Slashdot Mirror
Should Science Be King In Politics?
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
Sorry, but for the last ten year or so they haven't been comparable. Yes, neither party is perfect, but only one party has taken a conscious ideological (as opposed to strategic) hard tack away from the facts.
Only one party has made it a party platform to attack scientific facts based upon religious or ideological principles.
The Greeks were arguably far more educated than we are. There is a difference between knowing stuff and being educated. We know way more maths than they did, our science is lightyears ahead, but what does that change? If the state of the art is making wheels out of iron instead of wood, then democracy will ideally work when the voters have a minimal knowledge of wooden and iron wheels.
The Athenians, for instance, did. Obviously, the people who could vote in this ancient democracy were but a small subset of the population of the city, but those were pretty much guaranteed to have had extensive education in litterature and philosophy, with the latter being critical for thought processes and passing for science at the time.
In the modern days? State of the art is so diverse and impenetrable to the common man that they know nothing. They do not know the actual statistics on how much nuclear power is dangerous, nor have they read Darwin's theory and the multiple refinements done to it in the years after. They do not understand relativity, they do not comprehend how vaccines work or how virus work.Most do not know psychology, statistics, they barely have a primitive knowledge of their own history learned and then quickly forgotten in high school. In this perspective, we know more on average than the Greeks did absolutely, but quite a bit less relatively.
I'd say that unfortunately the problem is that democracy was initially created for mid-sized communities with a very uniform distribution of knowledge and education. For extremely large scale communities like many countries these days, where knowledge levels vary wildly, it isn't adapted.
> we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls
Actually voter fraud is quite rare. There's been something like a couple dozen cases in the last decade or two, and most of those were just mistakes (eg: people voting in the wrong precinct). Election fraud, on the other hand, is a real reason for concern. With recent revelations on the weakness of electronic voting machines, that seems a far greater hazard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You mean logical fallacies or rhetorical fallacies.
e.g. Affirming the consequent == logical fallacy. Argument ad Personam == rhetorical fallacy.
Generally, logical fallacies are actually worth learning, while a focus on rhetorical fallacies tends to lead to a duel of "who is arguing wrong."
Logical fallacies are in "basic logic" rhetorical fallacies are part of "critical thinking."
Remember: When you wind up fighting about process, the status quo wins.
-GiH
You appear to be saying that raising the minimum wage has no bad effects, only good ones.
?
He's doing nothing of the kind. He's pointing out that a very large body of actual data demonstrate that the proposition, "Normally constituted minimum wage laws designed to provide basic subsistence wages for low-paid workers do not increase unemployment." That is what people mean by and have implemented as minimum wage laws, you know: basic subsistence wages.
You have completely fabricated your beliefs about what he is saying based on god knows what. Certainly not anything he has said, which could in no wise be used to support claims that arbitrarily high minimum wage laws would be a good thing. That claim is a straw person purely of your own making, made doubly funny by being in response to a comment that points out Republican's inability to understand the higher-order effects of economic changes. You should perhaps read Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" before making your side of this debate look even more foolish than it already does.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.