Nature magazine. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Association of Biology Teachers has also condemned the bill, along with more than 4,000 Tennessee residents who submitted a petition to ask the Republican governor, William Haslam, to veto the bill.
The name “monkey bill” refers to the landmark Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which Dayton, Tenn., high school science teacher John Scopes was prosecuted by the state for violating a state law against teaching evolution. The bill passed in both houses of the Republican-controlled state legislature. After Ron Paul, Then What for Libertarians? Rove: About That 'Permanent Democratic Majority' Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.
Climate. A Liberal Moment. Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West. Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time any Democrat has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936. And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent. The number of voters who agreed to the “l” tag was up by three percentage points, for what it’s worth, from 22 percent in 2008. What’s going on here, demography and democracy seem to be saying at the same time, is the advance of progressive political ideas by a majority that spurns an obvious label. Women’s suffrage in 1920, Social Security in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — all liberal moments.
International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Sep., 2007), pp. 451-467. When Warren Went Left: The Ideological Seduction Of Warren Buffett. Morality Quiz/Test your Morals, Values & Ethics - Your Morals.Org. Project Implicit® The Two Moons. During Franklin Roosevelt’s era, Democrats were the Sun Party. During Ronald Reagan’s, Republicans were. Then, between 1996 and 2004, the two parties were tied. We lived in a 50-50 nation in which the overall party vote totals barely budged five elections in a row.
It seemed then that we were in a moment of transition, waiting for the next Sun Party to emerge. But something strange happened. No party took the lead. It used to be that the parties were on a seesaw: If the ratings of one dropped, then the ratings of the other rose. In these circumstances, both parties have developed minority mentalities. Their main fear is that they will lose their identity and cohesion if their members compromise with the larger world. The Democrat and Republican parties used to contain serious internal debates — between moderate and conservative Republicans, between New Democrats and liberals.
The Democratic and Republican parties used to promote skilled coalition builders. How we (should) decide. Caspar Hare is interested in your choices. Not the ones you’ve already made, but the ones you will make, and how you’ll go about making them. The more important, the better. By way of example, suppose you’re deciding between two careers: journalism and physics. You enjoy both, but for different reasons: Journalism lets you interact with a broad swath of society, exercise your passion for writing and reach a wider audience; physics, though, represents the allure of science, with the freedom to chart a research trajectory at the forefront of human knowledge. Suppose, too, for argument’s sake, that you had a pretty good idea of how each career would turn out. Either way, you’d be successful and recognized within your field. You’d live in a desirable location and make a good salary.
In your mind, the two options — call them J and P — are so equally and oppositely attractive that you truly cannot decide. If you’re like most people, the answer is “not really.” Incommensurate values. A Vote for Reason. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Suppose I offer, at no charge, to drop a drug in the water supply that would cause almost everyone in the country to vote like you this November. You would probably feel at least a little bit tempted to take the deal. Presidential politics is a matter of grave import, after all. Still — many of us would hesitate, and rightly so. There seems to be something really wrong with manipulating people to believe things even when the stakes are high. We want to convince our opponents, yes, but we want them to be convinced by our reasons. The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment.
This hope that exchanging reasons matters, not just for what it gets us but in itself is as old as Plato, but it has often been derided as something of a muddle-headed fantasy, as “nothing but dreams and smoke” as Montaigne put it in the 16th century. Leif Parsons Michael P. Haidt's Problem With Plato. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. This is the second of two posts dealing with arguments concerning reason found in Jonathan Haidt’s recent book “The Righteous Mind” (the first, “A Vote for Reason,” by Michael P.
Lynch, was published on Sunday). Haidt’s response to these two pieces will be published at The Stone this Sunday evening. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” is an important and exciting book, from which I’ve learned a great deal about the limitations of human reasoning. I was, however, disappointed at what struck me as its cavalier treatment of some highly relevant work by philosophers. To illustrate my concerns, I begin by reflecting on Haidt’s effort to refute Plato’s central argument in “The Republic.”
Plato would not be surprised to learn that people typically don’t use reason to seek the truth. Socrates (as usual, Plato’s spokesman) responds to a view put forward by his young friend Glaucon.
Inspirational. Jonathan Haidt: Reasons Do Matter. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. This post by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a response to two previous articles in The Stone — one by Gary Gutting, the other by Michael P. Lynch — which argued against certain views on reason found in Haidt’s recent book, “The Righteous Mind.” Among the most memorable scenes in movie history is Toto’s revelation that the thundering head of the Wizard of Oz is actually animated by a small man behind a curtain, who lamely says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Modern psychology has, to some extent, pulled the curtain back on human reasoning and shown it to be much less impressive than it sometimes pretends to be, and much more driven by the hidden force of intuition. I never said that reasons were irrelevant.
In separate essays in The Stone last week, Michael P. Leif Parsons One of the issues I am most passionate about is political civility. The Personality Problem. When it comes to treating mental illness, I guess I’m glad we’ve made this shift. I put more faith in medications and cognitive therapies than in Freudian or Jungian analysis. But something has been lost as well as gained. We’re less adept at talking about personalities and neuroses than we were when psychoanalysts held center stage. For example, in the middle of the 20th century, a woman named Karen Horney (pronounced HOR-nigh) crafted a series of influential theories about personality. Like many authors of these intellectually ambitious theories, she was raised in Europe and migrated to the United States before World War II. More than most of her male counterparts, Horney felt that people were driven by anxiety and the desire for security.
People who have been seriously damaged, she argued, tend to react in one of three ways. Some people respond to their wounds by moving against others. These people are often excessively proud of their street smarts. Other people move away from others. Help Republicans Rescue Their Party From Itself. Cruelty, fear, cowardice, xenophobia and disrespect invaded the inner sanctum of the U.S. government this week, bringing embarrassment and dishonor to what was once the greatest deliberative body in the world: the U.S.
Senate. On Dec. 4, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, an 89-year-old Republican whose right arm was shattered in combat during World War II, was wheeled into the Senate chamber by his wife to rally support for a United Nations treaty that should have been entirely unobjectionable. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, negotiated under President George W. Bush and signed by more than 150 nations, takes a stand against “discrimination on the basis of disability” and in favor of “respect for inherent dignity.” That’s completely false.
Dramatic Appearance Dole’s dramatic appearance was meant to advance the values of compassion and nondiscrimination, not the UN. Imagine that: Taking a stand for basic human decency around the world. ‘Stupid Party’ The God Glut. That was deliberate. “It seems a little presumptuous, when you’ve got the land mass and the talent that we do, to ask for more,” he told me recently. But there was an additional reason he didn’t mention God, so commonly praised in the halls of government, so prevalent a fixture in public discourse.
“I think you have to be very, very careful about keeping religion and politics separate,” Kerrey said. We Americans aren’t careful at all. In a country that supposedly draws a line between church and state, we allow the former to intrude flagrantly on the latter. And it suffuses arenas in which its place should be carefully measured. The cadet, Blake Page, detailed his complaint in an article for The Huffington Post, accusing officers at the academy of “unconstitutional proselytism,” specifically of an evangelical Christian variety. Page said that on other occasions, religious events were promoted by superiors with the kind of mass e-mails seldom used for secular gatherings.
Hardly. Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote. Persuading such voters is difficult, political professionals say, because direct appeals have already failed. So campaigns must enlist more subtle methods. In particular, according to campaign officials from both parties, two tactics will be employed this year for the first time in a widespread manner. The first builds upon research into the power of social habits. The Obama and Romney campaigns, as well as affiliated groups, have asked their supporters to provide access to their profiles on Facebook and other social networks to chart connections to low-propensity voters in battleground states like Colorado, North Carolina and Ohio.
When one union volunteer in Ohio recently visited the A.F.L. -C.I.O.’s election Web site, for instance, she was asked to log on with her Facebook profile. “We talked about how if you don’t vote, you’re letting other people make choices for you,” said the union volunteer, Nicole Rigano, a grocery store employee. The answers themselves are unimportant. After 9/11, Hate Begat Hate. How we (should) decide.