Policy and Politics
tfk | October 6, 2010
In answer to requests from the previous post on graduation rates, here's the same data broken down by race. African Americans still lag whites in graduation rates, but have made impressive gains in high school graduation rates, though graduation appears more likely to be delayed. African Americans are making impressive gains in grad school, but only quite recently. I may try to look at income later, but that's trickier to handle. The societal decline in number of people completing grad school in any subject is declining regardless. I haven't figured out how to separate non-Hispanic whites…
tfk | October 6, 2010Via This Is Not Helpful, a review of creationist movie Dragons or Dinosaurs: Creation or Evolution. The reviewer is concerned that teachers presenting the view that dragons are really dinosaurs might get fired from public schools, "loosing 4-8 years of collage."
My greatest fear is that this blog cataloging unhelpful Netflix reviews will turn out to be a work of sockpuppetry and be withdrawn from the intertubes in disgrace.
Whether those reviews would still be unhelpful if that transpired is left as an exercise for the reader.
tfk | October 5, 2010The opening of Sam Harris's End of Faith, like several essays he wrote at HuffPo, focus on suicide bombing. He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers, who were not fighting a religious war, but rather were part of an ethnic and nationalistic conflict. He waves this objection away at HuffPo by writing: "it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as 'secular' ⦠While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who…
tfk | October 5, 2010When Sam Harris first broached the topic of his latest book in a YouTube video, Sean Carroll made a thoughtful criticism of the talk, and Harris replied via Twitter: "Please know that I will be responding to this stupidity." He did reply, though never successfully addressing the arguments offered against his position. He's studiously ignored the most salient criticisms of his thesis since then (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here, and here), perhaps hoping no one would notice the giant hole in the middle of his argument.
Now that his book's come out, it turns out he didn't address those…
tfk | October 5, 2010While answering a question for Science and Religion Today ("Is it of greater importance for America to have more scientific experts or less scientific illiteracy" – short answer: both, but if I must, I'd choose scientific literacy), I started toying around with these data on graduation rates in different generations:
Based on the General Social Survey, I plotted the percent saying they completed at least high school, college or junior college, and grad school against their birth year. The drop off for college and high school right at the end is probably just a sign that some people take…
tfk | October 4, 2010Senator Jim DeMint clearly hates America for its freedoms. As a local paper reports:
DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend â she shouldn't be in the classroom.
â(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,â he said. âBut everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.â
Perhaps no one came to his defense because he's dead wrong.
tfk | September 29, 2010My post yesterday about Pew's religion poll has generated a certain amount of discussion, though mostly about a point that I phrased poorly and ought to rework to clarify. I'm getting general pushback on my suggestion that atheists did better on this survey because they are book smart about religion, but lack experiential or emotional knowledge about religion. I haven't been dissuaded by the arguments, but look forward to seeing what else emerges.
The thing that shakes me most is the fact that paleocon Daniel Larison made the same point at American Conservative magazine. I assume that…
tfk | September 28, 2010Martin Cothran (cf.) demonstrates that he's a religious illiterate, writing:
It's Banned Books Week again: You know, the week where we talk about all of the books religious parents have objected to in schools, but where we ignore the fact that religious books were prevented from making it into schools in the first place?
In fact, I did a search in the "Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009," for the word "Bible," but it didn't turn up anything.
Funny how that works.
Funny indeed, as he wrote this the same day that Pew released a major survey on religious literacy (Pew's site is hammered, so I…
tfk | September 27, 2010Disco. club owner Bruce Chapman is upset. He saw a report from Saturday which claimed that the UN had someone in charge of meeting aliens if they landed. Two days later, he therefore launched a breathless critique of the obviously Darwinian influence on this decision, a blog post he titled Evidence of Mindless Evolution at the U.N.:
the U.N. now wants to establish a liaison with these unknown creatures, even if there is no evidence for their existence at all--just speculation. A Malaysian astrophysicist is to be the first ambassador of the world to little green men on Mars, or wherever they…
tfk | September 27, 2010The more I watch Christine O'Donnell's riff on evolution, the more sure I am that Christine McDonnell would, had she not been interrupted, have told Bill Maher, "even Darwin himself renounced evolution on his deathbed." Alas, she only got through "even Darwin himself…," but I think we'd all have been treated to the Lady Hope Story had Maher just waited a second. Then she got distracted and issued a different canard.
tfk | September 24, 2010Rolling out big federal bucks to fund merit pay for teachers the day after a major report found no benefit from merit pay was probably poor timing.
tfk | September 24, 2010Ed Yong has a great blog post up asking Should science journalists take sides? He rightly answers: yes, "a commitment to the view from nowhere has many problems." Among those problems, this opinions-on-shape-of-earth-differ style is "a disservice to journalism," reflective of "laziness" and "a poor understanding of one's audience," and a sign of "naiveté" among journalists who adopt the pose. It can force writers to make "ethical breaches." Lastly, he notes that it derives from â and more importantly contributes to â a "failure to understand the nature of science."
Other bloggers have…
tfk | September 23, 2010Not to reopen raw wounds, but reposting my talk from Netroots Nation reminded me of two other sessions I attended, both on the theme of snark and satire. Unfortunately, video from the one I want to talk about today is not yet online.
As you'll recall, sciencebloggers and skeptics were really bored over the summer, and to pass the time they got into a fight over whether it was good or bad to be dickish. Those who said "no," generally argued that there's no particular evidence that such behavior is effective at convincing people to join your cause and the peer reviewed literature found dickish…
tfk | September 20, 2010
That's the full video from my panel at Netroots Nation this summer. Mark Sumner (DailyKos's DevilsTower, and the author most recently of The Evolution of Everything), Greg Dworkin (DailyKos's DemfromCT), and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (co-authors of the excellent and important Merchants of Doubt.), joined me to talk about threats to science in today's society, and what scientists have done to fight back.
Don't miss my discussion of Leviathan melvillei and the Fail Whale.
tfk | September 17, 2010David Klinghoffer is looking for reasons to apologize. That's all I can conclude from his latest post at the Disco. 'tute blog: On Yom Kippur, Considering the Moral Meaning of Theistic Evolution. He writes about the Yom Kippur liturgy, probably the holiest moment in the Jewish year, when we apologize to those around us for our failings in the last year, and then take a deeper look at the offenses we may have caused to no person in particular, but which still deserve apologies.
Klinghoffer's point, to the extent we grant that it is a point, is that this moment is also a good time to pursue his…
tfk | September 17, 2010As far as I can tell, the new Disco. blogger I discussed yesterday made a mistake in her post's title. "Nature: I used to love her, now I'll have to kill her," sure seems like a reference to the classic Guns 'n' Roses song: "I used to love her." But the lyrics go:
I used to love her, but I had to kill her
I used to love her, but I had to kill her
I had to put her
Six feet under
And I can still hear her complain
And so forth.
Aside from misquoting a line repeated at least 8 times in the song, I still don't see the connection between that sentiment and the article's theme. But since the…
tfk | September 16, 2010Every now and again, the Disco. 'tute's blog rolls out some breathless announcement. Sometimes they've been invited to join other creationist groups at a public forum, or maybe they're angry at a newspaper article claiming they have ties to religion, or they might just have come up with another reason to claim evolution is at odds with their theistic understanding.
My favorites, though, are the times when they invite a new contributor to their blog. First it was the incomparable Michael Egnor. Then Martin Cothran, who is such a stereotypical wingnut that I'd have had to invent this…
tfk | September 10, 2010I just got a copy of this letter, sent by Tom Holland, the Democratic candidate for Kansas Governor, to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce:
Members of Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Industry Executive Board,
Thank you for contacting my campaign regarding your endorsement process for Kansas Governor. Out of respect for your organization’s time, I wanted to inform you that I am not seeking, nor would I accept, an endorsement from the Kansas Chamber of Commerce.
I firmly believe that the Chamber’s rhetoric during this past legislative session was unbecoming of any organization whose mission is…
tfk | September 9, 2010I'm back from getting married, back from Brazil, back to work. Got my Twitter software working again, reading blogs, and am convinced that nothing has changed in the last month.
Are we still talking about "Don't be a dick"? Yes, and now we're talking about whether it's dickish to call the radical religious right "American Taliban." (Not really). Or whether it's dickish to burn a Quran (yes, among other things). PZ is still trying to explain and defend Crackergate. The asinine obsessions of scienceblogs and skepticblogs have become our national discourse.
Meanwhile, we're still talking about…