Violent Muslims and Mood Affiliation

Tyler Cowen talks brilliantly about the fallacy of “mood affiliation,” which usually involves feeling an urgent need to counter optimism or pessimism towards a certain topic. It overlaps with “confirmation bias” and “cherry-picking,” and I find myself committing this fallacy quite often. For instance, I think climate scientists have engaged in alarmist predictions that are already failing to come true, so I like to dismiss as exaggeration any evidence of negative things happening to the environment. When you suffer from mood affiliation, you are so opposed to an extreme viewpoint that you feel the need to argue against anything that even comes close to that viewpoint for the fear that it helps validate the extreme viewpoint, even though the truth may lie somewhere between.

One topic that attracts mood affiliation from all over the spectrum is the threat of violence from radicalized American Muslims. I certainly believe there are those who overplay this threat, from conservative Republican voters fretting about Sharia law and TV shows about Muslims, to neo-conservatives looking to justify war, to the federal government making excuses to creep onto our freedoms via the TSA and other civil liberty intrusions. They are the pessimists in this exercise. Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is weakened, and it’s been ten years since 9/11. What do we still have to be afraid of?

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Do the very poor have an ample safety net?

Mitt Romney got lots of attention last week for saying he’s “not concerned about the very poor” because they have an “ample safety net.” Someone on reddit’s r/moderatepolitics asked what people thought of that, and I commented but was late to the discussion and didn’t get any votes or replies. I don’t think many saw it, so I have expanded and improved my thoughts here.

What kind of safety net do the poor in America have anyway? There are food stamps. There is housing assistance. There are unemployment benefits. For health, there is Medicaid. For high school education, there are free public schools. For college education, there is financial aid.

And that’s just the government safety net – people often forget that there are voluntary communities as well, with food shelters, homeless shelters, churches, and a slew of organizations and organizers who consider it their primary mission to serve the poor, along with millions of other Americans and businesses who contribute money and time to these organizations.

Now obviously all of the opportunities mentioned above aren’t available to every one who is poor. You may run out of certain benefits, or you may not qualify for them in the first place. Additional voluntary services may not be available in your area. The demand for these services is also uneven: Some poor may simply lack opportunity or be “down on their luck,” but there are the severely handicapped or severely addicted who are unable to make wise decisions or escape their situation, and they may need more help than others. But in general a large number of the poor have a myriad of options for assistance for all of their basic needs regarding food, shelter, medical care, education, and more.

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Rooting For Divided Government

I’m a political junkie who likes to keep up with the latest polls. I try not to put too much stock in them because I know how quickly they can change, but it’s interesting to observe the conventional wisdom as it changes. Most of the US political discussion right now is focused on the Presidential race, such as who is going to win the Republican nomination and whether or not that person can defeat Obama. The majority of the head-to-head polls so far show Obama tying or beating Romney, Obama beating Paul by a bit more, Obama beating Santorum by a bit more, and Obama beating Gingrich by even more. Of course, there are dozens of things that could change that landscape in the next nine months, besides the fact that it’s not a true popular vote and we don’t have enough state polling yet to start projecting which states are safely red or blue in the electoral college math. I’m certainly not going to do any arrogant predicting about what the people will decide because I think I know how they feel about Obama or Romney or whoever, but it definitely looks like a plausible possibility that Obama will be re-elected.

But, of course, that is only one race. Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for election, as well as one-third of the Senate seats. The polling is early here as well, but it definitely looks like a plausible possibility that the GOP will not only retain the House but will regain a majority in the Senate. This would establish a GOP-controlled Congress and Democratic-controlled Presidency for the first time since Clinton in the mid-to-late 1990’s. And I’m trying to decide if this is something I want to root for.

I know, I know, as a conservative I’m supposed to think that Obama is a dangerous big-government socialist and that there is nothing more important than kicking him out of office. But what would his presidency look like if the Republicans controlled not one chamber of Congress, but both of them?

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Romney and Gingrich and the Mudslinging Wars

After Newt Gingrich won South Carolina, he rose to the lead in polls of Florida, the next primary state. This was too threatening to Mitt Romney’s campaign, so he proceeded to completely smother Florida in negative ads about Gingrich. They’re saying that Romney outspent Gingrich by a whopping 15 to 1, but that only 0.1% of the overall ads were pro-Romney and 70% were anti-Gingrich! Unfortunately for those of us who don’t like negative campaigning, it worked. Romney erased Gingrich’s lead in the polls and soared to new heights, completing the race yesterday with a solid first-place finish of almost half the votes.

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How Liberal is the New York Times Anyway?

The conservative Internets have been all aflutter the last couple days with smoking-gun proof that the New York Times has a liberal bias. On January 28 the NYT had an editorial called “Filibustering Nominees Must End,” arguing against the Republican tactic of filibustering nominees. Of course a few years ago they were publishing editorials encouraging Democrats to filibuster under Bush. Boom! Gotcha!

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Elizabeth Warren And The Roads

Elizabeth Warren has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet lately, inspiring progressives and infuriating libertarians with things she said in her appearance on Jon Stewart last week. I watched these three videos to try to get a sense of what was going on before realizing that the first one was from a Daily Show appearance in January 2010, not January 2012. But it doesn’t matter; it was all pretty much the same thing.

First let me say that Warren is a very smart and articulate person (she is a professor, after all), and I can see why liberals are falling in love with her (just listen to the cheers from the audience). She is very good at presenting her understanding of the problems with today’s system and her vision for fixing it, which is much different from, say, simply demagoguing your political opponents as corrupt. And since she is elevating the discourse to a level of political philosophy, and there seems a good possibility that she will continue to increase her attention at the national level (she is running for Senator of Massachusetts), I think it is worthwhile to express my severe disagreements with her philosophy.

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The 2012 South Carolina Primary

With all but a handful of precincts reporting, South Carolina’s GOP primary last Saturday (January 21, 2012) looked like this:

Newt Gingrich 243153 (40.45%)
Mitt Romney 167280 (27.83%)
Rick Santorum 102057 (16.98%)
Ron Paul 77993 (12.97%)

How does this compare to the primary four years ago? (January 19, 2008)

John McCain 147733 (33.15%)
Mike Huckabee 132990 (29.84%)
Fred Thompson 69681 (15.63%)
Mitt Romney 68177 (15.3%)
Ron Paul 16155 (3.62%)
Rudy Giuliani 9575 (2.15%)

1. The pundits don’t know anything. After Romney won New Hampshire with 40% two weeks ago, the commentariat was pontificating about how Romney was cementing his inevitable path to the nomination. Now that Gingrich surged in the final days of South Carolina and won it with 40%, the commentariat is pontificating about how Romney is so not inevitable now. Which reminds me: I don’t like the commentariat, and I try really hard not to be part of it.

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What’s In A Name: How the Government Invites Definition Lobbyists

There’s been an interesting topic showing up in the Google News headlines for the last couple of days. The “experts” at the American Psychiatric Association are considering changing the definition of autism, which probably means that many people “would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services.” Naturally a lot of people are concerned about losing access to these services. I haven’t been able to figure out yet exactly what kinds of services these articles are talking about, whether it’s private (like insurance) or public (like government programs) or some of both (probably), but it’s interesting how definitions are becoming so important these days, especially as they seem to endlessly and arbitrarily change.

Last month our government decided that X-Men are not humans. For reasons unbeknownst to me, our tariff laws dictate that “the import tax on dolls is twice what it is for toys.” Well, the makers of X-Men action figures wanted to pay the lower rate, so their lawyers fought the customs office to argue that X-Men weren’t humans so they could be charged the toy rate instead of the doll rate, and “the court found that mutants are not human.” (Of course, this caused a fun and ironic storm in the comic world since a key part of the X-Men story is that the mutants are trying to convince the government that they are human, or at least that they deserve the same rights.) None of this would have mattered at all if we didn’t have laws that allowed a bunch of money to be hinged on the definitions of “doll” and “toy.” If there was no import tax, or even if it was just the same for dolls and toys, we would never have had to force a court to waste time making a decision on the humanness of X-Men.

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Money and Politics: The Proof Is In The Sopa?

Buddy Roemer, outcast candidate for the Republican nomination, rails against the way money buys power in politics on a daily basis. It’s easy to make such claims, but I’ve always wondered how much stock to put in them. I’ve heard people say the data doesn’t show such a strong correlation between money and election winners. And there were some wide disparities in the “money per vote” average of the results of the Iowa caucus.

Sometimes, however, things happen that just seem, well, pretty convenient. A couple weeks ago I read about millionaires pouring money into a pro-Gingrich PAC. Now Newt is surging in South Carolina polls (the primary is tomorrow). Could these events be related?

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Update to my Candidate Guide and other news

I’ve published some updates to my 2012 GOP Candidate guide to demote some candidates who are gone, insert a candidate who had been neglected, and update a lot of text to reflect more recent developments in the race. (I also added some interesting data I came across regarding the estimated value of each candidate’s home.)

In regular news, there have been some developments against SOPA and PIPA in recent days. Ars Technica does a good job summing the backpedaling that has emerged thanks to the clamoring calls of opposition from the tech community over the last few weeks. We also have more people joining the SOPA fight, a strange response from a Senator’s staffer (but proof that the opposition calls are working), and an interesting response from the White House. (Thanks to the misnamed “Hacker News” for the hat tip on all four of these links.)

In meta news, I’ve been chatting with Simon over on Classical Values about the possibility of doing a guest post responding to his position that closing our military bases around the world would create a dangerous power vacuum. We both have things that we like and dislike about Ron Paul’s policies, but Paul’s desire to bring our troops home from around the world has always been something that made sense to me, while admittedly not being very familiar with the “power vacuum” position. So I’m doing a little research and will hopefully find some time to express why I’m not afraid that the world would become a more dangerous place if we brought all our troops home, or at least offer the best reasons I can give that I don’t think I need to be afraid –  and give Simon, who seems to have more experience and knowledge on this issue, a chance to shoot them all down 🙂 Hopefully by putting this on a public blog post I will solidify my commitment to get such a post written in the near future. (And assuming I do so, I will either link to it from here, or if the guest post thing doesn’t work out, just post it here.)