Category: discussions

Dawkins interviewed by Piers Morgan

March 31, 2023 • 11:30 am

I found out about this recent appearance by Richard Dawkins on Piers Morgan‘s show via the tweet below. Reader Luana, who sent me that tweet, says that many people online are now going after Richard, accusing him of cowardice by refusing to give his opinion on matters Islamic. I’ve put the entire interview below and you can judge for yourself.  Morgan, by the way, is a Tory, but not as conservative as a hardwired American right-winger. He’s also religious.

Below is the whole 47-minute video. Topics discussed including cancel culture, evolutionary biology, and how did something come from nothing (this plays into Morgan’s religious sentiments), Morgan asks Dawkins what happened before the Big Bang, which of course nobody knows. (Dawkins says, “it doesn’t help to postulate something complicated [God] at the outset.”)

Morgan claims that as a believer, he needs an alternative to a purely naturalistic origin of the universe, and sees that as a telling point against atheism. Dawkins’s response, “Science take a pride in admitting what they don’t know”—a good response given that Pier’s own “theory”—that Catholicism is the true faith—has no evidence at all in its favor. I think Richard should have asked Morgan, “What evidence do you have for the Catholic god you believe in?” or “How do you know that YOUR own ‘theory’ is right?”

After each man has stated his position on God and the afterlife, the conversation moves to the recent movement of the woke to purify language, especially in biology, including discussion of sex. Here Dawkins and Morgan agree (and so do I). Dawkins says, “There are two sexes—and that’s all there is to it.”

The discussion moves on to how “perceived scientific wisdom” can change, as in the covid pandemic. Morgan asks Dawkins to respond to those who use these shifts in position to denigrate science itself, and Dawkins again has a good response (I think Morgan agrees with him, though I’m not sure.) This brings up the “culture of nastiness” on social media, and then artificial intelligence (“can a machine be sentient?”)—seemingly the most important topic of today’s intellectual discussions.

The discussion of Islam begins at 30:28, when Morgan reminds Dawkins that he, Richard, said that fundamentalist Islam is “one of the great threats” to humanity.  Dawkins explains why he adheres to this, but rejects the idea that he’s an “Islamophobe”; he simply objects to the tenets of fundamentalist Islam like female genital mutilation and the denigration of music and dancing. As Dawkins says, correctly, “Muslims are the biggest victims of Islamism.”

Dawkins then refuses to give an opinion of whether a British “ISIS bride” should be allowed back to Britain, saying that he hasn’t studied the situation thoroughly enough. He doesn’t want to talk about the threats that he himself gets, which may have given rise to the tweet above, but I understand that Richard doesn’t like to discuss threats to public figures, including himself, because he thinks it just encourages nut cases and wannabees who might follow suit.

At 34 minutes in, Dawkins reveals who he thinks is the smartest person he’s ever met, but I’ll let you go to 34:15 to hear the answer.

Other questions include what does Dawkins hope to achieve now that he’s 82, does he have any great unfulfilled ambitions, and so on. He does mention the topic of the book he’s writing now, which is going to be, I think, scientifically controversial because of its claim that you can read off the ancestral environments of any species by reading its DNA. (I have issues with that idea, though I will read the book to see what it says before weighing in.)

At 36:30, Morgan asks him, “What is the one question you’d most like answered before you die?” You can hear the answer for yourself. (Dawkins actually mentions several questions.) During the show’s last bit, Morgan peppers Richard with personal questions like, “Are you a romantic?”, “Do you get a bad rap?”, “What is the one thing you’d like to be known for?” and so on.

It’s a good interview, and I have to say that I think the tweet above is misguided: there’s simply no indication that Dawkins evinces cowardice in his discussion of Islam or religion. In fact, it’s one of the better interviews with Dawkins I’ve heard. Morgan asks provocative questions, but he’s not out to “get” Richard, and the only agenda he seems to have is to hold onto his Catholicism.

Discuss: Trump’s indictment

March 31, 2023 • 10:01 am

I’m trying to make up for the work time I lost by getting more sleep last night (isn’t that pathetic?), so why don’t we just discuss the Trump situation? By now you probably know the details, which raise a number of questions. Readers can weigh in, though of course none of us know how this mess will unfold.

1.) Will he turn himself in or be arrested? I always thought the former, but now I’m wondering if he thinks it would help his image to be dragged away by the cops—”witch hunt” and all.

2.) Will he be charged with misdemeanors or felonies? (There are over two dozen charges.) The DA, you know, has a choice.

3.) Is this whole mess going to help or hurt his Presidential candidacy for the election next year?

4.) Will this trigger any major unrest in the U.S.? So far it doesn’t look like it.

5.) This is of course the least important of the three other investigations involving him—investigations that could also lead to indictments. These are the interference with the voting process in Georgia, Trump’s possible incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and his possession at Mar A Lago of confidential government documents. Which do you think will lead to indictments.

6.) Do you think he will go to prison?

7.) He cannot pardon himself if he gets re-elected, and Biden can (but won’t) pardon him of federal crimes, though the NY case is a state case.

8.) If he’s found guilty, will Republicans in Congress weaken their ties or fealty to him. (Again, it doesn’t seem likely.)

There are many more questions, but I have a book review to write. Stay tuned. I’ve put a photo of Trump below, which leads to another question: every time I see a picture of Trump in the MSM, he has an expression on his face that’s just like Mussolini’s.  Does he always posture that way, or is the press just picking the bad photos to make him look evil?

[File: Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo]

McWhorter and Loury on equality vs. equity—and music

March 24, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Below is an hourlong of John McWhorter making his every-other-week appearance on Glenn Loury’s podcast, the “Glenn Show”.  The YouTube notes for this bit are indented (their bolding):

John McWhorter is back, and fresh off an appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time that provides plenty of fodder for this conversation. It’s always an interesting experience comparing the relatively unrestrained version of John that I record with three times a month and the carefully crafted version of himself he presents on other programs, when he knows he only has a few minutes to make his point. This is something all of us who regularly appear in the media have to grapple with: How do we distill all of the thinking, reading, and writing we do within our areas of expertise into audience-friendly sound bites that will give some sense of our deeper reasoning? John has mastered this art, and I have to say, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, too!

We begin by discussing that Real Time appearance. John is turning into one of Maher’s regular guests, but he wasn’t always such a skilled communicator. He recounts an earlier Bill Maher appearance where he dropped the ball. John was invited on to talk about equity and equality, and we take the opportunity to talk more expansively about the difference between the two. We are both advocates for equality, and we both think that equity is a poor substitute. We also both think that black Americans have the potential to perform at the same level as everyone else, but the test scores tell a different story. So how do we know that potential is real and not just wishful thinking? It’s a tough question. The most zealous DEI advocates come from the ranks of educated middle and upper-middle-class blacks, and I’m reminded of E. Franklin Frazier’s classic critique, Black Bourgeoisie. We move on to the question of standards in the arts, and John says it’s not such a big deal if African Americans don’t have proportional representation in classical orchestras and audiences.

We get a pretty unfiltered version of John in this one. Anybody who catches him only on TV or in the New York Times is missing out!

It’s a wide-ranging conversation, going from equity to music, and is well worth listening to. I’ll highlight just a few landmarks:

10:56: Equality vs. equity. McWhorter, who dominates this hour, argues that there’s a certain arrogance in pretending that “equity” just means “equality”, but it’s okay for the woke because the conflation “battles white power”.  He adds that only under equity is racial “tokenism” seen as okay, but the notion of equity creates a “wormy and arrogant social policy.”

16:57: Loury makes the devil’s advocate case for equity, saying that “equality” avoids the hard questions: how do you assess talent,  opportunity, and the moral obligations of society? What good, he asks, is equal opportunity if people start from different points of advantage and disadvantage? He then describes the cartoon below, which you’ve seen before:

19:30: McWhorter calls that cartoon not only misleading, but deeply insulting to black people, because it implies that people will think “black people are born dumb” (i.e., they start with a shorter box). My response is that the short box isn’t mental difference, but cultural difference that ultimately can be ascribed to slavery, oppression and bigotry and that results in lower performance on test scores.  McWhorter eventually does claim (and I agree) that black people are culturally rather than genetically disadvantaged. But his constant claim is that to overcome racial differences in achievement and test performance, black people must begin setting themselves standards and goals and meeting them—not kvetching that they’re disadvantaged by racism and need the compensations associated with equity.

It becomes clear that both Loury and McWhorter do believe that we should not relax standards of merit for promotion or achievement, but that black people, insofar as they don’t perform as well as whites, should simply work harder.  It sickens McWhorter, he says, to see the call for holding black people to standards different from those to which we hold white people.

McWhorter then mentions the tweet below, which I found on his website. He says he issued it deliberately, not to self-aggrandize but to make the point that “equity” is patronizing toward black people by holding them to different standards.  As he says (or maybe it was Loury), “we cannot exempt people from having to display competency.”

The last part of the discussion turns to classical music, one of McWhorter’s great loves. He deals with whether there should be equity in orchestras (no), whether symphonies should program music that more people of color would want to hear (no), and why classical music is so great.  But he then argues—and here I agree with him—that the only reason that opera is seen as more highbrow than many Broadway musicals is because opera is in a foreign language. He argues that there’s no reason to think Puccini any better than, say, the musical “Showboat,” and at that point I stood up and cheered.

Anyway, the hour is divided into two distinct parts: equity and music, and though they’re connected, it’s worth hearing the show simply because I love the way these guys interact.

 

 

And to show the greatness of musicals, here’s the inimitable Paul Robeson singing a song that always brings tears to my eyes. It’s “Old Man River,” and was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, two white Jews. This is a scene from the 1936 movie version of “Showboat.”

Big Brother is coming: machines to catch implicit bias in the workplace

March 20, 2023 • 1:15 pm

What if you had an Alexa-like device around to monitor your behavior, especially your “implicit biases”? Would that bother you?  And if you knew you were being monitored, would it affect your behavior? And if it did affect your behavior, would it do so permanently, or only so long as you knew you were being monitored?

Well, first we have to know if the concept of “implicit bias” is meaningful. People may be biased, but it may be something that they recognize: explicit bias that’s kept largely private. In fact, that’s what seems to be the case: data show that not only is there no commonly accepted definition of “implicit bias”, but ways to measure it, most notably the “implicit association test” (IAT) are dubious and give widely varying results for single individuals. Further, ways to rectify it don’t seem to work.

In a post from earlier this month, I reprise psychologist Lee Jussim’s many criticisms of implicit bias. Even if you take the most generous view of the topic, you have to admit that we know little about it, very little about how to measure it if it’s real, and nothing about how to rectify what the tests say is “implicit bias.”. In other word, it’s way too early to start ferreting it out, much less asserting that it’s ubiquitous. Implicit bias (henceforth “IB”) is one of those concepts that we can’t get a handle on, has been largely rejected by psychologists and sociologists, but is nevertheless taken for granted by the woke. Who needs stinking data when a concept meets your needs? The first paragraph of the piece below shows that a highly controversial topic is just accepted as true when it’s ideologically convenient.

The piece below, from Northeastern University in Boston, outlines the proposals of two researchers to measure “implicit bias” remotely, with the aim of eliminating it. Click to read:

The article assumes from the outset, without any justification, that the bias is there and is also ubiquitous. It further claims that implicit bias is costly because (again assuming again that it’s real), it demoralizes workers who are its targets—and that costs money:

Studies have shown that implicit bias—the automatic, and often unintentional, associations people have in their minds about groups of people—is ubiquitous in the workplace, and can hurt not just employees, but also a company’s bottom line.

For example, employees who perceive bias are nearly three times as likely to be disengaged at work, and the cost of disengagement to employers isn’t cheap—to the tune of $450 billion to $550 billion a year. Despite the growing adoption of implicit bias training, some in the field of human resources have raised doubts about its effectiveness in improving diversity and inclusion within organizations.

I reject the assertion of the first paragraph entirely, for the data (while sometimes conflicting) do not show that this kind of bias is ubiquitous—or even exists.  Note as well that in the second paragraph “implicit bias” has now become “bias”, yet they are two different things.  One is a subconscious form of bias, the other more explicit and recognized by its proponent. And, of course, the paragraph assumes that employees who perceive bias are actually receiving bias rather than acting out a victim mentality, and we just don’t know that.  (I’m not denying that racism and sexism exist; just that it’s subconscious, ubiquitous, and has the financial effects noted above.) This being America, of course, the goal is not a more moral business, but a more lucrative one.

But technology is here to fix the problem! All we have to do is eavesdrop on people interacting, analyze what you find, and then use it to “rectify” the behavior of the transgressors. Problem solved!

But what if a smart device, similar to the Amazon Alexa, could tell when your boss inadvertently left a female colleague out of an important decision, or made her feel that her perspective wasn’t valued?

. . .This device doesn’t yet exist, but Northeastern associate professors Christoph Riedl and Brooke Foucault Welles are preparing to embark on a three-year project that could yield such a gadget. The researchers will be studying from a social science perspective how teams communicate with each other as well as with smart devices while solving problems together.

“The vision that we have [for this project] is that you would have a device, maybe something like Amazon Alexa, that sits on the table and observes the human team members while they are working on a problem, and supports them in various ways,” says Riedl, an associate professor who studies crowdsourcing, open innovation, and network science. “One of the ways in which we think we can support that team is by ensuring equal inclusion of all team members.”

The pair have received a $1.5 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to study teams using a combination of social science theories, machine learning, and audio-visual and physiological sensors.

Welles says the grant—which she and Riedl will undertake in collaboration with research colleagues from Columbia University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Army Research Lab—will allow her and her colleagues to program a sensor-equipped, smart device to pick up on both verbal and nonverbal cues, and eventually physiological signals, shared between members of a team. The device would keep track of their interactions over time, and then based on those interactions, make recommendations for improving the team’s productivity.

. . .As a woman, Welles says she knows all too well how it feels to be excluded in a professional setting.

“When you’re having this experience, it’s really hard as the woman in the room to intervene and be like, ‘you’re not listening to me,’ or ‘I said that and he repeated it and now suddenly we believe it,’” she says. “I really love the idea of building a system that both empowers women with evidence that this is happening so that we can feel validated and also helps us point out opportunities for intervention.”

Addressing these issues as soon as they occur could help cultivate a culture where all employees feel included, suggests Riedl.

A device on the table watching and filming everyone! Now THAT will lead to a freewheeling discussion, right?

But the problem Welles addresses is real. As I’ve said before, when I started teaching graduate seminars, one of the first things I noticed, since these were mostly discussion of readings, was that the men tended not only to talk more than the women, but tended to talk over the women. Not only that, but many times I’ve seen a woman student make a good comment, followed up by a comment from a man, only to have the good comment attributed to the man. Since then, discussions with other women have convinced me that this problem is widespread. It doesn’t make for a good learning environment, and it saps the confidence of women.

Now I’m not sure if the male behavior I saw reflects bias, much less implicit bias: it could just be the tendency of men, especially young ones, to be more aggressive and domineering. But it still needed fixing.

The way I fixed this was simple. At the beginning of the quarter I laid out discussion rules including these: everybody gets to finish what they’re saying, and every comment must either address the previous comment or say something like, “I’d like to switch gears now.” If a woman wasn’t participating enough, I would call on her more often to summarize papers, and myself follow up on her comments.

In my mind, at least, this solved the problem, so that by seminar’s end both men and women students were pretty much equal in participation. I did NOT have to take the most vociferous men aside and tell them that they were being domineering and bossy.  That might have solved the problem, but at the expense of hurt feelings and divisiveness, as well as resentment.

So would it improve matters to have an Alexa and a camera on the table, some kind of “implicit bias” or “body language” analyst to go through the data, and then rectify the problem: presumably by calling out the offender? This not only smacks of Big Brotherhood, but is confrontational, divisive, likely to breed resentment, and, most of all, not a fix of the problem. I’m not saying that my own rules fixed the problem permanently, either, but I am not a machine but a human being who could act on the spot, and my job was to promote learning for everyone by giving everyone equal opportunity to participate.  In contrast, the goal of an Alexa Bias Controller seems to be not the promotion of learning, but social engineering based on post facto analysis.

Just sayin’.

Upcoming webinar panel on the future of affirmative action

February 9, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Here’s the announcement I have, and note that the seminar/webinar features Loury and McWhorter, who will surely make some people angry. But everyone knows that affirmative action is effectively dead, just as we know that universities will find a way around it when the Supreme Court bans it this Spring.

To register to see it, just click HERE (or click on the screenshot. You need provide only your name and email address, and it’s free.

Discussion thread

January 2, 2023 • 9:45 am

I’m not feeling very well today, so I’ll let readers contribute instead of me.  I suppose the most obvious question is this: What are your predictions for 2023?

And there are many subquestions:

Where will the war in Ukraine be at the end of the year?

Will Uncle Joe announce he’s running for reelection? (This seems a clear “yes”.)

Will Honey the duck drop by after October?

Alternatively, did you have a good year or a crappy one? I’d rate this among the lower half of years I’ve had, but I did get to travel some (in a month I’ll be heading to the Galapagos, Machu Picchu, and Cuzco, lecturing on an alumni trip).

What do you hope to accomplish in 2023? (Me: more travel, and get my damn children’s book published.)

Best book you’ve read this year? Best movie you’ve seen? Best meal?

Or talk about anything you want. If there aren’t at least fifty comments, I’ll feel worse.

Discussion thread

September 21, 2022 • 1:15 pm

I am now officially debilitated after three nights of getting but 2-3 hours of sleep. The result is that I have no ability to concentrate, and stagger to work in the morning like a drunken man. (Writing the morning post damn near killed me.) But that’s my problem, and you needn’t try to solve it. Your problem is to see if you can cobble together a discussion. I am loath to subject subjects, but here are a few ideas:

The midterm elections are only six weeks away. Which party will take the Senate and/or the House? What about the state races?

On what issues do you think that both parties should be campaigning on? DId the Republicans hurt themselves by flying/busing immigrants to ritzy areas?

Russia went to increased militarization today, calling up 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine. Will that help Putin? If not, will he go to full militarization, or even tactical nuclear weapons?

Will Elizabeth Holmes get a new trial? If not, what will her sentence be?

What is the best book ever written? (“My favorite book” will suffice.)]

UPDATE: I’ve put my 2 choices answering the last question in the comments.

CFI Video: Dawkins and I discuss his latest book

September 3, 2022 • 1:15 pm

Two days ago I interviewed Richard Dawkins about his latest book: Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. The Center for Inquiry’s video is already up, and if you missed the live version you can watch it below. The discussion is about 45 minutes long with another 15 minutes for questions.  At the end of the discussion, Richard describes the book he’s writing now.

I haven’t watched this one; like many, I can’t bear to see myself on video.

Discussion thread

July 18, 2022 • 12:30 pm

I was preparing a post on the topic “Are races purely social constructs without biological meaning?” (my answer is “no”, but it’s nuanced), when I heard that a friend of mine is in a very bad way and that made me too sad to post.

So, if you will, please comment below about what you want until tomorrow. There are lots of things to discuss, here are three in increasing order of importance.

  1.  I usually don’t eat potato chips as they’re not good for you. I do love them, though, and when my grocery store had a special half-price sale for registered customers (like me), I decided to look into it. It turned out that the half price was for a “family sized” bag of chips (if you have a family of two), and the regular price was $6.50!! For chips! That’s unconscionable. If you want to beef (so to speak) about food prices, or anything else, go ahead. (I didn’t buy the chips.)
  2. People keep telling me that wokeness is on the wane now; that in ten years the crazy excesses of the “progressive” Left will be gone. I don’t think so, if for no other reason than DEI initiatives are in place in many universities, companies, and organizations, and many of people who work in those organizations make their living by constantly emitting the narrative of oppression, division, intersectionality, and so on. These people are not going to put themselves out of a job, so they keep the narrative going.  Don’t get me wrong: we need to have some way to ensure that bigotry is frowned upon (but also a way to teach students about what freedom of speech is). Still, the enormous progress in racial relationships and equality of the sexes that has been achieved are ignored. (Yes, of course we still have racism and sexism.) But to listen to some, it’s as if we’ve been stuck in the 1950s for 70 years. That’s just not true. So, Will Wokeness Wane?
  3. And of course, let’s have your opinions about whether race is just a “social construct” (it’s best if you define “race” and “social construct” in your answer). I’d like to hear what readers have to say before I write what I was going to write.

Or talk about anything else you want.

Discussion post: 2024 and other things

July 10, 2022 • 9:20 am

I’ll be downtown most of the day, although I’ll definitely be avoiding Millennium Park, for the whole area is teeming with tourists here for the Big Food Ripoff, otherwise known as “The Taste of Chicago“. That’s a three-day capitalistic festival in which credulous visitors pay large amounts of money to secure small portions of “classic” Chicago food. Meh. I can go to the places directly and eat much better.

I spent much of yesterday with my oldest friends, who live in Cambridge, MA and who I visit about twice a year and talk to weekly. They are a married couple (I was in their wedding in 1972), and I’ve known the male half since 1967 when we lived on the same dorm hall at William and Mary. The woman half (womb-bearer?) arrived at W&M two years later. I was in their wedding at Bruton Parish Church in colonial Williamsburg. Dressed in an ill-fitting suit borrowed from the groom’s father, and having hair down to my shoulders, I was asked to escort the guests to their places at the proper side of the aisle. The bride, from the South, had invited a lot of proper Southern friends and family, and when a southern guest took a look at me as I offered her my arm, she remarked to a friend, “Do you mean that I have to be walked down the aisle by RASPUTIN?”

We’ve had many adventures since the late Sixties, and that was one of the tamer ones. We talked about those old times, about getting old, and about our mutual friends who were gone. But we swore that if we ever started discussing the condition of our bowels, we’d shoot each other!

But I digress, that’s just a story to introduce a discussion thread. I’ll be gone again most of the day spending time with my friends downtown, and so proffer you the chance to spout off in the comments.

There are many topics you can discuss, and the floor is open, but here are a couple on everybody’s mind: who can the Democrats run for President in 2024, and who will run for the GOP? And who would you like to represent the Democrats, and fear will represent the GOP? (I’m assuming you’re center-Left or Left here, but Republicans are welcome to join in).

My own view is that Biden should not run again. His approval ratings are in the dumpster, his age is showing, he’s incapable making-off-the cuff remarks without a gaffe (this isn’t new), and all his remarks are written down on a piece of paper. His record is mixed; the economy, while not in recession, is squeezing nearly everyone; gas prices are through the roof, and of course the elections are “about the economy, stupid.” Voters won”t care as much about the Ukraine as about their weekly grocery bill, and as for domestic policy, Biden hasn’t particularly done anything about immigration (that was Kamala Harris’s job), while the Build Back Better plan didn’t get off the ground. (Granted, that’s the fault of two “Democrats”, but Biden takes the ultimate responsibility for getting stuff through Congress. Further, even my friends, who are more woke than I, agree that Biden has gone too far towards “progressive” Leftism—in a way that will hurt Democrats. Believe me, Republicans will do everything they can to capitalize on every bit of Wokeism they can find in the Left, including the email recently sent out by Oregon health officials postponing a meeting because “urgency is a white supremacy value”. When Biden was elected, I was relieved that he wasn’t a Woke Democrat, but he’s turned out plenty malleable to Wokeism, including his administration’s proposed and damaging revisions of Title IX.

Biden, then, is a no go  for me, though I’d certainly vote for him as President over any Republican opponent. Although next in the traditional manner of succession, Kamala Harris won’t run, or, if she does, she’ll be buried. She simply hasn’t shown that she has the stuff to run the country, having failed at the one big task assigned her.

Who, then, do the Democrats have as a viable candidate for President? Weigh in below. As for me, I’d like to see Cory Booker run.  He’s got the experience, the smarts, the rhetoric, and he’s also black, which will help pull minority voters back to the Democratic party. If not him, Pete Buttigieg, though he’s a second choice. But Mayor Pete is also really smart, rhetorically skillful, quick on his feet, and has done a good job in a difficult position: Secretary of Transportation. When he’s asked a question by reporters, he answers with refreshing honesty.

Both Buttigieg and Booker are on the right Ii.e, Left) side of issues I like, and neither is a “progressive” of the “Squad” stripe.  Of course if both houses of Congress turn Republican this fall, and stay that way, we’re screwed seven ways from Sunday.

So those are the Dems I’d like to see run, though there may be dark horses out there, and if you know of any, name them.

I’ve been thinking that the GOP has only two viable candidates at this time: Ron DeSantis and, of course, The Donald. I cannot believe that Americans would elect Trump again, and yet I think that his candidacy is the most likely outcome—if he’s not indicted. (I hope he will be, which will both knock him out and perhaps put him in a uniform that matches his hair.) DeSantis will run, I believe, if Trump doesn’t: right now DeSantis has a national profile and seems hungry for bigger things.  Ideally, Liz Cheney would be the Republican candidate, but she doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell given her (admirable) behavior on the January 6 committee and Trump’s hatred of her. And remember, she’s still a Republican with a Republican view on many issues. I’ve heard some people say she should run as a Democrat, but even if she were elected as such it would be a disaster.

So, who do you think will run, and who do you want to run? Who would you vote for gladly, and who while holding your nose. I’m off and will see you anon.