Willful Ignorance

Religion and politics don't typically make good workplace discussion topics. Especially religion. Why not? A major reason is that our religious beliefs are tightly bound up with our individual identities. Therefore, when our beliefs differ from others, we tend to think of the situation as "I'm right and you're wrong." Even if no one says that explicitly, there is an implicit challenge to your beliefs when someone expresses their own.

This causes tension.

In fact, I think this tension is a big reason why we don't talk about religion with friends that don't share our beliefs. We think it will get in the way of our friendship by offending one or both of us. Yet if knowing someone believes differently than you causes offense, it must be because you care about what they think about your religion (and in some way you). And if you care about what they think, then shouldn't you try to find out what they think? And yet that requires you to talk about religion, the very thing we are avoiding by choice.

If this is the case, it may be that we actually don't care much what our friends think about our religion. But if we don't care, then we wouldn't bother purposely avoiding it. I think it is more likely that we hit a psychological snag when these things are discussed openly. We no longer have plausible deniability. Before it is discussed openly, we hold convenient assumptions about their beliefs so we can think about how much fun we have otherwise. After, we can think of little else.

Obama or McCain?

My general attitude toward government is that it is, in most cases, part of the problem not the solution. In 2004 I voted for Bush. I did it because I was ill-informed on his policy positions and I saw the Republican party as the party of fiscal restraint. I had just taken 2 economics courses and everything in the world seemed to start making sense.

Bush betrayed me. His administration has led to huge deficits in non-military spending. He has led a horrendously planned and executed war in Iraq. The signs and decisions were already in place in 2004, I just hadn't taken the time to find out the facts. But still, I felt betrayed that the Republican brand had led me so far astray with respect to Bush.

In 2006, I voted for Jim Webb, a Democrat, for Senator of Virginia. To punish the Republicans for misleading me 2 years prior? Yes, a little. But more so because if government is part of the problem, then a divided government can do less harm than one that is run by a supermajority party (see years 2002-2006).

So this brings me to the 2008 Presidential election. However, unlike 2006, my residual feelings of betrayal and my less government philosophy are pulling me in opposite directions this time. A vote for Obama would give me the psychological satisfaction of voting against the Republicans. However, now that the Democrats have and will likely expand upon a large Congressional majority, I am nudged toward McCain to avoid disasterous over expansion of government that is likely to ensue (since McCain can veto all that wasteful spending legislation).

So, since my single vote does not count in any practical way, I plan to vote on principle. It seems the "golden years" of prosperity came during the last Democratic presidency and a Republican congress, so I'll vote that way this election. Obama for President, and Republicans for Congress (i.e., Jim Gilmore for Senate).

What if my vote were desicive, would I vote differently? Perhaps. But even then, I am very socially tolerant and I don't think I could bring myself to vote another George Bush a heartbeat from the presidency (in the guise of Sarah Palin).

In the end Obama will win, I'm guessing he'll probably pick-up around 320 electoral votes, and the Democrats will pick up a decent majority in Congress. In the next four years we'll see a continued large deficit as spending is slightly increased but as taxes are also slightly increased. The Republicans will concede that they've lost their touch with mainstream American and get back to their roots of small government and individual responsibility. And by 2012, we'll have a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, our standing in the world will be much improved, and we'll be moving back toward a more free-trade, less protectionist economy that Obama and the Democrats will likely usher in in the next few years. I guess that is more of a hope than a prediction.

Are you feeling well?

I think I have a case of the whichPoliticianIsTellingMoreLies-itis. I assume that politics has always been a race to the bottom, with politicians stretching the truth tighter than a pair of Usain Bolt's spandex on Rosie O'Donnell, but the only reason they get away with it is because we must like seeing Rosie O'Donnell in nasty-tight spandex. Seriously, if anybody says they are proud of how McCain or Obama is running their campaign, I'm going to laugh. Then I going to treat you like a elementary school student, because apparently that is when your mind stopped developing.

The Gateway to Hell?

In a previous post we discovered that our position for keeping marijuana illegal is not well supported by the self harm argument.

But what about marijuana being a "gateway" drug to harder drug which cause more deaths or emergency hospital visits? Unfortunately, these statistics don't generally support the Cannibis as a gateway drug theory (see wikipedia's article):

"The people who are predisposed to use drugs and have the opportunity to use drugs are more likely than others to use both marijuana and harder drugs," Morral said. "Marijuana typically comes first because it is more available. Once we incorporated these facts into our mathematical model of adolescent drug use, we could explain all of the drug use associations that have been cited as evidence of marijuana's gateway effect."

In fact, if you want to use the Marijuana gateway drug argument, you have to admit that the ultimate gateway drug is alcohol. So there are a lot of numbers and they seem to favor marijuana as a substitute to alcohol and tobacco. The question is whether the numbers matter.

We can take several perspectives. The libertarian perspective says that the numbers be damned, it's none of the government's business what individual risks one chooses to take. A utilitarian perspective would say the numbers are everything and would attempt to weigh the benefits to the user against the risks. A liberal would probably attempt to devise government intervention to minimize the pertinent numbers (often neglecting secondary effects). A conservative would probably be interesting in a different set of numbers than the liberal, relying tradition and morality to justify the current prohibition.

Considering the relatively low risk of self harm, little correlation with external harm, the high cost of enforcement, and the claimed pleasurable benefits, we'll need to delve deeper into the conservative perspective in order to find arguments against legalizing marijuana.

Stay tuned as we don our bow ties and smoking caps and determine why marijuana should be illegal!

Obamathematics

The media's love for Obama's causes CNN to disregard one of the 4 arithmetic operations which has served mankind for millennia; that is, subtraction.

In classical mathematics: 267-250=17
In Obamathematics: 267-250=7

See it here:

“Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,”

An Argentine expression, meaning, "I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why." That's from an excellent article by Alvaro Llosa called The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand.

No man is without some redeeming qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those qualities may help us to measure the gulf that separates reality from myth. His honesty (well, partial honesty) meant that he left written testimony of his cruelties, including the really ugly, though not the ugliest, stuff...
...
In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his “Message to the Tricontinental”: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

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See also: A list of people Che had executed
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Just to keep things linked up, see also, a past blog on Communism and Che