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A Ray of Hope For Americans and Scientific Literacy?
An anonymous reader with a snippet from Politico: "A finding in a study on the relationship between science literacy and political ideology surprised the Yale professor behind it: Tea party members know more science than non-tea partiers. Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative. However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn't, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said. Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him. 'I've got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I'd be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,' Kahan wrote. 'But then again, I don't know a single person who identifies with the tea party,' he continued.'" More at the Independent Journal Review.
A lot of private practice Drs and Dentists back the tea party, as they vote single issue - lowering the taxes on their $300k+ incomes. Medical degrees and certifications are of course lumped in the science bucket so probably make up a large part of the total. They tend to dislike welfare programs such as medicaid and medicare too, as they cut into their profit margins.
You spelled "know" incorrectly. Besides, it is the opposite political philosophy from the Tea Party crowd that have "magical thinking" about how things work. Mostly they just want centralized government to do less.
You like your computer networks decentralized, why not your government? Local is better.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That can't be!
Everyone knows that the Tea party is a bunch of comic, laughable clowns with no grounding in reality. I mean, why else would they be so thoroughly lampooned using derogatory terms and snarky, dismissive comments.
Even Obama himself (praise be his name) mocks them.
It can't be true... can it?
Here is the actual Tea Party platform
Feel free to argue any of those points, but don't just make up stuff. Far too often (if not "always") there is no debate on the issues... just "but what about the children/unborn". Whatever.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The stereotypical Tea Partier is, for me, somebody who is professional, a high achiever who believes that most, if not all of that is due to their own merit. They might be really good at science and math; but they're short on compassion and unwilling to admit that they benefited in their youth from programs that are socialist. It doesn't surprise me one bit that they'd be more scientifically literate than average. Scientific knowledge isn't everything when it comes to leadership, management, politics, etc.. In fact, I'd me inclined to say it isn't worth much at all in those positions. Face it. The squishy "human factors" matter.
I figured out in college that there were smart and dumb people (and informed and ignorant and good and evil ones) on all sides of pretty much any political question. That left emotions as the key issue, and it has never ceased to amaze and depress me how many people think of politics in the the most primitive, emotional ways: name-calling, tribalization, and tons of logical fallacies, all in the service of flinging feces at the Evil Others Who Don't Vote The Right Way.
The Tea Party is an interesting case in point. Their views, boiled down, amount to 1) the federal government should stick to its Constitutional powers, and 2) not spend more money than it has. Those are hardly extreme notions, but you'd never know it from the vicious attacks on them. This is not to say that every Tea Partier is correct on everything, or that their aren't nuts and unsavory types among them, but any political division that encompasses roughly 25-30% of the population will have some nuts and unsavory types.
So I don't find this result terribly surprising, but the people who think Tea Partiers are all ignorant racist/sexist/fascist/homophobes will certainly be surprised.
Final note: anyone interested in the psychology of political belief should check out the work of Jonathan Haidt, particularly his work on moral foundations theory. No matter what you believe politically, it will help you understand why the people who disagree with you think the way they do.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
KAHaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaNNNN!!!!!!!!!
That is all.
Grr filter.
Ron Paul types are idealists, not your "normal" Republicans. We don't think of Ron Paul as a TPer, but that's only because he's so extreme. He's also a bit weird (i.e. mystical) which is why he stayed in that party.
The anti-science people are merely Republicans. There's actually very little conservative about them, and when you ask them about certain aspects of government relationship with people, they'll go left of Stalin and insist upon an extremely authoritarian police state that tells people what to do.
Then there are the non-mystics. They know about science, because science is the only way anyone has ever come up with, for understanding Anything; it turned out that everyone else (the non-scientists) were always lying about everything they said. So of course, they're informed. Not extremely informed, just better than average (remember: average is a pretty low bar). And a lot of them are idealists too. And .. get this .. some of them go with non-planned economies, really thinking that a free market algorithm will tend to find some fairly good optima (and by "fairly good" they mean something superior to everything you've ever seen in real life). So they become Tea Partiers.
That isn't to say all non-mystics become TPers; some believe in Philosopher Kings instead. If only we put unbelievable amounts of power into the hands of the best planners, they'll do Good. And also do better than anything you've ever seen in real life.
And then there's the other 90% of the population, who believe in mysticism. They split between Republican and Democrat however their parents did. And then they (incorrectly) label themselves as conservatives or liberals, or sometimes even become their self-assigned right/left labels through the power of cognitive dissonance. But without the idealism or any intellectual component at all. So they'll project anti-mysticism by knowing about evolution or global warming, but they're really doing it as dogma, not science. They just happen to be correct, as a matter of luck. Had they been told to believe in Body Thetans, they would.
I think that means "they know just enough to be dangerous". Perhaps on occasion little knowledge is worse than none at all.
That said, I do not find Tea Party supporters laughable at all. On the contrary - I think they are dead serious, and quite scary.
Tea party members - feel free to mod this "troll".
Perhaps their idea of compassion just doesn't involve using the threat of force to take money from others for their own ends.
"So far it conforms to the cultural expectations."
You mean it conforms to the stereotype promoted by liberals. Not the same thing.
"So when the people who are "conservative" but not "tea party" are included with the people who are "liberal" then that group scores worse than the group that is "tea party"."
No. If you look at his actual comments, you will see that he found no significant difference in Cognitive Reflection Test scores between liberals and conservatives. He DID find a significantly higher score in those who identify with the Tea Party.
So get off your liberal high horse. I have found this smug attitude about IQ on the part of liberals to be [1] not supported by the actual data (see the link above for yet another bit of evidence), [2] unjustified, in my personal experience, and [3] old, tiresome, and offensive.
That's why we have elections.
If they piss off enough people, throw the bums out!
Don't blame them for taking advantage of a free taxpayer provided lunch.. its the electorate who are asleep at the switch and tolerate it. Its HIGH time we organized ourselves and get a government in place which represents the electorate, not just the special interest groups.
They will try to keep their stuff secret, just as a kiddie porn collector will do. Its up to the voters to DEMAND open government, and be willing to quickly expel via recall any politician who promised lipservice then fails to deliver.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Everyone is run through those "programs", and only some come out as high achievers and well-paid professionals. If the program were the cause, then everyone would come out the same.
Flawed logic. Take a group, and give them all the benefit of a socialist program, like government financed education. Some will do better than others, which is at least closer to a meritocracy than would otherwise be the case. Eliminate that socialist program, and only the well off will be able to afford a decent education for their children. You now have a system that is based more on your parent's wealth than your merit. Hence people who believe they've done well because of their merit, and believe that's what success should be based on, should be in favor of such a socialist program.
News anchors and columnists still think anyone that isn't in the Democratic Party is a bible thumping, gun clinging, racist hillbilly. And their view is what gets spread to people in big cities who never experienced a tea party member for themselves. No surprise then that the researcher was surprised that tea party members have a large nerd contingent. We weren't surprised because we've seen them here on /. quite a bit.
If you read a bit more than the review article you find that scores on the test of scientific literacy they used is highly correlated with years of education. Since the tea party is heavily skewed toward older white males you'd expect them to have more years of education than the general population. Years of education was not controlled for.
The Soviets had a similar problem - except the lefties were in control and imprisoned or murdered the "deniers".
I won't mince words. Anyone who conflates what's widely considered a "leftie" in America with Stalinists, is a clown.
You've got it backwards. That astroturf "movement" was funded and assisted so that large numbers of people that opposed the regulations that Koch and the other funders disliked could be bussed in to protests to give an appearance of a lot of support. The people that organised the transport, media releases etc were not "Tea Partiers" themselves but professionals paid to create events. Most of the tea party was literally a rented crowd which is why it has no cohesion and nobody within doing much in the way of organising anything. Left alone they do not appear to be able to organise a drunken party in a brewery.
I'm not knocking the individuals who stand for whatever they do, but instead that it's a disorganised mob that cancel each other out and ultimately don't really stand for anything. They are a weird "only in America" footnote whose time passed once the adult supervision driving the busses decided to do something else.
The ironies are many, the largest of which are the strident calls for replacing the United States with the sort of fuedalistic system that the Boston tea party was a protest against. "Getting the government out of people's lives" really means letting the rich and powerful run a country without interference from the people - just like those English Lords could do.
Our best hope for scientific literacy for Americans is immigration reform.
Get enough people from places where they don't think the world was made in 6 days and it might raise the average some.
Either that or hope the South secedes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let's see. Everyone is run through those "programs", and only some come out as high achievers and well-paid professionals. If the program were the cause, then everyone would come out the same. Maybe there is something to the concept that some people are different than others and they can excel because of who they are and not the socialist programs they were subjected to?
SERIOUSLY? Even within my small home town of 10,000, the quality of public school that you went to was pretty directly related to how wealthy your parents were. The school that all the doctors' and lawyers' kids went to? Renovated every 10 years, 20 or less kids per class, teachers' aides in every room, a number of gifted programs, and a lab full of modern PCs, along with PCs in every room, laptop carts, smart white boards, etc. But if you lived in one of the apartment complexes behind the mall you were going to the school where the bricks were falling off and the classes were packed and with few additional programs and your tech classes were taught on shared Apple IIes. In the same school district in the same town.
By highschool all of those schools filtered together...and you know what? I went to the elementary school with all the rich kids, and in highschool guess who I saw in all my AP classes, all my advanced math and science and such? The vast majority were the same kids I'd gone to elementary with -- even though there were six elementary schools in the district.
The problem isn't that these "socialist" programs don't work. The problem is that they aren't actually socialist.
2) Refused to even allow debate about gun-law reform as children are murdered in movie theatres and preschools. (2012)
That's because some of us are intelligent enough to have observed that criminals do not obey laws. We have also observed that governments which disarm their people become tyrannical. Want my guns? Come get 'em.
3) Held hostage the national debt forcing the most austere sequester in federal government history, leading to spending cuts and furloughs (2013)
Good. Any spending cut is a good spending cut. As it turns out, us fiscally conservative people you hate use our money more wisely than the government does.
4) Shut down the government and almost lead to the worst global economic disaster since the Great Depression (TWO DAYS AGO)
Funny. Two weeks of no government and I didn't notice a single difference. Global economic disaster? Melodrama much?
If you were to get a proper representation of the Tea-Party demographic (the three-C's: climate-change deniers, creationists, capitalists), you would find that there are more GEDs and high-school drop-outs than college elite. You would also find that multiple studies have proven that the college elite (read: EDUCATED) tend to be liberal.
You might not be patting yourself on the back if you'd stood in line to vote in my precinct. Obama's biggest constituencies seem to be welfare trash, non-English-speaking immigrants, drug addicts, and various other dregs of the big city. Conversely, everyone I know who owns a business AND a college degree votes Republican. The backbone of the American economy is not interested in the opinions of ivory tower liberals or Starbucks coffee-jerks.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
The Republican party is actually very slit up.
You have the evangelicals, these are the Anti-Science People, their religion tells them that science is wrong, and they should follow only what the bible says. these guys swinged republican, to stand against the abortion issue, then they got more power, now they are the Anti-Science wing to the Republican Party.
You have the big Business men, These guys may know a good deal about Science and Technology, However they have earned a lot of money and they just don't want to waste it away on frivolous spending, and constantly changing regulations.
Now the Tea Party, is the middle ground of the two, they don't have any issues with Science, and want what the Big Business Men want (even though it may not be in their best interests) But they see how effective the evangelicals were with their no hold back attitude so they adopted it. It isn't the lack of Science Skills is their issue but stubbornness to realize that there are a lot of details to maintain. In many ways the Tea Party is like Physics Majors XKCD.
You can be good at science and still be very stupid.
Now the Democrats can jump on a lot of anti-science band wagon stuff too.
Such as Hyper Environmentalism. Where people condemn new technology and not consider that its tradeoffs overall is better.
Then you got the Foodies, Where they want all natural everything even if there is no evidences to their views.
Heck I remember when they found some findings that GMO Foods doesn't have any heal effects, all these guys jumped up an arms and just won't believe the data, making excuses, attacking the scientists motives etc...
However being the Colleges and Universities will tend to be supported by Government aid, Scientist will be more naturally gravitated towards the Democrat party.
For most of them, it isn't as much about the party being better then the republicans but the fact they pay the bills.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Funny, I've never met a single one who wasn't
In other words you almost never meet them because you are so insular - I know your type; you are the type I would not tell I am a Tea Party member because you would automatically turn against me without thought, and you'd never suspect me of belonging because my views don't match up with your bigoted notions of Tea Party members.
It's a shame that there are even some people I consider good friends who I cannot admit to being fiscally conservative, because I see how unhinged you become at the thought of any kind of conservative in your ranks...
Something to chew on is that Tea Party members are WAY more tolerant of alternative viewpoints than you are; we have to be.
The Social Conservatives are just the people more used to being loathed by people like you so they don't mind telling you what they are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The stereotypical Tea Partier is, for me, an unemployed truck driver in front of the Capitol Building holding an effigy of Obama and a sign with racist epithets. I'm not trolling here; it's what a lot of people saw during the early days of its "coming out" on the cable news networks 4-5 years ago.
You should probably learn the difference between what's on television, and what is reality. You have just described a Democrat voter -- because your unemployed truck driver is probably a Teamster who votes Democrat because his union does.
I am a college graduate, a business owner, and I was Tea Party before you ever heard of it.
Stereotypes can be useful things, but only if you pull your head out of your ass and get them right.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
"That's usually how it works with scientific subjects".
Clearly that isn't the case. At any rate, the point still stands that people can understand something and still disagree with it. In fact, that is quite common in the scientific community. Just because crazy people believe jesus was reborn after three days or whatever or that astrology is a real thing doesn't mean they don't comprehend the explanation between known science and the conclusions science has derived from them.
Your seeming attitude of "if you know the truth, then it is all obvious and clear and you could not disagree!" is the exact same mindset that religious nuts have. Obviously, you just don't understand baby jesus, so if I just explain it to you one more time or read you the right parable or do the right magic dance, you'll finally see it clearly, because once you know the truth, it all makes sense, because it's the truth!
Also, I'll wait for a more meaningful study before I let my bias against stupid conservatives override my bias for stupid liberals. In the meantime, I'll continue to operate under the assumption that despite this small representative survey, the stupidity and ignorance is quite strong in both courts.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he is suggesting that progressives (educated scientifically literate liberals) want a philosopher king. Woodrow Wilson could be considered the prototype of such a king. An authoritarian schoolmaster if there ever was one. Willing to trample the rights of the individual to make the correct decision *for* that individual. The fact he was very well educated and probably right quite a large portion of the time doesn't alleviate the effects of removing individual responsibility and freedom upon creative thought.
And the notion that a greedy optimization algorithm like a anarcho-capitalist pure free market is so incredibly elegant that it must work, neglects the nasty inelegant humans that are part of that market and screw everything up. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how elegant it is. I think that is the mysticism the gp was talking about. The faith Ron Paul has placed in elegant ideas often involves handwaving and appeals to common sense, rather than empircal tests. I think that is somewhat unfair as he does cite historical incidents, he just has different interpretations from his detractors. Also doing correctly scaled economic tests that control for all the variables is impossible. Still, he's kinda handwavy even compared to economists.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Everyone knows that the Tea party is a bunch of comic, laughable clowns with no grounding in reality.
Not at all. From outside the US, particularly from places like Europe where we have suffered when countries like extreme right wing political parties get out of control they look dangerous. The finding that they actually know science and reality but choose to reject it makes them scarier. I'd be far happier if I thought that all they lacked was education instead of medication.
Arguing that the federal government should not spend more money than it has in the depths of a recession is remarkably ignorant.
Huh? George Washington lost to the French who were the only ones still operating with a system ran by Dukes, Earls (actually they didn't have Earls) and a Monarch who thought he was appointed by God.
Now the English at the time of George Washington had a Parliament who was partially elected (the elected House controlled the purse) by the land owners and larger renters but was in need of electoral reform with whole cities without representation and ridings (electoral districts) with only a couple of voters who were quite happy to sell their vote to a rich business man. It had been 80 years since the last King who thought he was appointed by God was booted out by Parliament which finally was in undisputed control (The Supremacy of Parliament). So the King had about the same political power as the current Queen though he was more vocal. The Lords did have one house of Parliament so they could slow down and affect the democratic process and do things like push for limited copyright when the elected people were going to make it forever.
It was Parliament that enacted the laws that pissed off the colonists, a partially elected Parliament who did not represent the colonists and truthfully represented the rich, who were a mixture of business men who didn't want competition and landed gentry who thought they were special because of their parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If people are that venal when their constituents can actually show up at their house and complain, what makes you think that the ones with more power over more money, with less direct interaction with the voters, are more honest?
Why should you control for that? Where do non-white people and non-male people think science knowledge comes from?
"This is about scientific knowledge. Not IQ. They are not the same."
No, it isn't. This is about the Cognitive Reflection Test, which is correlated with IQ, and which has no direct relationship to education. Do I detect a hint of Dunning-Kruger showing through?
"At least read that link you posted all the way to the end."
I did. He claims that the difference is "trivially small", yet elsewhere he shows that it is statistically significant. I'll stick with the numbers rather than his opinion, thanks very much! He even admits that his opinion has been biased. So I'll adhere to the science.
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Neither can he. Statistically significant and "trivially small" are mutually incompatible. One is science, and the other is opinion, and they are in conflict. Given that, I'll go with the statistics. Also, saying in effect "I wouldn't be surprised if it reversed" does not lead to the conclusion you appear to assume; perhaps he thinks they will undergo a shift in membership.
"Like I said, lies, damn lies and statistics. Understand what you're measuring and how to measure it."
From what you have written in the last couple of comments, I am pretty confidant that I understand it better than you do.
"Yes. He divided the results into 3 groups. 1. Liberal 2a. Conservative 2b. Tea Party"
Your very choice of numbering indicates a bias. But let's leave that aside for now. While what you say is not false, you present it in a very misleading way. To avoid confusion, I'm going to call them 1, 2, and 3, because they are 3 distinct subgroups of the sample population.
He compared 1 to the population as a whole, and 2 to the population as a whole, and found no significant difference between the results. He then compared 3 to the population as a whole, and found a significant difference.
You are presenting 2 and 3 as 2a and 2b as though there is some kind of statistical impropriety or shenanigans going on. He compared each of the 3 groups to the population as a whole, as is right and proper. Your insinuation that there is something wrong or weird about the way it was divided up is just so much hot air. If he had not compared each against the whole population, then there would have been something strange; but such is not the case.
In fact, his own statements show that what you seem to be implying is false. He states:
"It turns out that there is about as strong a correlation between scores on the science comprehension scale and identifying with the Tea Party as there is between scores on the science comprehension scale and Conservrepub.
Except that it has the opposite sign." [emphasis mine]
Clearly, then, any implied "bias" that might arise from combining your "2a" and "2b" is more than made up for by the difference in scores.
Taxes are the lowest they've been in half a century.
Local government is easier to influence, however. Your vote in State and national elections have zero impact when taken on its own. In a local election, you actually stand a chance of making a difference. The problem is when people choose not to attempt making a difference.
The federal government is basically a coalition of the fortune 100 corporations. The larger and more toxic to liberty it gets, the more power the 1% has over the rest of us. It's better to have a coalition of smaller governments as it makes it a lot harder to keep them all infiltrated enough. Also, the local interests of the population take precedence over the interests of people thousands of miles away, protecting the local values and interests of that section of society.
While centralized systems offer some advantages to this, a critical fault is that they have one point of failure.. kick it there, and it's yours for the pilfering. The founders knew that there are benefits to both, and that's why we have a system with both. However, in recent years the fed has gotten too large and too influential in too many areas for state governments to resist. "Do as we say on X, otherwise no funding for your Y" rules the day.
Today, the liberals draw more political power to the state with things like encroaching tax, identity politics, censorship, and other marxist tenets, while the neocons use that power to keep market cornering laws, passed for the benefit of their lobbyists, enforced. This includes things like tax loopholes, leaving the rest of us with the bill. Meanwhile corporates 'agree' to fund the liberals' identity politics campaigns and allow leftist politics into their corporate employee behavioral policies. This reenforces the left's voter base and keeps them coming back to the polls (vote for us or you'll lose your 'rights'!). The result is that both parties punch each other with one hand while patting each other on the back with the other, each supporting the other's interests while the rest of us lose our liberty to these very influential minority populations. Who walks away laughing to the bank? That top 1% liberals are always complaining about. Walking down the campaign funding tree to the largest donations, a lot of the names become the same across both parties. 'Why?' becomes an important question here.
Why should you control for that? Where do non-white people and non-male people think science knowledge comes from?
Because of the potential for Simpson's Paradox.
My co-worker is a Tea Party advocate, and I generally consider him bright, although a tad stubborn.
His issue with "science" is that he believes people in general are motivated by their wallet; and climate science, for example, is allegedly heavily biased toward "alarmist" results in order to justify yet more studies of a (allegedly fake) growing threat. If there are no fires, then nobody hires fire-fighters.
And evolutionists are allegedly biased to "deny a creator" so that they can sin without penalty. He knows all the usually down-side talking points, like the Piltdown fraud, the relatively suddenness of the Cambrian Explosion, few if any new phyla since then, etc.
Complex topics are difficult to verify on one's own and one has often has to rely on expert interpretation of fossils, weather patterns, etc.
Perhaps if he really dug into the topics, he'd see the stronger evidence, but it's not his interest to do such. He likes military history the most and reads only cursory articles on science-related topics, usually from biased sources. You are not going to "get to the bottom" of the topic that way.
As a semi-side note, I once wanted to "get to the bottom" of the UFO mystery and purchased many books on the topic from both sides. Unfortunately I still can't come to a conclusion. The skeptics don't make a good enough case to stop exploring UFO's. I consider it an "open mystery" still. Not everything has an available answer. I would note that the top skeptics surprisingly don't claim witnesses to the top cases are lying, but rather propose psychological explanations. But those explanations are odd, full of a few contradictions, and untested.
Table-ized A.I.
The tea-partiers may or may not understand science, but, fortunately for the future of our democratic republic, they are manifestly ignorant of the legislative process, which is why they just got their heads handed to them on a platter in the U.S. Congress.
The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse
The clearest example of the bizarrely naive quality of hermetic liberal provincialism was attributed to the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael almost 40 years ago, and has been discussed in right-wing circles ever since. It went something like this: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” ... more
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The "effin' difference"? In most cases, it is far, far easier to "throw the bums out" at a local level, where getting word out and mobilizing the citizenry is way easier to do. The local "bums" don't have the massive reservoir of money and consultants to get them out of a jam like the national office-holders do. You screw up as a local official, and you can almost count on being ejected from office.
The smaller the population, the more an official has to be attuned to the cares and whims of the people he ostensibly serves. It's a question of simple logistics.
Now this doesn't scale up very well, so places like Los Angeles or New York City have a harder time putting this into effect than, say, Minot, ND.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Opportunist:
What you observe is exactly what I am referring to.... the majority of people being mindless sheep that follow any leader.
If these people get pissed off enough to put down their Hollywood drivel and sports and supervise those who control their lives - things will happen.
Yes, I said "supervise". Those people are elected. We pulled the levers that put them in office. They are beholden to US, yet we let them go willy-nilly and run their own show. I, for one, am highly disappointed with the performance of our so-called leaders.
You, like I, have been around long enough to see that way too many people do whatever the microphone-men tell them to do. And they wonder why they are treated like cattle.
If the electorate of this nation wake up in time, this mess can still be cleaned up in the election booth.
If they don't, it will be far messier. Riots. A lot of blood will get spilled.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
You don't get to redefine political terms on the fly to mean something utterly different than what the rest of the world understands them to mean. If you do that then you might as well start calling the sky yellow and grass grey, because it amounts to the same thing, which is Orwellian doublespeak a la "Freedom is Slavery" and "War is Peace."
Here is the standard understanding of the political spectrum, since you don't seem to know what that is, or because you're being cute, "According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, opposite fascism and conservatism on the right."
That means authoritarianism is not the sole province of the left (to which "liberal" belongs) or of the right (to which "conservative" belongs). The entire rest of the world understands that fascism and socialism are distinct political philosophies that stand on the opposite ends of that left-right political axis. Conflating the two is ludicrous and bespeaks profound ignorance of political science. It is nonsense. It is like asserting that democracy=fascism=socialism=monarchy=theocracy because they all have hierarchy and are not the one truly moral and good political philosophy, anarchy. You see? I have just done exactly what you have done by claiming Republicans are "left of Stalin," and it's ridiculous.
"Conservative" does not mean what you think it means, as a catch-all for everything sweet and light in the world like chocolate fudge sundaes and bunny rabbits and sweet, blond haired blue-eyed children gamboling on a sunny meadow. "Liberal" also does not mean what you think it means, as a catch-all for everything dark and evil in the world like taxes and public education and rules and safe food in your grocery store and helping out a random person whose car died on the side of the road. They are both political labels that describe political philosophies that are different, not smears. This is easily understandable by acknowledging that liberals also like sundaes, bunnies, and children, and that conservatives also like education and help random strangers whose cars are broken down on the side of the road.
Please quit perpetuating the idiotic meme that claims otherwise. Calling Obama a socialist fascist marxist muslim, all of which are mostly diametrically opposed (marxism espouses atheism, for example), does not tar him with anything because all of the tar has already wound up on you.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
So Paul Ryan, the quintessential Tea Party Republican, Chairman of the House Budget committee and member of the Bowles-Simpson Commission can't do math when talking about budgets?
Your comment seems to say much more about your personal political bias then they do about the math and science knowledge of Tea Party members of Congress...
Next you'll be claiming Ron Paul has less medical knowledge than your average liberal....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
True Scotsmen with Roving Goalposts
I think you've got something there...
To cold_fjord: Your quoted article doesn't touch on any of the background, but it touches on an example of how history -- if not actually repeating itself -- often rhymes.
A key component of Nixon's victory had to do with the schism in the Democratic party that formed in the late 1940's to 50's between the Northern Democrats (your "hermetic liberal provincialism", which sought to embrace the burgeoning Civil Right movement), and the Southern Dixiecrats (who portrayed themselves as primarily opposed to the expansion of Federal power, but also happened to be rather socially conservative). The Dixiecrats splintered off into their own faction -- the "States Right's Democratic Party"; at least portions of it saw themselves as separate from the the mainstream Democratic Party, even while attempting a Democratic party-platform takeover from within.
Not surprisingly, this conflict eventually would prove terribly destructive to the Democratic Party. Even though the Northern Democrats eventually won control of the platform, the climax of the conflict would come with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, at which time President Lyndon Johnson was said to have prophetically stated that "We have delivered the South to the GOP for a generation" (note: variations in claimed wording of LBJ's quote, and he infamously has also been rumored to have remarked that "We'll have those N------ voting Democrat for the next two hundred years."). Nixon successfully courted the disaffected supporters of Southern ex-Democrats, winning him the presidency and successfully splitting the formerly Solid South -- the move that was the source Pauline Kael's bewilderment in your quoted article.
Of course, every reaction has it's equal and opposite reaction(s). The absorption of the Dixiecrats would also mark the beginning of the fall for Rockefeller Republicans. It also resulted the beginnings of an exodus for Black Republicans who had long supported the "Party of Lincoln", although the migration to the Democratic Party would take many years to complete.
The absolute smallest amount possible, after everything else has been tried.
When government is actually helping people, it's often not necessary to threaten people to get their money. Roads can be built with money from the road users' fuel taxes. Air traffic control can be paid for by taxing fliers' airline tickets. Food inspections can be paid by taxing food -- and if it's too expensive to pay the tax, let people buy un-inspected food or food certified by non-government inspectors, like the guys who certify food is kosher. Courts can be funded by a surcharge on unsuccessful plaintiffs. Local businesses will probably be glad to pay a reasonable tax to fund an effective police force. Fire departments can be funded by a local tax on the property that the fire department protects from fire -- or by direct membership fees charged for fire protection. Sewers can be funded by charging home owners and businesses for service. The same goes for water. Trash pickup is often wholly privatized.
Stealing money from person A to give to person B requires the threat of force.
That wasn't non-sequitur, it was a perfect argument rebuffing your comment. No taxes (money taking by force) means no government, means anarchy.
Lack of compassion is the exact problem of the - everybody for themselves, I'll give to charity if I want to help - crowd, they are usually well off and do not understand and relate to the plights of people who are not. It is not about advocating against violence, just violence against them. They are perfectly willing to use violence to keep people hungry, poorly educated and without adequate shelter.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
That's not what I said at all.
The reason Newton, Kepler, Copernicus believed the "world was made in 6 days" is because they lived before plate tectonics, Darwin and carbon dating.
There is nothing incompatible about religious faith and science. Lots of great science has been done by mystics. You mention Newton, and he was an alchemist and believer in scrying and other occult practices too. Nobody would mistake him for a circa 2013 American Christian Fundamentalist. In fact, Evangelicals would consider Newton a heretic and dangerous person. They'd be trying to pray the demons out of him.
Kepler was an astrologer. You know a lot of American Fundamentalist Christians who are into astrology?
Copernicus? Well, Copernicus was a faithful Catholic, and for his trouble had to delay publication of his work on heliocentrism out of fear of the Church. If you read the dedication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (to the Pope), you can see how delicately and carefully he had to present his case that the Earth was not the center of the Universe.
And did you know there is a movement in American Catholicism that still believes to this very day that the Earth is the center of the Universe?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-07-04/news/ct-met-galileo-was-wrong-20110704_1_modern-church-universe-splinter-group
And I note that Charles Darwin's name is conspicuously absent from your list of great scientists who "think the world was made in 6 days". Is that maybe because the American Christian Fundamentalist group "The Discovery Center" believes in Creationism?
So don't you dare tell me that "most of modern science rests atop pillars" built by anyone resembling American Christian Fundamentalists in any way. It's just baloney.
You are welcome on my lawn.