Matt Schonert's Blog

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Mayor Michael Sessions has brought an ugly tone to an otherwise genial mayoral race. A few weeks ago, the mayor publicly endorsed Tony Vear and embarked on an effort to criticize Douglas Moon, but his motivation for doing so is not clear.

Perhaps the only valid concern he has raised is Moon’s vote against rezoning the hospital, which Moon said was done to protest the way that Sessions prematurely ended discussion of the issue and forced it to a vote.

Sessions has also argued that candidate Doug Moon’s employment in Coldwater will make him unavailable to respond to emergencies in Hillsdale.

If Sessions truly believes that Moon will be unable to give his personal and immediate attention to such crises, it is only fair to ask Sessions what specific crises have required this type of response in his four years as mayor. Specifically, what mayoral crises have required a response time of 30 minutes or less?

In comparing the candidates, Sessions has suggested that the value of Moon’s city council work pales in comparison to Tony Vear’s work on the planning commission.

In order to take this seriously, we must ignore the irony of quibbling over which candidate’s city government experience is more applicable to mayoral duties that were previously carried out by a high school student.

Sessions is free to endorse any candidate he pleases, but it seems vindictive to endorse one candidate so forcefully and attack the other without a severe reason for favoring one over the other.

If there is a serious reason why Doug Moon is unfit to be mayor, then let us hear it. The petty grievances Sessions has raised do not explain the excessive zeal that he has shown in his attempts to undermine Moon’s campaign.

(originally appeared in October 30 edition of the Hillsdale Daily News)

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AFP reports:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to give “a major address” in an Islamic capital soon after taking office as he seeks to mend America’s image in the Muslim world, a Chicago Tribune interview said.

“I think we’ve got a unique opportunity to reboot America’s image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular,” Obama said in the interview published late Tuesday on the Tribune’s website.

As an information technology guy, I appreciate this advent of computing metaphors in mainstream political speech. I hope his speechwriters make a habit of this. Here’s something to get the ball rolling:

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Quote:

Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you – the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.

One should also be aware of a related failure pattern, thinking that the course of Deep Wisdom is to compromise with perfect evenness between whichever two policy positions receive the most airtime. A policy may legitimately have lopsided costs or benefits. If policy questions were not tilted one way or the other, we would be unable to make decisions about them. But there is also a human tendency to deny all costs of a favored policy, or deny all benefits of a disfavored policy; and people will therefore tend to think policy tradeoffs are tilted much further than they actually are.

That’s Eliezer Yudkowsky talking about one-sided policy debates.

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