Forget McCain, here’s the really promis­ing story out of today’s NYT: “More Amer­i­cans Are Giving Up Golf”

Consider me swayed by the breeze of par­tic­i­pa­tory democracy.

I’m hardly expect­ing a flood, but I figure it better to lay out some guide­lines at the beginning:

1/ My gen­eral policy for now is that com­ments are wel­come as long as they aren’t dumb or offen­sive. They’re espe­cially wel­come if they’re not boring.

2/ I will be the sole and final arbiter of what counts as dumb and offen­sive. You get to decide what’s boring.

3/ I will not modify com­ments with­out the per­mis­sion of the comment’s author…

4/ …but I may delete a com­ment at any time for any reason. That means that a com­ment may be deleted even if it doesn’t fall into the dumb and offen­sive clause of guide­line 1.

5/ A person who sub­mits many (i.e. more than two) dumb or offen­sive com­ments may be per­ma­nently blacklisted.

6/ I may shut down the com­ments on the site at any time for any reason. This may include past com­ments. If you leave a com­ment that you are espe­cially fond of, be sure to make a local copy for yourself.

7/ These poli­cies may change at any time. For the latest ver­sion, click the link below the com­ment form on any single-​post page.

A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the cen­tral tenets of the New Athe­ist pro­gram lately being ped­dled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Den­nett, Sam Harris, et al., is that ratio­nal athe­ism does not entail moral nihilism. But what hap­pens when sci­en­tists, work­ing in the new field of moral psy­chol­ogy, find out that our moral think­ing depends less on reason than it does on naturally-​selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Mag­a­zine, rec­og­nizes the threat:

“Morally cor­ro­sive” is exactly the term that some crit­ics would apply to the new sci­ence of the moral sense. The attempt to dis­sect our moral intu­itions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enter­prise seems to be drag­ging us to an amoral nihilism, in which moral­ity itself would be demoted from a tran­scen­dent prin­ci­ple to a fig­ment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appear­ances, but his solu­tions aren’t very con­vinc­ing.

Today at Slate, Alex Halperin won­ders why a Kenyan exit poll spon­sored by the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute hasn’t been released to the public:

The Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute, a democracy-​fostering non­profit funded by the U.S. government—and despite the name, offi­cially nonpartisan*—commissioned an Elec­tion Day exit poll but has declined to release the results. Two people famil­iar with the results told me that they showed [Raila] Odinga with a sub­stan­tial lead over Pres­i­dent Kibaki—one reported eight points, the other nine points.

Why would the IRI with­hold a poll that showed Odinga in the lead? I’d guess that it has some­thing to do with Odinga’s polit­i­cal past: he trained as an engi­neer in East Ger­many and named his first child Fidel Castro, and his father was an open pro­po­nent of a social­ist polit­i­cal pro­gram. From what I’ve heard from people in the coun­try, Odinga’s (past/present/potential) social­ist ten­den­cies have been a quiet but recur­ring theme in pro-​Kibaki polit­i­cal argu­ments. The answer to Halperin’s ques­tion might there­fore be depress­ingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

UPDATE (12/12/08): Looks like I was right.

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*Note: It may be true, as Halperin argues, that the IRI “missed an oppor­tu­nity to advance its mis­sion of pro­mot­ing democ­racy and fair elections,” but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, a person famil­iar with the organization’s activ­i­ties in Haiti a decade ago might be excused for doubt­ing the sin­cer­ity of that mis­sion in the first place. Saying that the Inter­na­tional Repub­li­can Insti­tute is “officially nonpartisan” is a little like saying that Iran is “officially democratic”: it’s true but pointless.