Month: November 2008

A reader writes:

I love to see you grapple with trying to explain this woman and her thought processes. You are missing something obvious though.  She believes in the literal truth of the Bible. She believes it informs on matters of science, biology, evolution, physics, cosmology, etc. So if there are multiple creation versions in the Bible what do you do, make up your own reality. If there are contradictions in it, ignore them. Just like you ignore inconvenient facts about day-to-day life.

If you BELIEVE the bible is the literal inerrant word of God what do you do?  Well then you ignore all contrary facts, like the earth revolving around the sun, like the age of the earth.  You are seeing in Sarah Palin the fact that she has translated her biblical literalism into a way of attempting to deal with the real world and hence as you put it, her alternative universe.  I think what is going on is that she has internalized the fundamentalist way of thinking to such a degree that she no longer has much of a grip on reality.  She has taught herself to ignore reality in matters of faith and has transposed that way of thinking into her regular life.

The first chapter of my book on how conservatism destroyed itself in America is called "The Fundamentalist Psyche." I don’t think you can understand what happened under Bush and what Palin represents unless you grapple with the mindset that can deny empirical truth in favor of Divine Truth. The resistance to debate, the inability to see your own faults and errors, your final surrender to the will of the Almighty as a way to cope with the massive errors involved in your own management of the material world: this is Bush’s world and Palin’s world. Their magical thinking, combined with the mainstream media’s defensive crouch, made a great deal possible. And Cheney took advantage.

It can work for a while. But real conservatives know that dogma can never work in managing a fallen world. In the end, it collapses. And Obama walked confidently over the wreckage. Until conservatives understand this, there will be no recovery.

Paul Varnell fisks marriage equality opponents. A snippet:

Homophobes like to argue that if we legalize gay civil marriage it will lead to heterosexual polygamy. As usual with homophobes, they have things backwards. For much of recorded history, marriage was a man and a number of women, depending on the man’s economic status. Any reader of the Old Testament knows this. That tradition continues to this day in Muslim countries and existed for several decades among Mormons in the U.S. So, as same-sex marriage becomes a reality, we can accurately say that polygamy preceded same-sex marriage, not followed as a result.

Jonah Lehrer sums up a new study:

Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which are crucial mental talents. The basic idea is that nature, unlike a city, is filled with inherently interesting stimuli (like a sunset, or an unusual bird) that trigger our involuntary attention, but in a modest fashion. Because you can’t help but stop and notice the reddish orange twilight sky – paying attention to the sunset doesn’t take any extra work or cognitive control – our attentional circuits are able to refresh themselves. A walk in the woods is like a vacation for the prefrontal cortex.

Maybe that’s why I often seem to write and think more clearly in Provincetown. Of which Thoreau would surely have approved as well.

The count keeps tightening:

Since Election Day, Obama has gained almost 1,000 votes statewide, most of it from St. Louis County.

County election officials have recovered almost 3,200 additional votes in the last few days. Most of them came from various electronic voting machines where the votes had apparently not been tallied by polling place workers during the initial collection of votes.

McCain’s latest lead is 4,968 votes, out of more than 2.9 million cast. Yet to be counted: an estimated 7,000 provisional ballots — most cast in Obama-leaning areas — that are just now being examined to determine which ones were cast by properly registered voters in the correct polling place.

Drezner argues that the internet hasn’t killed intellectuals:

…critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried — what Russell Jacoby called the "professionalization and academization" of public intellectuals. In fact, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down — or at least erodes — the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.

From later in the essay:

Perhaps the most-useful function of bloggers, however, is when they engage in the quality control of other public intellectuals. Posner believes that public intellectuals are in decline because there is no market discipline for poor quality. Even if public intellectuals royally screw up, he argues, the mass public is sufficiently uninterested and disengaged for it not to matter. Bloggers are changing that dynamic, however. If Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, or William Kristol pen substandard essays, blogs have and will provide a wide spectrum of critical feedback.

Fredricksburg, Virginia, 10 am.

Spencer Ackerman on his unlikely friendship with Eli Lake:

… You should want to have friends who disagree with you, and sometimes disagree with you deeply. Check each other’s excesses, fill each other’s blindspots, strengthen your own arguments and then light the peace pipe and make Steely Dan references. It’s a better way to live.

Actually, it’s not so unlikely when you think about it. I barely know either person but just reading them you can tell they are kindred spirits. Both care passionately about America and the world, both are obsessed with Middle East politics, both entwined in that murky place where Washington intrigue meets Middle East conflict, and both, well, are prepared to light peace pipes and riff on Steely Dan. They are men of their generation.

Good times.

(Hat tip: Dispatches. My own essay on friendship through the ages, from Jesus to Emerson, through Aelred and Montaigne, is the last third of the book I’m proudest of: Love Undetectable.)

The final analysis is pretty clear. There was a big overlap between new, largely black Obama voters and the forces for discrimination against gay married couples and our families:

When Proposition 8’s passage first became apparent, it was widely assumed that hundreds of thousands of first-time or occasional voters had turned out to vote for Obama, then left the rest of their ballots blank, thus allowing more conservative voters to dominate ballot measures. In fact, however, there was very little voting drop-off.

There are still some late absentee and provisional ballots to be counted, but as of Monday, 10.96 million votes had been tallied in the presidential race and 10.85 million for and against Proposition 8.

The massive black turnout was the critical factor. And Obama’s refusal to take a firm stand in the last few weeks of the campaign was instrumental to its passage:

Historically, black Californians have voted in about the same proportion as their population, in the 6 percent to 7 percent range, while Latinos, although more than a third of the state’s population, have been about 13 percent of voters.  

Last week, however, 10 percent of voters were African American while 18 percent were Latino, and applying exit poll data to that extra turnout reveals that the pro-Obama surge among those two groups gave Proposition 8 an extra 500,000-plus votes, slightly more than the measure’s margin of victory.

Black liberals were the critical voting bloc. Jewish liberals voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8, to offer a simple contrast. Obama has always opposed marriage equality, even splitting with his own church on the issue. In California, he got his way.

From the WSJ, confirmation of a proposal made by the Dish months ago:

President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his position for at least a year, according to two Obama advisers. A senior Pentagon official said Mr. Gates would likely accept the offer if it is made.

Joe Klein assesses the situation in Pakistan, where it appears the government may be serious about cracking down on the Taliban:

The Pakistanis have promised to take action against the Taliban before. This time, however, the U.S. should help the process along with a concerted and targeted aid package: military aid that can only be used to fight the Taliban (counterinsurgency training and equipment like up-armored humvees etc.) as opposed to untargeted military aid, plus civilian assistance to build local institutions (especially schools, to provide an alternative to the madrassas). Perhaps most important, as President-elect Obama indicated to me a few weeks ago, a high-powered special envoy should be named–someone like Bill Clinton–to try to solve the eternal dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. If India recedes as a threat, the Pakistani military’s imagined need for a guerrilla counterforce in Kashmir and Afghanistan should also recede.