Agnoiologist

Surprisingly, I’ve been talking to people, and McCain’s selection of Palin has made a huge difference — a big negative effect. I spent a lot of time emphasizing that the VP pick doesn’t really make a difference, so that’s why this was surprising to me. Then again, you don’t expect a campaign to be so scatter-brained as to pick someone they hardly vetted. This is the GOP. They sacrifice the long-term for the short-term. They’d sacrifice their morals if they could win a news-cycle. Sarah Palin was all about winning the news cycle and taking away Obama’s post-convention bounce. It worked, but afterwards, McCain has been tanking in the polls.

Now, I’m not a polling outfit. I only called so many people, and they weren’t exactly randomly selected. However, it was interesting to hear Palin’s name come up unprompted when I asked who they were voting for. She really was a deal-breaker for people who might’ve given McCain more of a chance. One of my friends admires McCain a great deal (ever since 2000), and Sarah Palin was a strong factor in his decision.

Still, if you look at the empirical data, you’ll see that the Palin pick does worry a lot of people. [Note: Find those polls.] [Another note: I will probably not go back and find them.]

I never would’ve guessed that a Vice President would make that much of a difference.

I have some sort of illness. I don’t think it’s a cold because the only symptom is a cough. Thus, I think it must be the SARS. Anyway, I’ve been spending my time today calling lots of my friends, encouraging them to vote for president and vote no on prop 8. After my last call, I erupted into a violent coughing fit. Geeze, the things I do for my country. Don’t tell me I’m not a patriot, Sarah Palin.

I still haven’t given up on this idea of a political Realignment. Strangely enough, even though the GOP brand is poison to my generation, I’m not quite so sure this will be the case 10 years from now. If indeed the big divide will be between young and old, the Democrats still look like they’ll defend the status quo of social security, which is becoming increasingly unwieldy. If the Republicans rediscover empiricism, there might be a window in which they can steal the young vote. Of course, this may all be hogwash and the future party of Palin will get crushed by Obama, and won’t recover for a generation.

Life doesn’t neatly fit into chapters. When (if?) we end the Republican reign by electing Obama and several more Democrats, it won’t be the end of the ugly side of the Republican Party. Face it, they won’t wake up after election day. They didn’t wake up when we didn’t find the WMDs, when we screwed up Iraq, when we tortured, when they lost in 2006, and they’re not going to wake up now. They’ve laid the seeds for their denial of reality with their false claims of voter fraud and their villification of ACORN. They’ll cry that McCain didn’t take the gloves off (when all his negative attacks were the cause of his rapid fall in the polls) and their hero will be Sarah “Palling around with terrorists” Palin. Even if they lose the election, this isn’t over. This isn’t over by a long-shot.

After the fall of the Bush-Republicans should begin the rise of a new Republican Party, but it won’t happen automatically. The Ugly Republicans — the Rovians, et al — have a stranglehold on the Republican media, talk radio and the like. We see glimmers of honesty. Even on Fox News, you have Chris Wallace questioning McCain about his robocalls. You have the Ron Paul Republicans who want to “Restore the republic.” That’s so refreshing after 9/11 brought in the age of the “homeland.” And everywhere, you have Republicans who aren’t racist fuckheads, who aren’t asshole Machiavellians, who aren’t heartless torturers, and who aren’t incompetent, proud ignoramuses. The trick is to get us, even though we won’t agree on everything, to band together and kick out the incompetent party hacks who got us here in the first place. That’s going to be a lot of work.

So as much as we would like to close the book on the Bush Age, it’s not going to happen. The Republican Party needs to be transformed. The loss is a necessary condition for such a change, but it, alas, is not sufficient for the change. It will require hard work, especially on the intellectual end. Conservatism, as we know it, must die a little death. It will not change into something altogether new (conservatives don’t believe such a thing is possible anyway), but it must be something modern. It must see how human nature works, and not vow to reform human nature itself, but put in fetters to restrain our dangerous tendencies. Yes, this means regulation is necessary, but we should be judicious. It means a conservatism which respects ancient laws, like habeas corpus. It must be scientific, not anti-science. It must respect the planet. As much as I’d like to go on, I’ll stop here because this isn’t something that can fit in one weblog entry.

Even for you who aren’t conservative, remember that the real work begins after the election. The Democrats have continually caved in to Bush’s demands, thus garnering approval ratings lower than Mr. President himself. They are also in the pockets of several business interests. Obama himself voted the wrong way on telecom immunity. We’ll finally have a president who’ll listen to us, but you have to make sure you shout louder than the enemies of liberty and democracy.

It seems as if the NFL has been thinking about how to protect quarterbacks. I know a rule change which can easily solve the problem: Eliminate the forward pass.

I’m really tired of conservatives who worship Reagan as a god (or as I often vulgarly put it: “Stop sucking Reagan’s dead cock”). I keep coming back to this one quip from Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Then, I think, what if he had said this after Hurricane Katrina? I don’t think conservatism can survive if it continues to be so anti-government. Yes, we can be skeptical, but you cannot start with the premise that it is inherently impossible for the government can do anything right. (For the moment, let’s ignore Bush and the Republican Congress’s massive expansion of the state.)

Why I should’ve live-blogged the debate, Reason #1:

Joe the Plumber Denies McCain’s Friend Request

Weirdjosh: I have a story with a simple beginning
Weirdjosh: come with me on a journey
Weirdjosh: My arms are sore
SCHIZO KILLER: wuh?
Weirdjosh: from last night. while I was here, I had to go up to the server cages to do some work, as you might expect
Weirdjosh: but I had forgotten something downstairs after I unlocked the door and started setting up
Weirdjosh: so I had to go back down, and before I left I locked up
Weirdjosh: problem: I had taken the keys out of my pocket and put them on the console to keep them from digging into my leg while I moved around
Weirdjosh: and neglected to put them back in again when I left because I was distracted by having forgotten that thing
Weirdjosh: so now I’m outside of a locked cage with the key to the cage inside
SCHIZO KILLER: excellent
Weirdjosh: I’ll have to paint you a better picture before I move on
Weirdjosh: these cages I’m talking about are fenced in areas of a building filled with racks of servers. there’s about 12 or so racks in cage two, each of which must hold at least 20 servers if not more
Weirdjosh: the room itself that contains these cages has a very high ceiling with exposed air conditioning ad wire racks because they need to be maintained and worked on so often
Weirdjosh: so the fences go up to the height of a typical size, but the ceiling continues on above it, with rafters and stuff all over
Weirdjosh: so I quickly assessed the situation and realized I had a choice
Weirdjosh: I could call Brian at 2 am and tell him I’d locked myself out and could he please come and bail me out
Weirdjosh: or I could climb the cage myself and get the stupid key back, and hope that security didn’t think that was too weird
Weirdjosh: you may well guess which I chose based on my story’s beginning

Applying my tactic of deconstructing systems in order to sift for the truth, I cannot reject Christianity outright, I think. It is not all bad, and has not produced uniform evil.

It would be easy to divide Christianity into the miraculous and moral, to try to separate the non-earthly elements from the earthly elements. (I think of Thomas Jefferson’s version of the gospels.) No, I think you must deconstruct the morality of Christianity. There is some good in it and some bad in it. I don’t think atheists can properly communicate with (and perhaps convert?) Christians until we stop harping only on the spiritual aspects of religion. We must engage with them and show how not only their myths are wrong, but that their moral system is inadequate.

I bring this up because a prime trait of the so-called New Atheists is deploying the tactic of ridicule. It’s a good tactic, and appropriate at times, but it will not win the debate. That being said, none of what I have said is particularly new. I’ve heard excellent defenses of the morality of secularism versus the prize-in-heaven religious morality. However, we must be even more specific. What specifically can we preserve from Christianity?

So those are my initial thoughts, and I think it would be a good exercise to go through the parables, and see what’s worth saving.

A good time to get drunk is when you’re moving, especially if you’re a packrat. When you’re drunk, you don’t really care when you throw things away. By the time you think about what you’ve done, it’s too late.

I don’t think this works as well if you have children.