Swift brash flash of blue
Nobly shielding your fledglings
Can’t I mow the lawn?
From the category archives:
Religion
One thought that went through my mind during the recent fuss over the visit of Yussef al-Qaradawi to Britain was this: what did those who, after September 11th, uttered variations on “Islam needs a Reformation” expect the agents of such a Reformation to look like? Martin Luther or Calvin maybe? Because those guys had some pretty nasty views, and yet ….
Marc Mulholland has written a very useful and serious post on “liberal Islamophobia” over at Daily Moiders, and, in comments, Anthony Cox responds.
The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:
The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.
“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…
The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…
But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”
I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.
P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).
AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?
Eugene Volokh posts a table from a poll showing that about 60 percent of Americans say they believe Biblical stories like the 7-day creation, Noah’s flood and Moses’ parting of the Red Sea to be literally true. This is rather higher than other estimates I’ve seen of Biblical Literalism. Based on GSS data (the GSS is the best available public opinion survey in the U.S. with a long time-series), we know that in 1998 about 30 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”. This was down from about 40 percent in 1988. (Most of the decline seems to have happened in the late 1980s, however.) About half of Americans agree that “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.” And a steady 15 to 17 percent agree that it’s “an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men.” Here's a graph, I put together of these trends, in pdf format.
Daniel’s unfortunate comparison of the great David Icke with the dull and ordinary Yusuf Islam has ignited a bit of irritation from commenters. But Yusuf’s defenders are out-of-date about his doings. Contrary to popular belief he now does allow his old records to be released, donating the proceeds to a variety of charities (including the September 11th fund). I can’t find documentary evidence, but I have heard him retract his support for the Fatwah on Rushdie, and do so in an embarrassed and genuinely apologetic way. Perhaps more importantly, as a leading and respected voice within Islam in the UK he has, since September 11th, put his cards unambiguously on the table as an uncompromising opponent of terrorism, Islamic or otherwise, and is a leading voice for a modern, tolerant, Islam.
In this interview with Bob Harris (recorded before Sept 11th, and which, I now see, you can’t actually hear on the site) he comes across as a modest man who has had a lot of demons to conquer, and has sort of sorted his life out.
I post this just to update people, not to criticise Daniel. I certainly didn’t think the comparison was Islamophobic, just inapt. But the problem is that comparing Icke with just about anybody is inapt! I just thought he deserved to have people know what he’s up to.
For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a piece I wrote out of irritation with the local chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ.
I was reminded of this when I learned, via Billmon, of the strong Christian beliefs of General Counsel Mary Walker. She led the legal team that wrote the recently leaked memo arguing that there were no legal considerations, domestic or foreign, that prevented the President from authorizing torture. She is also a co-founded of the Professional Women's Fellowship, an offshoot of the CCC. Philip Carter at Intel Dump has described the memo as 'a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct'. Here is Walker in an interview about her beliefs, followed by a snippet of her report:
bq. *Walker*: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.'”
*The report*: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.”
With just a little more effort here, we could push through to the world of Jack Lint, the character played by Michael Palin in Brazil.
*Update*: The Walker interview was yanked from the Professional Women’s Fellowship website, in a Christian act of covering up embarrassing stuff. But Billmon has a copy.
Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.
We’re on an Evolutionary Psychology kick here at CT. It seems most of our commenters are more enamored of it than some of our contributors. This is maladaptive for the CT meme, because the realization that we disagree will cause traffic to our site to drop. Unless it’s actually adaptive, because the disagreement means traffic to our site will rise. While we’re on the topic, I mean meme, I want to know how my 12-week-old daughter’s emerging desire to put everything that comes her way into her mouth is either evolutionarily adaptive or individually rational. I’ve also spent the day variously exposed to something else realist-types tend to explain, according to taste, as a matter of adaptive fitness or rational choice, namely religion.[1]
Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.
Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.
The comments thread on my last post led me to this site (hat-tip: novalis), advocating Condorcet voting and presenting a critique of the instant runoff/single transferable vote , the core of which is
IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates–but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.
It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.
Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and its hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of rank-order voting as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades.[1]
A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting.[2] Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.
fn1. To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.
fn2. More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station – there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.
I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can _never_ recover (He sent his only son, and we _killed_ Him):
bq. …. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis. 
Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.
I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term) was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”.) Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.
The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a centrist. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .
The notion that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Christ may seem too silly for words, but it is obviously still taken seriously enough to require refutation, not surprisingly in view of the immense human suffering it has caused. My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians[1] are collectively responsible?
Kevin Drum is surprised to learn that schools in Britain offer religious education classes. (Ireland is the same, by the way.) He comments that “I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about teaching a “History of Religion” class or something like it in an American high school, but it just wouldn’t happen. And then a proposal to add atheism as one of the highlighted religions? Kaboom!”
I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in Classical Social Theory that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some Max Weber, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about Durkheim.