The Noble Lie-3: The Noble Lie applied to religion

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

One place where one hears the argument about the virtues of the Noble Lie is in the case of religion.

Atheists are sometimes criticized for undermining belief in god because some sophisticated religious people feel that even if there is no god, believing in one may serve some good ends by helping people overcome personal adversity, prevent them from doing evil things, and even inspire them to do great things.

Some political thinkers feel that religion plays an important role in maintaining social order and seek to perpetuate religious beliefs even if they themselves are unbelievers. Seneca (circa 4 BCE-65 CE) argued that belief in god is a fraud perpetrated on the public in order to sustain a ruling class: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
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The Noble Lie-2: The Noble Lie as a deliberate political strategy

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

One might think that the idea of the Noble Lie existed only in ancient times where access to education was reserved for a small elite. But the proponents of the Noble Lie exist to this day.

A long and fascinating article titled Origin of the Specious: Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin? by Ronald Bailey that appeared in the July 1997 issue of Reason magazine lays out how leading neoconservatives such as the late Irving Kristol (father of the always-wrong current neoconservative William Kristol) have been arguing against the theory of evolution because of the fear that it might undermine religious beliefs, even though they themselves are often not religious at all and consider themselves pro-science. Such people feel that religion is needed for social stability and must be preserved for that reason alone, even if it is a false belief that might harm scientific advances.
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The Noble Lie-1: The slippery slope from benign to evil

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

As children, we are repeatedly told that we must tell the truth at all times. But despite the indoctrination, all of us lie in small and sometimes big ways because we are weak or because we feel trapped in a situation where lying is the only way to escape without harming ourselves. However, all except pathological liars know that they are doing something wrong when they lie for those and similar self-serving reasons and feel guilty about it.

But while it is generally agreed that truth is preferable to falsehood, the idea that truth is a fundamental virtue that trumps all others does not always hold true. One can easily think of scenarios where lying for immediate tactical advantage is not only not wrong but is actually a virtuous act, say in order to save someone’s life by misdirecting a killer. But most people would agree that apart from such extreme situations, lying is to be avoided.

More difficult situations are those in which no serious harm is threatened but the lie might benefit others. So for example, we might lie to protect a co-worker who might lose her job if we told the truth or people may tell lies to benefit the company they work for because to tell the truth might result in the company being hurt and many people losing their jobs.

But what about in the world of ideas? Is true knowledge always preferable to false beliefs? Some would argue that even here it may be acceptable or even desirable to lie but I feel that this line should not be crossed. All people should be encouraged to seek the truth, even if it may destroy cherished beliefs. Furthermore, the reason that something is false is because either the evidence contradicts it, or the arguments in favor of it don’t make sense, or believing it leads to logical contradictions. Encouraging people to believe in false things is to also encourage them to discount the value of evidence and to abandon their reasoning skills and this can making them easy prey for liars and charlatans and demagogues.

One often hears the case made that believing false things can be beneficial. One can think of many situations where people choose to propagate falsehoods over truth for what they believe are benign or even positive reasons. For example, parents often deliberately tell their children things they know to be false (like the stories about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy) and these are thought to be harmless, because at some point the children are told the truth if they haven’t figured it out for themselves. Even though this deception is probably harmless, when children learn that they were deceived by the people they trust the most, they may become somewhat cynical.

Furthermore, there is the danger that this attitude can be extended to assert that it is acceptable to tell even adults lies ‘for their own good’. Political leaders often fall prey to this temptation, thinking that people cannot handle the truth, that they must do things ‘in the public interest’ that the actual public may not agree with, and the only way to do that is to lie. The trap here is obvious. There is a very thin line that separates telling lies for the benefit of the people being lied to, and telling lies that benefit the liars themselves. It is all too easy for political leaders to think that only they have the wisdom and judgment to understand the complexities of a situation and the action it demands, and treat the public as simpletons who must be fed some bogus story to get them to agree to a pre-determined action.

The war against Iraq was such a case. It was based on falsehoods that were clearly known to be falsehoods by those who took the country into war. Were the leaders self-aware that they were cynically manipulating public opinion in order to achieve crass goals of power and money that they knew the public would not support? Most people would agree that that would be wrong.

But what if the leaders were engaged in what they thought was a ‘Noble Lie’, because they thought they were serving a greater good that the public was too naïve to understand if they were told the truth? I would argue that it would still be wrong. The idea of a Noble Lie depends upon the notion that the people who can deal with the unvarnished truth consist of a small elite, while the mass of people are either incapable of understanding it or are too fragile to handle the truth and thus must be protected from this knowledge.

Such an attitude is condescending and profoundly anti-democratic that feeds on, as well as nourishes, the self-regard of the people who espouse it. Such people invariably think of themselves as part of the elite who can handle the truth and should know it. You never hear people demanding that they be lied to.

Next in the series: The Noble Lie as a deliberate political strategy

POST SCRIPT: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Here is a clip of Jack Nicholson’s speech in the film A Few Good Men, where he argues that a few people must make hard and unpleasant and secret decisions, even if they are criminal, in order to protect the very people who object to such acts. It is a good example of the mentality behind the Noble Lie.

Film review: Avatar (Spoiler alert!)

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I suspect that my spoiler warning will not matter much because going by the box office records this film is setting, I may have been one of the last people to see it last weekend.

I don’t usually go to see much-hyped blockbusters as they are often overly focused on action for its own sake and thus not the kinds of films I enjoy but I felt that I should see Avatar. At the beginning of each semester, I ask my students various questions to help me get to know them better and one of these is their favorite film. Many of them replied that it was Avatar, which made me intrigued as to what was so appealing, especially since some of my faculty colleagues also said it was their favorite film ever. (I also ask students their favorite book and this year for the first time many students said Harry Potter, which suggests that the first generation of students for whom those books were a formative reading experience are now entering college.)
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Film review: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I realized that I hadn’t discussed a film that deals with evolution and intelligent design (ID), topics that are central to this blog, so here is my long overdue review.

Frankly, Expelled is a mess. The film is polemical but that is not the problem. There is nothing wrong with having a point of view and making the case for it. The creators of Expelled have a story to tell of a scientific community (especially biologists) acting like a totalitarian cabal that demands Darwinian orthodoxy from all scientists and expels heretics from their midst, by denying them tenure, rejecting their papers, and firing them. All those who would even dare to whisper that evolution may be wrong and that there is a possibility that a designer is at work in life processes are victimized, ostracized, and expelled from the academy.

To tell this story, the narrator Ben Stein basically tries to copy Michael Moore’s patented shtick of the bemused Everyman, just a simple guy who has a childlike belief in truth and justice, trying to figure out what’s going on, and constantly being surprised at all the chicanery and bad intentions that he stumbles across almost by accident. In Stein’s case, he acts like a naïf who assumes that scientists were open to every possibility and every alternative theory and he is shocked, just shocked, at the extent they are willing to go to suppress ideas that they see as contradicting Darwin, and the appalling lengths they will go to destroy the people who are brave enough to do so.

Stein starts off by speaking to five scientists and a journalist who say their careers were destroyed because they criticized aspects of evolution and spoke in favor of intelligent design. I am not going to examine the validity of these claims since they have already been scrutinized here, but will instead focus on the filmic aspects.

The major difference between Moore and Stein is that Moore has a deft touch with comedy. He knows how to make people laugh by inserting verbal, visual, and musical gags that can startle the viewer into laughter while at the same time making an important and serious point. With his huge bulk, disheveled appearance, and trademark baseball cap, Moore comes across as a big lug, a doofus, a regular guy confronting the rich and powerful.

Stein, by contrast, looks throughout the film like an undertaker having a bad day. He seems to never crack a smile and speaks in a monotone. We see a lot of him walking everywhere in a dark suit and sneakers, with an inflectionless voiceover narration, and interviewing people with a dour expression.

The filmmakers have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the word ‘overkill’ is not in their vocabulary. The tone is set right at the beginning, with stark black and white images of the Berlin Wall going up as dismayed onlookers watch helplessly. The Berlin Wall is a central metaphor throughout the film. (The scientific community wants to prevent the free flow of ideas, just like the Communists, get it?)

From then on, we get repeated black and white stock film footage of Nazi and Communist soldiers marching in formation (the scientific community marching in lockstep, get it?). We also see lots of footage from what seems like old school education filmstrips and newsreels and films, with the grimacing, scowling faces of old wrinkled people (the hidebound nature of the scientific old guard, get it?) and slapstick comedy (the childish arguments against intelligent design, get it?).

And then there is Hitler. There is always Hitler. Religious people never seem to get enough of Hitler. They seem to think he is an argument against evolution and atheism even though Hitler was a Catholic and his entire program of mass extermination was carried out by a nation of presumably devout Catholics and Lutherans. We see images of Nazi death camps and hear much about their eugenics program. The claim is made that the theory of evolution leads in a straight line to eugenics, which in turn leads to not only the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps but also to euthanasia and abortion. In other words, when you accept evolution, you embrace a culture of death. The scientific community apparently just loves the thought of killing people in huge numbers. Oh, and Stalin appears in the film too but Pol Pot does not. He must have ended up on the cutting room floor.

The heavy-handed allusions last right up to the end. The film concludes with clips of Reagan making his famous speech calling for the Berlin wall to be torn down, juxtaposed with cuts to Stein concluding a speech to some college students, exhorting them to break free of the chains of scientific orthodoxy and fight for freedom. As the students stand and cheer Stein at the end of his speech, the film cuts away to the Berlin wall being brought down by young people. The take-home message is clear: Stein=Reagan and Evolutionists=Berlin wall. The self-aggrandizement is so painfully obvious as to be cringe-inducing.

The film was interesting to me in that it gave me a glimpse of some of the people in this debate whom I had not seen before. Evolutionist (and atheist) P. Z. Myers, author of the blog Pharyngula that has a pugnacious, take-no-prisoners writing style, comes across as low-key, soft-spoken, and mild-mannered. Mathematician David Berlinski, an apologist for intelligent design, comes across as smug, supercilious, condescending, and thoroughly unpleasant.

Richard Dawkins is of course the person the ID people hate and he gets a lot of questioning from Stein, mainly to highlight the fact that he thinks evolution and science tend to support and encourage atheism. Stein goes to great pains to get Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous atheist, to explicitly say that he does not believe in any god. In fact, after Dawkins has made it quite clear that he thinks the idea of god is absurd, Stein starts listing the gods of the various religions individually by name, asking him if he believes in each. Dawkins’s expression clearly signals that it is beginning to dawn on him that he may be talking to an idiot. He asks, “How could I? Why would I? Why would you even need to ask? Any god, anywhere, would be completely incompatible with anything I’ve said.”

Stein spends a lot of time in the film talking about the origin of life and the fact that we do not as yet have a good theory of how the first self-replicating molecule and the first cell appeared, even though neither the theory of evolution nor intelligent design has anything to say about this question. The reason is, of course, that religious people’s last resort is to insert god as an explanation for whatever question science has not yet answered, and the origin of life and the origin of the cosmos is their Little Big Horn, their last stand. But even here, they will meet the same fate as Custer.

One of the chief negatives about ID is that it is a useless theory that does not make any predictions or provide the basis for any research program. The film did not provide any either, because there is none. In the DVD edition though, it promised a bonus segment dealing with the practical applications of ID. This I had to see. It lasted a little less than three minutes and dealt with just two items: a neurosurgeon who looked at how engineers designed buffer systems and used that idea to understand how blood pressure to the brain is modulated, and another person who said that he thought a part of a cancer cell looked like a turbine (which is of course designed) and used that idea in his research.

That was truly pathetic. Scientists borrow ideas from other areas all the time. The fact that you got an idea from something that was designed and used it to understand the workings of a biological system is not evidence for the truth of ID. Doing science means postulating mechanisms that enable one to predict new outcomes and do experiments to test hypotheses. After all these years and all that money, ID still has not done any of that basic science and this is the truth that they cannot hide from.

ID is rejected by the scientific community because it has failed as science, not because of any grand conspiracy to keep it from exposing the weakness of evolution. This film is, at the end, a confession of this failure.

POST SCRIPT: Obama’s disingenuousness

In his State of the Union address, Obama said the following concerning the current health care reform plan being discussed by Congress, whose weaknesses I have discussed here and here:

“[I]f anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.”

Really? He hasn’t heard of the single payer option, the Medicare-for-all option, and the public option? All of these things would achieve all his goals and have been widely discussed. It was he and his cronies in Congress who went out of their way to make sure that they were never seriously considered.

To pretend that he is open to better ideas is simply a flat out lie. He sold out to the health industry and all his fine words cannot hide that ugly truth.

The end of politics-7: Obama the faux liberal and his apologists

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

For the previous posts in this series, see here.

John R. MacArthur says that it is becoming increasingly obvious that Obama is a faux liberal. But his deluded fans still seem to think that he has some deep progressive plan that is hidden from the rest of us, and twist themselves into logical pretzels to make the case. MacArthur says that Obama’s speeches at West Point and at Oslo (the latter accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while making the case for war) reveal “two breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic liberal reform.” Glenn Greenwald describes the ‘classic Obama strategy’: “pretty words, rhetorical appeals to lofty ideals, self-congratulatory preening, accompanied by many of the same policies that were long and vehemently condemned by him and most of his supporters.”
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The end of politics-6: Obama on social issues

For the previous posts in this series, see here.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The stylized and ritualized politics of the one party state that I have been describing has gone on for a long time but the façade is once again slipping, as it does periodically in times of real hardship. The rank and file of both parties is becoming more restive as they realize that elections come and go but their interests keep getting ignored.

On the Republican side, the rise of ‘tea-bagger’ activism as symbolized by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is one symptom. This is a truly crazy, religious, nativist, and paranoid movement that is obsessed that Obama represents some dangerous socialist/fascist/Muslim threat. Apart from the lack of any semblance of reason, the fact that they cannot see that Obama is firmly wedded to the capitalist framework and is a faithful servant of Wall Street shows how ignorant these people are of the realities of politics. But their rise is a symbol of popular frustration with the current state of politics.

The problem the Republican party leaders face is how to keep these crazies within the party fold while not letting them take over the actual leadership because that would be a disaster for the party. What the business and financial oligarchy that actually runs this country want are dependable, steady, reasonable-sounding, puppet leaders who can mask pro-war/pro-business/anti-people polices with silken words. Someone just like Obama, in fact. The oligarchy does not like populist bomb-throwers of any kind, right or left, because such people are unreliable and unpredictable and cannot be depended upon to faithfully follow Wall Street’s agenda down the line.

Of course, this collusion by the two parties’ leaderships to favor the war and business interests of the country can only succeed if this reality is hidden and for that they need an important ally. The mainstream media has to perpetuate the myth that we have two ideological parties that fiercely oppose each other and the rise of the tea-baggers gives them an excuse to perpetuate that myth even though the things that the tea-baggers care about do not even come close to addressing the pro-war/pro-business consensus on which the two parties operate. But their vocal presence perpetuates the illusion that we have two parties that are diametrically opposed on policies, when in reality the policies on which they differ are almost entirely social ones.

This is not to say that the social issues are not important. They can affect individuals and selected groups significantly. Obama has done some positive things, such as reversing the restrictions on overseas aid that allows for family planning and abortion. His Justice Department has stopped prosecuting those who use marijuana for medical purposes as long as they conform to state laws, thus reversing a harshly punitive Bush policy. And he has lifted the restrictions on federal funding on embryonic stem cell research. While these are not trivial steps, and have significant impact on some groups, it should be obvious that these are things that do not touch the privileges of the oligarchy.

One can also expect Obama to take a more positive attitude towards gays, though even here he seems to be moving much more cautiously there than the situation warrants. His decision to reverse the Bush policy of not backing a United Nations declaration to decriminalize homosexuality is to be welcomed, but he seems to be hesitant to repeal either the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in the military or the infamous Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by Bill Clinton), and he also has not come out in support the rights of gays to marry.

Obama’s caution on the gay issue is a bit strange because I really think that the gay community has won its battle to achieve justice. Not that they have actually achieved equality (far from it) but we are now on an irreversible course in which it is only a matter of time (I give it ten years) until gays have the same rights as heterosexuals. Gays have become mainstreamed into our popular culture and civilization as we know it has not collapsed. The recent decision by the Iowa Supreme Court that overruled that state’s ban on same-sex marriages is just the latest sign of this progress. So you would think that even the ultra-cautious Obama might want to get a little ahead of the obvious curve at least on this issue and gain some points, but yet he is hesitant.

As I have said repeatedly, Democrats and Republicans differ mainly on a few social policies, and it is the strong emotional reactions that those policies generate that hides the fact that on the core issues of war and business, the Democrats and Obama walk pretty much in lockstep with the Republicans in serving the pro-war, pro-business interests.

The reason I titled this series as ‘the end of politics’ is that public politics has come down to merely wanting to tick the other side off on some hot button issues. Right-wingers want to stop whatever the left wants and progressives support a lousy health care bill because they want to tick the Republican base off. Meanwhile, the real business of siphoning off the country’s wealth to private interests goes on smoothly in the back rooms, adversely affecting all of us who are not part of the oligarchy, wherever we might lie on the left-right political spectrum.

This is no way for a mature country to be governed.

POST SCRIPT: Elizabeth Warren for President

The chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the U.S. banking bailout is one of the few high level government figures who tells it like it is.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Elizabeth Warren
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Health Care Crisis

In April of 2009, I posted clips of a two-part interview with Elizabeth Warren that is worth viewing again.

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Economic Crisis Political Humor

Part 2:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Economic Crisis Political Humor

The end of politics-5: How Obama sold out on health care reform

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

For the previous posts in this series, see here.

Senator Joe Lieberman became the public face of implacable opposition to any meaningful reform and has been the target of much venom. All of it is deserved, because nobody epitomizes sanctimonious, publicity-seeking, self-serving greed like Lieberman, though Obama is coming dangerously close to reaching even the high bar of unctuous hypocrisy that Lieberman has set. But I have strong suspicions that Lieberman was actually advancing Obama’s interests and had Obama’s support. Obama actually told his negotiators to comply with Lieberman’s demands and not threaten him with removing his coveted committee chairmanships. We should not forget that Obama sought out Lieberman as a mentor when he entered the Senate and supported his re-election bid for the senate against the more progressive Connecticut Democratic Party candidate Ned Lamont.

Glenn Greenwald shares my view on how Obama sold out his supporters on health care reform.

[C]ontrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP — will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.
…
The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

Paul Craig Roberts highlights one key feature of the health care “reform” package that is part of the ‘huge boon’ that Greenwald speaks about:

The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies.

In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America.

As Digby says about this:

[M]andating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good.

Meanwhile, Obama and the Democratic party leadership launch full-scale attacks on their progressive supporters for asking for more while saying nothing against those who purportedly oppose their reform plans, like Joe Lieberman.

So as a result of all these shenanigans, we finally have the policy that the health industry should really like: a mandate for people to have insurance with no public option to compete with. Thus they get more captive customers subsidized by the government. This does not mean that there is nothing worthwhile in the health reform bill. It does offer some marginal improvements. It is just that it could have been so much better if Obama and the Democrats were not such obvious hypocrites.

So why is the health insurance industry now trying to kill even this highly watered-down reform that gives them so much? Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum argue that it is because they see some problems for them down the road even with highly limited reforms of the current bill and have started to feel confident that they can completely kill the reform effort altogether and return to the comfortable status quo. This may be a mistake on their part, a case of hubris. Even though the Democrats desperately want to please the health industry, not passing any health reform at all, their signature issue, would be too much for their supporters to take. So they will pass something, however bad it is, and call it a success.

People who think that Democrats are being thwarted by the filibuster threats of the Republicans are missing the point. The Democrats actually welcome the filibuster to cover their duplicity. I believe that in the mid-term elections to be held this year, the Democrats would like nothing better than to lose some Senate and House seats. The ideal situation for the Democratic Party leadership is not to win big but to win slim majorities in both houses so that they can gain the real prize sought after by both parties, the coveted committee chairmanships. This is where the real power lies, where the legislative agenda is set and where they can control the language of legislation and write the implementation rules. The committee chairs are in the best position to do the bidding of business interests and thus gain campaign contributions and other favors.

Having slim majorities has the benefit of allowing the Democrats to constantly whine that the mean Republicans are preventing them from carrying out policies that favor ordinary people. If they win big majorities they have no excuse for not carrying out the policies they promised. As exemplified in the case of the drug reimportation issue. Democrats love to be in the position of saying they are ‘fighting’ for the issues dear to their supporters as long as there is no danger of winning the fight, if such a win would threaten the interests of their real paymasters.

Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists who sees the charade for what it is. As he said on Bill Moyers’s show:

And I think, you know, a lot of what the Democrats are doing, they don’t make sense if you look at it from an objective point of view, but if you look at it as a business strategy- if you look at the Democratic Party as a business, and their job is basically to raise campaign funds and to stay in power, what they do makes a lot of sense. They have a consistent strategy which involves negotiating a fine line between sentiment on the left and the interests of the industries that they’re out there to protect. And they’ve always, kind of, taken that fork in the road and gone right down the middle of the line. And they’re doing that with this health care bill and that’s- it’s consistent.

That’s about right.

POST SCRIPT: Book signing and talk

I will be giving a talk and having a book signing on God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom at the Joseph-Beth book store in Legacy Village in Beachwood, Ohio at 7:00 pm today (Wednesday, January 27, 2010).

I would enjoy meeting any readers of this blog who can make it.

An unnatural blog

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would pre-empt my series on the end of politics where I excoriate Obama and the Democrats and indulge in some self-indulgent musing about the whole blogging exercise and my contribution to it.

After some initial hesitant steps when I was not sure what I would do with this new medium, I soon settled into a routine of one op-ed length essay of about 1,000 words on a single topic each weekday. Apart from repeating some postings when I am on travel or for holidays, I have not taken a break. As a result, I have now written about 1250 essays and well over a million words. But I realize that this type of blogging is not natural for the form.

The big advantage of a blog is that it can be a way of providing immediate and informed commentary on news, whereas newspapers and magazines have lag times that can be quite considerable.

The second advantage is that a blog post can be of any length. Magazine and newspaper and journal article are of the ‘long form’ type and there are often constraints of length that one must conform to, about 800 words for op-eds, or 1,500 or 5,000 or 10,000 word lengths for magazines and journals. But a blog can be any length at all, from just a few words to thousands. So you can say exactly what you want to say, no more, no less, as the need arises, which can be enormously liberating and prevent needless verbiage.

What I have done is seemingly take the negative aspects of the long form essay (fixed word length and more analytical pieces) and used it as a basis for my blog. I am not entirely alone in this. Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog (which should be a must read for anyone) also has usually one long (often very long) analytical piece each day, but his deals with breaking news on the legal and political fronts. I often learn about breaking news from his blog. I cannot do the kind of quick analysis that Greenwald can (he is a constitutional lawyer and has a lot of expertise at his fingertips) except on rare occasions, so I rarely publish things in such a timely way.

So why I am blogging in this unnatural way? Partly out of necessity. It takes me a while to digest information and make sense of it. I jot down ideas that I think are interesting and may have some insight into, and sometimes think about them for weeks or even months before I write them up. Also I have other work to do so that I cannot spend a lot of time keeping up with breaking news or cruising the web picking up interesting tidbits to comment on.

I know that every one is busy so it has been my goal to not waste the reader’s time. I arrived at the approximately 1,000-word length because it can be read in a few minutes. Since what I write about usually deals with old news, to add value, the blog post should contain things that are at least useful or new or interesting. One way of adding value is to provide at least some original analysis. As someone for whom teaching is in the blood, I also try to explain science or other difficult topics in ways that I hope will be clear and helpful to those who do not have the time to invest in learning these things on their own. The combination of trying to explain something in depth while restricting myself to the daily word limit has resulted in the many multi-part series of posts.

I also try to write the post as well as I can, given the limited time that I can devote to it, because I know how annoying it is to read something that has typos, factual errors, poor grammar, and generally looks sloppily done. I feel that such writing is an insult to the reader. So each post is rewritten and edited several times before it is posted, which is another reason that I rarely comment quickly on breaking news stories. I also try to be as accurate as I can about the information presented and give the sources so readers can follow up for themselves. All that takes time.

The benefits of blogging for me personally have been tremendous. In researching the information for the posts and in trying to explain things to others, I have learned a lot myself. I think I have also become a much more proficient writer as a result of the practice I have gained. The blog posts have often formed the first drafts of articles that I have subsequently published in more formal venues. Even my recent book God vs. Darwin began as a series of blog posts.

In the process, I have learned a lot from the readers and made many new contacts and renewed others thanks to people finding the blog.

At each anniversary I wonder how long I can keep up the pace. My main worry is that I will run out of things to say and start repeating myself. So far, I think I have avoided that danger. It has been fine and fun so I plan to keep going.

So thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting and sending me information. Here’s to another year!

POST SCRIPT: Book signing and talk

I will be giving a talk and having a book signing on God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom at the Joseph-Beth book store in Legacy Village in Beachwood, Ohio at 7:00 pm tomorrow (Wednesday, January 27, 2010).

I would enjoy meeting any readers of this blog who can make it.

The end of politics-4: Obama and health care reform

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

For the previous posts in this series, see here.

Many of Obama’s liberal supporters are deeply disappointed. After one year in office, they have almost nothing to show for all their efforts to give their party big majorities in both houses of congress. What they have instead received is a non-stop nauseating spectacle of whining and handwringing by the Democrats about how hard it is to overcome the filibuster threats of the Republican senators and how they must compromise away everything as a result, even though they have a huge 256-178 majority in the House (with one vacancy) and a 59-41 majority in the Senate.
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