Thursday, October 30, 2008

en attendant Frodo

It's after noon, and we're still waiting for the Fairfax County inspector to show up and give our deck a look-see; he was supposed to arrive at 10AM. I have little to do at the moment, but once the inspector has come and gone, I'll be helping Dad take down another major fixture from our living room: the giant mirror that has sat above our fireplace since The Beginning, when we moved here in the early 1980s (1982, I think).

In the meantime, a bit of balanced reading for you regarding Barack Obama:

1. REI guru (and CouchSurfing host) Rico points us to Andrew Sullivan's very positive take on Obama:

Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.

2. Canuck blogger Skippy's very negative take on Obama:

Obama has a major fundraising scandal on the horizon that would cripple his presidency if any Republicans were likely to survive next Tuesday, but that’s not going to be a problem, now is it? At this point, the Democratic nominee for president could get drunk and run over 5 pre-schoolers and Joe the Plumber with a fucking steamroller, and he’d still win the Commonwealth of Virginia by six points. [This election] is over and has been ever since the banking industry collapsed.

[A word of caution: this post contains a vulgar Mondegreen in animated GIF form. I'm a big fan of Skippy, but if you're one of my more delicate readers, you might have to steer clear of him, period.]

Don't just read the people who agree with you, especially when it comes to politics. As Michael Shermer pointed out in his lecture on "Why People Believe Weird Things," we're all prone to confirmation bias, i.e., to weeding out discomfirmatory evidence so as to focus on and remember only the evidence that confirms our basic orientation. Certain strains of environmentalism* again come to mind (see earlier discussion-- and the comments appended thereto), but this bias is just as evident in other human pursuits, like religion and politics. Whether confirmation bias is an inherently bad thing is debatable, but it is something we need to watch out for, because little good comes of being wrapped up in a world-denying cocoon.





*From the above-linked article:

One thing does seem very clear, however; science is only beginning to get a handle on the big picture of global warming. Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at the political cry of "alarming rates." We may simply be going through another natural cycle of warmer and colder times - one that's been observed through a scientific analysis of the Earth to be naturally occuring for hundreds of thousands of years.


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