Doug pre-assesses the GOP debate

Doug basically thinks Ramaswamy is going to come away the winner because, according to Doug, Ramaswamy is a good talker who can sway people. Doug goes through the list of GOP hopefuls, talking about their positives and negatives as he sees them. He's more of a DeSantis man himself, but he sees Ramaswamy as coming away with the victory. Doug is a social conservative and conservative Christian, which means he and I don't see eye to eye on issues like gay marriage. Doug is also, like a lot of conservative Christians, turned off by Ramaswamy's Hinduism, which he describes as a type of "polytheism" (some Hindus would dispute that*). I think getting hung up on religion amounts to dying on the wrong hill. Most damningly, Doug talks about how Ramaswamy had his Wikipedia page scrubbed of any reference to the fact that he once received Soros money (the money was a scholarship from the family of Paul Soros, late brother of George: see here and here). Assuming all this is true, Ramaswamy's actions could be seen as unethical or hypocritical, but Ramaswamy himself has addressed these issues in multiple forums, so in the end, I don't see this as damaging his already-dim prospects of becoming the official GOP nominee for president.

If I can find the debate online somewhere, I'll watch it. Or I'll catch the highlights and postmortem commentary later.

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*For more philosophically sophisticated Hindus, there's a real question as to whether the many gods in the Hindu pantheon are simply that—many gods—or whether they are merely the faces or aspects of a fundamentally unitary (or nondualistic) ultimate reality. The advaita vedanta tradition, for example, would be more in the unitary/nondual camp than in the multiple-gods camp. And even among Hindus devoted to specific gods, you can find believers who will say there's a God beyond the gods, often called Brahman in many Indian traditions. Keep in mind that "Hinduism," as a label, is a Western scholastic imposition on a whole complex of tradition-streams (later Indians embraced the "Hindu" label, but mainly for political reasons, not religious ones). To say "Hinduism is polytheistic" isn't necessarily false, but it's also not necessarily true. Anything said about Indian religion almost immediately needs to be unpacked. There's too much pluralism and diversity for anyone to be able to sum up the subcontinent in a single phrase or sentence.