Maggie's Farm

Overcoming Bias, in a discussion of science and the supernatural, quotes Richard Carrier's definition:

A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.

Doesn't most of our lives consist of ontologically basic mental things: wishes, fantasies, thoughts, dreams, emotions, ideas?

Naturally, the Obamas send their kids to elite private schools. Would not want them associating with the riff-raff or being taught by unionized teachers.

That's what wealthy Liberals do. Lefties seem to consist mainly of the condescending and/or guilty elites and the "gimme more" poor - and the young kids who know nothing about real life.

Public schools are for us proles, I guess. Us middle-class proles who work hard and pay our taxes and worry about our savings.

Palin's kids go to public school.

Should libertarians fear the Dem nominee? asks Chapman at Reason. He begins:

There are no disciples of small government in the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama fits right in. His economic program is based on the assumption that the economy is to the president what a marionette is to a puppeteer, requiring his direction and responding to his every wish.

Anyone partial to free markets, restrained government, fiscal discipline and light taxation approaches a Democratic nominee's economic platform with trepidation, expecting one fright after another. Obama does not disappoint.

Read the whole thing. Of course, Repubs are only marginally better because people in government tend to become enamored of - and dependent upon - the power. To vote as a statist, you must believe in the supreme wisdom of the State and its (our) employees. Few Americans believe that.

In the end, the dividing line is between those who trust in the power and wisdom of The State vs. those who have faith in the wisdom and potential of the individual. I happen to think that The State is an ass, and foolish when it is not self-interested. No Pasaran has a bit on Statism.

These are the things folks need to be considering in these elections. Americans are ambivalent about government.

More from Chapman: This election season, both the left and right promise big government.

Well, so much for diversity and appreciating and embracing "the other." I think that thing only applies when "the other" is pathetic or damaged in some way, or manages to wiggle their way into some victim class.

Or perhaps some pomo reader, if we have one, could help me distinguish between the "good other" and the "bad other."

It sure doesn't apply when "the other" is a regular American woman, albeit one with unusual energy and coping skills. Nick Cohen on When Obama's berserkers lost the plot. (h/t, Lucianne). One quote:

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was 'the other' - the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama's church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor's office.

Some animals are more other than others.

Addendum: Apparently those folks at the Guardian also view people like me as "the other" - and as a primitive, apeish ignorant "other" for whom they hold contempt. They have clearly never met me. I'm an Ivy guy, and I wear ties and like guns. Call me a knuckle-dragging redneck if you want to. Story at Jules.

Addendum: From our commenter "People on the left are breaking the teeth of reason on the irrefutable fact of Sarah Palin--the other--as they gnash the grinders in their dismay. They have attacked her strength and accomplishments with sexism; they have belittled her origins with classism; and they have mocked her beliefs, leaving only the shell of their multiculturalism. Thus the lie of identity politics and multiculturalism lay in ruins."

Addendum: The Palin Problem. Rick Moran. One quote:

Most women work because they have to in order to make ends meet or give the family those vital little extras not to mention the fulfillment many women get from the feeling of independence and pride that having a job brings. Politicians have tried for years to address these women directly with varying degrees of success. Democrats have offered child care, family leave, job protections for pregnant women, and the child health insurance program S-CHIP among other programs. Republicans haven’t ignored these women but have not offered much government assistance, preferring tax credits to ease the financial burden on the family.

Palin is the first Republican politician with which these women can truly identify. She speaks their language. She sounds like them. Her family looks like their family. And when she speaks of the mixing of her career and family, she can look directly at the camera and give them a knowing smile of solidarity – as if they were neighbors casually talking over the backyard fence.

Photo is our refined, sophisticated, Euro-sensitive, metrosexual editor Bird Dog. Just your typical American voter...

Looks like we have some hurricane residue headed our way. I am always happy to see that up here - a little visitor from Africa and the tropics. Some left-over Gustav or whatever today, and Hannah on her way up here.

So it looks like a stormy-weather working weekend. Insty picked up a Joyner piece, Rich Work More than "Working Class." No kidding. I guess I qualify as rich although you wouldn't know it: I have only one house, no time-share Citation, and not enough dough to retire at my current manner of living (nor would I want to, because I like being useful).

The quoted NYT piece in the above link begins:

What’s different from [Max] Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.

This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).

Read the whole thing. I work about 55 billable hrs/week - sometimes 60+, except during July and August when things slow down and clients aren't around much. Thank God we barristers aren't unionized.

Unlike the Euroweenies and the socialists, we Americans like to work. Not everybody admits it, but we do.

BTW, read Dr. Bliss' piece below about Seduction, if you missed it (scroll down). Interesting.

My focus group (of one - my wife) sees something special in Sarah Palin, besides her humor, good cheer, and optimism. She said "She is the candidate for the heartland of America. No... for the heart of America. She's not the candidate for New York City or Cambridge or San Francisco, where the elites don't know anybody who ever started up a gas station or a dry cleaner."

Of course, my wife is just a small town Connecticut Wellesley ex-PTA rube.

Dem politicos, via Moonbattery:

It doesn't matter if it's true or not. RUMOR IS TRUTH.

The modern laws of media hype and political warfare have a useful tenet:

Repeat ANYTHING or raise false concern over ANYTHING and it is likely to be planted in the conscious/subconscious of many voters.

If people start to think that there might be something fishy with Palin's last kid (if hers), then that's FINE. One more doubt (whether tied to reality or not) is another hesitation at the ballot box.

GET WITH THE PROGRAM PEOPLE. The "rising above it" bullshit has served us so well in the past, hasn't it?

If you have problems with the story, then STFU and get out of the way of Dems who are engaged in MODERN POLITICAL WARFARE.

That is the face of evil.

Feldman at Am. Thinker begins thus:

I'm a sucker for Frank Capra movies, movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington "which underscore the difference an honest person dedicated to the common weal can make to his community and his country. While today the stories may seem dated and too black and white a depiction of good and evil, they resonate still in American hearts even after decades of public viewing.

We are cock-eyed optimists at heart. And we have been forever in love with the common man (or woman) who loves his family, his God and his neighbors enough to work hard to make their lives rich and full and better than they are.

I do not think I am alone in my love of these stories. And I think that's why the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as Senator McCain's running mate has struck such a powerful nerve among the electorate. She is not a part of any ruling elite. She comes from no moneyed family. Her family and its strengths and problems are familiar to us all. She's smart, courageous, honest and personable.

Read the whole thing.

Via Mod. Voice:

I always thought that the American Promise was for freedom. John Judis clearly thinks otherwise. A quote:

(The speech) fed two other arguments. First, it figured in the liberal or progressive (to use Croly’s term) argument that government has a responsibility to make good on the American promise: through regulating the market, and through providing health insurance and education for all citizens. Second, it figured in Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” argument (that has goes back to the Puritans) that in order to achieve the promise of American life, Americans have to exercise mutual and individual responsibility. People have to be willing to work; parents have to look after their children; corporations cannot behave like brigands. So through this notion of the American promise, Obama united the two historic strands of American liberalism: the older New Deal argument of the 1930s and the “New Democrat” argument of the 1990s.

One America: Finally, Obama invoked his vision of a single America--and he used it not only to put forward the promise of racial reconciliation, but as an attempt to defuse the great social divisions of the last decades over immigration, abortion, gays and guns. And that, too, dovetailed back into the idea of the American promise, which could not be achieved, Obama suggested, if America continued to be rent by incivility and social discord. It was one of the most intellectually elegant speeches I’ve heard. Besides that, I expect that it will do Obama and the Democrats a lot of good in the weeks ahead.

America is indeed divided. There is an America that wants free stuff from other people's labor, energy, and risk-taking, and there is an America that wants freedom and to be left alone by the government, to find its own way through adult life.

We are meant to build our lives, and to live with it. That's what grown-ups do in a free country.

The psychiatrist Krauthammer notes, interestingly, that there is nobody to vouch for Obama. Shrinks are trained to notice things like that: how do people relate, and to whom. Where are the witnesses to his ability? Where are his friends and colleagues? Are there any left? A quote:

So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he's out. Then there's William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He's out. Where are the others?

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger — a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair.

Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

Yes, he does seem like the elegant mysterious stranger who arrived out of nowhere like the Music Man. Immature people without personal foundations fill in those blanks with their own hopes and dreams. The reality is that he is a fine but not extraordinary black preacher/talker who has never done much, who nobody seems to really know, who carries a barely-covert communitarian message which is not my vision of America (except in my own neighborhood, where we all give eachother a hand).

Fantasy is fun, as is ego-tripping. Reality is the problem, and hard reality is often a bummer.

Let's grow up, America, and not feed on pixie-dust.

A quote from a Robert Samuelson piece in the NY Sun:

By all rights, we should be having a fierce debate over the role of government. What should it do, for whom and why? What can we afford? Who should pay? These questions would suggest a campaign that seriously engages the future, but instead, we have a bidding war between candidates to see who can promise the most appealing package of new spending programs and tax cuts...

As we watch the conventions, we should recognize that we've entered an era of fantasy politics. Like fantasy football and baseball, fantasy politics is an exercise in make-believe that is intended to keep its players occupied and to make the winners feel good. Senators Obama and McCain emit pleasing slogans and programs that, as often as not, are disconnected from the country's actual problems they'll encounter in office.

I get 90% of my ideas for my website posts in the shower. And this is probably why.

My morning shower thought for today was this: Why were the top two Dem candidates people who have never accomplished anything substantial or difficult in their lives - other than to be in elections?

(Note to John McCain: An ad asking "Name one thing Obama has accomplished in his life.")

This is not coincidence. Many politicians are not very good at regular life, but these two stand out as having only been good at being, not at life accomplishment. Being female, being black, and being medium-smart and above-average crafty and calculating. They have never run anything, made anything, or done anything: It's all about being them. As Dino notes:

Think about this: most people have someone whom they know or with whom they work, a relative perhaps, who has a thicker résumé and a longer list of achievements than the Democratic presidential candidate. Consider this: if history were different and Senator Obama had decided this year to run to become governor of Illinois, would he have been given rock-star status? Could his Republican opponent have run against him as “too inexperienced” to govern the Prairie State?

These folks are all about Jive Talkin':

Admittedly, I will always tend to vote for the more conservative candidate in any election, even if he or she is brain-damaged. That's because individual freedom and protection of our freedom is my main political agenda. That's my bias. I'm sure the Lefties approach things similarly.

However, my resume (and life experience) is deeper than Obama's or Hillary's, for sure. But that's not saying much.

A quote from a wonderful review of some Pepys books, at Dublin Review of Books:

Given the extraordinary character of Pepys’s journal it is surprising that it is not more central to English culture and self-understanding. After all, (Leopold) Bloom, once a confirmed outsider, is ever present in contemporary Ireland’s attempts to understand itself.  One of Pepys’s nineteenth century admirers, Robert Louis Stevenson, described the diarist as among the greatest men in the annals of mankind, adding: “he has yet placed himself before the public eye with such a fullness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius like Montaigne”. Indeed, there is enough material in the diaries to keep the English costume drama sector busy for many years, yet, notwithstanding this and their unique character, they have failed to make a serious impact on the popular mind in England.

Read the whole thing. Here's his entry from Aug 22, 1665, when he hangs out with one of his girlfriends, Mrs. Bagwell (Mr. Bagwell made himself scarce when Pepys stopped by):

Up, and after much pleasant talke and being importuned by my wife and her two mayds, which are both good wenches, for me to buy a necklace of pearle for her, and I promising to give her one of 60l. in two years at furthest, and in less if she pleases me in her painting, I went away and walked to Greenwich, in my way seeing a coffin with a dead body therein, dead of the plague, lying in an open close belonging to Coome farme, which was carried out last night, and the parish have not appointed any body to bury it; but only set a watch there day and night, that nobody should go thither or come thence, which is a most cruel thing: this disease making us more cruel to one another than if we are doggs. So to the King’s House, and there met my Lord Bruncker and Sir J. Minnes, and to our lodgings again that are appointed for us, which do please me better to day than last night, and are set a doing. Thence I to Deptford, where by appointment I find Mr. Andrews come, and to the Globe, where we dined together and did much business as to our Plymouth gentlemen; and after a good dinner and good discourse, he being a very good man, I think verily, we parted and I to the King’s yard, walked up and down, and by and by out at the back gate, and there saw the Bagwell’s wife’s mother and daughter, and went to them, and went in to the daughter’s house with the mother, and ‘faciebam le cose que ego tenebam a mind to con elle’, and drinking and talking, by and by away, and so walked to Redriffe, troubled to go through the little lane, where the plague is, but did and took water and home, where all well; but Mr. Andrews not coming to even accounts, as I expected, with relation to something of my own profit, I was vexed that I could not settle to business, but home to my viall, though in the evening he did come to my satisfaction. So after supper (he being gone first) I to settle my journall and to bed.

Just as professional journals and newspapers are more interested in printing pieces that support hypotheses rather than papers with negative findings, so we all tend to spend more time discussing the risks of action rather than the risks of inaction.

That seems to be human nature, but it ain't rational and, fortunately, people vary across a spectrum of activity/passivity.

Passive people worry about the risks of action. Active people worry about the risks of inaction. I am more-or-less in the middle.

To discuss that half-intelligently, though, I first need to review the notion of Type 1 and Type 2 errors, now that we have taken a look at the null hypothesis a couple of days ago. 

A Type 1 error, also known as False Positive, is the error of erroneously rejecting the null hypothesis. In other words, it supports a connection which does not really exist.

A Type 2 error, or False Negative, is the error of wrongly accepting the null hypothesis. In other words, it says nothing is there, when it is, in fact, there.

For example, a blood test which has a 10% False Positive rate will wrongly tell you that there is an abnormality 10% of the time. A blood test with a 10% False Negative rate will miss an abnormality 10% of the time.

For another example, convicting an innocent person is a Type 1 error; letting a guilty person go free is a Type 2.

Depending on the matter at hand, either sort of error could have worse consequences. A Type 1 error in a death penalty case is a grievous error. But sometimes you need Type 1 errors.

My favorite example of a good Type 1 error is in the emergency treatment of appendicitis. Since medical diagnosis contains both art and luck as well as science, some error rate is inevitable unless you have the diseased organ in hand. But since a False Negative diagnosis would have dire consequences (ruptured appendix), it is necessary to do some unnecessary appendectomies on patients who might have appendicitis, but do not turn out to. In the case of emergency appendectomies: one study indicates that the Type 1 error rate is around 10%, with 18% False negatives. I would have guessed that the False Positives would be higher, and you could argue that there is room for them to go higher. The point is that, with appendicitis, you want to minimize your False Negatives by having more False Positive diagnoses - by being deliberately biased against the Null Hypothesis that there is nothing there, but without cutting open everyone with a bad stomach ache.

Thus that is the opposite of what you want in a justice system, where the null hypothesis of innocence is presumed in order to minimize False Positives.

Cal Thomas, via LaShawn:

“Obama and others on the evangelical left see government, not individuals or the church, as the instrument by which the commands of Jesus are implemented. In such a doctrinal interpretation, government serves as a kind of “lesser God,” intruding on believers and their commission to do good works, as a means of sharing the gospel message, and concentrating not on the message, but on the implementation of the work itself, which only helps in this life, not the next.”

Right. These people want a theocracy? Americans are the most generous people on earth.

What is college for? I've been writing about that subject recently. Stanley Fish's essay of the above title begins thus:

Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-Mart; and of course the list could be much longer.

So much for the humility of scholars. Read the whole thing.

Two friends of Maggie's Farm, Dennis Keegan and David West, have written this book which has come out today.

An Amazon reviewer says:

This book provides an unbiased review of the major issues of the past 10 years. Heavily researched and footnoted, it provides a much different picture of the United States than what the media paints. If you would like data rather than opinion on the state of the U.S., this is the book to read.

The book description reads:

Streaming headlines, round-the-clock broadcasts--we live in a world of twenty-four hour news. But lately, most of what we read and hear is either negative, biased, or both. Cutting through the gloomy reports and liberal slant are Dennis Keegan and David West with their brand new book, Reality Check: The Unreported Good News About America. Contrary to what the cynical reporters and politicians say, Keegan and West prove that America is still a shining city on a hill, with a low unemployment rate, high GDP, and enviable democracy. These are not opinions, but facts--based on statistics that the media isn't reporting because of political agendas, industry competition, and limited resources. In Reality Check, Keegan and West cut through the bias and spin to reveal:

How our twenty-four hour news culture gives us more inaccurate information, not less
Why the U.S. economy is doing better than we realize
* Why the recent rhetoric and politics of change may do more harm than good

In this age of information saturation, the need to question and critically think about what we're reading and hearing is more important than ever. In Reality Check, Keegan and West show us how to be discerning consumers and why the news about America is much better than the media would have you believe.

A timely book. Check it out.

I am reading one of those books that I've heard about on and off all my life, but never read: Van Wyck Brook's 1937 The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865.

While the book is mainly about the blossoming of American scholarship and literature, I would have to rank the book as a piece of literature itself. Wonderful stuff. It's not literary history - it's history, told in an engaging and often humorous way.

The parts about the remarkable Daniel Webster are hilarious, as are the bits about one of America's first world-renowned eccentric geniuses, Nathaniel Bowditch.

Brooks was one of those old-fashioned scholar-writers who knew everything about everything.

Mary Graber at Pajamas notes that pomo English profs are making Solzhenitsyn disappear. Apparently he did not toe some party line or something. It's a sad piece to read. A quote:

...under “classroom strategies” in the Norton instructor’s manual, teachers are told that they are likely to encounter the problem of students accepting the “truth” of what Solzhenitsyn has to say: “Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction.” Here we have the apologists for communism directing teachers: All that you’ve heard about the brutality of communism is merely part of our “myths and preconceptions.” Students must be reeducated to “resist” the testimony of Solzhenitsyn as dramatized in his fictional account.

The fine rant below is from a commenter on the piece:

I know the tone and tenor of that barbaric gibberish–and that is precisely why I am not in graduate school. Pure shit, from theory to practice, from Lacan’s bunghole to their mouths, this highfalutin’ jargon is a daily testament that the university has gone slumming right off solid ground and into a nihilistic miasma. This is the language of decadence and exhaustion, of cowardice and self-loathing; it is the cadence of suicide, the scholarly language of insanity.

I do not feel pity for people who write and talk like that anymore (but imagine how diseased and fallow their souls must be like to have these pale shadows of ideas running around in their minds all day and night); I feel contempt toward their presumption to teach, and anger at their pestilential influence on the world around them. Word by word, phrase by phrase, they are putting young souls to sleep, droning on while the great project of human completion dies on their watch. To Hell with them, dead souls, empty-headed, clarifactors and frauds, apologists for evil, over-ripe fruit, they are the last men, the enemies of Rabelais and Goethe, they should be put in stocks and have rotten tomatoes thrown at them.

Bravo, commenter. Well-said. Solzhenitsyn himself warned about such fashionable nonsense in his famous 1978 Harvard Commencement speech (audio and print). If you haven't read or heard it, I recommend it.