This post examines to characteristics of the two candidates, which are strong negative aspects of their personality. This isn’t meant to be a thing to point out deadly flaws of either candidate. But is a (for me) relatively even handed discussion of two aspects, possibly even related, in which both candidates both have in these two characteristics respectively demonstrated symmetric negative character flaws.

Mr Obama, we have come to understand, at least in his public persona has little or no sense of humor, for example there are clips of their recent public joint comedy appearance. Mr McCain by contrast, came through with comedic timing and sense, does not share this flaw in fact quite the reverse, that he can be quite funny. Inability to tell a joke, for the Meyer-Briggs crowed is probably tell-tale for a distinctive personality type. Now, it may also be that in private, Mr Obama has quite the sense of humor, but that in public he can’t pull it off, but remember, Mr Obama is by all accounts quite the demagogue … which might lead one to discount the notion that it is a public/private matter.

On the flip side, much has been said about Mr McCain’s temper. I have written not just a few times about the virtue of apathy, from the Greek apatheia, or dispassion. Apathy as a virtue is that one is not driven by passions. Anger and rage are strong passions and publicly (or privately) giving way to this, especially when not controlled, is certainly problematic. Mr McCain reportedly has, in private, quite the temper problem. By all accounts, Mr Obama, while not as famously dispassionate as those two NFL apatheia exemplars, Coach Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, is himself highly controlled.

So, in the virtue vice column, Mr McCain has an excellent sense of humor, Mr Obama does not. Mr McCain has anger/temper issues, Mr Obama is dispassionate. A plus for each and a negative for each.

As an aside: one wonders if the virtues noted above are not unconnected to the vices mentioned. That is, is Mr Obama’s “control” and dispassion linked to his lack of a sense of humor and on the flip side is the emotional lack of same control on the side of Mr McCain also linked to his also having a sense of humor?

Two movies, one good, one not so much.

Things rising to the top of my ever-expanding Netflix queue are not all “wonderful.” The purpose of those movies is mostly to provide a distraction from tedium during evening, bad weather, and cold weather basement indoor bike riding. Last week, I rode/watched the not-so-recent Zemeckis Grendel’s Mom, err, Beowulf. My eldest daughter, in watching various films of movies which are derived from books which she has read, is highly critical where movies, for good reasons or not, diverge from the original text. I am not always so critical, but in this case I find myself in agreement with that assessment. This movie might have been improved, I think, if had hewed more closely to the original tale. Cinema and prose read text are different media, and narrative elements which lend well to one media do not necessarily transport to another. However, there are other diversions from an original narrative which are not driven by the media, but that the auteur has decided that the emphasis of the original no longer “works.” Zemeckis decided that Beowulf is such a tale. In the original Beowulf the titular hero is not flawed in ways that so many modern heroes are. It is may very well be that the major themes of the original tale do not work so well for a modern audience. There is a modern conceit that heroes need to have (visible) feet of clay, to humanize them. However, I wonder if this is so. Would an unabashed unflawed hero fail in modern narrative? Our culture is divided in many ways, I wonder if yet another litmus test of that divide might necessity for their heroes to be flawed is only a particular requirement of one side. Compare for example, this flawed Beowulf, or any number of flawed heroes coming from Hollywood. 300 comes to mind as a recent film in which the hero was less flawed than the others. It was also one which, it seemed to me, appealed more to the right than the left. For myself, I found myself annoyed and not able to separate myself from the expected tale, that is this was too much like Beowulf the poem and too little like it at the same time for me to enjoy it.

The second film, I saw recently was seen at the nearby “arts” cinema. Tell No One is a French crime drama. It is a superlative tense mystery film. A film made with no CGI and little in the way even of any stuntwork, this is a cerebral thriller which doesn’t disappoint. Story wise, our hero, a pediatrician whose wife was killed in a mysterious encounter 8 years earlier, receives an email contact from hinting that perhaps his beloved wife (he still is grieving) did not die. The police also reopen the case because of a recent discovery of buried corpses near the site of the original attack. Murder, escape, blind alleys and confusion lead us through a taut maze to the final scenes. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. It was excellent throughout.

• Spread the wealth … or not?
• Abortion. Oh, and the abortion bald-faced lie told by Mr Obama in the debate. (HT: Mr Chan)
• Continuing the Joe saga. And a question, how many write in votes will Joe get? And some satire.
• Hope. Fear. Whatever.
• Gladiator and reality.
• Immigration and both candidates.
• Joe “the lawyer.”
• Commuunism and capitalism. (HT: Mr Boudreaux)

Where do we get when we come to a place where we’ve established and believe that the “other side” isn’t stupid or evil. It seems that one of the results holding that as an axiom, is that identification of who agrees with “your view” of things is the sort of person whom you might support, and that this is in fact as (or possibly) more important than competence in a political standpoint. Thus the team urgency and loyalty we see by, for example, GOP vs Democrat actually makes far more logical sense than one might think. It isn’t the same as “team loyalty” to a particular football or baseball team. You support and have political loyalty to a party which “speaks your language”, and in doing so assures you that their train of logic and their conception of the good in government is shared by you. Alsdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? writes in some length about how hard it is for those who do not share essential assumptions on the fundamental concerns defining the Good and the rational to communicate. So often those who do not share your assumptions don’t make sense. It is hard to understand why the “other” arrives at the conclusions that they do, and more often than not, we fall back on the (erroneous) assumption that the other is merely deluded, stupid, or intentionally malefic. Read the rest of this entry

• Joe Plumber? One more, less satirical.
• Mrs McCain and the cell phone tower.
• Guitar, err, Budget hero?
• Finally, setting aside steam perhaps?
• Fiddling while Rome burns?
• Proof and machine.
• Mr Obama’s central campaign stragegy, be a mirror.
• Back to blogging, QoD.
• Two great men noted.
• On feeling sullied.
• Here’s a book of note.
• For your prayers and do remember to pray for Mr Kennedy.
• Hmmm.
• Pro private charity.
• Is that correct? The left is now against more affordable housing. 😉

If we are to honestly engage and discover the “other” side, political, economic, religious, or one of the other measures by which our society is divided one thing has to be set aside, which alas is hard to do. It is easy to decide that the “other” side are stupid or evil, and they are by and large no more stupid nor evil than any other side of the fray, with of course a few obvious exceptions. From my comments yesterday,

I believe that the truest measure of a society is how they treat those who are least able to defend and to speak for themselves.

How a Republican could say that with a straight face is beyond me.

“Bravely fighting for tax cuts for the rich” would be a little more… true.

The Democrats, the progressives, and the GOP all share concern for the poor and “those who are least able to defend and speak for themselves”. It is true, on both sides, there are stupid people and there are evil people. And one can likely argue endlessly about which side has a smidgen more of which and which particular individuals are stupid or evil. Read the rest of this entry

• Quotes on living a Holy life.
• Is this where the Ayers/Obama/Wright connection is leading? … and a question for those supporting Mr Obama, why does he not support the hidden ballot for unions?
• On weeping with Erkenwald.
• This is sweeping through the Christian blogs, it and similar posts are quite common all appearing yesterday.
• Pro-choice, pro-abortion … the term examined further. Contra the “against abortion, don’t have one”, we find “Against wife-beating? Don’t beat yours.” or “Against rape? Don’t assault anyone.” or “Against murder? Don’t kill anyone.” or “Against slavery? Don’t own one.”
• Some interesting thoughts on Mr Obama.
• Some math games.

• Mr Obama’s welfare program, called a tax-cut.
• Mr Obama’s suggestion that “only above $250k, will have raised taxes … a lie?
• Finally, Mr Obama and intimations of his notions of righteous rule and freedoms of speech.
• A meditation on Eucharist and community.
• Our children are often precious.
• “Technology” and the battle for Sadr city … apparently to CBS concrete walls are high tech.
• ACORN and voter registration.
• On Mr Krugman’s Nobel.

One of the common notions of this age, especially as compared to others in the past, is the supremacy of the individual. That is to say, that notion that oneself is the final and best arbiter of what is best for oneself is dominant. Many if not most of our community has sufficient ignorance of history and the changes in culture that have occurred in the past century or two that by and large there is rampant ignorance that this is in fact a radical departure from the past. While it is a common trite saying that those who forget the past, are doomed to repeat it. It is also the case that those who forget the past can’t understand which choices they make are better or worse than those of prior ages. One might suggest that those who are unaware of the past, will believe anything they do as better than before, alas without any knowledge of whether that is indeed the case or not.
Read the rest of this entry

• Some social commentary and a history lesson on the early Middle East.
• On Mr Maher.
• Of means, ends, and Mr Obama as a small “c” communist.
• Putting doubt in context.
• Ms Redding returns to the news.
• Theology and aesceticism.
• Relating politics and moral relativism.
• Not Ayers, Mr Giannoulias gets next?
• A call for national unity.
• A thing Mrs Palin is not.
• Science fiction and it’s place as narrative.
• A teachers trials.
• Media and abortion regarding Mr Obama.
• Playing politics in Iraq, Mr Obama commits treason?

• Epistemic arrogance and the financial crises. Or game theoretic errors.
• Chapter 3 of Porn and the Christian life is out.
• A replacement for the ass and the elephant.
• When truth to power had teeth.
• A film recommendation.
• The waning of the Gospel and the crippled church.
• Abortion not linked to poverty?
• Pro-choice as a replacement term for pro-abortion perhaps makes little sense.

Rights are a very confusing notion. It seems to me there are two possibilities regarding Mr Obama’s recent claim that “health care is a right.” Either he means something completely different by “right” than I might understand it to mean (which is to say not a common notion of what is casually meant by “a right”) or he should not get anybody’s vote because he’s, well, insane. Bill Whittle, former democrat, at NRO puts this one perspective:

Well, back in the day, we would simply say that a right has legal authority — it’s in the Constitution and therefore it’s a not just a right, it’s a birthright. So why shouldn’t we amend the Constitution to include the rights to health care, food, housing, education — all the rest? What’s the difference between the rights we have and the “rights” Obama wants to give us?

Simply this: Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

The Declaration states that the “rights we hold to be self-evident” (and perhaps granted by Nature’s God) where Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Happiness almost certainly mean for Jefferson, Adams and Franklin to be the Aristotelian eudomonia (definition #2 at the link). Rights for our founders are emphatically not consumables that the government should provide for us.

There are two essential problems with Mr Obama’s (insane?) claim that health care is a “right”. The first is illustrated above, and that it is not a right as normally thought. The notion that health care is a fundamental right to which every person is entitled is radical policy of redistribution at best. The second problem with the idea of healthcare as thing which government can cure is that it’s wrong! Read the rest of this entry

• Mr Obama and Ayers matters … or not.
• Marx on the bailout. And a T-shirt.
• Links by ginny.
• Plugging a worthy College. If you’re not going into Science/Math/Engineering, I can’t imagine a better education.
• Imagine the reaction if this was Ms Clinton and Camille Paglia on Mrs Palin.
• A question Mr Obama refuses to address.
• 9/12.
• Both sets of (mostly stupid) pictures.

• What’s wrong … a good answer.
• The debate summarized. A much shorter summary.
• Al Gore invented the Internet (not!), and Mr Obama thinks that the government invented computers? Where do these guys get those wacky notions?
• Terror politics … not about political costs vs gains.
• One thought on the significance of the reaction to Mrs Palin.
• Lepanto.

As far as mudslinging goes it is useful to recall that in these latter days of the American Republic, mudslinging is a lost art form. Rarely if ever, unlike the heady days of when the Republic was fresh do opponents in races accuse the other side of corrupting infants or worse … stealing them.

Mudslinging, machine politics, and the rest came of age in the first few elections, notably I think when Mr Arnold almost stole an election in New York by virtue of good organization. Very quickly the high minded concepts of Madison and the rest of the Constitutional convention designers had in mind were thrown aside by the rough and ready actualization of their political structure. Read the rest of this entry