And Kerry still voted to use force against Iraq?

From Ron Suskind’s New York Times magazine profile of President Bush:

A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: “Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, “Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.”

And Kerry would sign off on an undebateable item?

Now our troops are murdering Iraqi civilians in cold blood

Abu Ghraib has nothing on American soldiers fragging Iraqi civilians in broad daylight, according to Seymour Hersch.
Now, it’s cold-blooded My Lai type murders by our troops in Iraq:

Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

Better-off white liberal guilt AWOL on schools?

Conservatives like to talk about real, or acted, white liberal guilt for a lot of things.
But Yale’s Stephen Carter, in the Oct. 12 New York Times, wonders when white liberals of enough means to afford private schools for their children will feel real guilt to the point of putting their children where their mouth is
Of course, I’m sure most of the Times’ editorial staff, let alone those on the Op-Ed page, are either unaware of or ignoring the irony.

A couple of further points about Robert Wright and design issues in evolution

First, in his Beliefnet post on his discussion with Dan Dennett, Wright claims near the bottom of the last page.that he’s not an Intelligent Design pusher of the William Dembski stripe.

“I’m just saying that natural selection, though able to do all the work of designing organisms, may itself be a product of design,” he states.

But for my money, that’s just taking the old “personal designer” issue and moving the “regress cutoff point” back one step. If Wright believes in the possibility of an intelligent designer having started up a neo-Darwinian framework with some intentiaonlity, then he’s an intelligent designer. To distinguish him from Dembski, I’ll keep “intelligent design” in lowercase when talking about his point of view. But that’s all.

Second, I believe his analogy between the Darwinian evolution of life (let alone the physical evolution the universe) and embryogenesis of an individual human being is, to be charitable, not very strong.

More on Wright claiming Dennett supports design

Robert Wright has claimed that atheist cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett recently agreed that evolution shows evidence of design, as I note below.

Even if that were true, by some perceptions, Dennett could have simply had a little slip of the tongue.

But he says here that it isn’t true, namely that he clearly used the word “if.”

Wright himself talks about the interview here.

As for his claim that direction in evolution (or something else) requires purpose, that doesn’t at all necessarily follow. Science is replete with organisms and systems having emergent properties.

True, a strong reductionist like Dennett, in my opinion, doesn’t like dealing with emergent properties, as they can be hard to fit into his highly reductionistic Procrustean bed. But their existence doesn’t negate reductionism as a general tool, nor materialism as a philosophical stance. They may put some constraints on the thoroughgoingness of reductionism, that's all.

Or, alternative B, Dennett, having consistently used “design” and “designer” in anthropomorphizing fashion, objects when Wright “translates” them literalistically, or sensationalizes his use of them.

Wright does offer a mea culpa for this. But, as he was posting written copy, not the original videotape, he had time to reflect as to how much context he was keeping, or interrupting, or removing entirely.

I think Wright is a thought-provoking writer with some great things to say on matters of social theory; but I still think he has played “gotcha,” at least to a degree, with Dennett.

(As a sidebar, I have no doubt Dennett was blunt at least in some of his replies; I've seen him in sharp give-and-take in the video of “A Glorious Accident’ (see it or buy the book) and I’ve had a brief e-mail exchange with him once; and while he was kind enough to reply, I have no doubt he could have been curt or more if he felt I were worth the effort. I did actually experience a bit of testiness in a conversation with Steven Pinker on some of the same issues of nature vs. nurture about which I disagree with them.)

Did Robert Wright play ‘gotcha’ with Dan Dennett on intelligent design issue?

Robert Wright, social philosopher and author of “Nonzero,” among other works, claims that he got noted cognitive philosopher — and noted atheist and naturalist — Daniel Dennett — to admit that evolution shows principles of design.

Dennett has fired back, claiming he was speaking about purely hypothetical instances of evolution in nature examined from a hypothetical point of view.

I picked this up on Andrew Sullivan’s website; Wright’s postings are on Beliefnet. I’ve skimmed them but haven’t had a chance to closely peruse his comments.

However, having read all of Dennett’s major books, and his care with at least the written word, I am highly doubtful that Wright tripped Dennett up. My guess is it’s a little spinning and blowing out of proportion by Wright.

And, given that the original debate, and the follow-up back and forth, all being on Beliefnet, that only increases my skepticism that Wright is either mightily pushing the envelope of a different perception on one point in a debate, or else he's engaged in “gotcha” polemics.

While I certainly agree with Wright’s premise of viewing human development, at the least, as a non-zero-sum game, or possibly viewing evolution in general that way somehow, that in no way logically implies a designer behind the curtain.