Politics
j7uy5 | August 24, 2009
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A fair amount has been written about the topic of motivated
reasoning. Jonah Lehrer
href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/09/motivated_reasoning.php">explains
the relationship between motivated reasoning and the political process;
Orac
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/04/why_projection_isnt_all_its_cracked_up_t.php">addresses
the issue with regard to quantum woo. (Plus more at Mixing…
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
oracknows | August 23, 2009Although I was born in Detroit itself, like so many Detroiters in the 1970s my family moved to a suburb of Detroit called Livonia when I was 10. I haven't lived in Livonia in nearly 25 years, but my parents still live there in the same house where I spent my teen years. So the politics of the town occasionally still piques my interest. Sometimes they turn really nutty, such as this year's City Council election. The city posted videos of all the candidates answering the following questions:
The following are 10 of the 11 candidates running in the Livonia City Council Primary election on…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? , atheism, religion, water, streaming video
The only people who are so stupid as to not understand the answer to that question are the creationists themselves.
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: cultural observations, Lewis Black, travel, health insurance, humor, funny, fucking hilarious, streaming video
Bill Maher talks about the relationship between religion and political office, noting that most Americans would not vote for a political candidate who does not believe in a god of some sort.
jrosenhouse | August 22, 2009I have been a huge Quentin Tarantino fan ever since seeing Reservoir Dogs in college. I have loved all of his movies, with Jackie Brown being the only item in the corpus that gets a rating below brilliant. So you can imagine my excitement over the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. I almost never go to movies on Friday or Saturday nights since I hate crowds, but for this I made an exception.
There are only the most minor of spoilers below the fold. Really, the movie advertisements give away more than I am about to.
Short review: Tarantino is a genius. If he doesn't win Best Everything…
drorzel | August 21, 2009The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday:
Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (…
oracknows | August 21, 2009Sorry, but I guess I was incorrect when I pointed to Barney Frank's blistering putdown of a woman with a picture of President Obama decorated with a Hitler mustache who likened health care reform to Nazi policies as being the "only? correct response to such vile and obvious guilt by association gambits. Here's another, from a Jew at a town hall meeting in Las Vegas, who, while talking about the national health care system in Israel, was subjected to "Heil Hitler" salutes from another clueless woman:
The crazy is strong in this woman. Clearly, the Hitler Zombie has feasted on the thin gruel…
razib | August 20, 2009A question below:
I'm curious about the demographics of this category, specifically their geographic distribution, religion and ethnicity.
First, I limited the sample to whites to remove confounds of ethnicity. Interestingly, in the GSS in the period between 1998-2008 24% of black Democrats/lean Democrats considered themselves conservatives, as opposed to 18% of whites. This surprised me, I generally remove blacks from he GSS sample in politics so had no data to fill in the gap where intuition lay. It does reiterate my suspicion that personal assertions of political ideology are less…
oracknows | August 20, 2009I don't normally like Barney Frank. At times, I've thought him to be a blithering idiot. However, this time around, he gets it exactly right in dealing with a woman who was carrying around a picture of President Obama with a Hitler mustache and comparing his health care reform initiative to Nazi policies.
Best quotes:
On what planet do you spend most of your time?
And:
Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table.
Indeed. I actually have a bit more respect for Barney Frank than I once did.
In other news, Rush Limbaugh has cheered on this idiot of a…
gregladen | August 20, 2009Let me tell you what I think about this:
Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
What I think about this is that I'm tired of people demanding hard and…
gregladen | August 20, 2009Unfortuntaely, Taitz was not born in the US... seriously. I'm not making that up.
razib | August 20, 2009Question below about the details of what conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans might believe, etc. I decided to look for a few questions. I removed Independents because their sample sizes are a bit smaller. I clustered all those with socioeconomic status 17-47 as "Low" and those from 47-98 as "High." Again, I limited the sample to whites & the years 1998-2008.
Dem Repub
High Low High Low
Yes – Abortion on Demand Liberal 74.8 57.5 52.9 41.6…
gregladen | August 20, 2009Yesterday, I called Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar and expressed my support for the public option in Heath Care. If you are a Minnesotan, please do that too. Al's number is 651-221-1016. If you are not a Minnesotan, call Al anyway as he is on the Health Education Labor and Pensions committee. Use his DC number for that (202-224-5641).
Amy's number in he Twin Cities is 612-727-5223, and if you are outstate you can get the right number at this link.
While you are in the process of making calls or sending emails, you should consider contacting the members of the Senate Committee on Heatlh,…
oracknows | August 20, 2009One of the advantages of hanging out around home on the proverbial staycation is that, instead of actually paying more attention to the news, I've paid less attention to the news. That's why I didn't notice some stories from earlier this week about what the new director of the NIH, Francis Collins, plans to do.
Regular readers probably know that, other than the occasional snarky comment on other people's blogs, I haven't (much) engaged in the blogospheric kerfuffle over Collins' religion and the (in my opinion) vastly overblown fear in some quarters that he would inject his religion into his…
emjohnson | August 20, 2009In a huge breaking story, The New York Times is reporting today that the CIA, with Bush administration authorization, used the private military firm Blackwater (who changed their name to Xe Services after controversy erupted when contractors killed Iraqi civilians) in a program intended to hunt down and assassinate suspected Al Qaeda militants. Congress was never notified nor was there authorization for the program.
The House Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never told about the program. According to current and former government officials, former Vice President…
jrosenhouse | August 19, 2009Barney Frank confronted one of those “Obama is a Nazi!” types at a town hall meeting the other day. Video here.
QUESTIONER (holding a picture of Obama with a Hitler moustache): Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama expressly has supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?
FRANK: When you ask me that question I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?
You want me to answer your question? As you stand there, with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler, and…
razib | August 19, 2009Andrew Gelman has a post up, Who are the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans?, which shows that conservative Republicans tend toward higher incomes, while conservative Democrats tend toward lower incomes. I decided to see if something similar was discernible in the General Social Survey. I used the PARTYID, POLVIEWS and SEI variables to explore the question, and limited the sample to whites and the years 1998-2008 (so as to have contemporary relevance and control for ethnic confounds). I clustered all Republicans & lean Republicans into one category, and did the same for…
catdynamics | August 19, 2009"...a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity"
click to embiggen
with apologies to WB and PZ both.
The Great American Bubble Machine article is up on the Rolling Stone website.
Great rant.