Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • The Proper Bounds of Political Correctness

    In my experience, political correctness is invoked more as a way to stifle requests for courtesy and consideration than it is to actually stifle freedom of speech. People here in the southern part of the country want to avoid the charge of political correctness at all costs. It’s sort of like being accused of being a whimp, lacking gun and pickup truck, and never shooting any deer.

    But for me courtesy is just that–courtesy. I don’t vary my holiday greetings to match with the person I’m addressing because the political correctness monitor is going to get me. I do it because I like to greet people in the way they would like to be greeted, not in the way I want to greet them. I don’t use racial epithets because I think they’re inappropriate, not because someone made a law or because someone is looking over my shoulder.

    There is an important line I’ve drawn here. I don’t want to make you use any particular greeting. I don’t want to force you to live and speak according to my standards or anyone else’s standards. In my view, free speech is not just the law–it’s a good idea! Besides the wonders that a free exchange of ideas does for truth-finding, it’s useful simply to prevent boredom. If everyone said precisely what I thought they should say at the time and in the manner in which I though they should say it, well, it would sound a lot like this sentence, and that would be dull.

    But there’s a very solid line that one can cross, and that is illustrated in some policies in place at Michigan State University. You can read about these in a report from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars) I doubt that Michigan State University is alone in this. Ed made a number of good comments on this policy in his post. I’m looking at it for just one thing: The line!

    What has happened here is simply that force has been added to political correctness, and the result is inappropriate suppression of expression. It would be fine for the university to make certain suggestions but to force the students to produce certain results is ridiculous and despicable. Hazy standards given the force of law have been the bane of religion for millenia, with an absolute certainty that when religion is given the force of law the result will be destructive of both religion and law. Now hazy standards in dialogue and discourse are similarly given the force of law, and the result will not be good.

    It would be a good thing for freedom in this country if we learned to distinguish between simple courtesy–the way I want to address people–and suppression of free speech. When the force of law is placed behind the words I want to hear, then free speech is being suppressed, and nothing good will follow. This is the liberal form of despotism. A private business can choose what to permit and not to permit. A government agency cannot.

  • Critical Thinking and the Attack on Judge Jones

    In my Bible Translations FAQ, I respond to a common question about Bible translation and about the NIV in particular. Let me quote my basic response first, and then I’ll discuss why I’m bringing this up now. No, this is not a post about Bible translation, though I’m going to use a translation issue as an illustration.

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  • ID = Intense Desperation?

    Or perhaps it had set in a long time ago. I hadn’t really meant to comment on the current uproar about the Discovery Institute’s apparent “discovery” that part of Judge Jones’s ruling in the Dover case came “almost verbatim” from the propose findings of fact from the plaintiff’s attorneys. I’m not an attorney, and I hardly consider myself qualified to discuss that. But I can read, and I can see what’s similar and what’s not, and I can smell desperation.

    As a non-lawyer, some interesting questions come to mind.

    1. Did it take them this long to compare the proposed findings of fact with the final decision?
    2. What were they doing in the meantime, counting the pixels in each letter?
    3. Is there possibly some reason to conclude that other tactics having failed, this is a desperate attempt to catch the unwary by making claims that sound terrible, but that the average person doesn’t actually understand?
    4. Does anybody other than me find the combination of citing percentages in tenths of a percent (90.9%) with a phrase like “virtually verbatim” (see Discovery institute quote here and the original press release source below) to be a troubling case of using math to imply greater exactness than one’s data actually supports? OK, that one may seem more obscure, but it will be understood as 90.9% identical by many readers, and the one thing DI has is good media manipulators.

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  • Something Weird

    Jim Rutz of WorldNetDaily has an article here that is so far over the top that it’s classically funny. If Jim Rutz is right I should probably be gay, considering I’m a fourth generation vegetarian and was raised on a diet including a much higher portion of soy bean products than that of the average population.

    Oh, wait, look here:

    Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

    I am probably tolerant of homosexuals because I was “feminized” as an infant. What will they think of next?

    (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

  • No Place Like Home for the Troops

    I’m a fairly regular reader of the evangelical outpost, and often disagree, even though I respond here infrequently.; Today Joe Carter has a post, The Ruby Slipper Option: Why We Can’t Win in Iraq, that is really exceptionally good, though I detect that Carter is less happy with his conclusion than I am.

    I have commented a few times that Americans are, quite fortunately, not ruthless enough to be an occupying power. Carter notes that we tend to be a bit of a homesick power, although the homesickness is heavily the work of the voters who are already home. This is an excellent point with regard to American attitudes.

    I would add, however, that there never was a hopeful option in Iraq. There was never any doubt that we could win on the battlefield, and of course we did. But winning as an occupying power with troops required to function as a fairly advanced police force is much less likely. I sense regret in many conservatives, such as Joe Carter, that we don’t have the staying power to make Iraq stable before we leave.

    But what solution is there in Iraq that creates a stable country? The fact is that a stable Iraq that is also completely democratic is a fantasy. It’s not going to happen. Iraq is an artificial country combining people with different goals. These facts should have been given more consideration before we went in. One important consideration in formulating foreign policy should be: Is it sustainable? Determining that means considering whether the voters are likely to hang in there for the long haul. If you persuade people to enter the war with optimistic forecasts, you can’t be surprised when they abandon that support when things don’t look so rosy.

    I would note, however, that I see no good reason for the voters to have been deceived. I believe the administration painted an excessively optimistic picture, but why would anyone with reading skills have believed it? If anyone supported the war, it should have been with the knowledge that it could have been worse than it is, and that it would certainly involved American lives and resources for a substantial period of time. I credit those who continue to support the war with consistency. I wonder about those who supported it and changed their minds.

    In any case, American leaders should consider the Wizard of Oz factor when formulating foreign policy.

  • Australia Moving on Stem Cells

    Australia is reversing a previous stand and allowing therapeutic stem cell cloning. Read the full story on Yahoo! News.

  • Politicians Working Together

    Do we really want our politicians to work together?

    I caught a few minutes of an interview with former Senator Danforth of Missouri, who commented that “the people” want their government to work, they don’t think it is working, and that they would like their politicians to work together. Now I like Senator Danforth, which was why I stopped long enough to hear his interview. (I’m afraid I don’t even recall the network.) But I think a lot less people want politicians working together peacefully than say they do.

    What they really want is for politicians who agree with them to succeed at their goals for for all the other politicians to work with their favorites. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m sure there are a number of people who actually do want politicians to work together in a bipartisan fashion. I just think there are less of us than the polls would indicate.

    If you want to know where you stand on this ask yourself how many issues are litmus test issues for you. For example:

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  • Polar Moon Camp

    NASA has announced plans for a polar moon camp which would be a start to full time living on the moon. I got this story a number of different ways, but I want to provide a special hat tip to The Evangelical Ecologist, who has commented on the potential value of this plan and technology in providing energy and other resources for life here on earth.

    This provides us with an excellent example of the often overlooked fact that sound ecological policy and technology are not necessarily enemies. In the short term we may seem to benefit from ecologically unsound use of technology, but in the long term it will always cost us dearly.

    Careful and wise use of technology, however, also provides the solutions.

  • The Problem with the Drug War

    This story about Afghanistan and the opium harvest, which has reached a record high this year reminded me of one of the problems with reporting the drug war.

    We tend to report on the huge amounts of drugs that are stopped. What we don’t comment on so much is how many drugs are getting through. It’s a bit like Vietnam when we reported body counts but paid much less attention to the new live bodies that were replacing the dead ones. It’s time to do some rethinking, both in Afghanistan and here at home.

    As long as there’s demand for drugs, there will be supply.

  • Ignorance and Opinion Polls

    Well, I’ve written about a couple of posts by Joe Carter over on the evangelical outpost when I disagreed with him, so I ought to write once in a while when I agree! This morning he posted a truly wonderful write-up on opinion polls.

    It has been said that “figures lie and liars figure,” but that is not precisely accurate. It is not that the figures lie, but that they allow us to compile and present them so as to make the combination of many truths turn into a lie. The major problem with polls I believe is that they are either poorly designed, or their results are given a meaning in presentation that they don’t actually possess.

    So many people are so weak at math, and so unused to thinking with any precision about the data that they are easily mislead. One of my favorite means of statistical deception is the “on a scale of one to ten” question. Ask any sample of people to rank some issue from one to ten and then average the numbers and you will get what appears to be a very precise impression of the views of that group of people. The impression, however, is largely false.

    I recommend a couple of books: How to Lie With Statistics, which is old, but still very relevant, and Damned Lies and Statistics, which is more recent and also covers major issues in more detail.

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