It’s nice to hear about this insider stuff. Helps give a better understanding to why the House voted against the bail out.

In giving an explanation for the current financial crisis Darwin writes:

1. from the millions of people who are getting evicted from their homes because their bank assured them they could afford a variable-rate mortgage and

Notice that Darwin frames the issue as a matter of the bank tricking unsuspecting borrowers into taking loans they couldn’t afford. He doesn’t frame it as the borrower making a bad decision. It’s very common to see people on the left model poor people this way. The poor are model as ignorant saps ready to be taken advantage by unscrupulous greed driven capitalists. The model dictates that blame lands on the capitalist because the poor person is to stupid to know what they were doing.

This model of poor people is ridiculously common in academy. This got me thinking about why such a crappy model of poor people permeates throughout a group of people whose supposedly should know better. For the last couple of years I have been toying with the idea that liberals like to be compassionate and this causes them to support policies that protects the poor from their bad choices. Like for example, in the current crisis, they support protecting poor people that took on loans they could clearly not pay, by stopping the foreclosure.

However, thinking about it more today I came up with an alternative explanation. I think the biggest reason why people on the left, particularly the academic left, hold such wrongheaded views on the poor is because they have never had direct exposure to them for an extended period of time. Liberals have never faced watching a poor person make a bad decision after they spoke with them about why deciding that way is a bad idea. By not living with poor people in a day to day fashion, the educated left can maintain the belief that the poor are not responsible for making bad decisions because of the machinations of others.

Perhaps we should mandate the passing of legislation forcing young people to live with poor people. Hopefully that will libertarian them up as they grown into adulthood.

The bailout fails. I figured since they made a big fanfare about having a revised version that meant they knew they already had the votes. I’m very surprised.

This is moderately partisan but I think makes some strong points.

UPDATE: Found a functioning file.

One important aspect of operating in the environment is predicting future outcomes. Let us then assume that the evolution of our species has lead to the optimal development of faculties that allows us to predict the future. Since these tools are not very good, is it fair to infer that future prediction is just not possible? Evolution has literally had million of years to develop the faculties needed to predict the future and yet by far and large has failed.

If evolution is not capable of developing the faculties needed to predict the future, what luck will we have, as products of evolution, in developing technologies that predict the future.

This seems to suggest that accurate future prediction is simply impossible to accomplish.

How do you guys like it?

The organization Intelligence Squared put on a debate about universal health care. A previous post featured a segment of that debate. It actually was an interesting debate and I highly recommend viewing it.

One thing that I was struck by was how often the supporters of universal health care invoked moral imperative to justify forcing taxpayers to assume the cost of providing health care to all. Those arguing against universal health care would point high cost of health care for all and often times supporters would argue that regardless of cost, we have a moral obligation to provide that care. Another variant of this argument was that health care is to important to be handled by profit making in the private market. Again implying that health care has a moral element which mandates a different treatment then say the production of automobiles.

What I find odd about using morality to justify health care is that at it’s core, its a religious argument. When supporters are pressed and fail to show the merits of universal health care, they appeal to this moral imperative to overcome the deficits in the merit of their position. Invoking moral imperative signals this kind of argument: “yes I realize their is no cogent argument for universal health care, but you should feel guilty about people dying because they lack health care and want to do something about it”.

Being raised Catholic I am all to familiar with this kind of argumentation. The incongruity of people on the left relying on an argument I have associated with religious argumentation was quite ironic given the left’s hostility towards religion.

Arguments based on moral imperative almost always come from a place in which it’s rationally obvious the argument can’t be made on it’s own merits. It attempts to engage emotional regions of the brain to overcome the more rational skeptical regions that find the argument wanting. It’s a kind argumentation I deplore.

All ideological systems have concepts that seem silly to those that that don’t buy into the system. What’s odd is that people on the left honestly think the problem with Christianity is that they believe these silly things. For example, Christians believe an omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous entity created the universe. Liberals think this kind of thinking is ‘irrational’ and indicative of an ignorant person. All the while they think what distinguishes knowledge from ignorance is belief in an incomprehensibly massive universe started from a practically imperceptible speck of a dust billions of years ago.

Having grown up dealing with religion I can tell you first hand that the problem of religion has nothing to do with their beliefs. The problem with religion is that they use those beliefs in conjunction with moral imperatives to force you to do their bidding. For example, Catholics believes in something called original sin, in which by virtue of the fact that you are born, you are lacking and must prove yourself in the eyes of god. Of course the system is set up so that if you do the Church’s bidding, what they would call the ‘moral imperative’, you would be A-Okay in god’s eye.

You see this is the kind of dangerous thinking that I rejected at very early age. Using guilt and emotion to force someone to do your bidding is only a marginal improvement over outright force. It was on the basis of this repeated argumentation found all throughout Christianity that I eventually abandoned the system entirely. For quite some time I associated the use of moral imperative to win the argument without merit to be a strategy unique to religion. Only later did I realize many kinds of people like this kind of argumentation.

I find people on the left using the worst part of religion to win the argument about universal health care to be problematic. More to the point, you would think that people on the left, having taking up the cause to fight religion, would know better than to employ religion’s most dangerous tactic in trying to ‘convince’ people of the merits of their argument. Unsurprisingly though, the left wishes to align itself with one of religion’s most heinous aspects while at the same time condemn them for their beliefs. Catholics are stupid because they believe through the process of transubstantiation they drink the blood of their god every Sunday. Meanwhile those on the left consider it a mark of erudition to believe one electron can be at two different locations simultaneous.

I should also like to make one more observation about the supporters use of moral imperative to win the argument about universal health care. Its somewhat disingenuous to argue for a moral imperative and then demand the state enforce it. If it’s such a compelling moral imperative it would not require the use of the state’s monopoly on force to implement it.

Honestly, it don’t get any simpler than this:

A recent WSJ article points out that non-religious people are more much more likely to believe in pseudoscience and paranormal activity than religious people.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

In the CNN article detailing the proposal by the federal goverment to buy the mortgage debt has some ‘expert’ make this howler of a claim:

“The government could make a profit, a substantial profit,” said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services analyst at the Stanford Group, a policy research firm. “The pricing mechanism is going to be central.”

Can this guy be serious? Seven hundred billion dollars in bad loans is so unprofitable that the only entity willing to purchase it is an entity that finance it through other people’s money which was acquired through force. He can’t seriously be suggesting that the market price of these loans is wrong and that the state will eventually down the road make profit from assuming the debt of millions of people who have a proven track record of not paying their debts. Just one day they will wake up and magically be responsible for their actions.

While I don’t buy the reason to assume this much debt is to protect the economy, at least its a reason. To actually suggest that taking on all this bad debt will be profitable requires buying into a level of spin that is outright insulting. The Federal government is not amusing this debt to turn a profit. They are doing this to ’save’ the economy.

Quick question: Is there anyone who reads my blogs that supports the federal government’s proposal to purchase 700 billion dollars of defaulted loans? I know my right leaning friends dislike this greatly. But I’m wondering where my left leaning friends land on this issue. From what I can tell, nobody likes it, which makes me wonder where the political support for this action is coming from.