This Is Funny

Although, people like to make fun of Bush for his speaking style, the Washington Post is reporting that researchers have discovered that it may be been the speaking styles of Edwards and Kerry that lost them the election.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin collected transcripts of 271 televised interviews, news conferences, town hall meetings and candidate debates conducted in 2004. The speech samples — more than 400,000 words in all — were run through a computer text-analysis program. The team included lead author Richard B. Slatcher, a doctoral candidate in psychology, and professor James W. Pennebaker.

The key to their study is previous research that has identified subtle but distinctive linguistic patterns and words that, for example, differentiate the way men and women talk.

Specifically, they rated each candidate's use of language along six dimensions: cognitive complexity (marked by sophisticated sentence structure and word choice); femininity (use of words and speech patterns favored by women); depression (use of words that are markers for depression or known "indicators of suicidality"); age (preference for words favored by young or old people); presidentiality (speech patterns and frequently occurring words favored by presidents since FDR in their speeches); and honesty (based on analyses of samples of truthful and deceptive language).

Cheney easily sounded the smartest of the four, while Edwards and Bush favored the least sophisticated language patterns, Slatcher and his colleagues report in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Research in Personality. When it came to sounding presidential, both Bush and his running mate scored considerably higher than Kerry or Edwards. Bush was the oldest-sounding candidate. Edwards also was the most likely to use feminine speech patterns and "female" words (Bush was a close second), while Cheney sounded most like a man's man.

The vice president sounded the most honest of the four, and Kerry the least. Kerry's language also was most like that of a depressed person, followed by Edwards. Perhaps that's inevitable; after all, challengers must sound gloomy and doomy about their opponents' records, though in doing so they run clear risks.

(Posted by Trask)

Why Diversity Is Not Agape Love

The Washington Times is reporting on this year's Collegiate Network award.

The Collegiate Network has given its annual award to highlight the negative influence of political correctness to Yale University for enrolling a former Taliban official with a fourth-grade education.
    "Yale pursued [Sayed Rahmatullah] Hashemi's admission in the name of that sacred cow, diversity, which now appears to extend not only to people of various sexes, creeds, races, ethnicities, sexual preferences and practices, but also to enemy combatants who make war upon the United States," the conservative group said.

This admissions decision at Yale could not better demonstrate the corruptness of postmodern diversity. It is fortunate that World War II was so long ago. If it had just occurred, Yale University would be admitting Nazis right now, and I am not joking about this. In fact, the Nazis would probably be even more qualified for admission since they would probably have better than a fourth grade education, and Nazi ideology is clearly an underrepresented viewpoint. This is the problem with postmodern diversity. It places merit on a person just because they are in a minority class, and it disparages people just because they are considered to be in a majority class. I say "considered" because women are the majority in the general populace and in colleges and universities, but they are still considered diverse. Anyway, you are almost certainly damned to diversity hell if you are a white straight male Christian. However, you are just as certainly guaranteed a spot in diversity heaven if you are a Native American female transgendered lesbian Taliban member.

Here is the ultimate problem with diversity. Since no criteria are relevant other than one's minority status, diversity ends up embracing people who are intolerant. The Taliban oppressed women in extreme ways, and the Taliban's policies on religious freedom were probably slightly worst than the current regime, which recently just tried to execute a convert to Christianity. The Taliban openly supported and gave refuge to the terrorists who launched the September 11th attacks, but there is no moral outragage in the world of diversity.

So here is my prediction. This Taliban style diversity is going to become the new trend. Until now, diversity has just been explained in touchy feely tolerant and non-violent ways, but there is no reason that diversity must be this way. It is just a fad. Once this touchy feely form of diversity becomes passe, the new trend is going to be the embrace of violence in all forms as the ultimate form of tolerance. They will logically point out that the old form of diversity is no longer diverse since it so dominated the culture. They will justify the transition to the new diversity with the claim that they are just taking diversity to a more authentic level by embracing a violent strain of diversity that has always existed i.e. abortion and euthanasia. Destroying inferior and unwanted groups of people will become the new form of tolerance since it destroys lives that are not worth living. Racists like David Duke will be the kings of the college speaking circuit. As the coolness of old style tolerance slowly fades away, the new trend will be toward an open embrace of violence as the solution to society's ills much like Nazi Germany. One cannot abandon respect for objective truth and human dignity without producing extreme consequences.

(Posted by Trask)

Strategy Split in Gay Rights Movement

The Washington Times is reporting on a split over strategy among gay rights advocates similar to the current split that exists among pro-life groups. Some want to continue to fight for incremental victories, and some want to play all their chips at the Supreme Court.

As homosexual "marriage" advocates battle through the courts for the legal right to "wed," a split has emerged over the best strategy to win.
    Two homosexual California men plan to ask a federal appeals court this week to declare that they have a right to "marry" under the U.S. Constitution, but heavyweights in the fight for same-sex "marriage" think that legal tactic is misguided.
    Groups such as the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union are withholding funding and other support for the case, saying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling is a likely loser and would set bad precedent.
    "We have been very active in trying to win the freedom to marry for same-sex couples," said Jon Davidson, legal director for Lambda. "We think there is a smart way to do that and a less smart way to do that."
    Lambda and other groups are waging their campaigns in state courts in California, Iowa, Washington, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere, seeking similar rulings to the one that led to legal homosexual "marriages" in Massachusetts.
    The lawyer for a California couple whose case will be heard today by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals scoffs at the groups' tactics.
    "You fight for your rights when your rights are being denied," Richard Gilbert said.

(Posted by Trask)

Is the Scientific Establishment Big Brother?

 A recent article in World Magazine by Anthony Paul Mator describes the current attempts at protecting the fragile evolutionary narrative. In a world where dissent and opposition to unpopular ideas is protected and encouraged, its amazing to see the fear which is evident by all attempts to silence critique of evolutionary canons.

But in a new book, Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision (DI Press, 2006), Discovery Institute scholars outline a hard but not hopeless future for ID proponents and conclude that “teachers seeking to ‘teach the controversy’ over Darwinian evolution in today’s climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution.”

This “chilling effect on open inquiry” receives a lambasting from law professors such as Steven D. Smith of the University of San Diego: “The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It’s not. . . . We’ve heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side.”

Posted by Summa Theologiae