Stones Cry Out

This was the title of a post on Redstate by Aaron Gardner, regarding where the Republican Party goes from here.  Gardner started, as his foundation of what the Republicans need to stand for, from the party platform of 1980, when Reagan was swept into the White House with 489 electoral votes.  He made some of his own modifications, but overall the (lengthy) statement stands as a good starting point.

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Via Malkin, it seems we have a new slogan, what with the election of Barack Obama.

Wrong!

Truth be told, Barack Obama is half black and half white. In other words, he’s biracial.

Martin Luther King said, in his I Have a Dream speech, that he dreamed of the day when his children would

not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So, let’s encourage supporters of Barack Obama to start following Dr. King’s wishes, and not focus so much attention on the color of Obama’s skin. Or, if they must draw attention to it, to at least begin admitting that, Our President is Black & White.

• Pet peeves in English usage (HT: Mad Minerva)
• Disaster at sea.
• 76 of them?
• Of brilliant complex explanations.
• Just say no.
• Apologetically.
• Maths teaching and what’s wrong.
• Memory of a night.
• Golly.
• Orthodoxy in the ESV Study Bible.
• The benefits of certain struggles.
• Considering unemployment.
• “I do not know” and getting it right.
• On Prop 8.
• Tracking fitness.
• A birthday.
• Ms Hirsi Ali … unsolicited advise for Mr Obama.
• Destruction of an institution.
• Voters mapped.
• Awaiting apologetics for this on the liberal blogs.

On my flight to the East Coast (New Jersey) I read the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which in an of itself being #76 on the Amazon best-seller list is by the authors criteria itself a “Black Swan”. This book has a number of good ideas, but alas uses a number of fallacious notions and claims, some less critical some more so to stake its claim.

One of the interesting repeated targets of Mr Taleb’s scorn, which he terms Platonism, is one which is carried too far. Platonism, that is essentially the use of abstraction, is ridiculed and dismissed repeatedly. However, one might at the same time, put alongside the paper cited a few days ago of Mr Wigner’s on the unreasonable success of Mathematics in Physics (or one might say … the unreasonable success of Platonism in explaining the Physical universe).

I plan to get into more detail about some of the notions in this book during the rest of this week, but I’ll leave with a few short comments tonight.

• I had mentioned when I noted that I was going to be reading this book, that camparisons to the more traditional historical work by David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, might serve as a counterbalance to this book. In The Great Wave, Mr Fisher notes some intruiging research. In the last 800 years of Western history there have been a small countable number of periods of dramatic stability (or in the Mr Taleb’s terms the “Black Swans” had little impact) and periods of great instability (lots of Black Swans having greater effect) on political and social fronts. Mr Fisher correlates ecomonic price data of staples and commodities and lines them up with those historical periods and found a strong correlation. Periods of growing price instability especially in staples and other commodities precede and continue throughout periods of instabliity and during periods of relative price stability … political stability was also seen.
• Mr Taleb “cleans” up his argument a great deal. He presents occupations as being part of, or disconnected from, the affect of Black Swans, i.e. the improbable. One of his consistent examples is writing. However there in addition to luck (or the improbable) as connected with the career of writing at the same time a stable (non-Black Swan) related career one can derive from that. Not all aspiring writers are either wildly successful novelists like Ms Rowlings or operating machinery in Starbucks. Many, if not most, writers are writing copy for ordinary use. Writing technical manuals, textbooks, advertising copy, white papers, and so on. Programmers like the Woz made a killing, but there is an ordinary profession and stable livelihood to be made from perfecting and developing skill at programming (as at writing).
• It’s interesting to note that the ancient Chinese Lao-Tzu philosopher also considered the problem of the danger of upheaval and perhaps loosely interpreted the Black Swan in the political arena. Lao-Tzu suggested becoming a craftsman in a trade that was specifically not useful for the machinery of State, so you wouldn’t get drafted into the games of Nations and at the same time, being useful for society, but not useful for the state insured the greatest chance of not being caught up gristmill of intra-national and inter-national strife.

Opponents of California’s Proposition 8 – “Marriage Protection Act”, which clarified that marriage is between a man and a woman, claim that the proposition was all about hatred (e.g., “No on 8, End Hate” and “Separate Church & H8”).

They prove it by holding hateful, anti-Mormon marches after the measure was passed by the voters.

images – LA Times

I was on the road again this week, so not much time for a post-election wrap-up from me.  But now that the dust has settled, let me knock out a few thoughts.

1.  Exit polls indicate that the number of self-described liberals in this country and the number of self-described conservatives hasn’t changed hardly at all since the last election, and conservatives hold a 12 percentage point lead (34 to 22).  This is still a center-right country.  Obama would do well to remember that.

2.  You win with your base, and McCain took too long to pick it up.  Now, I know that others (our own contributor, Jim, being one) have said that the base took too long to converge around the candidate, but I have to respectfully disagree; I think that’s entirely backwards.  Conservatives in the Republican party have always looked at McCain with a cocked eye, and they — or, to be honestly inclusive, we — had a tough time with many of his positions.  Our minds weren’t going to be changed overnight because he won the nomination.  That’s not principled.

Conversely, McCain did, in fact, make moves to the right that eventually won over the base, but I don’t think he did it quickly enough.  However, if you win with (or lose without) your base, what about the highly-touted independents that were supposed to make McCain so popular?  The answer is…

3.  …they largely split between the two candidates, which throws out all the conventional wisdom on how to win elections.  It’s been all about the "bell curve", that huge group of voters in the center; neither Left or Right.  In a race between a center-Right candidate and a hard-Left one, the conventional wisdom was that the more centrist candidate would pull in the middle in droves.  That didn’t happen.  Karl Rove, love ‘im or hate ‘im, was right, as Dan McLaughlin noted on Redstate:

Karl Rove’s theory – one he perhaps never explicitly articulated, but which was evident in the approach to multiple elections, votes in Congress, and even international coalitions run by his boss, George W. Bush – was, essentially, that you win with your base. You start with the base, you expand it as much as possible by increasing turnout, and then you work outward until you get past 50% – but you don’t compromise more than necessary to get to that goal.

Standing in opposition to the Rove theory was what one might call the Beltway Pundit theory, since that’s who were the chief proponents of the theory. The Beltway Pundit theory was, in essence, that America has a great untapped middle, a center that resists ideology and partisanship and would respond to a candidate who could present himself as having a base in the middle of the electorate.

Tonight, we had a classic test of those theories. Barack Obama is nothing if not the pure incarnation on the left of the Rovian theory. He ran in the Democratic primaries as the candidate of the ‘Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’ His record was pure left-wing all the way. He seems to have brought out a large number of new base voters, in particular African-Americans responding to his racial appeals and voting straight-ticket D. As I’ll discuss in a subsequent post, the process of getting to 50.1% for a figure of the left is more complex and involves more concerted efforts at concealment and dissimulation, but the basic elements of the Rovian strategy are all there.

John McCain, by contrast, was the Platonic ideal Beltway Pundit-style candidate, and his defeat by Obama ensures that his like will not win a national nomination any time soon, in either party. McCain spent many years establishing himself as a pragmatic moderate, dissenting ad nauseum and without a consistent unifying principle from GOP orthodoxy; McCain had veered to the center simply whenever he felt that the Republican position was too far. McCain held enough positions that were in synch with the conservative base to make him minimally acceptable, but nobody ever regarded him as a candidate to excite the conservative base.

Yes, this is essentially a restatement of point 2, but where as #2 is looking from the Right, #3 is looking from the center. 

Also keep in mind that the center is where most undecided voters live, some of whom don’t decide who to vote for until they in the voting booth.  Reagan won by sticking to his conservative principles and Obama won on his liberal credentials (spreading the wealth around, socializing health care, anti-war).  It wasn’t the blowout it should have been, given the perfect storm of an unpopular President, and unpopular war and a tanking economy, but a win is a win.

UPDATE:  John Hawkins concurs:  Top 7 Reasons Why the GOP Can’t Build a Political Party Around Moderates.

4.  McCain was hoist on his own petard; McCain/Feingold.  On election night, you could almost hear, in the back of your head, a voice-over saying, "This election brought to you by…campaign finance reform."  Another element of the perfect storm for Obama was the fact that he reneged on his promise to stick to public financing and hugely outspent McCain (yet still only managed an average victory).  This unconstitutional (in my humble opinion) program restricts free political speech, arguably what the First Amendment is precisely about.  McCain/Feingold is dead, for all intents and purposes.  At least it’s now irrelevant. 

I still respect McCain as a politician and a bridge-builder, and I believe he would have made a far better President than the one we’re going to get.  But cheer up, Republicans.  At least Obama is going to pay for your gas and your mortgage.

They spent money on this?

Sexual content on television is strongly associated with teen pregnancy, a new study from the RAND Corporation shows.

Researchers at the nonprofit organization found that adolescents with a high level of exposure to television shows with sexual content are twice as likely to get pregnant or impregnate someone as those who saw fewer programs of this kind over a period of three years. It is the first study to demonstrate this association, RAND said.

Next week, RAND comes out with their study that gravity leads to falling.

The suggested remedy is equally obvious.

A central message from the study is that there needs to be more dialogue about sex in the media, particularly among parents and their children, said Anita Chandra, the study’s lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND.

Although the Hollywood culture is certainly a major contributor to the oversexualization of the media (and they could do their part, but won’t, and will whine publicly and loudly if you suggest they do), parents still need to be the gatekeeper.

As my kids would say, "Thank you, Captain Obvious!"

• Japan’s aging population.
• OK, those of you on the left, spin that!
• For those who thought Mrs Palin a drag on McCain’s race.
• Problems with a taxonomy of philosophy.
• A prayer.
• Chick Tracts and Cthulhu.
• Mr Emanuel one view. Another.
• Links.
• One view on McCain’s loss. Another.
• Goin’ to the big city … and as a coda, now I’m seeing it in more than one place … I’m going to have to read some Rawls it seems … even thought what I have seen seems very flawed.
• The visible body of Christ.
• Inequity in wages … and the parties.
• Will Obama slow that growth?
• A biker won.
• Voting and felons, on which I might try to write more this weekend from a non-social contractarian point of view (having at this point rejected the notion of social contract as being useful or valid myself).
• Dance of death.
• Batmobile downsized and its nemesis?
• Memory eternal.
• Into the last book.
• A question for a shared faith. Another political question and faith.

Apparently the left and progressives, as noted recently, find that race and its consequences are the most important historical axis/issue on which to judge American history. On Monday I had asked:

Is this what the left believes, that “race is the single most important and consequential issue in all of American history.” Really? Wow.

There are a number of arguments against this. Here is the first one. What is the most important issue, what is the most important factor to track when viewing history of American and indeed the larger international history?

Math. Specifically, the history and development of the body of Mathematical knowledge.

Consider first the following. Imagine for a moment American history without race. No civil war, no civil rights movement and so on. Possibly without a civil war America would have been in a different place regarding the power of the central government and perhaps in that light a weaker America might have reshaped the outcome of the brewing European conflicts.

But … picture instead a world history without technology, without the advances in power such as steam, oil, and electricity; without the transistor, the printed circuit; without automation and industrialization. Picture instead, America in a world in which technology was still at the level of the Roman era. Wars were still fought with spear, sword, and javelin. That there were no airplanes, instead galleys and sailing vessels still plowing the seas.
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California, Florida (two blue states) and Arizona voters rejected same-sex marriage in their states.  As Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council notes, this signals that the electorate is still generally socially conservative, and that if Obama has a mandate, it’s an economic one. 

This is especially true among Obama’s big support blocs; blacks and Hispanics.  Byron York noted at the National Review Online that these constituents supported the ban 70-30 and 51-49 respectively.  The 90+ percent of African-Americans that voted for Obama, and who rightly have celebrated the election of a black man to the White House, quite apparently think this is "Change We Can Do Without"(tm).

The limbo that those who were married under the Supreme Court decision find themselves in is of their own making.  Rather than using the legislature or respecting the will of the people expressed in the last ballot initiative, they changed the battlefield.  However, they took their initial success with irrational exuberance, and when they were met on that battlefield they were defeated, leaving them in an odd situation, and forcing the California legal system into a Gordian Knot.  Once again, the "will of the people" cry we used to hear from the Left has died down to a whimper when they have an axe to grind.

• Anticipating 2012 more predictions here.
• A magazine plug, on which I concur.
• Art.
• Party alliance and income and more do check out the highlighted link here.
• Patristics carnival.
• I had noted I had seen no evidence of right wing rage on Obama’s election … apparently if you search for it you can find it. However, based on the hundreds of right wing (dominantly Christian blogs I have in my feed I think the fact I saw none is significant).
• Dog talk and political rhetoric.
• Heh.
• Who really lost in this election.
• Eschatology without the man (who is God).
• Faculties of mind.
• Prop 8 and Obama’s coattails.
• Patristic pitfalls and the Orthodox convert.
• Skepticism and uniform individualism.
• Another book to read.
• A libertarian looks at the election result.

The California Marriage Protection Act, aka Proposition 8, was passed by popular vote on Tuesday, November 4th. The proposal was to add the following 14 words to the California constitution:

As of Wednesday, November 5th, lawsuits have been filed by Gay Rights backers to challenge the will of the people, and protests against the Proposition were occurring in the predominantly gay city of West Hollywood.

Lest anyone think that rights have been eliminated, by the passage of Proposition 8, one should read the already existing California Family Code 297.5. An excerpt:

Bottomline: Proposition 8 it isn’t about hate, inequality or discrimination; it’s about protecting marriage between a man and a woman.

Note: as an aside, check this “No on 8” ad which displays blatant hatred towards Mormons.

Well, by John McCain as well, but by prominent conservative bloggers and personalities, too.  No moves to France contemplated here.

• Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.
• Scott Ott, Christian, satirist at ScrappleFace, but serious blogger on his TownHall blog.  Excerpt:

After George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, and later John Kerry, for the presidency, countless Democrat-owned cars bore bumper stickers with clever phrases like ‘Not My President’ or ‘Don’t Blame Me I Voted for Kerry’.

As a conservative evangelical Christian who voted for McCain-Palin, and for every other Republican on the ballot yesterday, let me say for the record: Barack Obama is my president.

I stayed up past midnight to watch his victory speech. I wept (a little less than Jesse Jackson) because the moment stirred me with gratitude for how God has thus far corrected America’s most crippling birth defect — racist discrimination.

• The entire panel of Directors at Redstate.
• Jonah Goldberg at National Review.
• Hugh Hewitt, conservative radio talk show host.
• Chuck Colson, Watergate convict and Christian writer and speaker.

And a guest blogger at Patterico’s Pontifications, along with congratulating him, lists what President-elect Obama can do to keep his campaign promises, and offers his own promises in return.

Congratulations again, to our first black President.  We’ve lived through a point in history that will be talked about for a long time to come.