Politics
emjohnson | July 28, 2009Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…
oracknows | July 28, 2009You may have heard of the lunatic fringe contingent that thinks that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and thus not eligible to be President of the United States according to the Constitution. They're incredible cranks, cooking up all manner of dire conspiracy theories about a doctored birth certificate and birth documents, all full of dark plotting, aided and abetted, of course, by the "liberal" press. They're very much like 9/11 Truthers, only not as coherent. (And, no, that's not a compliment to 9/11 Truthers, either.)
That there are kooky conspiracy theorists…
ejohnson | July 28, 2009
As President Obama continues to garner support for his healthcare reform plan, ScienceBloggers are also taking a look at the issues in play. Peter Lipson of White Coat Underground investigates the perception that centralized, salary-based medicine is more efficient than a system based on private practice. Revere of Effect Measure discusses the dangerous tendency to eliminate all reserve capacity--spare hospital beds--in order to cut costs. Mike the Mad Biologist argues against what he calls a mislabeled "centrist" position on reform. And Razib of Gene Expression presents a glimpse of what…
pharyngula | July 28, 2009If you believe Bill O'Reilly and Fox News, that is. They've been fond of claiming that that very liberal European nation's experiment with tolerance and personal freedom is a complete failure, that the Netherlands is collapsing in anarchy. So an Amsterdam resident made a short clip documenting cultural armageddon.
That was beautiful, an extremely effective rebuttal. If the Netherlands is in decay, the comparison of the statistics between that country and the US must mean that Bill O'Reilly really despises America.
Now I want to move to Amsterdam.
pharyngula | July 28, 2009The other day, one of those routine, empty resolutions came up in congress: a Hawaiian representative brought up a nice fluffy little resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood, which contained a collection of whereas's listing notable features of the state. Bland stuff, nothing controversial, except maybe one line, if you're a kook: one of the points of pride is that Hawaii has now contributed a native son to the White House.
Need a kook? Minnesota's own Michele Bachmann stood up to shoulder the honor. She bravely blocked the vote. (The resolution has since been passed…
drorzel | July 28, 2009There's an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs:
# The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a "nagging theory" in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.
# Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity --…
oracknows | July 28, 2009In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…
pharyngula | July 27, 2009Sam Harris seems to have triggered some kind of reflex, because there is discussion going on all over the place.
Jerry Coyne has a long piece up that chews over that awful talk Collins gave at Berkeley. He has the full recording of the whole talk — it was titled "The Language of God: Intellectual Reflections of a Christian Geneticist", and I'm pretty sure the fifth word slipped in there entirely by mistake — and it is a genuinely appalling load of rubbish. It's two hours long, but I could only make it through the first half hour before having to give up. I thought I had a strong stomach from…
emjohnson | July 26, 2009
In the 1960s military strategists promoted the "domino theory" as a rationale for why the United States needed to intervene in what later turned out to be a Vietnamese civil war. The logic was that, as communist influence extended from Russian and China, every country that fell before the "Reds" would perpetuate yet another country going the same direction. However, as Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, stated in his mea culpa documentary, The Fog of War, their logic was based on an erroneous foundation:
We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as…
emjohnson | July 25, 2009Stanley Fish, distinguished law professor and close friend of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., puts the arrest of Gates and President Obama's comments into perspective in his latest piece for The New York Times:
Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn't the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama's initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been…
pharyngula | July 25, 2009When I read this opening to an article about a Republican politician, I knew instantly exactly where it was going.
Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He's a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is "a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school." (Check out the religious imagery on the site -- the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God's presence -- which of course shows Stanley's deeply pious nature.)
Can you? Take a guess, then look below the fold…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples):
Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…
oracknows | July 23, 2009The only thing he's left out is a takedown of Nazi analogies. After all, Nazis wanted universal health care, too, except that they wanted to guarantee the health of the volk more than any individual:
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pharyngula | July 23, 2009
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emjohnson | July 22, 2009President Obama just stated the following at a press conference:
Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…
gregladen | July 21, 2009In any event, more people seem to like Al Franken than who voted for him ... if we compare the 42% of the vote he got with the 49% approval rating he now has. (details)
This is partly a function of increased favorablity following the nasty recount process, but is also reminds us of something else: There was a third candidate in this race. If Dean Barkley was not in this race, would the outcome have been so close? And, who would have won?
The common knowledge on the street at the time of the election is that about two thirds of Barkley's votes would have been for Franken had Barkley not…
oracknows | July 21, 2009If there's one characteristic of the anti-vaccine movement that helps define them as true cranks, it's a streak of conspiracy theory mania. It's not too much of an exaggeration when I wonder if they think that the Lizard Men have taken over the government, the CDC, and the American Academy of Pediatrics in order to use vaccines in a New World Order plot to make all of our children autistic. Or something. I'm never quite sure. Knowing this particular aspect of the anti-vaccine movement, the only thing that surprises me is that they haven't joined the forces arrayed against President Obama's…
catdynamics | July 20, 2009"My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?"
B.B.
I had to look something up on nasa.gov earlier today, and was met with the grainy footage of an astronaut descending the ladder to the lunar surface, exactly 40 years ago today as I start typing this, thanks to the "flash" script that grabbed my browser as I entered the site.
I hadn't forgotten, just not…
emjohnson | July 20, 2009Mark Hemingway, the Conservative "tough-guy" for the National Review, has just posted a rant against health concerns for the endocrine disruptor Bisphenol A.
I've seen some estimates that over a billion people have had exposure to BPA and there isn't proof of anything. So why the big scare? I assume trial lawyers are involved in the fear mongering. That's a given. But then I saw that last year two reporters from the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel won a George Polk Award-- a major journalism honor -- for reporting on the "dangers" of BPA. It's another reminder that there are some perverse…