Month: October 2011

Frum keeps faith in Romney's ability to buck Party orthodoxy:

(1) Romney is not only very intelligent, but he also has demonstrated through his career a devotion to facts over ideology. (2) Romney has visibly not been caught up in the panic and rage against President Obama that has done so much to distort Republican thinking since 2009. (3) Romney has not signed up for the kind of ultra-deluded tax-cutting as solution to all ills program advocated by Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. His unwillingness to over-commit himself during the Republican primaries signals an openness to future contingencies should he be elected president. Slender hopes? Yes. But no other Republican offers any hope at all.

David might want to pipe down a little. The Tea Partiers have broadband, remember? Chait sees the jittery base thinking along the same lines but drawing the opposite conclusion:

Republican moneymen and pundits are starting to flock to the Mitt Romney banner, sending forth the word that it is time to bow to the inevitable. But the Republican voters just do not like Mitt Romney. The depth the of the base's resistance to falling in behind next-in-line Romney has continuously shocked observers, resulting first in the rise of Donald Trump, then Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry. Now Perry is swooning, and his support has gone to … Herman Cain! In the latest Washington Post poll, Perry's support has halved over the last month, but Romney remains stuck at 25 percent. Cain has risen to 16 percent. The new CBS poll has Cain tied, at 17 percent, for first place with Romney. PPP polled Republicans in North Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia, and found Cain leading in all three states…I don't see how Republicans could be making this any more plain. They do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.

(Photo: Former Massachusetts Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] at the Orange County Convention Center, on September 23, 2011 in Orlando, Florida. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Here's some rather staggering PPP data:

North Carolina: Cain 27, Romney/Gingrich 17, Perry 15, Paul/Bachmann 6, Santorum/Huntsman 2

Nebraska: Cain 30, Gingrich 16, Romney 13, Bachmann/Perry 10, Paul 5, Santorum 4, Huntsman 2

West Virginia: Cain 24, Gingrich 18, Romney 16, Perry 15, Bachmann 8, Paul 6, Santorum 3, Huntsman 1

There is one good thing about this, at least. The far right of the GOP is now behind a black man, rather than a Texas good ol' boy. Who would have ever predicted that?

Mark Shea thinks atheists who critique the Bible on literal grounds are missing the point:

It uses figurative language to describe a real event which took place here in the real world, not in cloud cuckoo land: Our First Parents abused their free will, sinned against God and fell. The mythic language is truer language than newspaper language, because it brings us to the heart of what happened, which is far more important than a photographic record of what happened.

A video of the first man committing the first sin would show us nothing, for the same reason that video of, say, a young Adolf Hitler sitting in a Vienna cafe and looking at an old Jew sipping his coffee would not reveal the momentous moment he turned from thinking, “Is this a Jew?” to thinking “Is this a German?” Traces of when sin, hate and evil are conceived in the heart cannot be detected in fossilized skulls. In the same way, even our outward actions don’t often tell much to those outside the heart.

Jerry Coyne counters:

Note carefully what Shea is claiming here: that an idle thought by one man (who, unlike Hitler, didn’t do anything!) doomed all humanity to a condition of sinfulness, only to be redeemed by the bloody death of an apocalyptic preacher. How can any rational person buy a story like that? And if the language is figurative (and there’s no indication that it is: Shea simply realizes that the story is wrong in light of modern science), how does he know the event is real?  Making miracles not only one-offs, but one-offs that can’t even be seen when they happen, puts the whole theological enterprise beyond the pale.  That means that there’s no way of knowing that miracles happened even if you were there. This insulates all miracles from empirical demonstration, which of course means that we can no longer make people saints, and endeavor that depends on two verified miracles. 

There's no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn;t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it's meant literally. It's obviously meant metaphorically. It screams parable. Ross sees the exchange as saying something significant about the atheist mindset – and I largely agree with everything he says, except his definition of "fundamentalist" doesn't seem to extend much past Pat Robertson. It certainly makes me want to take Jerry Coyne's arguments less seriously. Someone this opposed to religion ought to have a modicum of education about it. The Dish, if you recall, had a long thread on this subject in August. No one was as dumb as Coyne.

(Photo: A Hieronymous Bosch painting of Adam and Eve by Flickr user Ian Burt.)

Zack Ford takes up Herman Cain's challenge in the above video to "show him the science" proving that sexual orientation isn't chosen:

If Cain has not seen “the science,” he clearly has never bothered to look. Based on decades of research, all major medical professional organizations agree that sexual orientation is not a choice and cannot be changed, from gay to straight or otherwise. The American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychological professionals, describes sexual orientation as “a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors.” There is considerable evidence to suggest that biology, “including genetic or inborn hormonal factors,” plays a significant role in a person’s sexuality.

What staggers me in Cain's remarks is that he is not interested in what actual, you know, homosexuals say about themselves. The presumption that 99 percent of us are liars about one of the core aspects of our being and psyches is, the more you think about it, deeply insulting. How many gay people does Herman Cain actually know? I have a suspicion not many.

Bruce Bartlett reviews research on the subject. His bottom line:

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

Social media can hurt or help a job candidate:

Almost half of [employers] started Googling right after getting an application. The rest of them waited until the hiring process was further along. Again, 69% of those surveyed say they had at some point rejected a candidate based on what they found there. The most frequent sin committed by the erstwhile job seekers was not drinking (reason for the rejection 9% of the time) or drugs (10%) or having a mutual Facebook friend that the employer thinks is a total skeezeball (0%), but getting caught for lying about their qualifications (13%). Honesty is the best policy, job hunters, especially when there are so many places on the Internet for fact-checking your resumé

Nate Silver looks at presidential candidates who entered the race late. Jonathan Bernstein's take-away:

[Late entry] may hurt more in Iowa and New Hampshire than it does in early national polling. That makes sense; after all, the campaign looks a lot different in the early states than it does to the rest of us. If you're in California or Texas or New York, the campaign is mainly driven by "free media" coverage; debates loom large, and the press decides which candidates get the most air time. In Iowa and New Hampshire, however, voters are exposed to loads and loads of paid media and personal outreach by the campaigns, along with a local media environment that is heavily influenced by candidate campaigns.

The GOP is having a hard time picking a candidate:

A more legible version of the above chart here.

Conscription is on its way out:

[I]n 1970, only 20 percent of the countries for which we have data did not use conscription. In 2009, that figure was nearly 55 percent! The United States' move from a conscripted military to a volunteer military over this period, while relatively early, is not an anomaly. It is what happened in many countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Peru. Most significantly, the government of France, the country in which modern conscription first began, ended conscription in 2001.

Ilya Somin welcomes the trend:

Many people resist the comparison between conscription and other forms of forced labor because they see military service as providing a great good that is essential to our society. But military service is far from unique in that regard. Historically, slaves and forced laborers often performed work that was vital to the social order. The entire economy of the antebellum South depended on crops produced by slaves. So too with ancient Rome, Russia in the era of serfdom, and so on. The key point to realize is that this work, however noble and necessary, can be performed by free laborers. Thus, the use of forced labor to carry it out is still unjust. The same goes for military service. Both the United States and other liberal democracies can field more than adequate military forces without conscription. Indeed, they can create better armies without it than with it.