Daily Archives: March 19, 2008

2008 Presidential Election, Iraq

Clinton Right on Petraeus. Bush and McCain are too.

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McCain convinced Bush. Then he convinced me. Now he has convinced Clinton: the Petraeus, Surge, and COIN are the way to go:

Clinton Praises Petraeus – The Caucus – Politics – New York Times Blog
CHARLESTON, W.V. – As critical as she is about the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a relatively rare shout-out to the military’s top man in Baghdad, General David Petraeus, calling him “an extraordinary leader and a wonderful advocate for our military.”

The commanding general, who has been a target of antiwar opponents and liberal groups like Moveon.org, has been a strong supporter of the escalation of American troops in Iraq, a strategy that Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have opposed.

But Mrs. Clinton, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has had opportunities to talk and meet with General Petraeus about military matters over the years, and some aides say that she respects his expertise.

Major props for Bush for being stubborn enough to keep the war going until he found what worked, McCain for harranging him until he accepted the right answer, and Clinton for adjusting her positions as facts changed.

Bush is serious about natural defense. McCain and Clinton are the two serious Presidential candidates when it comes to national defense.

Faith

Should there be a religious test for office?

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Broadly, questions fall into two types: natural or theological. Natural questions are those open to scientific investigation. Example of natural questions are:

  • Is global climate change caused by human activity?
  • Would al Qaeda cease attacking us if we ceased supporting Isreal and Saudi Arabia?
  • Should the United States military include both blitzkrieg and COIN capacity

Theological questions, on the other hand, question the nature of God and His relationship to other things. Examples of theological questions are:

  • Is there Hypostatic Union of Human and Divine Nature in the Second Person of the Trinity?
  • Do all non-Missouri-Lutherans go to Hell?
  • Can Allah destroy the Koran?

In general, one might say that deciding who to vote for on account of natural questions is applying a “natural test.” Likewise, deciding who to vote for on account of theological questions would be applying a “religious test.”

Certainly, some people use religious reasons to answer natural questions. Thus, Paul argued that Christians should support the State, while Martin Luther King, Jr. agitated for civil rights for American blacks. Though some people are uncomfortable with religious motives for natural tests, there exists a broad consensus that religious beliefs can meaningfully inform political and economic structure, among both Catholics and Protestants.

However, fewer people support the idea of Religious Tests for office. Left-leaning Salon snickered at evangelicals who refused to vote for Mitt Romney. Even right-wing commentators limited their concern over a Muslim congressman to how he would answer natural questions.

Thus, I was surprised that Eddie of Hidden Unities argued in favor of a religious test for President. Specifically, Eddie appeared to argue for a cordon sanitaire against ministers who give incorrect answers to the theological question of who will go to Heaven or Hell, among other things.

I was taken aback by Eddie’s assertion. So far my friend has neither supported nor renounced his claim, though it has made me think about a question that previously I took to be a no-brainer. So

Should there be a religious test for government office?

If so, which theological questions must candidates and their associates answer correctly?

2008 Presidential Election

Obama’s Awful Speech on Race

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RealClearPolitics – Articles – A Speech That Fell Short
Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don’t really matter as much as we thought.

Barack Obama’s speech on race sounded like a prologue. All of his speeches do. While Barack’s old speech serve as a prolog to words on economic growth, national strength, and unity which have never come, now he promises sermons on racial differences and historical grievances. If Obama continues his pattern, he will not be any more specific this time.

This is too bad, because he recognizes the need for tackling his difficult issue:

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

So here are just two issues that Obama raised and then dropped. Both of them raise complex problems that just, workable, and future-oriented solutions. Which means, of course, Obama won’t bother. But I will:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

If Obama wants to do something more than running down his grandmother, he should address why an elderly woman should be fearful. For instance (Peterson, R.D. & Krivo, L.J. (2005). Macrostructural analyses of race, ethnicity, and violent crime: Recent lessons and new directions for research. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 331-356):

The racial character of crime reflected in Russell’s critique is based on more than media stereotypes. In the United States, blacks are a disproportionate share of those victimized, arrested, and imprisoned. In 2002, the rate of violent victimization was 34.1 per 1000 for non-Hispanic blacks compared with 26.5 for non-Hispanic whites (Maguire & Pastore 2004). Blacks now represent 38% of persons arrested for violent crimes, but they constitute only 13% of the U.S. population (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003). In contrast, whites make up 60% of violent arrestees and 75% of the population. The most dramatic differences are for homicide, for which black rates of victimization and offending were 6.2 and 7.6 times those for whites in 2000 (Maguire & Pastore 2004).

This is a serious problem that needs a serious solution which is just, workable, and future-oriented. The solution would be complex, and involve multiple factors. Would it help to legalize many drugs, thus lifting some blacks out of the black market and into a white one? Yeah. Would it help to castrate violent criminals, preempting felons before they are even conceived? Yeah. Instead, Obama talks about “original sin,” a nicely theological concept that no one can do anything about.

Moving on. Education:

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

Obama seems to be talking about long term memory. All normally developed humans appear to have the same processing capacity one the appropriate knowledge is stored into long term memory, so the solution is increasing long term memory. In the context race this poses a problem of justice and advantage-maximization, because American blacks tend to possess less working memory, and thus have a harder time getting that information into long term memory in the first place. This implies that many blacks would benefit from more intense, more structured education with more worked examples. It also implies that if we are going to teach those with less working memory more intensively, classrooms may break down somewhat along racial lines. This rightly a a “red flag” in the minds of many, so either we need to justify it or find a different way.

Instead, Obama ignores the problem. His next paragraph starts: “And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright….” No, it doesn’t, Senator. It explains why you see serious problems, and join in with a race-baiting demagogue rather than propose policies to end those problems.

Obama’s speech was based on the idea that hateful words do not matter, and divisive speech that avoids the important issues is OK. If this is true, there’s no reason to vote for Obama in the first place.