The Alternative December 17, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: conservatism
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Obama is taking a few hits in the polls as health care reform languishes in the Senate, unemployment stubbornly persists, and the war in Afghanistan escalates.
It is to be hoped that these are temporary setbacks. But in light of this downturn in progressive aspirations it is worth pondering the alternative.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) took aim at Democratic proposals for a new jobs bill. He apparently has objections to the “extension of unemployment benefits through June of 2010;” “extension of COBRA subsidies through June of 2010;” and “extension of the refundable child tax credit to those with income less than $3,000.
Vast numbers of Americans are unemployed, not because of any fault on their part, but because of a massive collapse of the global financial system, and the GOP wants to make sure those unemployed cannot get health care or pay for food, shelter, and other necessities.
This is their “solution”?
The fact that unemployed persons can help stimulate the economy when they can buy food, clothing, health services, and housing is apparently lost on conservatives.
As Steve Benen writes:
It’s a surprisingly helpful preview of what the public could expect if Republicans reclaim the House majority in next year’s midterms. When GOP leaders talk about “cutting spending,” they usually pretty vague. Cantor is offering a reminder of what he and his colleagues will target: the safety net Americans rely on when they’re most vulnerable.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Moral Bankruptcy December 14, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, politics.Tags: centrism in politics, Health care reform
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The question of whether we will have progressive health care reform or a new subsidy for the insurance companies comes down to whether the odious Joe Leiberman (Independent, CT) can be cajoled into supporting a public option or something very similar to it.
Yesterday, Leiberman seemed to pull the plug on that possibility, saying that he now opposes the Medicare expansion that he has supported in the past. The health care reform debacle illustrates once more the near impossibility of getting a liberal bill through the Senate.
But part of the reason goes beyond mere politics. As Matt Yglesias writes:
Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
The moral bankruptcy of so-called “centrism” becomes more apparent everyday but few seem to notice.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
All God’s Children? December 13, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, religion.Tags: Immigration, Salvation army
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Charity in the 21st Century apparently means punishing children for the “sins” of their parents.
The Salvation Army and a charity affiliated with the Houston Fire Department are among those that consider immigration status, asking for birth certificates or Social Security cards for the children.
The point isn’t to punish the children but to ensure that their parents are either citizens, legal immigrants or working to become legal residents, said Lorugene Young, whose Outreach Program Inc. is one of three groups that distribute toys collected by firefighters.
“It’s not our desire to turn anyone down,” she said. “Those kids are not responsible if they are here illegally. It is the parents’ responsibility.”
Why does the Salvation Army care about the immigration status of the recipients of their charity? Apparently only “the right sort” of children deserve toys and food.
This organization of bigots doesn’t deserve anybody’s cash.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Scam December 10, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Science, politics.Tags: climategate, global warming
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If you are tempted to question climate change because of the recent flap over hacked emails that are alleged to show scientists falsifying data, you should read Lee Fang’s article, “A Case Of Classic SwiftBoating: How The Right-Wing Noise Machine Manufactured ‘Climategate’ “. Fang shows how conservatives distort facts in order to discredit legitimate science:
…Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.
…As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?
And the media goes right along with the scam:
A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.
One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles…
Fang provides a detailed chronology of the media campaign to discredit global warming science.
Despite this nonsense, in fact, the scientific consensus on climate change has been achieved through the publication of thousands of independent peer-reviewed papers and field research.
The hacked emails show only that scientists are human and care about putting their data in the best light. Is that some kind of earth-shaking revelation? A scientific consensus such as that enjoyed by the global warming hypothesis is formed when competing scientists with an interest in making their own reputations can’t refute the data.
When data withstands repeated tests it becomes the consensus.
A few scientists dressing up their graphs does not threaten the underlying science of global warming.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
No Patience With Fools December 10, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Science.Tags: Al Gore, global warming
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Al Gore is fired up. In a recent Slate interview he lays into global warming skeptics.
“[W]e’re putting 90 million tons of it into the air today and we’ll put a little more of that up there tomorrow. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God’s sakes. It’s not some mystery. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, John Tyndall discovered CO2 traps heat, and that was the same year the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.
“But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they [global warming deniers] think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto! — physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is ‘unequivocal,’ which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.
“If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn’t take place, I’m sure we’d have a robust debate about it right now.”
“Well, you know, the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality,” …. “After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
Unfortunately, the news media continues to publicize nitwits who want to gamble with life on earth.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Professor in Chief December 8, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Barack Obama
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I can’t imagine George W. Bush giving an explanation like this.
Via Brad Delong, this is an excerpt from the Q and A with President Obama after the recent jobs summit:
ROBERT KUTTNER: You know, most of the things that have been proposed today cost money, and there is this concern about the federal deficit. I hope that your administration will recognize, as I know you will, that it’s possible, first of all, to reduce the deficit over time and sometimes in the short run realize that you need to increase the deficit. And I hope the concern about the deficit in the long run doesn’t crowd out the need for additional spending in the short run. And I also think that some of these programs that increase jobs and increase GDP are probably the fastest way to get the economy back on a track that will reduce the deficit over time. It’s certainly a better way to reduce the deficit than putting ourselves into a — into a debtor’s prison and assume we can deflate our way to recovery.
BARACK OBAMA: Well, I think this is an important point. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about specific initiatives. There is a macroeconomic element to this whole thing. And so let me just amplify what was just said.
We have a structural deficit that is real and growing, apart from the financial crisis. We inherited it. We’re spending about 23 percent of GDP and we take in 18 percent of GDP and that gap is growing because health care costs, Medicare and Medicaid in particular, are growing. And we’ve got to do something about that.
You then layer on top of that the huge loss of tax revenue as a consequence of the financial crisis and the greater demands for unemployment insurance and so forth. That’s another layer. Probably the smallest layer is actually what we did in terms of the Recovery Act. I mean, I think there’s a misperception out there that somehow the Recovery Act caused these deficits.
No, I mean, we had — we’ve got a 9-point-something trillion- dollar deficit, maybe a trillion dollars of it can be attributed to both the Recovery Act as well as the cleanup work that we had to do in terms of the banks. In turns out actually TARP, as wildly unpopular as it has been, has been much cheaper than any of us anticipated.
So that’s not what’s contributing to the deficit. We’ve got a long- term structural deficit that is primarily being driven by health care costs, and our long-term entitlement programs. All right? So that’s the baseline.
Now, if we can’t grow our economy, then it is going to be that much harder for us to reduce the deficit. The single most important thing we could do right now for deficit reduction is to spark strong economic growth, which means that people who’ve got jobs are paying taxes and businesses that are making profits have taxes — are paying taxes. That’s the most important thing we can do.
We understand that in this administration. That’s not always the dialogue that’s going on out there in public and we’re going to have to do a better job of educating the public on that.
The last thing we would want to do in the midst of what is a weak recovery is us to essentially take more money out of the system either by raising taxes or by drastically slashing spending. And frankly, because state and local governments generally don’t have the capacity to engage in deficit spending, some of that obligation falls on the federal government.
Having said that, what is also true is that unless businesses and global capital markets have some sense that we’ve got a plan, medium and long term, to get the deficit down, it’s hard for us to be credible, and that also could be counterproductive. So we’ve got about as difficult a economic play as is possible, which is to press the accelerator in terms of job growth, but then know when to apply the brakes in the out-years and do that credibly. And you know, we are trying to strike that balance, but we’re going to need help from all of you who oftentimes are more credible than politicians in delivering that message.
Because we want to leverage whatever public dollars are spent, and we are under no illusion that somehow the federal government can spend its way out of this recession. But it is absolutely true that any of the ideas that have been — been mentioned here are still going to require some public dollars, and those are actually good investments to make right now.
I am not an economist but I feel like I know more about economics after reading this. What a difference an election makes.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
And So It Begins December 7, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Science.Tags: Copenhagen Climate Change
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The climate change conference that began on Monday in Copenhagen, at which the world’s nations attempt to initiate a process of limiting the damage of climate change, may be among the most important in history since the fate of the globe hangs in the balance.
So it is worth debunking the myths about climate change that circulate endlessly on the Internets.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Altruistic Toddler December 7, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Human Nature, Science.Tags: altruism, Michael Tomasello, selfishness, shared intentionality
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Are humans selfish by nature? Yes. Are humans unselfish by nature? Yes. And that seems to be the answer(s) to one of the most ferocious debates in moral philosophy—at least among those who like quick and absolutist answers. A certain episode of Friends comes to mind—“The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS”—where even a decent human being like Phoebe ends up buying into the idea that “there are no good, selfless deeds.” But there are. And we don’t even have to disprove the silly notion that if an act of helping others makes you feel good, then you did it for selfish reasons. Because now new research shows that toddlers like to help, and they certainly don’t calculate beforehand whether helping will make them feel good, or whether it carries some reward:
The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.
When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.
Furthermore, this behavior is cross-cultural—and only lasts until the child is around 3. Then he or she begins to understand that there may be an advantage to helping some rather than helping others:
As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”
Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.
Dr. Tomasello explains this as a result of “shared intentionality” which is specific for humans; while apes may have a basic “theory of mind,” an understanding that other apes and humans have consciousness, it is in the human mind that curiosity about what goes on in the other minds becomes a vital part of the culture.
The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food.
This study is only one of many these days, from neuroscience to evolutionary psychology, to animal behaviorism, to experimental philosophy, as a new generation of thinkers and scientists is finding its voice and shaping a new picture of human nature: the growing consensus is that of course we humans are partly selfish—otherwise we wouldn’t survive. But our very well-developed sense of fairness reaches both ways—to ensure fair treatment for ourselves, but also in clear recognition of the common humanity of the Other who is in the same boat. It makes us feel good to be social and sociable. We are at the same time altruistic and selfish, and one behavioral aspect can’t be reduced to the other. Reality is far more interesting than the classical reductivist attempts to boil human nature down to one basic behavioral aspect. Let’s see if the false dichotomy of selfish/unselfish can finally be phased out of the ethical debate in the 21st century.
Is College Football in Trouble? December 6, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Education.Tags: College Athletics and budget cuts, Hofstra Football
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Hofstra University (on Long Island, New York) has just joined Northeastern in cancelling their football program for budgetary reasons. Via Brainstorms:
In an e-mail message sent out to the Hofstra University community earlier today, our president, Stuart Rabinowitz, announced the end of Hofstra’s intercollegiate football program. We were a Football Championship Subdivision school, not a Bowl Subdivision school, and football was not a money maker for us. Still, this can’t have been an easy decision. A lot of people (players, coaching staff, and fans at all levels) invest all sorts of emotions in college and university football teams — most of the time, more so than in other sports — and many of them are very upset right now. We’ve now joined Northeastern, also a Football Championship Subdivision school that (just last month) chose to end its football program.
Football is an enormously expensive sport and most programs do not pay for themselves but need substantial subsidy from funds that could be spent on sustaining threatened academic programs.
As Laurie Fendrich, author of the linked article writes:
What I’ve always objected to with college football is the charade of it all — particularly, the charade of Bowl Subdivision schools offering up their “scholar-athlete” football players as entertainment for couch-potato-ing, illegally betting, rah-rah-ing Americans who don’t for a second care whether or not football adversely affects the mission of a particular school, or whether it’s good for the players and their futures, or whether it fits with the goals of higher education in general.
Intercollegiate sports are not part of the core mission of a university. As much as I enjoy sports, I don’t see the justification for maintaining sports programs while academic programs are starved for money.
In a more perfect world, where education was valued and appropriately funded, we might have the luxury of expensive sports programs that have little to do with education, but such is not our world.
Cross-posted
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Vegetarians Rejoice! December 3, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink, Science.Tags: frankenfood, vegetarianism
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SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.
The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.
So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.
They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals. […]
“You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals,” said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research. […]
Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”
It is my understanding that a muscle has to be used in order if it is to develop the texture we are accustomed to eating.
So what would an exercise yard for disembodied pork parts look like?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
