Richardson

Richardson, predictably, gets destroyed on Meet The Press. His vanity trip crashes to earth.

The media wants a Democratic win, and that means a strong candidate, and that means Hillary. Former Cuomo staffer Tim Russert and former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos are operating as shills for the Clinton campaign, and they are going to carve up any and all Dem pretenders. Tim did the job on Richardson here, and a few weeks ago George cut Edwards to ribbons. Obama will be handled more tenderly, but when he leaves the studio he will be damaged goods.

I think Richardson is a very decent governor here in New Mexico, that rarest of Democratic birds who actually cuts taxes and is business-friendly. That's not easy, faced with a legislature that thinks its job is to redistribute wealth so all New Mexicans will be equally poor. Richardson has also been fortunate to be in office at a time of budget surpluses, due to high oil and gas revenues; you can't fault his timing. He's pro-choice, approved medical marijuana, and supports the Second Amendment -- all libertarian tendencies I'm glad to see. The Spaceport is a visionary idea, no matter how it turns out. His plans for a regional transport system are also visionary, but those run a much greater risk of becoming a financial albatross for decades to come, long after he's left office.

Beyond the state level it's a different story, with nothing on Richardson's vita that qualifies as a springboard to national elective office. He didn't make much of an impression at the UN, and he flunked his big test, an executive stint as Sec. of Energy under Bill Clinton. The security scandals at Los Alamos happened on his watch, right in his home state, and he never achieved command of the situation. He could have done himself a lot of good by launching a top to bottom review and re-tooling of the entire security system at the labs, a real shake-up and house-cleaning, but he didn't. We know he didn't, because the same nonsense continues to happen over there, with classified files lately waltzing out with a low-level employee and showing up in a crack raid on a doublewide. His non-portfolio shuttle diplomacy to free prisoners from North Korea and Sudan were nice, but basically Jesse-Jackson-style free-lancing that has nothing to do with being President of the US.

Byron

Duke faculty, et al.

Why would anyone pay to have their son or daughter at Duke?

Try to read the all-too-typical paranoid diatribe (linked here) by a highly-paid Duke faculty member, who fully represents the mode of thinking of the Academic Left that now firmly controls most of the liberal arts (aka "cultural studies") departments of our major universities.

In reading this kind of stuff, it is important to know that for these people there is no such thing as objective truth, but merely context-dependent meanings that arise from one or another construction of the world. The idea of appealing to an independent reality is rejected as absurd, a notion long ago deconstructed -- there is no such thing, you see, only perspectives. The only possible reality are texts and our varying interpretations of them. If you and I disagree, that can only reflect a disagreement about which signifiers (words, symbols) we accept. Disagreements about signifiers, in turn, result from differences in political ideology, ethnicity, race, gender, and class, which means that the signifiers themselves can have no fixed, agreed-upon meanings, but are free to slide around unanchored from any objective set of factual referents.

What the previous paragraph means in practice is that rational discourse and dialog with these people is virtually impossible. They do not engage in argument; for them, rationality, far from being privileged, is merely another power play. An appeal to logic is just another hegemonic move, an illegitimate attempt to impose stipulation. Conversation is impossible because what's being spoken is a nonsense tongue, destroying language as it goes.

If the universe is defined by subjective perspective, then we each create our own universe, and ours is as "true" as anybody else's. The predictable result is the narcissism of the Postmodernist, an escapist self-absorption that exalts the non-rational -- the mystical, the emotive pseudo-aesthetic, and the romantically idealized primitive. (Ask me why I was so happy to get the hell out of Santa Fe.)

The control of university departments and academic disciplines, by the way, is exercised in the hiring and promotion-and-tenure processes, as well as in the editorial functions of academic journals and the peer review process for grant applications. (Notice that this buddy system has our lunatic professor sojourning at Williams this year instead of Duke, the circulation of a crazed elite.) What this all means is that no matter what, by some miracle, might be done starting right now this morning, it still would take decades for this situation to change.

Byron

Debating Darwin, Part 43,257

The American Enterprise Institute held yet another Darwin debate, this time among four political conservatives, two pro-Darwin, two anti. The anti side talked about the sometimes nasty moral implications of Darwinism, like Social Darwinism and eugenics. But the whole thing finally came down these final four paragraphs.

While I don't think Darwinism is at all trivial, I do think Gilder's point is exactly the right one, and obviously so. No scientist with half a brain should presume to claim that science can answer Gilder's questions, because they aren't scientific questions. And people on the religion side only look foolish when they presume to make claims about how the natural world works, because that's not a religious question. There is an appropriate and necessary division of labor here, and this whole stupid mess is the result of people on both sides refusing to recognize that.

Since there is nothing very profound or difficult about that conclusion, the refusal has to be purposeful, having to do with personal celebrity, book sales, speaking engagements, and similar. In other words, both sides know better, but they do it anyway, for other reasons. And both sides have their partisans who love to cheer and cat-call from the sidelines, guaranteeing that there will be lots more Evolution vs. Religion "debates."

The more I look at this trumped-up squabble, the more it resembles a pro wrestling match. To put it all into its proper context, I recommend that from now on all Evolution vs. Religion debates be sanctioned by Vince McMahon and the WWE

I even have the costumes all worked out.

Byron