**** Elections thread *****

[wufwugy]

I don't want to sound like a hair-splitting ass, but Carson, as far as I know, isn't a scientist. He's a medical doctor and a neurosurgeon. I'm not familiar with everything that a neurosurgeon might know but he's not a neuroscientist. Medicine is a practice and only recently have there been more attempts at being more scientifically minded, i.e., collecting data on patient outcomes and determining best practices (large and small) that lead to the best outcomes. I agree with the posit that the more you know the harder it is to sure of something, and Carson does seem to hedge somewhat appropriately at times, and maybe it is due to this fact.

Yeah practitioners =/ scientists. It's not hairsplitting. It's an important distinction that many don't make.

Carson has hedged some (like with vaccines), but I think some of what looks like hedges aren't. He talks about the issues in ways that look to me like a depth of understanding on them greater than most. It almost makes him look like he doesn't know what he's talking about. The Muslim thing is an example.

I find it hard to swallow that someone can't understand that the both the bible (somewhat vaguely and open to interpretation) and the Constitution (fairly directly) say that religion should stay out of government. And yet he still thinks a Muslim couldn't be president and that the Bible is more important than the Constitution.

The media got this very wrong, and it's unironically a great example of the very problem that Carson most discusses, how the culture of how we discuss issues is creating more problems than solutions. In this situation, Carson said something, and instead of the media actually assessing what he said and trying to understand what he said, they immediately claimed victim status of one group and oppressor in another.

I'm having a little trouble finding the exact transcripts, but I remember the content well enough. Here's what Carson said: that he doesn't think a Muslim should be president, or that he wouldn't vote for one. After the undeserved shitstorm hit, he said that he was referring to how there are specific philosophical differences between the Constitution and Sharia Islam in such a way that a Muslim president would be likely to believe that his religious beliefs come before his duty to the Constitution. Then he said that he would be open to voting for a Muslim who rejected the theocratic aspects of Islam and he WOULDN'T support a Christian who does support theocracy.

Everything he said was accurate and reasonable. The media and the social justice culture are the problem.


It should also be noted that there is nothing unconstitutional about saying you have preference against a certain religion for office. The Constitution prohibits the government establishing standards, not voters having individual convictions.