It’s the day before the US presidential election.  I’m going to be voting for Barack Obama.

Why?

I appreciate Mr. McCain’s genuine love of country, independence on some important issues, and willingness to confront his party’s leadership on matters of principle.

And I don’t have any problem imagining Gov. Palin in the presidency – in a free country the presidency isn’t a very important role anyway.  The president does not “run the country”, the people do.  The president’s job is to run the government, and Gov. Palin seems unlikely to be worse at that than most of the presidents we’ve had in the last century.

Further, I disagree with most of Obama’s domestic policies.  I disagree with less of McCain’s.

However, Mr. McCain has a reputation for stubbornness, arrogance, and poor insight into the longer-term consequences of his actions.  Probably the best example of this is that, despite being told so in clear terms, he is still unable to understand (or care?) that McCain-Feingold has the effect of limiting political speech and the competition of ideas, rather than enhancing it.

If this were the worst that could be said about Mr. McCain, I’d probably still prefer him to Mr. Obama’s creeping socialism.

But.  Mr. Bush – who campaigned in 2000 on a platform of a more humble, less arrogant foreign policy – has transformed the last vestiges of America’s reputation as an advocate and example of freedom into that of a thuggish, war-mongering bully, trampling the freedoms of its own citizens and a menacing invader and occupier of nations.  And Mr. McCain promises to continue those policies.

As well, the last 8 years have destroyed any claim of the Republican party to stand for limited government, constrained spending, efficient administration, or defense of the Constitution.  After 8 years of such performance, the Republicans simply deserve to lose.

Mr. Obama is clearly intelligent, is said to genuinely listen to and consider counsel, and appears to value reason and pragmatism.

I do hope the Democrats don’t get a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate – I’m a fan of divided government, and think that that a government that “can’t get anything done” is the best kind.

I expect Mr. Obama to disappoint me.  Nonetheless, I will vote for him.  It’s time for a change.

Update, April 2011:  Mr. Obama has disappointed me.  Can’t say I didn’t see it coming.

A friend forwarded me Orson Scott Card’s recent essay Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?, in which Card complains about journalistic bias (in this case, concerning the causes of the mortgage loan crisis).

Card writes:

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

Card is a great science fiction writer (if you haven’t heard of him, go read Ender’s Game), but oddly, he seems to expect journalists to care about the truth.

I’m guessing he didn’t study journalism in school.

Professional journalists are trained to worry about “fairness”, not truth.  Reality, they are told, is socially constructed, and there is no such thing as objective truth.

Fairness means reporting “both sides” of a story even when there are 3 or 4 sides, or when it’s obvious who is lying and who isn’t.

If journalists were interested in truth, they wouldn’t pretend to be impartial (they’re human, of course they have opinions of their own).  Instead they’d openly admit their viewpoint and let the reader judge their arguments.

There are still countless newspapers in the US with “Republican” or “Democrat” in their title.  I suspect the relatively high esteem which journalists enjoy is a legacy from the era when these newspapers were founded.

Before the rise of “professional” journalism in the middle of the 20th century, truth was assumed to exist (even if it was difficult to find), and publishers were proud to announce their political allegiance.

Just as active is the opposite of passive, so action is the opposite of passion.

Desire acted upon is action.

Desire suppressed is passion.

Today NPR, that bastion of reasoned, intelligent and thoughtful reporting (as opposed to the crass celebrity-and-sensation commercial outlets) ran a typically panicky story about the documentary “Two Million Minutes”.

According to NPR, the film illustrates the looming downfall of American society as children in developing countries study and learn vastly more in school than their US counterparts. As a result, the next generation of Americans will be illiterate, innumerate, and utterly ignorant of science, history and geography. The sky will fall and Americans will be reduced to foot-washers and burger-cookers to Asian technocrats.

Two points.

First, economics is not a zero sum game. Other countries becoming more productive – even more productive than Americans are – does not hurt the US standard of living.

While it’s certainly true that American primary and secondary schools are pitiful (because they lack competition – compare America’s excellent, and highly competitive, colleges and universities), still, panic is not called for. Productivity determines living standards – nothing else. Americans are becoming more productive, not less, even if other countries are catching up.

Economics is not war. There are no “winners” and “losers” – everyone gets what they produce, be it great or small, and regardless of what others get.

It’s natural that countries like China and India, which still experience poverty that makes even the poorest Americans appear middle-class, are struggling very hard to improve their standard of living; much harder than Americans do or need to. This is admirable, but eventually when these countries catch up to first-world living standards undoubtedly they, too, will start taking some time to smell the flowers.

Second – education only goes so far. The brightest people will always be able to learn what they need to know without much effort, and the dumbest, sadly, will not be able to learn much no matter what effort is put into education. All nations have their share of genius and idiocy.

The December IEEE Spectrum has an article about online game “cheaters” and “gold farmers” who use bots or cheap labor to earn virtual money, which they exchange for real money, and how bad this all is.

According to the article:

For example, in Ultima Online, gamers can make money by cooking and selling chickens to tavern keepers. Thurman programmed his characters to buy raw birds from the butcher and then prepare the food. Ordinarily, a gamer can cook only one bird at a time, but Thurman automated the process so that his 30 PCs could cook as many as 500 birds at a time; he sold them in huge quantities to the taverns.

Chinese “gold farmers” earn virtual money the old-fashioned way:

Unlike Thurman, the Chinese workers actually do go out into the “worlds” and game. But they do so in teams, which gives them a distinct advantage in certain situations. For example, they can gang up on giant monsters whose slaughter will be rewarded with big piles of gold.

I wonder what’s so bad about this? Imagine for a moment that this was happening in the real world – the result is there’s plenty of yummy chicken in the taverns, and fewer dangerous monsters running loose. Who could complain?

OK, maybe the game is less fun when people can just buy stuff (with real money) instead of earning it in the game. But it seems to me that’s more a problem with the way the game works than with the “cheaters”.

Yet I wonder – isn’t this what people are complaining about when somebody invents a machine that “puts people out of work” or brings in low-paid immigrant labor? How dare they make sure there’s plenty of yummy grapes at the supermarket, or cheap clothing to keep poor people warm?

The world still gets the yummy grapes (or widgets, whatever), and the people who are “put out of work” get to do something more useful with their lives than pick grapes or weave cloth all day (like, say, making something new that hadn’t been made before). Seems like a win-win all around to me.

I guess there are people who will complain about anything.