Phantom Arguments

The New York Times reported yesterday that the British military, after allowing homosexuals to serve in 2000, has encountered no complications with the policy. According to members of the Ministry of Defense, the biggest news of the policy is that "there is no news." There has been no evidence of harassment or loss of morale.
Of course, this stands in stark contrast to the U.S. military, which continues its policy of forbidding gays to serve openly. Even though we are allegedly engaged in the fight for our civilization in the war on terror, homosexuals are apparently not welcome in such an important fight. But it appears that all the arguments against allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military are mere phantom arguments.
Just as in the gay marriage debate, critics couch their opposition in the language of the horrible effects such a policy will have on the population at large and America. But these arguments lack empirical data to back them up. Let's put the policy in place, study it, and see what happens. I suspect there will be adverse effects from allowing either gay marriage or gays to serve openly in the military. But the only way to find out is to try it.

Giuliani and Hagel: True Political Mavericks?

John McCain gets all the press as a "maverick," but how has he set his own course in the presidential primaries? His views are in lockstep with the prevailing Republican ethos. But the true mavericks in the GOP seem to be Rudy Giuliani and Chuck Hagel.
Giuliani bucked the prevailing political wisdom and decided to actually tell voters what he believes rather than equivocate. It will be interesting to see how voters react to such straight talk. This writer has always held that voters will respect a politician who tells the truth and doesn't try to be all things to all voters. The Giuliani campaign will be an interesting test of this theory.
Nebraskan Senator Chuck Hagel took his independence a bit further, claiming that the Republican Party has been "hijacked by a group of single-minded almost isolationists, insulationists, power-projectors." Hagel is pondering a run as an independent candidate with none other than Giuliani's successor, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a possible running mate.
The American system was never intended to be a strict two-party system and the introduction of a viable third party ticket, as well as some real "straight talk" from the candidates, would be a welcome political development.

The Roots of Self-Deception

On the anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, a common refrain has been to attack the administration's overly optimistic take on the Iraq war as delusional. The ability to hold beliefs in spite of facts and to convince oneself of the truth of things that are apparently untrue--self-deception--is unfortunately all too common in the human species. As Shankar Vedantam writes in the Washington Post, Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers found that "four in five high school seniors believe they have exceptional leadership ability, and nearly every single professor in the country believes he or she is above average."
Trivers holds that self-deception evolved in order to help an individual deceive others and to reduce the stresses of holding contradictory beliefs in one's mind. This may be why Bush and others can continue to assert that we are winning the war, despite the objections of Congress and the people. But it seems that our system of checks and balances is no match for the powerful genetic legacy found in the DNA of our President.