Politics
pharyngula | April 9, 2007To my dismay, even after a good night's sleep and a fresh perusal of the paper, after reading both of Greg Laden's thorough articles, Mooney's latest summary, Orac's claim that it's nothing but tailoring your message to your audience, and Nisbet's roundup of responses, I'm still hopelessly confused. What the heck is this paper telling me to do?
Here is my crude, primitive and confused understanding of frames. If I am an advocate for science, I should avoid saying, "I like science, and I strangle puppies!" I should say instead, "I like science, and I snuggle puppies!" OK so far, I can agree…
j7uy5 | April 9, 2007Ordinarily,
I dislike fisking as a literary style, but it does have its
place. This is one of them. As noted in the two
previous posts,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate.php">(Part
One,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate_part_two.php">Part
Two) some authors from the Cato Institute managed to get an
opinion piece published in the LA Times:
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-tanner5apr05,1,6553974.story?ctrack=2&cset=true">Universal
healthcare's dirty little secrets. In…
clock | April 8, 2007I have updated my uber-long post about framing science. I added a lot more links to the blogospheric responses, as well as my own response to critics at the very bottom of the post. I have also re-posted it as a Diary on DailyKos which I hope you will visit to see the comments and to recommend (if you are a Kossian).
clock | April 8, 2007I am thinking about going - this is only about 2 miles from me:
Tuesday, April 10th is our first ever MoveOn Virtual Town Hall meeting with the '08 presidential candidates. (The full list of candidates invited to attend is below.) The topic is Iraq, and we want you to have a front row seat.
You can join other members of your community and tune in via the Internet to hear the top candidates answer questions chosen by MoveOn members. Afterward, you'll have a chance to discuss what you heard, and then vote by email on who will do the best job of bringing our troops home.
Can you attend a town…
oracknows | April 8, 2007After all the chatter that's been going on throughout ScienceBlogs about Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney's editorial, Framing Science, published in Science on Friday, I almost thought that there was nothing really left for me to say. Of course, regular readers of this blog know that there's rarely an issue that's been so thoroughly picked over by my fellow science bloggers (ScienceBloggers and otherwise) that I can't find something else to say about it. And I'll do it by, in effect, "framing" the issue in perhaps a slightly different way than Mooney and Nisbet did. But first, let's examine a bit…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
Rarely has science been as much a public issue as in the past 30 years. Sure, people have queried the wisdom of this or that science or technology in the past, like the use of nuclear power or for weapons. But apart from anti-vaccination movements since the late nineteenth century, very little public attack was made on the science itself, and, when it was, it was rarely taken seriously. Sometime in the past few years, things changed. Why?
This is merely my impression, but I think that science began to be treated as equivalent to personal opinion some time in the 1970s, with the New Left…
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2007Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertion today that al-Qaeda had links to Iraq despite the fact that the US Defense Department recently released a report citing more evidence that the Iraq's prewar government did not cooperate with the terrorist group. Cheney stated that al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq before the US invasion of Iraq and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda.
"He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led…
drorzel | April 6, 2007Yesterday, on my way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio and Mike Greenberg made a bold assertion (paraphrased slightly):
Jackie Robinson is one of the ten most important Americans of the twentieth century. Not just sports figures, Americans.
Contrary sort that I am, my first thought was "I don't think I believe that."
Which is not to say that Robinson wasn't an important American of the twentieth century. I don't think there's any question that he's the most important twentieth century American from the world of sports (trailed by Muhammed Ali and Jesse Owens, and then a big step down…
clock | April 5, 2007Energy Use Study Demonstrates Remarkable Power Of Social Norms:
Most people want to be normal. So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center. Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling.
This tendency may not always be used for good. This is, after all, the idea behind the Overton Window, which the Right…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007
Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that "many scientists don't really know what they're up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians" — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We're also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It's more than a cosmetological failure, though;…
hrynyshyn | April 5, 2007Every campaign it's the same thing. The editors and their reporting staff vow to pay more attention to the issues and focus less on the horse race. And every campaign that promise turns out to be as hollow as the campaign promises of the candidates the journalists are covering. So it is with the mountains of attention paid to the fundraising efforts of the presidential contenders. The latest has Barack Obama pulling in a mind-boggling amount of... but there I go, sucked into the vortex of distraction. What I want to explore is John Edwards' environmental platform, which I think is remarkable…
clock | April 5, 2007Neural Gourmet and Blue Gal are organizing a massive blogospheric Blog Against Theocracy weekend:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism,…
jlynch | April 4, 2007Mike Dunford earlier introduced Bush to the Constitution, a document that he has in the past referred to as "just a goddammed piece of paper" and which has been ignored by his regime. Yesterday, he appointed Swift-Boat and GOP financier Sam Fox as
ambassador to Belgium, this despite withdrawing Fox's nomination last week due to insufficient support in the Foreign Relations Committee. Congress leaves town for a week and Bush gets his man in through the back door. As if there was urgency in appointing an ambassador to Belgium.
Let's pay attention to that "goddamned piece of paper," shall we?…
clock | April 4, 2007McCain, the Media, and Baghdad Security and A sadly necessary introduction
Unfortunately, that second one of them appeared as 'Most Popular' on Google News so the comments are filled with stupid Bushies (but hey, traffic must be great!). Perhaps an avalanche of readers not encumbered by irrational fear of terrorists, moslems, gays, women, blacks, liberals, etc. can go there and do some spring cleaning (I already did too much troll-feeding there...).
grrlscientist | April 3, 2007Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) joined forces with fellow GOP hypocrite, Trent Lott, who has condemned the Clinton White House for invoking a right to executive privilege. However, both Hatch and Lott have defended W's need for executive privilege in the course of investigations on the firings of US Attorneys. So they need to make a choice: they are either saying that Clinton was bad to use it so Bush is also bad to use it or it is alright for Bush to use it, so it was also alright for Clinton use it -- which is it?
Yesterday, yet another Republican Senator engaged in hypocritical partisan…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2007Nancy Pelosi arrived in Syria today. So far, she has visited a centuries-old market district and the Omayyad mosque in Old Damascus, which is considered one of the most sacred sites in the capital. She will meet with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad on Wednesday, which makes her the highest-ranking American politician to meet with a Syrian leader in more than 12 years. The last time an American leader met a Syrian leader was in 1994, when President Clinton met Al-Assad's father, the late Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad.
The Syrian media are hailing her visit as a potential breakthrough in…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2007If you think Bush is a bozo, seeing this collection of quotes will help to solidify your position. If you think Bush is not a bozo, this will change your mind. And, as Laura sez, "he's getting awfully windy."