Hanlon’s Razor

As a liberal atheist, I have a hell of a love-hate relationship with Christopher Hitchens. On one hand, I love that he’s such a strong member of the “new atheist” troupe with Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, to the point that he can tear Sean Hannity apart on live television and even calls himself an “anti-theist” because atheist isn’t strong enough.

On the other, his support of the Iraqi invasion is nothing short of infuriating. I do not believe he is a believer in its general goals, but rather that his extreme hatred of theocracy has left him supporting the war simply because it involves tearing down radically Islamic regimes. I’ve got a feeling he’d have no problem with the United States just marching around into Saudi Arabia and Syria with absolutely no pretense, just because we felt like getting rid of those theocratic assholes. Much as I’d like to agree, I just can’t support that kind of nutbar warmongering.

Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because, in a rather surprising move, Hitchens agreed to be waterboarded. His experience can be summed up in a single observation:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

The article as a whole is worth reading, if just to see Hitchens get a new perspective on the “War on Terror”. He may be polemic, he may have questionable views, but he’s not a stupid man. Nothing he says is asserted unless he can defend it. So to see him tear apart the torture argument is absolutely fantastic.

It’s torture indeed, and worthless as an interrogation tactic. I’ll be having another take on the issue later today.

George W Bush always talks about how, in time, historians will look back on his presidency and they will be the ones to decide. So far he’s got an awful lot of superlatives: most Americans killed by terrorists in a domestic attack, lowest approval rating, highest disapproval rating, worst economic downturn, among others.

Well now he can add another: laziest president of all time.

“Most vacation days taken by a sitting president,” Bee explained when Jon Stewart asked what record she meant. “People said that Reagan’s 436 would stand forever, but right now, as you can see, this president stands on 423, meaning his record should fall less than two weeks from today. And they said it shouldn’t be done.”

Bee continued playing up the great obstacles faced by Bush in his pursuit of the record and his dedication in overcoming them. “Reagan has a ranch in beautiful Santa Barbara,” she said. “Bush has spent his time chasing the record in Crawford, Texas, which by all objective accounts is a genuine scorched shithole. … And don’t forget, Bush is a war president. The 80’s? If Bush had been president then, he might not have come in at all.”

That’s over one-eighth of his presidency. I can’t really imagine any other profession getting away with taking a full eighth of their work year off.

Gotta hand it to him, though. If you’re going to be a bad president, you might as well go all out and be the worst president of all time.

Really? REALLY?

Is Obama ditching his signature fist bump?

According to Tuesday’s press pool report, the Illinois senator refused to bump fists with a boy as he was touring the Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio.

As the boy outstretched his first, Obama said no and added, “If I start that …”

His voice then trailed off.

The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate popularized the move last month when he and his wife Michelle bumped fists on the night he formally captured the party’s presidential nomination.

Okay, first off, no. Obama didn’t popularize a damn thing. All Obama did was make a cute little fist bump with his wife. The media made it popular by talking about it ad nauseum. If anything, he’s trying to avoid being “black man bump fist” candidate. The media’s already crucifying him over anything vaguely black he does, the last thing we need is for him to get fistbumps all the time.

I hate to be perpetuating this, but lord it’s bothering me that things like this are considered “issues” by our liberal media. And remember, they’re in Obama’s pocket.

One of the most painful aspects of 2004 was watching John Kerry’s military record dragged through the mud. Each of his medals was systematically attacked, defamed, slimed, and just plain lied about until enough of the country was convinced that he didn’t deserve them. So as 2008 rolls along, it’s tough to convince yourself that we shouldn’t just give McCain a pass on his record.

One guy didn’t though, and outright questioned it. That guy just happened to be General Wesley Clark.

“He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” Clark said.

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

It’s undeniable that McCain’s record as a “war hero” gets touted an awful lot. He’s occasionally referred to by that phrase before his name and here in Pennsylvania, the only ad we see on television is solely based on his time in Vietnam. A casual observer would hardly know that he was in the Senate.

We all agree that it takes a special class of man to survive five years in the Hanoi Hilton, but it’s definitely worth pointing out that, as rock hard as McCain had to be to get through that, it says absolutely nothing about his ability to lead the nation.

Military experience can be important. A man with a storied and celebrated military history has a track record of leadership, decision-making, and a cool head when under pressure. The problem is, there really isn’t anything in John McCain’s story that displays any of that. We have a man who graduated nearly dead last in his class of almost 900, and got shot down within a few months of his arrival in Vietnam.

One of the issues of this country is that living through hardship has become a qualification to hero status. We heard it used for those who survived 9/11 and the mining disasters. People who live through severe tragedies deserve our admiration for their courage, but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any better suited to be president for it. Being a POW for five years doesn’t mean John McCain would be a good president any more than if he had been kidnapped on American soil by a lunatic for five years.

I’m not demeaning his service. I’ve never been to a war and I certainly haven’t had to go through anything on the level of a Vietnam prison camp. The man has been to hell and back and I tip my hat to him for not being a crazybeans murderer or anything. That does not mean, unfortunately, that it indicates he’d do well leading the nation.

It’d be different if there was more to the story, but as it stands here’s what we have: John McCain joins Navy, flies in Vietnam, gets shot down and tortured. Terrible, tragic, completely irrelevant when applying to be President.

It’s gotten to the point where I just want to scream “so what?” when someone brings it up. I almost don’t want to hear about it any more because it’s never said in a manner that explains its pertinence. It is not relevant to any discussion on the political scene, which seems to escape the minds of many. It concerns me because I know the right will the take the exact opposite approach of 2004, bleating that we cannot demean McCain’s record.

The worst part is that the Democrats are going to accept it and say nothing, for fear of seeming unpatriotic or anti-military. But believe you me, it is an avenue that is worth pursuing.

Honestly now, this is getting absurd.

When I first got sent this article, my first reaction to “McCain pulls ads from anti-Obama website” was the expected one of derision towards McCain himself. But then I actually read the thing (a rare occurrence, I know), and I noticed just what websites exactly were subject to the ad-pulling:

One Web site, called Stop-Obama.org, is a group blog written by disaffected Clinton supporters, some of whom are now supporting McCain. A banner ad featuring McCain standing side-by-side with Joe Lieberman was running on the site until Monday.

A recent post on the blog outlined the “simple parallels” between Obama and Hitler, and accused Obama’s audiences of having the same cult mentality that characterized followers of the German dictator.

McCain’s ads have also shown up on a pro-Clinton Web site named “Obama WTF” that accuses Obama of being “spineless,” having “communist influences,” “courting Jew haters” and being “in the pocket of America haters.”

The only real WTF here is that these Clinton nutters won’t let go of the grudge. Policy-wise they’re pretty similar, and let’s not forget that they’re stumping together now. If Clinton’s supporters really follow the woman, you’d think they’d follow her advice to support Obama. Yet here they are, pouring on the venom.

Unless…

Hey, wait a minute. What if we’re still dealing with Operation Chaos? The goal of the thing wasn’t to have Hillary win the primary. That’s why they didn’t support Clinton until she was way behind, if they thought she’d win it’d ruin the enterprise. Heck, if she was winning OC would probably be pumping Obama.

So the purpose of Operation Chaos wasn’t to have her win. What was it? Right what the name suggests. They just wanted to keep a rift in the Democratic party, and just because the primary’s over doesn’t mean they’re just going to pack up their bags and go home. Obama has just over half of Clinton’s supporters, and frankly that’s not going to be enough. So what better than to be one of those “independent” political groups and wreck the potential unity?

It’s not like the GOP’s never done this before. Let’s not forget the 2004 tactics against Kerry that involved spreading “pro-Kerry” messages intended to make Kerry seem so radical that he’d lose moderate voters. Amongst those tactics were fliers touting Kerry’s promise to ban the Bible and flamingly gay activists marching up voter lines in Florida talking about Kerry’s pledge to support gay adoption. Incredibly dishonest, painfully effective.

Now there’s another opening: keep the grudge from the primary season. Obviously no matter how much Clinton says otherwise, some of her supporters are going to still be bitter about how things went. Chances are, if left alone, they’d just bite the bullet and vote for Obama because, hey, it’s either that or McCain. Get a bunch of lunatic right-wingers to start fanning the flames some more, though, and now mob mentality kicks in and Operation Chaos can actually bring the genuine Clintonites along for the ride.

Mark my words, these are NOT actual Clinton supporters spearheading these efforts. In time it’ll all come out.

I’ve been mulling over a lot of things lately, so forgive me for piling them all into this single post.

The first is an issue that I have with the presidential race entirely. We’re seeing Obama waffle (and let’s be honest, that’s exactly what’s happening) on all sorts of issues from Israel to FISA. People can claim all they want that he’s “clarifying” something or he’s got a “grand plan” that requires he take a stance contrary to what he said before.

No, really, that’s an actual argument about his FISA change: that he’s flipping positions because it would be a more prudent move to woo the voters in order to get into office, wherein he can fix the mess of a law that got thrown in there. Ignoring the fact that it might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, we have no real reason to think that’s an ulterior motive. The point is he’s “drifting to the center” in order to win votes.

“Drifting center” is a phrase I tend to dislike, because it assumes a center that isn’t quite where everyone thinks it is. That, however is not the issue. The issue is the drift in order to woo voters.

I know, I’m an idealistic liberal moonbat in this regard, the kind of head-in-the-clouds idiot that worries more about how things should be than how they are. Regardless, the thing that bothers me is that the presidential candidate should not be the one to drift. It is not the candidate who must find what the people’s opinions are and go to them, and before any conservatives pounce on this recall McCain is doing this in spades, but rather the other way about.

There’s a reason we have debates and town hall meetings and other similar platforms for the candidates to speak to the public. Ideally we are convinced whose ideas are better and vote for that person. Two candidates hop onto two podiums, are given an issue and duke it out until one persuades the public that his theory is superior. Instead we have boilerplate non-speak, and we all know how generally pointless debates are for anything but hearing repetition of slogans and talking points.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s not Obama’s fault, or McCain’s or even Bush’s. The problem is the people such platitudes are intended for: the only vaguely-interested middle 33%.

My stepfather and I disagree on a lot of things, but he did give me one of the best nuggets of thought on politics. He said you know how the most liberal 33% will vote, and how the most conservative 33% will vote, even if their candidates do something they disagree with; it’s the middle 33% whose votes can actually change.

The middle 33% is not, as is so commonly thought, political players whose views are so middle of the road that they just can’t stick to one guy or the other. Sorry, doesn’t happen. There’s no one who can actually look at the stances of these guys, know who they are and what they stand for, and be unable to pick a preference between the two.

No, we’re talking about (and I’m not going to make friends here) morons. People who believe the negatives ads and are actually swayed when someone says “my opponent wants to destroy America” or “my opponent wants to take away your retirement pension.” The tragic part of American politics that really eats at me is that, unfortunately, you can’t rely on the voters knowing what the hell they’re voting for.

If we set up electronic booths that started off with a ten question quiz testing the voter’s knowledge of world events and domestic policy, chances are those on the left and right would do okay, but the vast majority of these “undecideds” would have a list of blanks. Obama and McCain both have to campaign toward people who neither know nor seem to care to know the finer points of their politicians’ policy.

Thus we get to deal with a question like: is Obama a Muslim? The reasonable answer to this is, of course, “who gives a shit?” One of those neat little things in our Constitution is pointing out that there is no test of religion. If Obama swore on a Koran and was a “secret Muslim” (which wouldn’t make sense if he swore on a Koran…), it shouldn’t matter.

It does matter, though, to morons. Conservatives might care about it, too, but they’re already against Obama enough that it wouldn’t sway their vote. The middle morons actually can have their vote altered by this nonsense. Maybe they like Obama, but now that they “know” he’s a Muslim, their opinions changed.

So to an extent, I sympathize. It’s gotta be terrible knowing the only way to get the win is to appeal to the people who are never going to read your detailed policy outlines and haven’t the attention span for detailed explanations. So your choice is to either go for it anyway, or concede on a few points to woo the morons. Tough choice.

I don’t normally review movies here, but I’ve really had my hand forced here. I saw Wall-E opening night and fell in love. Really, if you’ve not seen it yet, go and check it out. It’s far and away Pixar’s most ambitious and mature movie. Gone are the cute animals of Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, no more bright colors and celebrity voices like Toy Story and Cars. We’re left with, instead, a rather dystopian epic that contains a center of humanity that few other movies have had.

However, all is not well. As soon as the plot arrived, I knew what was coming. The movie centers itself on a planet Earth that has been left a wasteland by humanity, where life is unable to survive. The only evidence that people were on the planet at all is mountains of trash and a swath of signs and electronic display from “Buy n Save” “Buy n Large” (thanks Rodney!),the generic representative of a Wal-Mart conglomerate that took over everything from groceries to gas stations to housing. Humans are now fat and lazy, riding around on little floating chairs in a spaceship until Earth is cleaned up, which is of course Wall-E’s job.

Once I realized where the plot was aimed, I knew the right was going to have a shit fit, and so they did. Just as a random example, the Washington Times railed the movie’s “anti-consumerist” message.

Actually, I’m being unfair. The New York Post adored the movie, getting the point far better than that moron at the Times did. So to say the right as a whole hated it is being ignorant. So I’ll say the blindly moronic “must hate anything vaguely liberal” sect of the right had a shit fit.

The movie is not anti-consumerist, it’s not anti-technology, it’s not radical or preachy. It’s a dystopian future story along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. We have a dark vision of a world that has seen the humans devoid of our humanity, letting robots “live” for us while we merely float along, eating and sleeping on schedule. The glimmering hope in the movie is Wall-E himself, and it is through him that our species finds itself again.

Any claims that this has anything to do with left vs right are made by people who honestly think “giving a shit about the planet” is a political issue. Maybe you don’t believe in global warming, that’s fine. The film only indirectly references it by the lack of vegetation and animals, never ascribing it to anything specific. The message of the film is one of responsibility, that we must take charge of both ourselves and our world.

And that’s ignoring the entire story of Wall-E and Eve. The above is not the majority of the film, most occurs between two robots. The amount of emotion Pixar managed to put into the interactions of robots incapable of speaking beyond saying their own names is nothing short of mindblowing. I won’t even lie, parts got me rather emotional. All done with nothing but the most basic “expressions” and no dialogue.

So ignore the hysterics claiming this is some preachy message movie. Yes, it’s a movie with a message, but if you think it’s partisan, you’ve got problems yourself. It’s surprisingly dark and heavy for a G-rated Pixar film, and might go down as their crowning achievement. To quote the Post’s review:

Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.

The latest little scuffle on the “evangelical voter” front is actually kinda nice, because it offers me a perfect opportunity to explain why everything’s all screwed up. James Dobson, he of Focus on the Family, got his panties in a knot in response to Barack Obama’s comments from two years ago about religion in politics, and now a nice big ol’ feud is a-broilin’.

Dobson paraphrased this as “unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe in.” But that’s not what Obama was saying at all. Rather, he was arguing that in a pluralistic nation like ours, politics depends on people of faith being able to persuade others based on common and accessible ground and appeals to reason — which sounds entirely reasonable. Christians who oppose abortion can make an effective case by talking about sonograms, fetal development and the moral imperative to protect the most vulnerable. That doesn’t mean one’s faith shouldn’t inform the question of abortion — or, for that matter, war, poverty and other issues. After all, President Lincoln’s argument against slavery was partly grounded in faith. But appeals to the Bible or church teaching aren’t sufficient in a pluralistic nation. That’s why Lincoln talked primarily about the Declaration of Independence.

Basically the argument came down to this: Obama says people’s beliefs based in faith must be defended on common grounds in a secular nation (which we nominally are), Dobson got a stick up his ass because he thinks we’re Jesusistan.

The problem is that so much of religion cannot be defended on grounds other than the holy text from which they came. There’s no empirical evidence that says gay marriage is bad for society, that abortion prior to the 2nd trimester is the destruction of anything other than a non-conscious lump of cells, or that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory of any sort.

What we’re dealing with is an angry reaction to a reality. The religious right knows in their hearts that none of the points they argue in the 21st century have any legitimate grounds. When they want creationism taught in schools or marriage defined as a man and a woman, their only basis is that of the Bible. And given that we are not a nation based on the Bible, it pains them to think that they may be unable to foist their worldviews on the rest of us.

Obama makes a great point that even those like me are loathe to admit: as our nation is based on our morality, and the vast majority of those in power based their moral codes on their religious beliefs, our laws are largely shaped by the religion of those who wrote them. It happens. Can’t avoid that.

That’s misleading, however. Many believe their ethical stances are based in their religion, but in reality it’s that their ethics have support from religion. That’s why so many pick and choose which parts to really put any stock in. We all have a similar moral compass, and tons of rules in the Bible/Koran/Torah can be expressed in secular terms.

Really, pick a law. Stealing, murder, rape, arson, assault, tax evasion, perjury, whatever. You can explain each of them in purely reasonable terms. It doesn’t matter if you have any religion at all, it’s easy to figure out why it’s probably not good to set someone’s house on fire or lie under oath. Have a bunch of aliens land on our planet and we can defend those laws.

Now try and imagine those Martians striking our surface and we have to defend a law against gay marriage or why evolution cannot be taught by itself in the science class. You’re going to have a tricky time defending that without resorting to “well there’s this book that says if we disobey it we get punished forever…” and that’s Obama’s point.

The religious need to accept, just as any of us do, that all beliefs and standpoints must have rational and logical defenses. You can’t trace it back to a mystical or ethereal belief and expect everyone else to come along for the ride. The Dobsons of the world are going to fade away and vanish unless they accept that. Of course, hopefully, they’ll vanish anyway.

And they don’t give away those “worst June” prizes away liberally, either. You gotta really earn that, and believe you me the Dow Jones really busted its ass to have the worst June in nearly eighty years.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) tumbled 358.41 points, or 3%, to 11, 453.42, leaving it down nearly 1,200 points, or 9.4%, for the month, with two trading days yet to go. As things stand, the month is the worst June so far since 1930 when the index declined 17.72%.

“It was the middle of March that the Bear Stearns debacle became public, sending the Dow to a low of 11,731. That level was broken within the first minute of trading today,” wrote Kathy Lien, chief strategist of DailyFX.com.

All of the Dow’s 30 components closed in negative territory.

Crude for August delivery reached a high of $140.39 a barrel in electronic trading on Globex. The contract closed at a record $139.64 on the New York mercantile Exchange, up $5.09, or 3.8%, for the session after trading as high as $140. .

“One thing is for certain, if crude continues to rally, stocks are dead,” said Dale Doelling, chief market technician at Trends In Commodities.

“If stocks have another day like this tomorrow, then the fallout next week could include government intervention in the markets,” said Doelling.

Sha-zam. But remember, the economy’s done GREAT under Bush and the GOP rule, way better than it ever did under Clinton and the Democrats’ bullshit tax-and-spend policies.

You know, there shouldn’t BE a rift in the Democratic party, and half of Clinton’s supporters isn’t an accomplishment. I don’t even blame Hillary, she’s stumping for Obama for all she’s worth. What I don’t get is why her damn supporters won’t follow.