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Progressivism got them there . . .

Wow. Then there were four. The remaining viable presidential candidates America has to chose from are now:
a woman,
a mixed-race man,
a white man who's Irish and Roman Catholic,
a white man who's a Mormon.

Embracing diversity is a value that progressives and liberals hold dear. Liberalism and progressivism made the above impressively diverse array of candidates possible. Conservatism did not. Conservatism failed to aid the forebears of every single viable candidate now running to become President of the United States.

Conservatism did not give women the vote, it resisted it.
Conservatism did not free slaves or end segregation, it resisted them both.
Conservatism did not champion the rights of Irish immigrants, it resisted them.
Conservatism did not tolerate religious diversity, it resisted it.

Every viable presidential candidate now running is where they are today in real part through progressives, reformers, liberals fighting hard. (And, yes, some of those reformers worked within fairly conservative organizations; but that's what made them reformers: they were the exception, not the rule; they made conservatism...a bit less conservative.)

Two of those candidates have strong records of championing diversity in the republic, in the workplace and at home, and fighting for the rights of minorities--Latinos, gay Americans, non-Christians, and others.

Two of those candidates represent a political party with a now decades-old record of opposition to diversity. In fact, at least one of those two candidates is most probably to the left of the base of his party on current immigration issues.

Analysis by Harper's Index shows that the percentage change in the number of Hispanic voters in the US between 2000 and 2008 is +122%.

Diversity matters, and political movements in America that resist diversity have thus far always ended up weakened or dead.

The test will be to see how these four candidates respond to opportunities to embrace diversity. Actually, all the candidates have blemishes on their record relative to diversity. Obviously, some of the blemishes are bigger than others. Obviously, some candidates have more blemishes than others.

Now is the time for these candidates' to show that those instances were in the past.

If Obama were a woman or Hillary black

New York’s Democratic Primary is on "Super Tuesday," February 5th, and I'm still undecided between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama.

On one hand, some of the polls scare me: they show Hillary doing much better than Obama does against any potential GOP nominee, including Sen. McCain, in key states like Florida and Ohio.

On the other hand, I tell myself that Obama might draw an amazing wave of first-time voters and voters registered Independent who would help him win in November’s general election.

But I'm not sure.

From the pro-Clinton angle: There are many hard-working, progressive Democrats who are legitimately concerned about the lack of specifics in Obama’s lofty rhetoric, or the almost mimicry-like quality of the delivery of his speech, which do not so much evoke Martin Luther King, Jr. as imitate him. Also, Obama’s not performed spectacularly well in the debates. What is more, the Clinton’s can fight dirty and fight to win, and Hillary Clinton is probably better positioned to take on the gargantuan rightwing noise machine than is Obama. I think many, many Democrats’ hearts are with Obama but their heads are with Hillary. Many Democrats want to believe that Obama could win in November, but they genuinely fear that a person of color just cannot win in America. The question becomes: how much of a risk will Democrats take on February 5th, will hope outweigh pragmatism?

From the pro-Obama angle: There are many hard-working, progressive Democrats who been very turned off by the way Sen. Clinton, candidate, and Pres. Clinton, powerful spouse, have become mega-candidate: "The Clinton’s." Increasingly, it’s no longer just Hillary’s campaign; it's become a co-candidacy and raised the potential of a co-presidency. This is not good in an era of genuine "Clinton fatigue." Additionally, the Clinton campaign has been pretty nasty to Obama. They were very disingenuous—intellectually dishonest—when they attacked Obama for supposedly endorsing Reagan’s legacy. He clearly noted that the Republicans articulated big ideas and inspired in the early 1970's and 1980's in a way Democrats failed to. That is simply true--a statement of fact. Obama didn’t say those ideas were good, however, or that what was accomplished through (and sometimes under cover of) inspiring sentiments had good outcomes: massive debt, making government the enemy, and illegal covert operations being just three of them. The Republicans invested (literally, with talent backed by money for think tanks, publications, and college groups) in those ideas, in communicating them, and finding a great communicator who represented the ideas with a friendly face.

Of course, it also has to be noted that before the issue of Obama mentioning Reagan, Obama’s surrogates were very disingenuous—intellectually dishonest—when they accused Sen. Clinton of failing to acknowledge Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy merely because she noted that President Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, the person who signed the Civil Rights Act. He signed it and it cost him and the Democrats politically to do so. This is not to diminish the fact that working towards great achievements like the Civil Rights Act cost M. L. King, Jr. far more over a far longer time of struggle, and eventually his very life!

I am not sure who I’ll vote for. And it's impossible to keep race and gender out of the picture. A black person becoming president would, I admit, in my eyes seem sort of like the tardy validation of Emancipation that the heinous era of Jim Crow laws interrupted, reversed even. On the other hand, a woman becoming president would in my eyes seem a tardy validation of women's enfranchisement but a simple catching up, for goodness sake: the UK, Germany, Israel, have all had women political leaders running their country, as have India, Canada, Finland, Argentina, Chile, the Philippines, Iceland, Ireland, and several more.

Yes, I know of the policy differences between Hillary and Obama. The differences aren't great compared to any Republican candidate for president, and frankly both Hillary and Obama are moderates--and, frankly, more moderate on many issues than am I. So in the end, I don't think policy matters will decide it for me. It's going to be a gut instinct, I think, and may yet be informed between now and February 5th by conversations with friends.

We shall see.

January 20 . . . 1 year left.

Today is an unofficial holiday for the reason evident in this snapshot of a keychain of mine.

One of my favorite muses in the blogosphere said it well:

Sunday, January 20th, will mark one year until Bush and Cheney leave office. Just think: every calendar day that passes from Sunday on will be the last one they serve as president and vice president.

January 21st will be their last January 21st.
March 18th---the day we invaded Iraq---will be their last March 18th.
May 1st---"Mission Accomplished" day---will be their last May 1st.
June 20th---"Last throes of the insurgency" day---will be their last June 20th.
September 2nd---"Heckuva job, Brownie" day---will be their last September 2nd.

Defending science education

Recently there was yet another attempt to force Creationism into the science classrooms of America as if it was a valid scientific concept on par with the theory of evolution. The theory of biological evolution is basically that species originate as a result of heritable changes in a population passed down over many generations. (Here is another good version of a simple definition of biological evolution.)

These latest attempts to insert Creationism into the science classroom are being made in Florida, but they happen frequently all over America. They are usually the work of conservative Christians who believe or wish to believe that God created all species more or less in accordance with a literalistic reading of the creation stories in the Old Testament, in other words, more or less instantly, like magic.

These Creationist attempts to inject religion into the classroom, are essentially political actions, and a manifestation of the religious right. Another version of Creationism is "Intelligent Design" Creationism, the non-scientific belief that that some unverifiable "agent"--perhaps God--set the evolution of species in motion, perhaps guides it, and perhaps initiated it with a common ancestor for all life of Earth. An even more watered down version of Creationism is that God is evolution's ultimate initiator, even if not its ongoing guide.

It is mendacious to insinuate or claim that Creationism or the other versions of it, like Intelligent Design, are scientific. The language of the recent Florida proposal displays ignorance about evolution, describing evolution as something concerning "how the universe was formed," and referring to it as one of "several theories." It didn't starkly proclaim evolution as one of "several scientific theories," but it is implied.

The truth is, quite simply, that the only scientific theory we have for the origin of species is evolution, and it is extremely well-founded.

Like the theories of gravity, germs, and plate tectonics, evolution is a formal scientific theory. By theory it is meant that it is well-established and overarching--it has both breadth and depth in terms of evidence and relevance.

When science uses the term "theory" formally, the term does not mean an idea based on idle or slightly-informed conjecture. That is how the term is used most frequently in casual conversationally--basically meaning, "a guess."

In science, formal theory status is a grand achievement, indicating that the theory consists of multiple, interrelated lines of repeatedly verified evidence, that the theory has been to a critical degree (and will continue to be) honed through the falsification or validation of predictions based upon it, thereby leading to better understanding of the theory. As always, these predictions will be rejected or accepted based on evidence that is open to peer review--that is, other scientists will challenge the evidence or interpretations of it.

Creationists (and many other people) routinely misunderstand how science works, and mistakenly interpret disagreements among scientists regarding evolution as an indication that evolution itself is a weak theory or that anything like a significant number of scientists don't hold to it. The opposite is true. Disagreements among scientists about evolution do not indicate a weakness in the theory of evolution; rather they are demonstrations of the scientific process in action: debate, examination of evidence, and competition among scientists as they attempt to falsify or verify propositions.

This happens in physics all of the time and no one bellows or hollers that, for instance, gravity isn't true, or that "other theories" besides gravity should be taught in science class as explanations for why objects fall or why you don't fly off the Earth as it spins. For instance, the theory of gravity is and has been perfected and revised based on evidence. When Albert Einstein in the early 1900's enhanced our understanding of gravity with his General Theory of Relativity, he presented something radical in light of to what Isaac Newton had discovered before him about gravity, but that did not mean that suddenly gravity ceased to exist! Newton's equations--which were generations-old by the time Einstein learned them--still worked even after Einstein enhanced our understanding of gravitation with his own scientific discoveries.

In much the same way as Einstein's scientific work built on Newton's, forced us to reconsider it and look at it in a new way, but did not invalidate the basics of either Newton's discoveries or the basic understanding of the laws of attraction that we call gravity, our understanding of the theory of evolution can improve when evidence--data--comes onto the scene and is considered in light of previous evidence. If new evidence seems to contradict old evidence, it may mean scientists got something wrong within the theory, but not that the theory overall is no longer the best scientific understanding for the origin of species.

An example of this is how scientists once hypothesized (or we could say, "theorized," using the term more casually) that humans descended from Neanderthals. Now, the preponderance of evidence, including genetic evidence, is that we are not descended from Neanderthals, but rather that Neanderthals and humans are descended from a common, earlier ancestor. But either way, the theory of evolution stands.

Our understanding of evolution can be improved not just by one set of evidence competing against another set of evidence, but also by new evidence adding to prior evidence, even in unexpected ways. For instance, Charles Darwin, who is credited with first coherently formulating the basics of the theory of evolution in 1855 in his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, knew nothing of genes. The scientific field of study known as genetics did not even exist in Darwin's day. Genetics greatly enhances our understanding of evolution by explaining how heredity works--by explaining how parents pass on traits to their offspring. (They do it by passing on molecules called DNA.) Darwin knew heredity happened. He could see that traits were passed down from parents to offspring. But he had no real idea how it all happened, and freely admitted that the missing "how" was very important to better understanding evolution.

Genetics explained the "how" of heredity, thereby adding hugely to our understanding of evolution, and by the early 1900's adding an entire new field of study--genetics--that both supports and refines the theory of evolution, just as geology--the study of rocks and soil--supports the theory of evolution by demonstrating that the Earth is very old indeed, and that the evidence of the thousands of millions of years of Earth's existence is all around us.

This is why it's ignorant to do as Creationists do and gleefully misinterpret disagreements between scientists about aspects of evolution as reason to doubt the overall theory. Science is about disagreements over evidence; and is about new interpretations challenging or enhancing old ones.

Imagine if two medical doctors disagreed over the best sort of treatment for an infection. One doctor proposes a radical new treatment that is based on the surprising findings of experiments he or she has completed. The other doctor prefers the old treatments. This situation doesn't mean that suddenly germs don't exist! Or that Louis Pasteur's germ theory is fundamentally not true! If two doctors disagree with each other about how to treat infections are you going to stop cooking your meat before you eat it or stop washing your hands if they are dirty because you assume (or hope) that it means that germs don't actually exist! You wouldn't say, "Oh, there is a new drug out for fighting staph infections, I guess instead I should follow 'another theory' about all this, such as one that says infections come from the will of God. If I just pray and please God, I'll never again have to cook my chicken breasts before I eat them." That might sounds silly, but remember, in the past people have believed all sorts of unscientific things--that depression was caused by demons, that plagues were spread by poor ventilation or creeping swamp gas, and that gold could be created from lead.

This is why it is so worrying that organized anti-science groups routinely spend so much money and time every year to convince parents, administrators, and occasionally ill-trained educators to put non-scientific ideas about the origins of species into the science classrooms of American public schools. (And there are such groups in other nations, too, including the United Kingdom and Canada; and in some Muslim countries teaching evolution is extremely rare.)

Imagine a group arguing that medical schools must let witch doctors and astrologists teach courses on how voodoo and horoscopes are vital to understanding surgical medicine. Would you want your surgeon to have gone to such a medical school before he operates on you? Would you rather that your doctor revealed to you before he operated on you, "I picked the best time for this surgery based on past medical experience and recent evidence-based studies published in medical journals;" or, "I picked the best time for this surgery based on my star chart. I'm a Gemini, by the way."

If you won't allow such gobbledygook non-science from your surgeon, then certainly don't allow such gobbledygook non-science--almost always religion- and politics-driven--into the science classroom as

*evolution is "only a theory," or
*there are "numerous theories" about the origin of species, or
*scientific evidence exists for an "intelligent designer" at the root of evolution, or
*something divine or supernatural is the only explanation for the complexity of an organism or of life, or
*disagreements among scientists mean that the underlying reality of evolution is shaky.

To allow such as the above is to allow non-science into education.

Now, some people may believe such supernatural non-science very deeply. They might even claim that you are being offensive to them or may even argue that you're being closed-minded (even "unscientific") because you don't want their beliefs to be introduced into the science classroom. If they are offended, then suggest that they ask themselves why they are offended, and leave it at that. You should not need to apologize for supporting quality science education for the children of the United States.

Here is a free documentary--in 12 short and easy-to-view segments--that you can watch on your computer. The documentary, Judgment Day, is just one chapter (with a happy ending) in the ongoing story (still unfinished) of how religion and politics embolden anti-science crusaders to push Creationism into the science classroom.

You can learn more about evolution from these free online lectures or from the online project, Understanding Evolution, particularly the Evolution 101 section originally designed for teachers. If you would like to support the work of defenders of quality education about evolution in America's classrooms, please join the non-partisan not-for-profit organization, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

The Anglosphere

On January 15, 1993, I arrived in Britain for the first time. I took courses at the University of London and interned for the Labour Party Spokesman on Energy, Martin O'Neill, MP. Now seems as good of a time as any to highlight from The Economist this look at US-UK success (and one could include Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere) as described in Russell Mead's new book "on why the much-loathed Anglo-Saxons have kept on winning—and messing up,"

The anglosphere's long streak of luck has preoccupied the losers more than the winners. Winston Churchill excepted, most Britons don't like being tied to modern America; Americans can't see what ancient Britain has to do with them. Yet for outsiders the link between the English-speaking peoples was horribly clear from the start: only a few years after the American revolution the French were sending back horrified reports that New England really was new England in spirit.

Outsiders also have plenty of explanations for the anglosphere's success. Some of them are unworthy (with anti-Semitism a constant theme) but most centre on the idea that the winners relied on perfidy and violence abroad and cruelty and inequality at home. In the old East Germany, officials had a list of terms to describe Britons: “paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators.” A Muslim journalist observes: “We worship God by loathing America.”

And Mead also sees this trend of the last 300 or so years:

Anglo-Saxons have a rotten record of predicting what will come next, nearly always declaring some version of a new world order, only for a new evil to emerge. Often they seem blissfully unaware of the ire their success has caused.

Neiwart exposes Goldberg's bizarro history

Dave Neiwart exposes the radical idiocy of the politics-driven argument that there's any such thing as "liberal fascism," and points out that the argument is akin to Newspeak.

The argument about liberals supposedly being fascists boils down to noticing that the German word for socialist was in the official name of the Nazi party, and then finding token policies, projects, habits or quotes of the Nazi regime or its leaders that ape liberal ideas either in truth or based on stereotypes.

When I think about what Hitler did to liberals in Nazi Germany and how the last bastion to defend Germany was the Catholic labor front--until the Pope told the unions to stand down (See John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, 1999.)--I am angered by the gross intellectual dishonesty at the heart of any argument that fascism is liberal or liberals are fascists.

Neiwart, who is founder of the blog Orcinus, lays out the honest facts:

Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism.
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The term "fascism" certainly is overused and abused. The public understanding of it is fuzzy at best, and academics struggle to agree on a definition.

But there are:

certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" -- that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously -- no, viciously -- anti-liberal.
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[T]he "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist.

More here.

A big year for faith in American civil religion

From Jeff Sharlet at The Revealer:

The truth is that [Democratic presidential candidate Barak] Obama's faith -- and his pastor -- are more conservative than the press understands, and [Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's] religion isn't as hick as the hacks covering the campaign imagine.

Huck sounds like William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner; Obama, with a better claim to almost all of Bryan's positions, sounds like Norman Vincent Peale, the conservative "apostle of posititive thinking." Were Peale alive to today, he'd likely hold his nose and vote for low-class Huck, fried squirrels and all. (Were Bryan alive, he'd run away with the nomination.) Both candidates look like they might represent the "third way" more and more rank-and-file evangelical haqve been waiting for. Such Christians are conservative on sex, paternalistic on poverty, and more inclined to support missionaries than militarism. They're big on government and big on God, which means the results on Iowa portend a big year for faith in the main event of American civil religion.

Oral tradition, literacy, and television viewing

From the article in The New Yorker, "Twilight of the Books," by Caleb Crane. Soon after a study on how literacy affects the way people think, by Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole in the 1970's, Walter J. Ong conducted his own. Crane summarizes:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

The television is a tool, not an environment. It should be applied judiciously.

The antagonism between words and moving images seems to start early. In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a child’s development. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found “little room for doubt” that television worsened performance in reading, science, and math. The relationship wasn’t a straight line but “an inverted check mark”: a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed that the younger children were watching educational shows, and, indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches “Sesame Street” is likely to have higher grades even in high school. Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.

Losing reading:

the N.E.A. reports that readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs, and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote. Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote, “all he can do is give us desires.” Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.

Hillary as source of pride

From Joan Walsh over at Salon.com:

Being the underdog suits [Hillary Clinton]. Clinton's resurgence in the last two days had a lot to do with her sudden accessibility, spontaneity and, yes, even vulnerability.
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But I'm also wary of overemphasizing the tea-and-sympathy vote in Clinton's win. NBC exit polls also found that Democratic voters said she was the candidate most ready to be commander in chief.
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But I also have to take in that every place I went in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton got her biggest hand when she or supporters emphasized the historic nature of her run as the first credible female presidential candidate.... It now looks like the Democrats will have a historic first whomever they nominate.

Hillary might even bring to the polls more first-time voters than is currently being thought possible. As we near the election, an increasing number of voters may chose to vote for her in order to be a part of history: electing the first female president. There's also the possibility that no small number of voters will respond to pollsters saying that they'll vote for her, will not do so, and then will say that they did--a Wilder Effect of sorts.

(Photo: Clinton rally in Oakland, California. San Francisco Chronicle.)

Obama as both payback and moving on

Gary Kamiya over at Salon.com considering the possibility of Obama's "double magic" -

[T]he idea of Barack Obama and the reality of the man are not necessarily the same thing. If the senator from Illinois becomes president, he may or may not do a better job than his two worthy Democratic rivals. But there are times when the symbolic aspect of politics is inescapable -- and creates its own reality.

In short, Obama can represent getting beyond anger (right now, mostly anger at Bush, with his deservedly abysmal approval rating).

[A]nger can itself become a toxin, self-perpetuating and self-destructive.... To fall into a state of permanent anger, of righteous indignation, is to become the very enemy you are fighting. This is the error that George W. Bush made when he launched his Manichean "war on terror," and turned America into a country far more like its fundamentalist enemies than it had ever been before.

Barack Obama's unique appeal is that he allows voters -- Democrats, independents and fed-up Republicans alike -- to simultaneously express their anger and transcend it. As a political outsider, as a black man, as someone who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, Obama is the antithesis of both Bushism and the mainstream Bush-lite Democratic stance on Iraq. Yet Obama's entire message is one of reconciliation and unity, the belief that even the most implacable foes can come together. And it's his race that seals the deal. As a mixed-race black man appealing to whites without using traditional racial guilt codes, he is the living proof of his own credo.
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Christopher Hitchens has correctly pointed out that...automatically calling [Obama] "black" reinforces the pernicious one-drop rule. But paradoxically, the fact that Obama is seen as black is precisely what will help America to get beyond rigid racial categories like the racist one-drop rule....Anyone who can contemplate the idea that America could elect a black president without feeling a sense of national pride is cynical indeed.

(Photo: Obama rally in Oakland, California. By Christina Koci Hernandez, Oakland Chronicle.)