Thursday, October 08, 2020

A science and reason party needed more than ever

 I thought I hadn't blogged at all here since 2006, but realize I had once just about a year ago.

Well, as I look more and more likely to distance myself from the Green Party in the future, and for various reasons, am not voting in this year's election cycle, it is needed more and more than ever.

First, coronavirus.

Yes, prez candidate Howie Hawkins supports the need for a vaccine, and doesn't seem conspiratorial. Too many Greens, though, are. And, sadly, the national convention took no position on this.

Related? Jill Stein's going off on Wi-Fi four years ago has enabled the 5G-coronavirus conspiracy theorists within the GP.

Meanwhile, the party as a whole is less enlightened on GMOs than the SPUSA. (Unfortunately, the only candidate besides Howie that the SPUSA had in its 2019 convention was and still is constitutionally ineligible by age.)

Add in that Howie, while more right than wrong on Russia, has / had top China-stanners Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers as top campaign advisors, and has been on sites like Black Agenda Report's Margaret Kimberly's special program.

I tell many others that I vote Green in part on foreign policy and now we have top Greens all kowtowing to China.

Finally, Howie's treasurer, Travis Christal, and the party's Presidential Candidate Support Committee, never responding to my emails about the "letter of interest" filed on behalf of Jesse Ventura? Last straw.

Well, I didn't register to vote at my new address, and no worries. 

The Texas Supreme Court has said, reading between the lines, that if David Bruce Collins and Kat Gruene did somehow win their Senate and RRC races, at a minimum, they'd have to retroactively pay the new filing fees and at a maximum, might be booted. And since I ain't voting for Howie, that's that.

So, now, neither Dems nor Greens own my vote.

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Thursday, April 25, 2019

Sounds reasonable, no?

Who could argue with a "Science and Reason Party"?

Well, me, the person who invented this blog almost 13 years ago and hasn't written here since 2006, might.

Look at the number of people practicing "scientism" and trying to apply science to philosophical or aesthetics issues. And, those philosophical issues are ones that often affect government, political philosophy (and political science).

And, even if people can't be fully charged with "scientism," it's still easy to bend science in particular political directions. Look at Steven Pinker. Ph.D. in psych from Harvard, but I certainly wouldn't agree with a fair chunk of his politics, nor do I agree at all with many of his ev psycher ideas that sometimes influence his political stances. Jordan Peterson? Ph.D. in psych at McGill, arguably Canada's premier university. Ditto on my general take on him.

But, per Tevye, it IS reasonable if one remembers the "and reason."

Now, a claim that we're highly rational critters, as a species, might be called "philosophism." Per David Hume, the reason need always follow the passions. But, Hume adds that it does "Need" to ... as in passions, as our drives and motivators, must be subject to the slow thinking of reason as much as we can.

The combination is why I grow uncomfortable with the Green Party after long-ago abandoning Democrats for presidential choices and other places where a more left third-party option was offered.

Unofficially on vaccines, and officially on GMOs, the Socialist Party USA has a more science-grounded stance. That's examining passions in the light of reason. The SPUSA isn't perfect on some other issues. But, true reason allows that, even with filtering of passions, they never go away.

After all, the only good Buddhist is a dead Buddhist.

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Saturday, September 30, 2006

Immigration is NOT a single issue

But a short, two-word partial answer is: Birth control


Readers of this blog have seen my occasional comments in favor of a border fence along the line with Mexico; readers of my Today Newspapers columns (link at right) have read the arguments for this in much more detail.

Needless to say, mine is not the “standard liberal position” (not to mention not being the standard left-liberal position) on this issue. Neither is my consistent, and insistent, use of the phrase “illegal aliens” rather than “undocumented aliens.” And my refusal to lump and mix illegal aliens into a larger discussion — let alone general, indiscriminate numbering — of aliens in general is of a piece.

On this one subject, I might sound like I had read a page from Pat Buchanon.

But, I have different reasons than Buchanon for my stance, and unlike Paranoid Pat, this is just one part of the larger issue of how to deal with illegal aliens.

I want a border fence not because I think Mexicans in particular, or Central American Hispanics in general, are diluting and perverting our Anglo-Saxon culture. Nor am I afraid of Osama bin Laden or his minions setting up secret shop in Hermosillo, Sonora, then sneaking across the Sonora-Arizona border.

I do it on union-oriented social democratic grounds, as part of keeping American wages from getting depressed; that, in turn is part of a larger issue to which I’ll turn below.

I also do it because of environmental and related concerns. America has more than 300 million people now. And, not even counting Alaska, just in our 48 contiguous states, about 40 percent is desert (less than 10 inches of rain per year, semidesert (10-15 inches of rain per year), semi-semidesert (15-20 inches) or higher-elevation mountains too cold for agriculture. In other words, about 40 percent of our land is of marginal carrying capacity, ignoring the massive stupidity of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City and Albuquerque being built, and being boomed, in the middle of desert or semidesert. (L.A. is a mix, and Cairo is the only larger metropolitan area in the world in a desert.)

The other environmental issue is that, largely due to poverty in their native lands (more on that, too, in a minute), illegal aliens have less regard for trashing up the planet. Yes, that’s a generalization; no, it’s not a stereotype. Sociological studies will confirm the poverty-environmental maintenance inverse correlation in spades.

Now, as said, this is all part of a larger whole.

First, the American union and wages issue.

I favor a guest worker program that offers adequate workplace and other protective conditions for guest workers, and has an adequate wage floor. That, then, must be tied to larger American wage issues.

First, of course, we need a minimum wage increase. Second, we need that indexed to the inflation rate, just as Social Security has its regular COLA.

On the protective and regulatory side, we need to make the NLRB again stand for National LABOR Relations Board, instead of the L having been replaced with an M for Management. Don’t (fully) blame Shrub for this one; this began as another brilliant triangulation of Slick Willie’s, coming from an anti-union, right-to-work state. And Democrats love him WHY?

Next, NAFTA does need to be revisited. We need to find a way to revamp it from destroying the more labor-intensive Mexican family or extended-family farm. That’s why a lot of Mexicans, and Guatemalans, etc., are coming north. Along with that, whether in NAFTA or GATT, we need to address corporate American farm subsidies. Period. At the same time, though, Mexico needs to do more to transition its farm labor into other jobs. And, we need to rewrite NAFTA to address labor and environmental issues elsewhere in the Mexican economy.

Finally, I have two small words that will stick hard in much of the collective Mexican social craw: Birth control.

If you look at a resource like the CIA Factbook, you’ll see that if you put our birthrate and that of, say, Saudi Arabia or some other high-growth Arab country on a line, Mexico would be half of the way to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Guatemala would be equal to it.

Our birthrate is 14.14 per 1,000 population; Mexico’s is 20.69; Guatemala’s is 29.88; Saudi Arabia’s is 29.34 and Pakistan’s is 29.74. Of course, if you throw out the more than 10 percent of our population that is foreign-born, many here illegally, our native-born birthrate is about 12-12.5 per 1,000, not much higher than the U.K.’s 10.71 and right in line with France’s 11.99.

I don’t give a damn what the pope in particular and the Catholic clergy in general say about birth control. Nor do I care about what the growing conservative evangelical and Pentecostal Protestant movements in Latin America say about the subject.

If Mexico, and Central American countries (the problem isn’t so bad in South America) want more American foreign aid, condoms, diaphragms, birth control pills and even RU-486 — with counseling information on all four — need to be part of the price of foreign aid.

Period.

Cross posted at my Socratic Gadfly blog.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

What’s needed in abortion law: a bimester framework

Honest people from both and left with a knowledge of medical science know that the trimester framework underlying abortion law in America is, no pun intended on this subject, unviable.

What is viable?

A bimester, or semester, framework. Reasonable odds of fetal survivability of an early birth only pick up at around 20 weeks. And, reasonable social conservatives who know the basics of medical technology, especially in neonatology, will honestly admit that this is one area where we won’t see any major advances at any time soon.

So, if I were president, whether through the move of an amicus brief in an abortion case, even if it led to a new round of law by judicial fiat, or through Congressional legislation, I would move us to a bimester system.

In the first bimester, I would ban 24-hour waiting periods between doctor’s visits, require Medicaid funding be made available to poor women, and allow only parental notification, not parental consent. States would be given very little leeway to further constrict abortion rights, which would largely be nationalized.

In the second bimester, things would be far different. Other than requiring states to allow abortion when maternal life or health were at stake, or incest was the cause of pregnancy (with reporting of the perpetrator, of course), states could restrict abortion, or even ban it outright, with the exceptions just listed, of course.

No, I would not have a second bimester exception for rape required. Yes, women may wait a while to report a rape, but waiting weeks is one thing and waiting five months would be another.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Mission statement

The platform of this party, in all issues subject to scientific research and hypotheses, shall be guided by the latest in scientific empirical findings and logically deduced theories.

While this includes the obvious matters such as the teaching of evolution in public schools, energy policy and climate change, it is not limited to that.

For instance, various aspects of social policy shall be informed by the latest in evidentiary findings solidly supported theorizing in fields such as cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.

For more information on the proper use of evolutionary psychology, and some thoughts on the latest research in cognitive science, search this blog.

It’s the Internet! Why can’t I start a political party?

Democrats right now are largely too conservative, and Greens, while right on Iraq, and a stronger stance on environmental issues than Democrats, get too New Agey, in general, on things like alternative medicine and irrational in their fear of nuclear power.

So, why not my own party? No, it won’t be officially incorporated, but I will post “platform planks” from time to time, and response statements to, above all, Republicans and Democrats, but proactive ones too.