Speaking of Political Parties, I May Have Found the One for Me...

I got this lead from Vox-Nova, and did some digging on my own, and I think that I may have found the first political party I would ever hit the street for. To bad it is in Spain.

I will continue to do my homework, but this may need to get imported over with the next shipment of rioja.

Here is a striking platform they have put quite straightfowardly: Rechazamos El Aborto Porque Somos de Izquierda (We Reject Abortion Because We Are of the Left). They also are vigorous admirers of John Paul II. In case you are not a Spanish reader, here is a representative of their abortion stance in English, the essay is entitled: Abortion, Euthanasia and Capitalism.

They are the Solidarity Party of Spain. I hope that this is the future of leftism. If so, then, sign me up.

I'll wait and see.

Bad Social Science: Exibit A

I am an online-registered Republican and Democrat (along with a few other parties: Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, Greens, Libertarians, Socialists and Chuck Norris), so, needless to say, I get a lot of mindless propaganda.

Now, at the heart of it they usually want money, but I was surprised in the latest mailing from my most frequent e-party, the GOP, when they wanted me to fill out a survey--and then give them some money. For the record, I have never given a cent of money to any party, but I was willing to try and give them some honest feedback. Unfortunately, their survey is a complete joke, but not entirely without its lessons: Namely, that most surveys in social science are smarter versions of this anyway, so, we should ignore or treat like the funnies page most "studies" and "findings" from our dear friends the social scientists.

Here is an edited (for space and format) version of the survey. If you want to see it for yourself, click here.

Part I. The Republican Party

1. Why did Republicans lose the White House and Congressional seats in the 2008 elections? Check all that apply.

- Iraq War
- Poor Economy
- Government's Response to Katrina
- Republican Scandals
- Republicans acted like Democrats
- President Bush's policies
- Liberal Media

2. What are the key strengths and beliefs of the Republican Party that we can build on? Check all that apply.

- Social Issues
- Family Values
- Ethics
- Free Markets
- National Security
- Fiscal Discipline
- Limited Government
- Personal Responsibility
- Pro-Life

3. What are the weaknesses of the Republican Party? Check all that apply.

- Bad Messaging
- Poor Response to Democrats
- Republicans who don't vote like Republicans
- Standing Up for Principles
- Need to Lead in Congress

4. What is the best way to encourage and register new voters in your community? Check all that apply.

- Door-to-Door visits
- Online Social Networking
- E-mail
- Personal Appearances by Republican Leaders in Your Area
- Radio Ads
- Interaction at Community Events
- Online Advertising

5. What technology would you like to see the RNC make better use of to grow our Party? Check all that apply.

- More Aggressive E-mail Campaigns
- More Aggressive Text Messages
- More Aggressive use of Twitter
- More Social Networking Sites like Facebook and MyGOP
- No Opinion

6. What can the Republican Party do to earn and maintain your trust?

Part II. Domestic and Social Issues

1. A recent national poll reported that nearly 25% of Americans want the government to pass more socialism. Do you agree or disagree?

- Agree
- Disagree
- Undecided


2. Which do you believe creates more jobs for the American economy: Government Programs and Spending or The American Free Enterprise System?

- Government Programs and Spending
- The American Free Enterprise System
- Undecided

3. The Obama Administration has proposed spending as much as $1.5 trillion to bail out the banking industry. Do you agree or disagree with this proposal?

4. Do you oppose so-called "card-check" legislation, which eliminates secret ballot elections during unionization drives and puts workers at risk of intimidation by labor bosses?

5. Should Republicans unite to block new federal government bureaucracy and red tape that will crush future economic growth?

6. Should Republicans in Congress oppose the new wasteful government spending programs passed in the recent "stimulus" bill by the Pelosi-Reid Democrats designed to "spread the wealth"?

7. Do you agree that we must secure our borders to stop illegal immigration?

8. Should we do everything we can to block Democrats who are trying to shut down conservative talk radio with the so-called "fairness doctrine"?

9. Should we resist Barack Obama's proposal to spend billions of federal taxpayer dollars to pay "volunteers" who perform his chosen tasks?

10. Should Republicans unite in opposition to judicial nominees who bring a personal, left-wing agenda on social issues to their jobs as judges?
11. Should bureaucrats in Washington, DC be in charge of making your health care choices instead of you and your doctor?

Part III. Homeland Security and Defense Issues

1. If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

2. Should we stop Democrat leaders from cutting funding from our intelligence agencies or bringing back Clinton-era restrictions on inter-agency communications?

3. Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?

4. Should Republicans unite in support of full funding for border and port security when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to make cuts in these areas?

5. Do you think U.S. troops should have to serve under United Nations' commanders?

6. Do you agree that our top military priority should be fighting terrorists?

7. Should we fight military-cutting efforts in Congress, such as the proposal from liberal Barney Frank to slash the Pentagon budget by 25%?

8. Even though Barack Obama pledged to meet personally with the likes of Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should Republicans continue to focus on supporting democratic movements in oppressive states like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran?

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. V

LECTURES VI AND VII: THE SICK SOUL

“If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion.” (p. 129)

“The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and the only obvious escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolute unitary fact.” (pp. 129 - 130)

“Does it not appear that one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from the one who habitually lived on the other?” (p. 133)

“Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.” (p. 138)

“So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface.” (p. 142)

“Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, interest, or perspective… The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.” (pp. 147 - 148)

“So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic condition. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts—gifts to us, from the sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond our control.” (p. 148)

“How can the moribund old man reason back himself into the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery.” (p. 148)

“It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” (p. 160)

“If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself!” (p. 160)

“…the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.” (pp. 161-162)

On The Dangers of Liberal Society, pt. II

In my first post in this series I argued that freedom or liberty--or whatever you would like to call the thing that I think we can all agree that we find in what is generally called "liberal society"--is not good on its own. In fact, it seems quite plausible that freedom can serve as an intoxicating sedative for human flourishing. I hate to use the rather stale analogy of the boiling a frog to death by slowly raising the temperature until he poached, but I think that it can apply here. To be clear, my point was this: Liberty need not be benevolent.

But this is not a surprising thing to say. What may strike us as a surprise is the implication that such an idea may have in the context of political authority. Could it be that, while fascism is never a moral thing to desire for its own sake, it offers us a unique opportunity to exist in the sober reality of the world as it is? In other words, I would contend that, while one need not make an outright case for fascism and offend those who in their own life have suffered at the hands of fascists, one can explore what is it about living in the midst of salient injustice and poignant illiberality that might cause the human person to flourish in a distinctly different way than the person who lives in apparent freedom.

This is the issue I would like to raise and while it may seem flamboyent or controversial, I actually think it is a rather normative thing to ponder. I mean, we rarely see movies that glory at the abilities of the human spirit to thrive in the midst of plenty. No, instead we like to see underdogs, slumdogs, and other caninesque things in our drama.

Now, this may seem overly simplistic, but, I wonder: Could it be that these cases are not extraordinary feats, but, instead, natural things that are proper to such dire conditions? What I mean to say is that instead of thinking about the heroism of the person who can rise out of oppression, what would it look like to think about that same event as something that the non-oppressed cannot do?

This reversal leaves the liberal societies and their (our) comforts behind as crutches that keep us from encountering the brute force of life and death, pain and suffering, and, of course, love. It turns an ironically tragic, but beautiful, light on the very places we long to escape from.

Politcally speaking, this would be fascism. What does it mean to long for this to happen? What does it mean to long for an end of liberalism and its desentitizing sense of freedom that traps our ability to live and, perhaps, to love at the height of our powers?

Social Science & Shameless Self-promotion

If you are interested in social science as it pertains to the general disputes over what constitutes legitimate scientific inquiry, then, you may want to read this recent essay review I co-authored from Education Review. It is a review of Bent Flyvjerg's book, Making Social Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it can Succeed Again. My contributions are mostly critical, but the basic argument is a worthwhile one to think about, I think.

The things dad's (or, at least I) say...

NO! DO NOT HANG MY KEYS ON YOUR PEE-PEE!

-As said by me to my diaperless son this morning.

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. IV

LECTURE IV AND V: THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS

“The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end in which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world really is.” (p. 89)

“I believe the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific, sect allows for.” (p. 120)

“What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?” (p. 120)

“Science to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically.” (p. 120)

“And why, after all, may not the worlds be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time comes out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal.” (p. 120)