Having watched the debate, I found myself thinking that Perry really is a much less impressive version of GWB: terribly incurious, titillated by small cruelties, painfully vain and insecure. It's gonna be a great four years!
At the same time (and please know that I don't mean this as a criticism of your post, for which, as ever, I'm grateful), I'm tired of progressives/lefties/Democrats expressing outrage at the outrageous behavior of movement conservatives.
Williams was such a wimp- when Perry said he didn't think anyone innocent was executed, why couldn't he pull out the specific case and all the evidence and basically ask, "Are you ignorant or a liar?"
Because a) Williams is a corporate lackey, and b) Williams believes that's not his job.
4(a): Last night while Fox News had Mitt Romney on blathering about jobs, I bitched to Rory, "This is a commercial, not news." The child looked back with such gentle condescension and reminded me, "All news is just a commercial."
7: I'm gonna need some disambiguation.
At the same time (and please know that I don't mean this as a criticism of your post, for which, as ever, I'm grateful), I'm tired of progressives/lefties/Democrats expressing outrage at the outrageous behavior of movement conservatives.
Holbo has lately assured us, however, that Perry doesn't mean it. Bachmann does, though, not that I know how one can tell these things.
The bits of the debate I watched really brought home to me the extent to which Republicans have constructed an alternate rhetorical universe in which all their candidates must now operate.
gotta say I think holbo's wrong on that; it's much easier to "go on in the same way" when you really believe, ergo developing such a belief is almost a prerequisite for the politically approved behavior. whether they believed just these things in the past seems irrelevant.
2: far better to maintain an attitude of detached irony and be blase at what they're doing to your country, for sure.
13: Ah, I thought it was an obscure In Bruges reference.
I'm tired of progressives/lefties/Democrats expressing outrage at the outrageous behavior of movement conservatives.
Not sure what the alternative is. Ignoring them?
Holbo has some kind of point -- I agree with everyone disagreeing with him that conservatives mean lots of the stuff they say, but he's still right that they don't really mean all of it, and what's more important is that very few people actually believe they mean all of it, so acting like you do believe they mean everything tends to look somehow like missing the point.
Global warming, for example: not talking about polls, most of the population probably doesn't believe anything solid one way or the other in the sense of having thought about the evidence for it. But I'd guess that most 'global warming' opposition among people who are actually engaged with it is people who don't so much disbelieve the science showing that anthropogenic global warming is happening, as they disagree with the conclusion that we should maybe do something about it, but they think it's more effective to deny that it's happening than to argue about responses. And everyone kind of knows that's what's going on, so giving opponents a hard time about being scientifically ignorant, although it's fair, falls flat rhetorically, because the audience knows on some level that it's not ignorance, it's an indirect (I would say dishonest, but it doesn't seem to come off that way) way of expressing disagreement on a different issue. I don't, and I don't think Holbo purports to, have a solution for this, but there's something real he was talking about.
I guess conservative politics is like conservative religion. You don't have to believe all of it, but you had darn better act like you do.
as they disagree with the conclusion that we should maybe do something about it
That's probably true. In other contexts, I have spent a great deal of time arguing "Why bother?" before I realized it didn't work and "What problem?" works alarmingly well regardless of how obvious the problem is.
17
I guess conservative politics is like conservative religion. You don't have to believe all of it, but you had darn better act like you do.
And this is different from liberal politics?
16, 17: The basic authoritarianism of the right wing is what's at work in both cases. Authoritarianism isn't just a political view, it's an epistemological technique.
Who says athropogenic global warming exists? Only scientists. Not anybody who is actually an authority on the subject. Not God. Not the rich. Not the generals. Not anybody else who has the Natural Right To Lead.
I get 2, somewhat. I mean yes, it's important to be aware of how nuts the movementarians are. But "wow, look, isn't this outrageous" is a hard sentiment to keep any enthusiasm for if it isn't leading to something more (like "maybe it's time to start attacking the basic legitimacy of this movement," just for-instance).
16.2: I don't know that global warming is a good example. Obviously the oil industry and its various shills know they're engaged in bullshitting on the science in order to prevent anything being done that might cut into short-term profits (which does precisely play as dishonest); but rank-and-file wingnuttia really does believe that an effective challenge of some sort has been made to the climate science, in the same sense that many of them still believe Dubya really did find WMD's in Iraq and that Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.
I guess conservative politics is like conservative religion. You don't have to believe all of it, but you had darn better act like you do.
From TPM's liveblogging last night:
9:35 PM: Jon Huntsman defending science on stage at GOP event and the crowd goes silent like a candidate were forced to explain a NAMBLA membership.
21
Democratic politics and liberal politics aren't the same thing.
You know, I'm not even opposed to the death penalty per se. However, displays like the one at the debate last night have left me convinced that Americans are simply too uncivilized a people to administer it fairly.
Does it matter whether a politician actually believes what he or she says? If they'll say something to get votes, they'll also do that thing to get votes. I'm not sure I get the point of the "Oh, but does he really believe this?" discussion.
James, I'll wager that in 2012 liberals come in stronger for Obama than either moderate or conservative Democrats do, despite having been Sister Souljah'd at every available opportunity for four straight years.
James Fallows: I still have enough faith in the basic Will Rogers-style, Tom Hanks-style, even Reagan-style, humanity of the general electorate to think that the exchange below -- the lusty cheers for the announcement of how many people Texas has executed, followed by Perry's saying he has had not one instant's regret about literal matters of life and death -- is not going to wear well in a general election campaign
That almost makes me weep.
Further to 22, I'm probably an example of James's point in 19.
I don't understand climate science the way that I do, say, evolution or economics. So when I make an assertion on climate science, I am relying largely on the views of climate scientists - the people whom I find authoritative.
That makes me, as a liberal, no different from conservatives who listen to other authorities.
26: and yet all the countries with citizenry civilized enough to administer it fairly have banned it.
Marx would have seen this. Groucho Marx, but still.
30: Not me. When I make an assertion on climate science, I am relying largely on my neighbor's dog.
19 -- There's a strain of contrarian liberal that I don't see mirrored much on the conservative side.
However, displays like the one at the debate last night have left me convinced that Americans are simply too uncivilized a people to administer it fairly.
So, which people do you think are civilized enough to administer the death penalty fairly?
Is this one of those paradoxes? iIf a people are civilized enough to administer the death penalty fairly than they wouldn't want or need it?
Anyhow, 25 is itself the refutation of Shearer's contention; liberal politics isn't the same because Democratic politics is manifestly not liberal politics. People have to hew the conservative line to get elected. Nobody has to hew the liberal line for any reason, except perhaps the approbation of blogs and/or blog commenters.
27
Does it matter whether a politician actually believes what he or she says? If they'll say something to get votes, they'll also do that thing to get votes. I'm not sure I get the point of the "Oh, but does he really believe this?" discussion.
A primary voter may prefer a candidate who won't tack to the center to try and maximize his general election votes. And there are always competing priorities.
33
There's a strain of contrarian liberal that I don't see mirrored much on the conservative side.
Can you elaborate? There are certainly lots of strains of conservatives, libertarians, Paulites, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, Bush Republicans etc.
35
... Nobody has to hew the liberal line for any reason, except perhaps the approbation of blogs and/or blog commenters.
The desire to be thought well of by your social group is a powerful force.
39: well, sure. So in that sense, conservative politics is the same as liberal politics is the same as a bunch of schoolkids assigned an arbitrary classification is the same as any given internet forum. The key difference here is that conservative politicians are basically compelled to tick all of these boxes in order to be elected. Liberal politicians must tick all these boxes in order to... be fêted online and then lose the next election.
You're disagreeing with 17, then? I think a better formulation would have been conservative religion and Republican politics.
Dems have tended to nominate the least liberal major candidate in the field while Reps seem to exclude anyone who disagrees on any of the central litmus issues. You disagree?
I think the example of Rickey Ray Rector fits this thread nicely.
Dems have tended to nominate the least liberal major candidate in the field while Reps seem to exclude anyone who disagrees on any of the central litmus issues. You disagree?
James has already drawn a distinction between Democrats and liberals. On the other hand, apo (in 28) has already demolished that distinction for the purpose of this conversation.
Heterodoxy is, in itself, a liberal trait. It's not a coincidence that scientists skew liberal. The idea of questioning assumptions is something that liberals do - which isn't to say that conservatives never do that, just that when conservatives do it, they're acting like liberals.
Huntsman is a liberal on the subject of evolution, regardless of his conservative views on other matters.
I'm still waiting for the Republican governor who will strangle death row inmates with his bare hands. These other fuckers are clearly soft on crime.
Huntsman is a liberal on the subject of evolution
Because he questions assumptions by accepting the views of every credible scientist in the world, instead of the views of a handful of religious reactionaries? I don't think that follows.
2: far better to maintain an attitude of detached irony and be blase at what they're doing to your country, for sure.
But far far better to issue pronouncements from another country.
Remember, the bitching about not releasing the OBL death photos was led by the conservative movement. The man was dead, justice had been done, they didn't think it might have been faked. They just wanted to gander at a corpse and feel righteous. The important thing is that the state is killing someone. It's preferable to do it to guilty people, but guiltyish people are an acceptable substitute.
I'm rooting for Herman Cain because I LOVE PIZZA! Please pass Pauly the particularly piquant pepperoni pie, paisano!
but rank-and-file wingnuttia really does believe that an effective challenge of some sort has been made to the climate science, in the same sense that many of them still believe Dubya really did find WMD's in Iraq and that Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attacks.
Okay, but I think that 'in the same sense' is the issue -- that for even a lot of the rank and file, it's not 'the same sense' as someone who gives a shit about the actual truth value of the proposition. Someone who thinks that Dubya really did find WMDs in Iraq, if you strapped them to a chair and had General Petraeus explain personally, with official copies of Army records, that no there weren't any, wouldn't have their worldview changed in any important way. They might slightly rephrase the statement of their beliefs, but the truth of 'finding WMD's' isn't a ground on which anything important rests, it's an expression of allegience, and expecting them to change their minds about anything at all by demonstrating the falsity of a statement would be missing the point.
Not sure what the alternative is. Ignoring them?
Eliminationism, of course.
The policy positions, rhetorical styles, idiotic pronouncements, private lives and cute dogs all become irrelevant when you accept that they will never, on balance, be worth a shitstorm in hell or get any better and truly commit to saving the world from Republicans.
Next President Wingnut will kill 10s of millions.
Because he questions assumptions by accepting the views of every credible scientist in the world, instead of the views of a handful of religious reactionaries? I don't think that follows.
Because he follows the views of those who adhere to an epistemological technique that allows for dissent based on facts.
50: Everybody allows dissent based on facts in certain areas. The difference is what areas.
Though gosh that Rick Perry sure is a handsome fellow! He gives me a special feeling down in my generals! Wait, I mean privates! HA HA HA HA HA! See what I did there? Come on guys, that was funny! Git 'r done! HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Right. I just mean, it seems odd to say that Huntsman is "liberal on the subject of evolution", since his view on evolution wouldn't be coded that way at all in most of the industrialized world. His view would be merely be coded as sane. It's a "liberal" view here, but that seems to have more to do with the specifics of US movement conservatism than with anything episystemicological about his entirely mainstream view on evlution.
Related to what LB says above, I don't think most of the people who say they don't believe in evolution actually disbelieve in evolution in any meaningful sense. They believe that creation comes from God and don't much care about science. Disbelief in evolution became the marker for that within the U.S. for historically contingent reasons.
@48
I more or less agree but I think it's still more insidious than your description suggests. Even if professing to believe things that are plainly contradicted by the evidence is just a form of in-group signalling, doing it constantly develops habits of thought that eventually change the way people approach the world in a deeper way.
If you spend enough time claiming to believe insane things than believing insane things comes to seem more and more normal.
I guess I'm making an analogy (banned!) with violent rhetoric. Of course no one supposedly "really means it" and yet it's no surprise when eventually we get someone like the Giffords shooter or Tim McVeigh.
43: I'm still waiting for the liberal candidate who will strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest but I guess it's going to be a long wait.
Next President Wingnut will kill 10s of millions.
Probably by nuking a leaking oil well or damaged power plant.
Gould has an essay arguing that opposition to evolution in the US is entirely William Jennings Bryan's fault, and that if WJB hadn't read about "social darwinists" in Germany then conservatives in the US would believe in evolution just like conservatives do everywhere else.
I'm not sure I believe him though. Gould was very attached to the idea that it's impossible for religion and science to conflict, but I think evolution poses major problems for many strains of conservative protestantism, and I think modern "scientific creationism" would have appeared anyway and is not so contingent after all.
but I think evolution poses major problems for many strains of conservative protestantism
You've got the chicken and egg backwards. If opposition to evolution weren't a bedrock belief, then those strains of conservative protestantism wouldn't have developed as they have.
55: Oh, absolutely. Like Holbo said in his post, it provides cover for the real loonies, because they're not saying anything different from the rest of them. And even among the people who don't really believe crazy extreme stuff, in the sense in which I would normally , it does odd things to their ability to evaluate evidence.
You know what's a better example? "Small government", because there I think there's a real mix of people on the right between people with policy goals that I'd genuinely call crazy -- who want to roll back the modern regulatory state all the way to shutting down the FDA -- and bullshitters who want a government with the size and complexity of our current system, but the benefits slanted much more to capital owners. And the latter group genuinely doesn't want the crazy outcomes: they want outcomes that I think are evil, but not the same kind of fundamental abandonment of modern governmental functioning.
But because of this conventional agreement that the truth-value of 'it would be a good idea to cut the federal budget to a level that would literally require the abandonment of all non-defense discretionary spending' is unimportant, the crazies and the bullshitters can work together seamlessly.
12: that wasn't actually the alternative I had in mind. But thanks.
Gould was very attached to the idea that it's impossible for religion and science to conflict,
This seems to me like a version of the not-exactly-an-argument-but-more-a-long-frustrating-discussion-where-I'm-clearly-missing-some-very-important-points I've had with Kotsko a couple of times, about whether it is important to religion that it make accurate truth claims about the world. And Gould's idea is that it shouldn't ever be important, so science can confine itself to the truth claims, and religion can confine itself to what it all means. I don't think he's right about the beliefs of at least an important number of religious people, who do think that the truth claims about tangible facts their religion makes are important, and given that, I think he's wrong about the lack of conflict.
Next President Wingnut will kill 10s of millions.
Hell, over a hundred million have already died just since Obama became president. I'm sure more will die under the next Republican president.
There's an important difference between the number of people who die while a president is in office and the number of people killed by that president.
Also, why the president killed the people seems like it should matter.
64: "A man's killing list is a very personal matter, between him and the voices in his head."
I distinctly remember Candidate Obama vowing to outdo the Republicans promise to get rid of taxes.
Sometimes I don't know where the apostrophe goes, so I just leave an ambiguous smudge on my monitor.
Gould was pretty clearly out to lunch on this one. Bryan had nothing to do with the modern conservative movement - he was on the populist wing of the Democrats - and he had nothing to do with the modern religious right - he was religiously naive, but he was a mainstream Presbyterian. It may be the case that his anti-evolutionism was due to his understanding of the malign influence of Haeckel, but the people that Perry and Bachmann listen to have never heard of Haeckel, and wouldn't be interested if they had.
Bryan had nothing to do with the modern conservative movement - he was on the populist wing of the Democrats
Most of those peoples' grandchildren went to the Republican party and much of that shift was because of religion.
70: But it's still the case that if certain strains of conservative protestantism were different than they are, it's possible they wouldn't have any problem with evolution. There's nothing about them that's irreducibly in conflict.
Seriously though, guys. Stop saying mean things about my main man Rick Perry. He was great in Journey! DON'T STOP BELIEVING AND DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS.
46: The important thing is that the state is killing someone. It's preferable to do it to guilty people, but guiltyish people are an acceptable substitute.
Indeed. One non-marginal figure even admitted as much on Bloggingheads. Kevin Williamson of NRO, Texan and Rick Perry supporter, was asked if he was troubled by the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. He said no, because he thinks Willingham was guilty, which is fair enough. But he went to say that it wouldn't trouble him to find out Willingham was innocent, because inasmuch as the death penalty is a human institution there will inevitably be errors, and while that's normally sufficient basis for him to oppose nearly all government action he does believe that one of the few things government should do is kill people.
34. I'd support any version of the Death Penalty in the United States that had majority support among African Americans.
|| This pic popped into my FB feed. Apparently one of my city councilmen went to BM. He's running for re-election, and this should help.|>
Right. I just mean, it seems odd to say that Huntsman is "liberal on the subject of evolution", since his view on evolution wouldn't be coded that way at all in most of the industrialized world.
The thing that makes him liberal is the method he's used to arrive at that view. Huntsman says that he believes in properly conducted science. I'm inclined to believe him when he says this. Properly conducted science, precisely because of its willingness to entertain heterodox ideas, is a liberal enterprise.
You could also say that universal healthcare is widely accepted among conservatives in most of the industrialized world. But the acceptance of universal healthcare is a liberal phenomenon.
but the people that Perry and Bachmann listen to have never heard of Haeckel, and wouldn't be interested if they had.
Not so. Check out any creationist/ID website and it'll be full of Haeckel - specifically how godless liberal textbooks still mention Haeckel and/or use his drawings (or, in one brilliant instance of the genre, use photos of embryos - Haeckel faked those too, a century after he died!). Haeckel is like a quarter a of the anti-evolution movement's armoury.
Germans always make the best villians.
I disagree with 59. The debate over biblical inerrancy was not driven by creation vs. evolution. In addition, death prior to the fall causes significant problems for some christian theologies. I really do think it was the rise of the christian evangelicalism in the past 40 years that's driving anti-evolutionism, not the other way around.
Also 78 is right.
My main objection to Gould is that I don't see how the revival of *young earth creationism* can be squared with the idea that it's WJB's fault. There's just no link between the age of the earth and social darwinism. The motivation for a young earth is entirely based on the text of the bible.
80: I think urple isn't saying (as far as I can tell) that anti-evolutionism is driving the rise of Christian evangelicalism, but that the rise of Christian evangelicalism could have taken a different path given different circumstances. At least, that is what I think.
I'd support any version of the Death Penalty in the United States that had majority support among African Americans.
"Kill whitey" wouldn't be my favorite.
Also, 82 is right.
Hrm, I was going to say that it's not clear to me that anti-evolutionism was a core conservative belief 30 years ago, but it looks like Reagan was a creationist in the 70s. So I might just be wrong.
81: I think the link is that WJB disapproved of Social Darwinism, so he became strongly attached to young-earth creationism because it was anti-Darwinist, and his advocacy for young-earth creationism influenced later evangelicals. The link between Social Darwinism and literal evolution is only in WJB's head (well, 'only' isn't right, but in this context 'only importantly'), but WJB was a big factor in later creationism.
(I can't vouch for the accuracy of this story, but that's the structure of it.)
WJB didn't believe in a young earth.
He was a day-ager: http://geochristian.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/william-jennings-bryan-and-the-age-of-the-earth/
70: Upetgi (9) got us off on the wrong track here by mischaraterizing Gould.
Gould's claim is that Bryan sided with the anti-evolution side for liberal reasons. Evolution was being used as a device to reinforce oligarchy in Bryan's time.
Let me quickly retract the statement that Upetgi mischaracterized Gould's view.
If we're supposed to start retracting statements just because they are incorrect, I simply don't have enough time.
88: Indeed, that was probably a bigger point he was trying to make, I was just objecting to the more specific historical counterfactual. I don't believe that if WJB had died 10 years earlier that would have ended the creationist movement in the US.
|| Have you hugged a Fourth Circuit judge today?|>
death prior to the fall causes significant problems for some christian theologies
I'm repeating myself somewhat, but if those theologies were different than they are, it's possible they wouldn't have any problem with death prior to the fall. There's nothing about the text of genesis that's irreducibly in conflict with evolution. The text of genesis requires no more of an interpretive reading to harmonize with evolution than the people who are currently religiously opposed to evolution are already applying to numerous other passages in their bible.
87 is a perfectly decent example of how this is done.
Isn't Poland also beset with creationists despite no WJB in their history? Of course I'm not sure to what extent Americans nurtured that.
87 is a perfectly decent example of how this is done.
I just have to say that the notion of reinterpreting "days" to mean "epochs" strikes me as deeply, deeply silly. I mean, if God had meant that each day was millions of years, wouldn't he have written it that way in the book?
I see that the conversation has moved on, but:
60: You know what's a better example? "Small government", because there I think there's a real mix of people on the right between people with policy goals that I'd genuinely call crazy -- who want to roll back the modern regulatory state all the way to shutting down the FDA -- and bullshitters who want a government with the size and complexity of our current system, but the benefits slanted much more to capital owners.
Right. And while it's worthwhile to point out the distinction between the true believers and the bullshitters on this or that matter, it should be in the service of encouraging us to ask of politicians, at every possible turn, "Do you really believe that? What would happen if such policies were to be enacted?" Some journalists do from time to time offer up such questions, but not nearly often enough.
The alternative is to gloss over outrageous statements under the assumption that they don't really mean what they say; I really don't see the point in mentioning that they don't, since everybody already knows it. Everybody does *not* already know it.
I should be clear that I'm making absolutely no claim whatsoever about any causal role that WJB may or may not have had in shaping american evangelical christian views on evolution. I'd never even heard of all this Gould business before reading this thread. All I'm saying is that the idea that there's something "not so contingent after all" about the conflict that american evangelical christians have with evolution is completely false. It's entirely contingent. There is no bedrock belief necessary to christianity (even american evangelical christianity) that compels rejection of evolution.
Now, in some sense a religion is no better than its crepes, so the fact that there is now such a noncontingent bedrock belief in certain strains of evangelicalism means those strains are in fact now in irreducible conflict with science, and in effect must go away and be replaced with other strains of belief in order to remove the conflict. But it didn't have to be this way.
I think that the story of anti-evolutionism in the US is strongly tied to the particular form of American protestantism, and represents a means of marking a distance from both mainstream churches and from modernity more broadly. UPETGI is right that this is also strongly linked to the rise of the amazingly stupid doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which is itself a fairly contemporary development.
I also don't think anti-evolutionism is really a particularly big contemporary problem. I agree with Moby that many people who say they are against evolution have no idea whatsoever what it means and don't care much about it, but just think of statements like that as a means of asserting that God created the earth. Yes this means that crazies sometimes take over school districts, and they should be resisted, but the state of biology education and research in the US is pretty damn strong.
I am MUCH more worried about the co-option of Christian fundamentalists by "prosperity gospel" nonsense and pro-capitalist bullshit, because it is helping to close off the possibility of a redistributionist left-wing populism (of the kind Bryan personified) in the USA.
95: 2 Peter 3:8
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."
92:
Love the result, but standing?? Ug. I hate standing rejections.
Now, in some sense a religion is no better than its crepes
Halford, is buckwheat an acceptable grain-ish thing?
So we need a religion without crepes.
Specifically:
"The paradox still intrudes upon us because Bryan forged a living legacy, not merely an issue for the mists and niceties of history. For without Bryan, there never would have been anti-evolution laws, never a Scopes trial, never a resurgence in our day, never a decade of frustration and essays for yours truly, never a Supreme Court decision to end the issue. Every one of Bryan's progressivee triumphs would have occurred without him. ... But the legislative attempt to curb evolution was his baby, and he pursued it with all his legendary demoniac fury. No one else in the ill-organized fundamentalist movement had the inclination, and surely no one else had the legal skill or political clout. Ironically, fundamentalist legislation against evolution is the only truly distinctive and enduring brand that Bryan placed upon American history."
The paradox he's referring to is the main point of the essay: why a progressive would take up anti-evolutionism. And as politicalfootbal correctly points out, Gould argues that his reasons for opposing evolution were good progressive ones (though based on misunderstanding evolution).
By contrast, I think without WJB you still get "The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications," and you still get the modern rejuvenation of young earth creationism. This movement was motivated by theological debates about the accuracy of the bible which would have played out the same way with or without WJB. In particular, between WJB and the modern creationist movement, I don't think that creationism was a core belief among educated conservative christians. I think that Gould was blinded to this because of his prejudice against the idea that religion should make scientific claims.
I mean, if God had meant that each day was millions of years, wouldn't he have written it that way in the book?
Well, it's clear he's not very good at keeping track of time. The bible says clearly "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day". So.
More fundamentally: yes, biblical interpretations that attempt to read it as literal truth are inevitably deeply silly. But this reading of genesis is not more silly (in fact is far less silly) than plenty that are widely accepted by the same people who insist that genesis must mean the earth is 6,000 years old.
103: Halford's church uses donated human flesh for the eucharist. A sort of half-transubstantiation.
I've actually had to become catholic on the whole transubstantiation thing in order to keep up my diet. Jesus' body is low-carb!
In the law school elective I took, the professor said that, paraphrased, standing is a big mishmash of inconsistency and he prefers to stay out of it. Is that generally agreed to here? I wonder if it might be possible to give the SC power to waive standing for constitutional cases it deems important.
98.3 is certainly true.
The thing that bothers me most about anti-evolutionism is not so much the thing itself, but rather that I think it has played a very important role in the way that american evangelical conservativism has become divorced from reality. For example, I think without anti-evolutionism it would have been much harder for climate-change denial to take root. I think there's a huge difference between say the Catholic church, which is reactionary but still willing to engage with facts, and the worldview of the modern evangelical movement which just makes up its own reality. If find the latter very frightening, even if it's harder to point to the specific dangers it causes.
Is that generally agreed to here?
Yes, at least by me.
I wonder if it might be possible to give the SC power to waive standing for constitutional cases it deems important.
In theory, this is completely constitutionally impossible. "Standing" is a jurisdictional requirement enshrined in Article III blah blah blah. In practice, that is already basically the reality.
I wonder if it might be possible to give the SC power to waive standing for constitutional cases it deems important.
It's even easier than that! If the SC deems a constitutional case important, they find standing.
This movement was motivated by theological debates about the accuracy of the bible which would have played out the same way with or without WJB. In particular, between WJB and the modern creationist movement, I don't think that creationism was a core belief among educated conservative christians. I think that Gould was blinded to this because of his prejudice against the idea that religion should make scientific claims.
All true. The modern fundamentalist/creationist movement doesn't care about Social Darwinism. They'd be all in favour of it if their world view left room for it.
The truth is, no one bothers to file a lawsuit if they aren't being harmed, or at least threatened with harm. In theory there's a reason you'd want to exclude those people from filing those lawsuits, but in practice it's a non-problem.
... worldview of the modern evangelical movement which just makes up its own reality. If find the latter very frightening, even if it's harder to point to the specific dangers it causes.
I kind of find it inspiring, but too against my nature for me to pull off. Like being thin or focusing on something at work.
Anyway, being disconnected from reality seems to help make money in "country house" amounts and I've never managed that.
I just looked at Article III and this explication, which tells me that it all stems from how we interpret "cases or controversies." Couldn't Congress or the SC reinterpret "controversy" not to require standing? Living constitution and all that?
112: mostly, they are in favor of it, they just don't know that, because they don't know what the words mean. The more educated ones have heard about it, but associate it almost entirely with Hitler and communism.
At the SC level, where you have circuit splits and, usually, close questions (otherwise, the SC is leaving them as resolved by the circuits/states), it's not surprising to find hair-splitting inconsistencies. Where most of the real law is done, though, trial and lower appeals courts, it's a big and important deal. And, ime, judges try pretty hard to figure out and apply the law.
I'd be interested in examples that folks think fit 111.
I don't think standing is any more of a mish-mash than the Establishment Clause, for example. Or Due Process.
113 -- There are all manner of people who file suits and lack sufficient injury to confer standing. Newdow, for example: I don't think it's unreasonable to confine suits about how children are treated to the custodial parents. Awlaki: the father of an adult doesn't have standing to vindicate rights of a son that the son doesn't want vindicated.
43: I'm still waiting for the Republican governor who will strangle death row inmates with his bare hands. These other fuckers are clearly soft on crime.
Don't wait, he's here. I have no doubt Perry would strangle death row inmates with his bare hands live on TV if the Lege and the Supreme Court would let him. That shit is good for his approval ratings with the people who count for him. He might not be personally inclined to do it only because he might hurt his hands or injure himself or something.
96: The alternative is to gloss over outrageous statements under the assumption that they don't really mean what they say; I really don't see the point in mentioning that they don't, since everybody already knows it. Everybody does *not* already know it.
Parsimon is absolutely correct.
16: But I'd guess that most 'global warming' opposition among people who are actually engaged with it is people who don't so much disbelieve the science showing that anthropogenic global warming is happening, as they disagree with the conclusion that we should maybe do something about it, but they think it's more effective to deny that it's happening than to argue about responses. And everyone kind of knows that's what's going on, so giving opponents a hard time about being scientifically ignorant, although it's fair, falls flat rhetorically, because the audience knows on some level that it's not ignorance, it's an indirect (I would say dishonest, but it doesn't seem to come off that way) way of expressing disagreement on a different issue. I don't, and I don't think Holbo purports to, have a solution for this, but there's something real he was talking about.
This is completely wrong. Most of these people (including the usual elite types) started out with the proposition that it's a liberal thing so it isn't true and then proceed down the yellow brick road of confirmation bias to convince themselves that the scientists are (essentially) cheating. I know they did this because I have watched them do it. Ezra Klein was on about this the other day:
"My favorite study in this space was by Yale's Geoffrey Cohen. He had a control group of liberals and conservatives look at a generous welfare reform proposal and a harsh welfare reform proposal. As expected, liberals preferred the generous plan and conservatives favored the more stringent option. Then he had another group of liberals and conservatives look at the same plans, but this time, the plans were associated with parties. Both liberals and conservatives followed their parties, even when their parties disagreed with their preferences. So when Democrats were said to favor the stringent welfare reform, for example, liberals went right along. Three scary sentences from the piece: 'When reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not.'"
People believe what they want to believe. (Which answers Glenn Beck's question - he was visiting Auschwitz and apparently said: 'How could this happen?!' and the answer is: easily.)
max
['If you commit to the idea that they're bullshitting all the time, you will constantly find yourself behind the curve.']
I think there's a huge difference between say the Catholic church, which is reactionary but still willing to engage with facts, and the worldview of the modern evangelical movement which just makes up its own reality. If find the latter very frightening, even if it's harder to point to the specific dangers it causes.
It's not very hard to point to the specific dangers it causes, is it?
One of the worst arguments I had with a religious friend of mine, and this was quite a few years ago, was over her belief that the universe was created for humankind, and given unto us as our sort of playground. She believed that it ultimately didn't matter if the rest of the planet was destroyed, say, ecologically, because as long as humankind existed, the, or a, world existed; and the reverse, if humankind were eradicated, the world would cease to exist. Very, very strange, and confused. It had something to do with souls, and how only humans have souls, and souls are the actual stuff of true reality, while our embodied selves, on the physical plane, are but a momentary phase in our souls' journeys. She believed in the immortality of the soul.
In any case, I was appalled, and our relationship was not quite the same after that.
Get rid of standing, and I can sue to invalidate "under God" in the pledge -- it's clearly unconstitutional -- even though I've never been compelled to say it, and don't, even when I do go along with the pledge. I'm irritated that we have it as part of our public life. If that's enough injury to support a lawsuit, we're going to have busy courts.
(I also edit out 'the flag and to' -- I'm not pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, but to a nation and its fundamental (and mostly aspirational) ideas.)
@60
Like Holbo said in his post, it provides cover for the real loonies, because they're not saying anything different from the rest of them.
I guess I'm not sure how clean the distinction between bullshitters and genuine crazies is. I mean the truly out there people are easy to spot but this
And even among the people who don't really believe crazy extreme stuff, in the sense in which I would normally , it does odd things to their ability to evaluate evidence.
seems more salient to me. I mean after you get used to "those crooked scientists are just making it all up to get grants" as a legitimate argument in one area, it's that much easier to accept it in others. Or in other words I agree with the notion in 109 that anti-evolutionism helps out climate change denialism.
I suppose I'm just pushing against the "really believing it" vs "just mouthing the tribal chant" distinction. I think the one can easily bleed into the other. If you lie often enough and fervently enough, some basic distinction eventually gets lost.
117, 118, 121:
Blah, blah, blah.
I only meant that standing shouldnt be used to prevent challenges in cases that I think have merit. Not those other people's cases.
over her belief that the universe was created for humankind, and given unto us as our sort of playground
I think of it more as a buffet. If there is life on other planets, we must protect it so that future generations can make new types of sandwiches.
I see from the docket that the preferred spelling is Aulaqi. And that plaintiffs did not appeal.
I'm reminded of a recent CT comment by a person who thought Sup Ct appointments were insufficient reason to vote with the intention of keeping Republicans out of office because, well, what good is the Supreme Court anyway, since it didn't say anything about Obama's targeting American citizens for assassination. And I'm reminded that I should get off the internet for a bit.
I'm not really interested in arguing about standing. Most commonly, it's used by the Supreme Court (or lower courts) as a means of not deciding a case that they don't want to hear (Lujan, Newdow), rather than reaching out to decide a case they do want to hear.
California has immensely more relaxed standing requirements than the federal courts (as just argued yesterday in the Prop 8 case) and it hasn't really made a whit of difference, except that it prevents the move of allowing courts to hear cases that they don't want to hear.
"to not hear cases that they don't want to hear."
I'm not really interested in arguing about standing.
Me neither.
It just delays the case until they get a plaintiff.
119.last: I don't think you actually disagree with me, we're at cross-purposes over what it means to 'believe' something. There's some level on which for a substantial portion of people who are engaged in the global warming debate, even if there's some sense in which they 'sincerely' believe that global warming isn't happening, they believe it in a manner that's different from an issue where they cared about the truth of the matter as opposed to the signal it sends.
Most commonly, it's used by the Supreme Court (or lower courts) as a means of not deciding a case that they don't want to hear (Lujan, Newdow), rather than reaching out to decide a case they do want to hear.
Well, sure, it's a judicial doctrine for dismissing cases, not starting them.
Whenever the SC claims a plaintiff doesn't have standing, I assume there's a tongue in someone's ass.
It just delays the case until they get a plaintiff.
Except of course if the plaintiff is an environmental rights group alleging some violation of environmental laws, or an aminal rights group alleging some violation of animal cruelty laws, in which case the doctrine often in practice makes it very difficult for any private citizen to be the plaintiff. (Even where a private right of action is clearly supposed to exist.)
Right, and the doctrine is confused and incoherent enough (not completely incoherent, but incoherent enough) to have it be a plausible -- but not legally compelled -- reason for not deciding lots of cases that the courts might otherwise not want to decide. So it's often a means of granting judges discretion as to how to control their dockets, which is something judges always like.
123: This is right too -- that bleeding back and forth is the problem. But the presence of the component of those who are saying something crazy that's just bullshitting, and is openly recognized and tolerated as just bullshitting is really troublesome for us -- it means that when we say "But that's crazy", lots of the media and the electorate roll their eyes because they're convinced, with some genuine basis, that the crazy stuff wasn't meant to be taken at face value.
I don't know what to do about this, but I think Holbo's pointing at a real rhetorical problem.
134: Oddly, where the practice being attacked is affirmative action, pretty much any white guy has standing.
it means that when we say "But that's crazy", lots of the media and the electorate roll their eyes because they're convinced, with some genuine basis, that the crazy stuff wasn't meant to be taken at face value.
Who are you referring to that is rolling their eyes at this? I don't get this sense at all. Lots of the media don't just join in saying "But that's crazy" because they're afraid to offend the 35% of the population who doesn't think it's crazy. And that 35% of the population doesn't think it's crazy; they're cheering.
That's the nonparallel between far left and far right. If a Democrat started talking from somewhere on the genuinely far-left, the media wouldn't hesitate to say "that's crazy", because they'd offend at most 5% of the population. (And that subsegment of the population would be less offended, anyway. They've got tougher skin. They're used to being called crazy.)
when we say "But that's crazy", lots of the media and the electorate roll their eyes because they're convinced, with some genuine basis, that the crazy stuff wasn't meant to be taken at face value.
Again, the electorate does not roll their eyes because they know the crazy stuff isn't actually meant. They roll their eyes because they assume we liberals who are saying "That's crazy" are biased toward big government, tax and spend policies, and godless pinko heathen etc. etc. Have you heard the term "gliberals" [sigh, roll eyes, sneer, smirk]?
Even the totally unbiased Fox News occasionally pauses when served up some particularly nutso rhetoric from a Republican opinion-maker.
Rick Perry has such pretty hair! I could just stare at him all day long.
@136, 138, 139
I guess there are 2 interrelated problems. One is that constantly saying crazy stuff gradually makes it easier to believe crazy stuff. The other is the erosion of the idea that making factual claims has anything at all to do with stating something about the world that is true.
Part of why attacking conservatives for being wrong on the facts, even to an extent that seems crazy, is hard is because for real movement conservatives the "say something about the world that is true" function of factual claims has been totally displaced by the "tribal signalling" function.
I mean after you get used to "those crooked scientists are just making it all up to get grants" as a legitimate argument in one area, it's that much easier to accept it in others.
On the other hand, you have to admit that scientific fraud happens a lot. Just ask Marc Hauser and Hwang Woo-suk.
@143
One would need to have some quantitative definition of "a lot".
144: more than twice, apparently?
138: This is getting too foggy for me to argue about (not your comment specifically, but the stuff I've been saying as well). I haven't got more than impressions to argue from, and I'm not really sure what facts I'd need to back up up what I'm saying.
143, 144, 145: From what you hear about medical science, you'd think nothing kept me from inventing findings except my lack of imagination.
On the other hand, you have to admit that scientific fraud happens a lot
No, I wouldn't say you have to admit that at all.
I'm not really sure what facts I'd need to back up up what I'm saying
One possibility would be a video montage of various media and lay persons responding to a liberal saying "But that's crazy" by rolling their eyes and explaining that they're convinced, with some genuine basis, that the crazy stuff wasn't meant to be taken at face value.
That would convince me, at least, that you're on to something. parsimon might require something less anecdotal.
I hadn't seen Holbo's post until now. I think he misses the point in a lot of ways.
I remember having one of those late-night, beer-fueled conversations about religion with a good friend. She told me that she was sure that, deep down, I knew that God exists.
I told here that this was a very condescending thing for her to say - I don't know my own mind? Plus, I knew that deep down she had to know that God didn't exist.
Point is, just because something is obvious to you or me doesn't mean that it's obvious to other people, or that "deep down" they know the truth. They don't. We don't. And max gets it right in 119.
Guess what? Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Or so I believe. But people with a different epistemological approach genuinely, deeply believe otherwise, often after a great deal of sincere deliberation.
I think it's heavily dependent by issue. I suspect, with some basis in personal experience, that many upper-class Republicans are far more gay-tolerant in person than in public presentation, and I'd guess that very few of the Republican elite genuinely do not believe in evolution. On most issues, however, such as the need for "cutting spending," Obamacare leading to socialism, or torture, I think that most Republicans mean exactly what they are saying; they're just wrong.
I've talked to some very smart, well educated oil industry people who really do genuinely believe in climate skepticism.
It's worth noting that all (as far as I know) the known instances of fraud involved the fraudsters being detected by other scientists.
The global warming denialists need to claim not just that individual fraudsters exist (which they do, although I doubt in the numbers that 143 and 147 seem to imply), but that virtually the entire scientific community is in on it.
I've talked to some very smart, well educated oil industry people who really do genuinely believe in climate skepticism.
I betcha not one of those climate skeptics believes in young-earth creationism. But I don't doubt their sincerity about climate skepticism.
I've talked to some very smart, well educated oil industry people who really do genuinely believe in climate skepticism.
I recently talked to a very smart, well educated lawyer who works in-house for a healthcare company, who really genuinely believes that the individual mandate such an obvious affront to liberty that it's plainly unconstitutional (or, if not unconstitutional, that we've clearly slipped into lawless tyranny).
(By "works in-house for a healthcare company", I mean is the GC for a very large, publicly-traded healthcare company.)
149: Er, that would go quite a way toward convincing me as well. I think LB, and Holbo for that matter, are being Pauline Kael here.
"Oh, nobody actually thinks they believe this stuff!"
"Right, the people who enthusiastically support the spouters of crazy shit are just, you know, bonding amongst themselves. Over something."
"Right! They totally don't actually believe it or want it to happen. They're just pretending. So we waste our time if we insist on pointing out how crazy their purported beliefs, which they don't actually believe, are."
?
many upper-class Republicans are far more gay-tolerant in person than in public presentation
I'LL SAY.
157: That's a really poor paraphrase of what Holbo was saying, and what I'm saying.
Who the fuck knows what Holbo is saying? There are shorter and clearer epic poems out there.
||
Happy birthday New York City! 347 today and looking every day of it.
|>
My dad is a sharp, educated UMC white guy and a total, total wingnut. Like, Glenn Beck level. That includes creationism. He just walls all that stuff off from his critical faculties.
This is what tires me out about the stereotypes of wingnuts as fat, stupid hicks. Demographic research on the Tea Party indicates that they're affluent, old white people, usually with college degrees, usually men. It's a tribal thing, not an intelligence/education thing.
I agree that standing is pretty boring, but still:
Awlaki: the father of an adult doesn't have standing to vindicate rights of a son that the son doesn't want vindicated.
Are you serious here? Somebody being targetted by the government for assassination needs to personally vindicate his right not to be so targetted; his own father can't do it for him? This is insanity; it's quadruple insanity insofar as nobody, to my knowledge, believes the government would simply charge Awlaki with x or y, put him on trial, and then let him go if there were no verdicts returned. Getting all precious about standing is just part of the whole "heads I win, tails you lose" posture the government takes in this area; we don't have to follow the law, but you certainly do. Newdow doesn't bother me too much, I suppose, but not having your son assassinated implicates a pretty serious interest in the case.
And as for the general claim, If [being irritated by an unconstitutional law] is enough injury to support a lawsuit, we're going to have busy courts. Well, maybe we shouldn't have so many unconstitutional laws, then. Or more judges.
Note that a number of other constitutional courts specifically provide for abstract review ("does this law violate the constitution?" independent of any concrete situation) on entirely sensible rule-of-law grounds. If you're really worried about swamping the courts, one way to control the caseload issue is to have, say, any 10% of parliamentarians or 5% of governors or what-have-you able to initiate such an action, but not normal people (or: only with a huge petition!).
My dad is a sharp, educated UMC white guy and a total, total wingnut. Like, Glenn Beck level. That includes creationism. He just walls all that stuff off from his critical faculties.
This is anecdote, but that's what I'm talking about. Not that the belief is insincere, but it's not belief where information supporting or refuting the truth of whatever it is, is relevant.
This article in the Journal of Medical Ethics claims that scientific fraud is on the rise. A lot of attention has been given recently to the fact that journal referees check to see if your conclusions follow from your data, but they don't check your data directly, and that this can be a big problem when lots of money is on the line.
And while it is true that individual cases of fraud are typically caught by the scientific community itself or government regulators, I believe that it is also true that the presence of big money can systematically distort whole fields of research. I suspect this is currently the case with research into the effects of agricultural GMOs on the environment.
The history of science shows us plenty of cases where research programs are driven by concerns external to science, and even have their conclusions shaped by shit that really doesn't carry epistemic weight. You don't get a century of research proving the genetic inferiority of other races because the evidence was pointing that direction.
Not that the belief is insincere, but it's not belief where information supporting or refuting the truth of whatever it is, is relevant.
Which is true in a practical sense for the vast majority (if not all) of the beliefs held by anybody about anything.
Which is true in a practical sense for the vast majority (if not all) of the beliefs held by anybody about anything.
Preach it, brother.
I don't think 167 is actually true, or at least that it involves equivocating.
121 is precisely why I framed it as letting standing be waived, not as getting rid of standing - the other comments of course make it seem very possible such a change would have no practical effect.
Nobody's answered my 115.
169 is poorly phrased. I don't think 167 is true, or at least, I do think it involves equivocating.
affluent, old white people, usually with college degrees
Which in no way precludes being fat and stupid. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
To 170:
Couldn't Congress or the SC reinterpret "controversy" not to require standing?
Congress no, Supreme Court yes. But it won't.
LB, your claim in 164 seems very different from Holbo's (with the caveat that I could be wrong because I couldn't bring myself to read Holbo's entire post). Your claim seems to be that climate-change denialism, evolution-denialism, small-governmentalism, supply-siderism, et al. have been accepted as something like the secular equivalents of religious propositions on the right: not subject to factual scrutiny, but just taken as articles of faith. Further, these various articles of faith have become required components of Replicanism in America.
Now, just as with the virgin birth of Jesus, there are certainly some people who genuinely believe these things, whether that belief arises from considered reason or sheer indoctrination or what have you. But there are certainly other people who express affinity with these ideas without actually believing their literal truth. And, since no one who doubts them is allowed to speak up (without risking excommunication), it's hard to tell the doubters from the true believers.
I think all of that is inarguable. It's the eye rolling that I haven't seen. I do think the left gives a similar pass to christian religious pronouncements from Democratic politicians. (It's not: "What? He genuinely believes a virgin had a baby? That doesn't seem implausible to him?!", it's "well, sure, that's what anyone has to say to get elected in this country. Say those are obviously silly fairy tales and you're toast.")
excommunication
I meant this figuratively.
I agree with nosflow.
And no amount of information can change your mind!
Well, 164 drifted a bit from where I started -- it's not contradictory, just not exactly the same point.
But your second paragraph is a large component of what I want to agree with -- locking that down as something where we're exactly in agreement is excellent.
165: ...have their conclusions shaped by shit that really doesn't carry epistemic weight.
I've certainly seen things that tiptoe right up to the edge of this. When arriving at a certain conclusion is the difference between (e.g.) tenure and unemployment unclear data can begin to seem at least mildly suggestive of the desired conclusion.
I have a theory that the entire field of economics is distorted by this effect due to the fact that the results of economic inquiry can have huge impacts on the interests of the whole of the class of people who endow chairs, buildings, or entire schools. I do not have evidence for this beyond my own biases.
it involves equivocating
Undeniably; the "in a practical sense" was added specifically to make the comment more equivocal. That said, if you wall off "beliefs that are held without active consideration of the information supporting or refuting them" from "beliefs that are subject to active reanalysis on the basis of new information" (and, indeed, if you buy that those are usefully complete and disjoint categories), the former walled garden will be bare indeeed.
Nothing in 175 seems controversial to me. If that's all LB --and Holbo? -- are saying, no problem, though I don't see the point in making a big post about it.
But 175 is descriptive. Holbo ventured into the prescriptive. What should we do about all that? Why, don't act as if they mean what they say, because that's been a losing strategy, and just makes listeners roll their eyes, since the listeners all already know that they don't mean what they say.
That is simply false. The listeners, a great many of them, do take it seriously. I'm not going to repeat this point any longer.
Putting aside the questions of what candidates truly believe, there is the more practical question of what actual policies they would attempt to enact if elected. For example, Rick Perry says that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. Does that mean that if elected he will act to eliminate it? I believe the general assumption is that he will not. Similarly, I think everyone (meaning here, the "media")assumes that neither Perry, Bachmann or Romney would really attempt to cut federal government spending as much as they claim to want to.
Contrastingly, while some of us may doubt the sincerity of the Republican candidates when they all claim to believe that climate change is a hoax, I think we are all fairly confident that none will attempt to enact any policies aimed at mitigating or preventing global warming.
or wait the latter walled garden stupid sifu trying to get all fancy.
This is anecdote, but that's what I'm talking about. Not that the belief is insincere, but it's not belief where information supporting or refuting the truth of whatever it is, is relevant.
This is similar to what I said in 50, but I said it in rebuttal to the Holbo-ian position.
Holbo wants to know, "Must We Act As If They Mean What They Say?" I say that we must. Because they do.
Are you serious here?
Yep. It's not like the son has to show up in court himself. But asking for some manifestation on his part that he wants to have his rights submitted to a US court for adjudication isn't unreasonable. I agree that the point is damn important, and wish the son had given the ACLU authorization of some kind. But he's an adult, capable of giving authorization, and he didn't. The dad doesn't get to do it.
For example, Rick Perry says that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. Does that mean that if elected he will act to eliminate it? I believe the general assumption is that he will not.
The assumption is that he won't even keep saying it once he's past the primary. If that's what he campaigned on in the general election, I'd expect him to at least make a push in that direction, although I doubt it would be successful.
Similarly, I think everyone (meaning here, the "media")assumes that neither Perry, Bachmann or Romney would really attempt to cut federal government spending as much as they claim to want to.
That's because mathematically it can't be done without cutting into programs that they claim not to want to cut. So their preferences as stated are absurd and contradictory; it's impossible to take them seriously. I do believe they would do everything they could to cut all the spending they could on any program that doesn't primary benefit their core supporters.
. So their preferences as stated are absurd and contradictory; it's impossible to take them seriously.
But people who are capable of appreciating that fact don't systematically take the expression of absurdly contradictory beliefs as discrediting -- that's where the eyerolling comes in. Purportedly objective evaluators of e.g., Perry's potential as a candidate don't note that he's stating absurd and contradictory policy preferences and therefore dismiss his as a nut with no chance (or, alternatively, talk about him as a lunatic with a chance because there are a lot of lunatics in the electorate). They assume that the absurd and contradictory bits are at least somewhat insincere, and disregard them other than as posturing.
I don't know how to effectively counter this, but it's a problem.
188: But that's precisely because they're not Perry's stated policy preferences, they're Perry's recitations of Republican religious propositions. You can't criticize them without criticizing the Republican faith as a whole, and that's not something you can do while purporting to offer neutral coverage of the Republican and Democratic parties.
And I don't think an assumption of insincerity has anything to do with it. I have zero idea whether Perry is sincere or insincere in all this. I suspect Romney is insincere, but that's mostly because he's only adopted the religion as and when it's become convenient. But, as pf keeps hammering, it doesn't matter.
180's use of "active" is unhelpful.
Certainly I hold many beliefs without actively considering, through the duration of my holding them, the information that supports them, if "actively" means something like "explicitly" or "occurrently". (I'd buy it too if "actively" means that the persistence of the formed belief is possible even in the absence of any mental trace of the information that supported it.) Why should I? I considered that information when I formed the belief. I'll certainly accept that I might continue to believe that I've drunk four cokes since Sunday even if I totally forgot what information supported it (this morning I counted, not the empty slots that were in the case, but the two that were still not empty, and inferred that there must have been four empty slots).
I'll even buy that the belief about the cokes isn't subject to "active reanalysis" if that means something like, whenever new relevant information is obtained, all beliefs to which the information is relevant are revised (or at least reanalyzed, since the reanalysis may not necessitate revision). Maybe I learn that cokes from 20 to a case, rather than 24, so that there are five rather than six columns of four bottles: must my belief about how many cokes I've drunk be revised to "three" right away? Surely not; maybe I'm distracted when I get this new information, or it's couched in a way that makes its relevance non-obvious, or I'm just not thinking about how it affects me.
But I would expect this:
(a) information supporting the belief was relevant to its formation (I didn't go out of my way to verify that I had remembered correctly that there are 24 to a case, but I did think about it a little and I certainly counted the number of slots that were full);
(b) I am capable of recognizing new information as relevant to the belief about the cokes, even if I don't always do so as soon as the information comes in;
(c) if the two beliefs were brought together, I'd see the relationship of relevance and revise one;
(d) the belief about the cokes is subject to reanalysis in the sense that it isn't a matter of dogma; that is, it can be put into question if information relevant to its truth comes to my awareness as such.
If, in practice, people don't recognize the relevance of new information very often, or don't see what the logical relationships of relevant bits of information to each other are, that's fine and it's a sort of everyday failure of rationality. But I take it that the real ffeJ annaH is trying to say that his father goes beyond that day-to-day failure and quarantines certain beliefs: won't acknowledge the relevance of new information even when it's presented as such, won't take action on relevant information even when acknowledged as such, or will beg the question.
It seems bizarre to me to say that basically all beliefs are like that.
I think the assumption that the absurd and contradictory bits are insincere is a mistake. It is entirely possible that a politician is that stupid. Still, it's clear that some of the people running are not that dumb, so it has to be a matter of dishonesty. The media can't call them on it because a large segment of the population wants to be lied to and the media's job is not to report the truth, it's to attract the attention of the audience so that they can be shown advertising. Telling people what they don't want to hear or forcing them to think will both drive away audience members.
The only really hard constraint on the media is that they must maintain the illusion that they are objective purveyors of important facts. Luckily enough reporters and editors still cling to idealized views of what their job is all about that there's a significant gap between the reality and economically optimized media. The latter would closely resemble the worst of Newscorp, but diversified to fill non-right wing niches.
But I take it that the real ffeJ annaH is trying to say that his father goes beyond that day-to-day failure and quarantines certain beliefs: won't acknowledge the relevance of new information even when it's presented as such, won't take action on relevant information even when acknowledged as such, or will beg the question.
It seems bizarre to me to say that basically all beliefs are like that.
That's true, but I think that there's a lot of research [n.b., this is shorthand for "I read something somewhere that confirms my general sense of the world] indicating that most beliefs about politics and ideology, which is what we are talking about here, generally are like that.
188: I think this goes back to Reagan. Reagan said a lot of crazy shit that Nixon never would have tried to get away with, and the media objected pretty strenuously.
Reagan got away with it, and the world was changed. Factuality was for chumps like GHW Bush, and not for successful leaders like Reagan and GW Bush. The media took notice and stopped complaining aggressively.
It goes back to the whole "reality-based community" thing. Liberals mostly can't get away with that shit because they would be eviscerated by other liberals if they tried.
I'm a little bit stunned that people here don't think Perry is serious about Social Security. It's like believing that Reagan wasn't serious about eliminating the inheritance tax.
"beliefs held by anybody about anything" seems to go beyond political and ideological beliefs, but I am prepared to believe that Sifu actually meant "anything political" if further information supporting that interpretation (e.g. a comment from Sifu saying "yeah, that's what I meant") comes down the pike.
I actually would like to know in what spirit the information presented in the relevant studies is taken, tbh; if I were given a political survey, then presented a bunch of say synopses of social science research, then given another survey, I think I would tend to bracket the whole exercise, not because of the nature of political belief, but because of the artificiality of it.
189 was actually supposed to say "I have no way to know whether Perry is sincere or insincere in all this, although I have zero reason to doubt he's completely sincere." I'm not sure how that came out so garbled.
I don't think sincerity or insincerity is the key at all.
For example, I think it's likely that Reagan always sincerely believed that programs such as Medicare and Medicaid were socialistic and evil. But he stopped saying that when he became a serious candidate for President, and he didn't do anything about it as President.
Similarly, I think that Barack Obama sincerely believes in global warming.
189: I don't follow this clearly enough to agree or disagree.
Seems like someone ought to bring up Leo Strauss and his views on conservatism and factuality, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to do it myself.
I'm a little bit stunned that people here don't think Perry is serious about Social Security.
Serious about what? That it's a lie, a Ponzi scheme? Or that he intends to do something about it?
Serious about what? That it's a lie, a Ponzi scheme? Or that he intends to do something about it?
A top Perry aide refused, under repeated questions from The Huffington Post, to rule out the idea that Perry would favor dissolving [Social Security] altogether.
199: Both, assuming he doesn't understand what a Ponzi scheme actually is. I know people who sincerely believe that Ponzi scheme means pretty much exactly what Social Security actually is.
I don't know how to respond to 197. Is there a particular part of 189 you thought was unclear? Or just all of it?
I always thought it was a Fonzie scheme.
Hey! My social security check came!
What has Perry said about Social Security that people doubt he believes? I think it's clear that he's extremely hostile to Social Security, and will act on that hostility, given a chance. I believe that he'd abolish it if he could.
I mean, even if you want to parse his actual, literal language, I think it's quite likely that he views it as a "Ponzi scheme" and a "lie," but regardless, it's plain that he wants to treat it as though it is.
202: The first two sentences. You're using 'religious' in a metaphorical sense, and the metaphor seems to explain the whole dynamic for you. If you restate it without the metaphor, it sounds to me as if you're saying almost exactly the same thing as Holbo was: something like 'Republicans get to say loony things because they're not perceived by the media as beliefs to be examined, they're just shibboleths. When the left tries to treat the loony things as beliefs to be examined, that looks like generalized anti-Republican rudeness, not something that could be substantively right or wrong.'
Or something like that. But I don't think you'd agree with my rephrasing, which means I'm not understanding you.
Here's what Perry said in the debate last night:
It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right
What has Perry said about Social Security that people doubt he believes?
I've said what I doubt: that he'll keep beating this particular drum in the general campaign (assuming he secures the nomination). I have no reason to doubt he's sincerely extremely hostile to the program.
I know people who sincerely believe that Ponzi scheme means pretty much exactly what Social Security actually is.
Right--there seems to be a general working definition of "Ponzi scheme" as: any scheme or program in which Person B voluntarily gives money to Person A, in the expectation that Person C will later give money to Person B (which Person C would only do if he expects that some Person D will eventually give money to Person C, etc.).
I don't disagree with the restatement in 205.
143
a lot
From your quoted paper, even in the worst year 1 in 20,000 papers were retracted for fraud. Where else can you go where less than 0.005% of what you read is made up?
208: Okay, we're still on the same page here. This bit:
When the left tries to treat the loony things as beliefs to be examined, that looks like generalized anti-Republican rudeness, not something that could be substantively right or wrong.
is, I think, the problem Holbo was talking about.
When the left tries to treat the loony things as beliefs to be examined, that looks like generalized anti-Republican rudeness
Er, I guess I didn't necessarily agree with that particular bit of phrasing. Or, at least, I didn't quite understand it. "Looks" to who? Republicans? Yes, I agree. Other leftists? No, I disagree.
To people who aren't committedly affiliated with one side or the other? Like, a hypothetical voter who really feels strongly that Social Security is a good thing, but also thinks that liberals attacking Perry as a danger to Social Security are just being partisan and attacking him for adhering to Republican shibboleths.
I probably got this from Yglesias, but I'm a firm believer that the reason all this happens is that we have a stupid multi-veto point system instead of a sensible parliamentary system with a government and an opposition. If the republicans could actually do *exactly what they wanted* when they won elections, we wouldn't have to sit around speculating about what they really believe and what they secretly believe. They'd either have to govern as insane extremists and destroy their party, or they'd have to moderate their rhetoric.
Sometimes I get into these conversations with you, and think that you're incredibly skilled at trolling me, particularly. The dynamic of "We're just talking past each other. Wait, that bit made sense. Okay, this is working, we're going to hammer out some mutual comprehension here. Almost got it, almost got it, and... no. Better luck next time." is one that I just can't walk away from.
What we have instead is a bizarre dynamic where people think that liberals are pretending to be more moderate than they really are, while conservatives are pretending to be more conservative than they really are. The solution on both accounts is to let the party in power actually run the government they way they want to run it, so that people can see what they'd actually do.
213 was perhaps too terse. What I'm disagreeing with is that your hypothetical voter exists (at least in any meaningful numbers). If Perry keeps talking through a general election the way he's talking now, no one would object to liberals attacking Perry as a danger to Social Security.
Bad news for Texas death row inmates: Perry is not going to be president. He really didn't have to answer that way on either the death row or medicare questions. He took out a shotgun, aimed it right at his foot, and pulled the trigger. Strangely, the pundits seem to think he did OK. (An aside to Rick Santorum: google "reagan lebanon".)
218: Mmmaybe. But there are a whole lot of voters who think very very highly of Social Security, and yet Perry probably hasn't lost their votes by threatening it.
Perry probably hasn't lost their votes
Because they aren't paying attention, and he'll be saying something different a year from now. (If he's not, he'll lose their votes.)
I'm also not sure how robust the support for social security really is among the famous swing voters. I know it polls well, and any plan to "reform" it of course has to exempt everyone on it or near it, but it wouldn't surprise me if people could be snake-oiled into believing that some sort of private accounts might work better. All the screaming about ponzi schemes must have some effect on low information voters.
221 -- Depends on how he packages it. There's a lot of people willing to exchange a bag of coins for a handful of magic beans. Especially if the coins belong to, or will benefit, someone else. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of support among the 65+ crowd for whacking benefits for the under 45 crowd.* You know, for their own good. Or for the children.
Never underestimate the contempt that people born before 1960 have, generally, for people born after 1960. (But before 1985!)
* Ryan wanted to draw the line at 55, but I think smarter people will see this as the mistake it is: all too soon, people who are now 55 will be 65+, and will be out for revenge. If you reach down low enough, you get enough time before the revenge comes around that (a) they'll have forgotten and (b) you'll likely be gone.
223: well, right, the votes I was saying he would lose in 221 are the votes of voters "who think very very highly of Social Security". As indicated in 222, I'm not sure how many right-of-center people that really is, once you get beyond superficial support.
I think pretty highly of SS for me. SS for you? Not that high on my list.
I've said what I doubt: that he'll keep beating this particular drum in the general campaign (assuming he secures the nomination).
Well sure. But that's political strategy and says nothing about beliefs in the sense that we are talking about beliefs.
And especially, it says nothing about Republican beliefs. Democrats predictably move toward the center after a primary, too.
226: I haven't said that I doubt the sincerity of any of Perry's beliefs.
222: All the screaming about ponzi schemes must have some effect on low information voters.
God yes. This seems to go underappreciated.
I said I doubted the sincerity of Romney's beliefs. Although of course I haven't looked into his soul.
All the screaming about ponzi schemes must have some effect on low information voters.
I doubt it. Most of the screaming isn't noticed at all by the low income voters. But that also indicates that they may not care that much about social security issues that don't directly and immediately affect them.
"low income" s/b "low information" although there's correlation between low information and low income.
Although on the other other hand low income folks who have any information whatsoever are very pro SS, of course.
Well, if they wanted Social Security to work, they shouldn't have put Bernie Madoff in charge of it.
Anyhow, 99% of this political campaign bullshit that we waste our time wanking over doesn't matter a whit for the election outcome.
230: It depends on how much the screaming is amplified, doesn't it?
I just saw this on Steve Benen's blog. The opening paragraph listing those conservatives who have echoed the "Ponzi scheme!" charge is sobering.
It's about the normalization of a certain rhetoric; the idea that we needn't call it out, because they don't really mean it, is absurd.
My level of outrage on hearing Social Security described as a ponzi scheme is attenuated by the fact that the first person I heard describe it thus was Paul Pierson. (Admittedly, he did so half tongue in cheek.)
Also, the fact that Pierson had to explain the term "ponzi scheme" to a room full of Harvard undergrads leads me to believe that the impact of such rhetoric on low-information voters will be nill.
It just means "they're ripping you off," knecht. That's all low-information voters register about it. Republican rhetoric on this matter started with the claim that SS won't be there for you and me (or our kids, whatever) when the time comes; now it's moved on to the further claim that we're being charged -- taxed -- for it even though it won't be there when the time comes.
In the event, Perry seems to be backing off from the Social Security claims. Now he just wants to move it to individual states. Which is equally stupid, but doesn't sound quite as bad as abolishing it altogether.
who really genuinely believes that the individual mandate such an obvious affront to liberty that it's plainly unconstitutional (or, if not unconstitutional, that we've clearly slipped into lawless tyranny).
I wish this was a more widespread belief. I want UHC as much as anyone but forcing me to buy a crappy expensive product from private companies for my entire life is fucking bullshit.
Perry's "Ponzi scheme" is like Reagan's "death tax." In Reagan's day, it was a pretty nutty thing to talk about, but the rightwingers play a long game.
Abolition of Social Security isn't imminent, but if I favored abolition, I'd be happy as hell with Perry, and quite satisfied that he'd significantly moved the ball forward.
239: Does anyone recommend those handles you attach to a Maglite to make it into a tonfa? It seemed like they were big for awhile, but now you hardly ever see them.
The other thing about Perry and "beliefs" is that nobody could possibly think that he's staked out a position on Social Security because of political expediency. Even among Republicans, Social Security is a popular program.
the rightwingers play a long game.
This is absolutely right. We've been caught in such a trap before, and giving a pass to the moves in their current game now is a very serious mistake.
Does anyone recommend those handles you attach to a Maglite to make it into a tonfa?
Those seem kind of nuts. I've never even seen one carried out here, but then again I can't think of anyone but a few highway patrol guys who carry a big old maglite. There's no way I'd want to try and run down people hopping fences and such with one of those. I carry an Olight.
http://www.batteryjunction.com/olight-m20s-s2-s.html
Next step is moral hazard. We have to get rid of it . . . for the children.
The political problem with the abolition of SS is that it really is political suicide for Republicans to eliminate it for anyone who already is getting it or even is anywhere near it. That's why even the hardliners have tended to say that anyone 55 or older would be grandfathered in. At the same time it would be political suicide to eliminate it for the under 55's while leaving the tax intact. That in turn creates a major revenue/expenditure problem. Which is yet another reason for liberals to be against low deficits. Keep a high debt, a nice non-crazy but quite substantial structural deficit and you make it much, much harder to end SS or Medicare.
Keep a high debt, a nice non-crazy but quite substantial structural deficit and you make it much, much harder to end SS or Medicare.
Or we could look deep in the distant past to the 90's and raise taxes on the top bracket, run a surplus, and have money for SS and UHC.
Rightwingers don't play the long game, they lose the long game. That's the story of history. At best, they're playing a medium game.
Yglesias gets to the heart of the matter:
Meanwhile, I can't help but think that the American economy has performed sluggishly ever since George W Bush gave a speech to Congress successfully calling for a ban on human-animal hybrids. Clearly we need to deregulate this vital sector and win the future with chimera stimulus.
245: Yeah, I mean, the argument was always "now you only have to carry one thing instead of two", but it seemed like you were getting the worst of both worlds. Definitely the small, crenellated flashlights seem to make more sense, unless you're just waving a big flashlight around willy-nilly, hoping that you hit someone.
I dunno, I am rapidly (like, within the last few days) coming to believe that I've had it all wrong up till now. Or, not wrong, but not optimal either. I live this absurdly Christlike life, despite being an anarchist and an atheist. My actions are probably more in line with Xtian doctrine than 98% of the people who call themselves "Christians" in this country. And for what? Capitalism and the state just grind on either way. This ridiculous liberal idea that you can consume your way out of the worst excesses of capitalism should have no place in anarchist praxis. Why should I walk around grumbling about the police when, with a bit of effort and application, I could OWN police officers. Without even breaking the law too much. What's stopping me? This absurd moral position that I've continued to try to justify, even though it is completely at odds with everything I've seen and everything I know about politics. You read in the newspaper everyday: Some poor black woman does something stupid, forges a welfare check, or forgets to watch one of her kids for the 10 seconds it takes for them to come to harm, and they throw the book at her. Some rich bastard fleeces 10,000 senior citizens of half their SS checks, and he gets a fucking medal from the government. If the system is really rotten, really corrupt to the core, then it's only by embracing that corruption that we can kill it. "Meekly wait and murmur not" doesn't describe any course of action that's likely to produce change. Where are the anarchists with media empires and small-arms factories and tame Senators who ask "how high?" when you say "Frog!" A bunch of good people getting together to be good at each other isn't a threat, it's just convenience for the powerful, so they can keep an eye on all of us at one time. I am so over it all.
251: I knew Marvel/DC was doing a reboot, but this is a lot better than I expected.
This doesn't help matters, at all, but it upsets me quite a bit to hear you talk this way, Natilo. Sorry, I know that's a stupid thing to say.
Don't make me do a "George Bailey" on you.
Obama is doing a great job killing SS himself with these unstimulating payroll tax cuts. In our household we are not spending a) because we won't be getting our usual late winter refund, b) because we have to save and prepare for the SS & Medicare benefit cuts that Obama is setting up (Oh noes, shortfall! How did that happen?) and because the economy is always gonna sux, as it always does when tax and spending cutters are in power.
Evil motherfucker.
Oh wait, was this about how you could tell if Republicans were lying if their lips are moving?
Or we could look deep in the distant past to the 90's and raise taxes on the top bracket, run a surplus, and have money for SS and UHC
Or rather have right wingers sincerely explain why surpluses are bad and deliver massive tax cuts to the rich.
In theory you're right. In practice, as long as you have Repubs and Dems more or less equally likely to win elections over the medium term, and the Repubs have zero interest in deficits except as a stick to beat on the poor and excuse to give more money to the rich, keep the deficit high.
A bunch of good people getting together to be good at each other isn't a threat, it's just convenience for the powerful, so they can keep an eye on all of us at one time. I am so over it all.
Just treat the bad ones worse. Make an effort to hurt the wicked, rather than help the righteous and needy.
And it's easier, because there are so many more of the wicked.
Ian">http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-short-on-the-presidents-job-plan/">Ian Welsh didn't watch the evil motherfucker either. I didn't even bother to read it.
Yggles thinks it's dandy. In the words of one of his lost commenters, "I am no longer gonna bother with that weasel."
I have never in my life seen anyone as evil, as destructive as Barry O, and I lived through Pol Pot.
Well, not "lived through Pol Pot" in any personal sense, of course.
I lived through Pol Pot
Did you have to eat spiders?
Bob is Cambodian and survived the killing fields? Wow.
So very, very pwned. This is worse than when I barely survived Pol Pot.
I have never in my life seen anyone as evil, as destructive as Barry O, and I lived through Pol Pot.
In all, an estimated 1,700,000-2,500,000 people died under his leadership.
Maybe what is meant that is that he had never truly lived until he learned how Pol Pot had lived?
263: Sure Blume, there's that. But didn't you read 255? Obama's cutting payroll taxes.
What do I care about payroll taxes? I'm unemployed!
I think "and I lived through Pol Pot" means that he lived vicariously through Mr. Pot.
I'm sleepy, worse than surviving Pol Pot.
What do I care about payroll taxes? I'm unemployed!
Unemployed? Not for long! Obama's cutting payroll taxes.
So, wait, just to update, the list of history's greatest monsters* now reads:
1) Obama
2) Pol Pot
3) Stalin
4) Hitler
5) Carter.
Is that right?
* Post industrial revolution edition, that is.
260: Did you have to eat spiders?
I thought I would have to eat spiders when I lived in a wigwam in the woods, but I wound up being able to subsist on spaghetti, pancakes, apples and ginger ale.
You could stick uncooked spaghetti into an apple and make it look like a spider.
As long as I don't have to eat snakes.
That's "Comrade Pot", Moby, if we're using Times style.
I eliminated a bunch of the rabble in our homeowner's association. Vicariously, through Bashar al-Assad.
"Comrade Pot" is a bong manufacturer.
"Drunken moose ends up stuck in tree"
274: We stick uncooked spaghetti through hot dogs and then boil them. We call them "alien hot dogs".
That sounds worse than Pol Pot. Or at least Carter. I suppose you'd need to add canned green beans to achieve Pol Pot.
Then you're just a few ingredients short of a chicken pol pot pie.
3 million dead is a drop in the bucket compared to what Barry O will accomplish not merely in specific cuts to the safety net or by his economic mismanagement, but by discrediting the idea of Keynesian stimulus for a generation, thereby almost guaranteeing a world depression and world war, a repeat of the 30s and 40s.
Not the only one to blame, but as leader of the free world, principally to blame for the upcoming holocaust.
And of course the New Keynesian economists who flattered Obama with the idea that tax cuts and budget balancing are stimulative. Motherfucking careerists at Berkeley and Hahvahd.
Is this like blaming Hoover and Hawtrey for the Ukraine, Anzio and Treblinka? Read your Keynes. Economic ideas rule us all, and kill the millions.
That's the lame Americanized version, anyhow. Authentic foodies insist on the traditional spider pol pot pie.
almost guaranteeing
It's not like you to equivocate, Bob.
I blame the Cambodian civillians for Obama. They're not so innocent.
Motherfucking careerists at [...] Hahvahd.
It sure is nice in Cambridge.
In some ways it's funnier not to be able to see mcmanus's comments per se.
Pol Pot totally would have nuked Fukushima if he was still in power, thus saving the world.
I would have nuked Fukushima, if there were any Catholic nuns or adorable Mennonite children there, cravenly hiding from their well-deserved application of spittle.
When I lived in California, Lon Nol was exiling it up in house not too far from where I lived and which was on my usual bicycle training course. For some reason I was always a bit creeped out whenever I rode past--"Well done, dude." But I guess he did escape the attempted Pol Pot top lop.
291: Ditto. Especially if Mother Theresa were there.
Speaking of Bashar Assad: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/07/return_of_the_renditioned?page=0,0
293: Oh man, now I forgot, do I spit on the nuns and kick the Mennonites, or is it the other way around? Sometimes the hatred just gets to seething so much I can't rightly remember just what I'm going to do to those religious types!
The problem with eating spiders is, everyone gets all "ego my leggo"; and, really, there are eight of them. Let's share.
295: you're Batman, dude. Be unpredictable, keep them guessing, and let Bruce Wayne heighten the contradictions.
Ah, this is so great. Up there on the top ten "best of Bob," though not quite at the trolling ancient Egypt or we must nuke Fukushima to save it level.
By the way, the Cambodians still eat spider; apparently it was a taste developed during the Pol Pot day that has survived into more prosperous times. They sell them in the markets in Phnomh Penh and, at least when I was there, when cross-country buses would pull over for a stop ladies would come over by the window with trays of spiders to buy as a snack. They were cooked in spices. Technically very I suppose but tbh there was no fucking way I was eating those things.
165
The history of science shows us plenty of cases where research programs are driven by concerns external to science, and even have their conclusions shaped by shit that really doesn't carry epistemic weight. You don't get a century of research proving the genetic inferiority of other races because the evidence was pointing that direction.
This research continues of course. Within a few years I expect the (main) genes influencing IQ will be determined and their incidence in various groups will be measured. I doubt liberals will care for the results. It will be interesting to see how they go about ignoring them.
1) Obama
2) Pol Pot
3) Stalin
4) Hitler
5) Carter.
Typical US-centric thinking from Bob. Two Americans and one created by American policies in the top five? Pah! The real list of the the five worst monsters:
1) Toussaint l'Ouverture. If he hadn't led the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world, Haiti would be a happy place full of dancing children.
2) Martin Niemöller. If he'd spoken out none of that would have happened. It was all his fault.
3) Julie Andrews. Wittering on about her favourite things instead of making serious speeches about the dangers of Fascism in Austria.
4) Adlai Stevenson. I was trying to remember his name the other night and getting really annoyed.
5) Ludwig Bemelmans. That's all there is; there isn't any more.
(Have I got the methodology right?)
Hey, I lived through Pol Pot. I was only a child! And Jonas Savimbi. Charles Taylor. Not in any personal sense, of course.
259,261: well, he watched three Cambodian films and read a semiotics monograph by a Cambodian, so basically.
blaming Hoover and Hawtrey for the Ukraine, Anzio and Treblinka
Putting J Edgar Hoover on the History's Greatest Monsters list is fairly uncontroversial. Charles Hawtrey, on the other hand, is an unusual choice, but it's generally accepted by historians that his negligence (while serving with the 3 FOOT AND MOUTH battlegroup) was directly responsible for the subsequent Bhurpa uprising led by the treacherous Khasi of Khalabar, the root cause of the subsequent Deobandi movement in northern India and hence the ultimate origin of the Taliban movement.
the Cambodians still eat spider; apparently it was a taste developed during the Pol Pot day that has survived into more prosperous times.
That would neatly explain bob's avid canine husbandry, wouldn't it?
299: I just heard about a large-scale genome-wide association study looking for correlates of IQ. They didn't find dick. Which doesn't mean they won't keep trying, of course, but I don't think this story will end the way you think it will.
305. I'd be grateful for a cite if you've got one.
re: 303
Hawtrey and Windsor Davies. I knew it. All that stuff about Qutb is just a distraction.
304: That would neatly explain bob's avid canine husbandry, wouldn't it?
bob's eating the dogs?
Wait. The spiders are eating bob? No. No. Nonono. The spiders are eating the dogs? No. No. No. The spiders are eating the Cambodians and then the dogs are eating the spiders! And then bob eats the Odogs!
max
['Who's eating his wife?']
Within a few years I expect the (main) genes influencing IQ will be determined and their incidence in various groups will be measured. I doubt liberals will care for the results. It will be interesting to see how they go about ignoring them.
Which, of course, would reinforce rob's point about how factors external to science are necessarily a part of science. If intelligence of races is innately different, it will be the racists who figure it out first.
I mean, unless it turns out that whites got the short end of the stick. Jared Diamond, a great public intellectual, is a bit of a crank on this subject. He contends that indigenous New Guineans are at or near the top of the intelligence ladder. I wonder if Steve Sailer has publicly pondered Diamond's evidence - it really would fit in neatly with Sailer's theories and methodology, but maybe Sailer wouldn't find the result so comfortable.
He contends that indigenous New Guineans are at or near the top of the intelligence ladder.
That would be due to their Denisovan genes, no doubt.
306: can't find one for the life of me. Some associated people are starting a larger scale follow-up study (with different methodology, maybe?) discussed here.
303:Ralph Hawtrey
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." ...JMK
Oh wait. Slaves
Representative Comments at Digby about Georgia Works
"wow wow wow. Georgia Works is a textbook monstrous hybrid: voluntary slavery."
"Voluntary?
And you know damn well that there are consequences if the employer says bad things about you.
Isn't this a lot like convict labor contracted to business?"
"@nostick: I doubt most people would consider "do this or else lose your unemployment check" as *voluntary*.
I'm also curious how much oversight there is of this - what exactly is stopping the local WallyWorld from just swapping in new people every eight weeks? Sounds like a pretty big corporate handout..."
Our President definitely has a sense of humor.
"Hey Bill, you think you fucked the poor with your welfare reform? Wait til you see what I'm gonna do."
311: I think Diamond's reasoning was that nature kills the stupid ones.
310: I can forgive him for that. If I spent half my time hanging around with indigenous Papuan hunter-gatherers of (for argument's sake) no more than average human intelligence, and the other half teaching geography to UCLA undergraduates, I'd probably come to the same conclusion.
Hawtrey and Windsor Davies. I knew it. All that stuff about Qutb is just a distraction.
CHARLES HAWTREY
will return as
GEN. PETRAEUS
in
CARRY ON SURGING
with
BENNY HILL
as
HOJATOLESLAM MOQTADA AL-SADR
JOAN SIMS
as
EMMA SKY
KENNETH WILLIAMS
as
AHMED CHALABI
and
SID JAMES
as
NURI AL MALIKI
and also starring
WINDSOR DAVIES
as
SADDAM HUSSAIN AL-TIKRITI
299: Tough talk from the man who's admitted on this very forum that he is unmoved by empirical evidence.
I've mentioned this PNG story about my cousin already, right?
And to answer my own question, it turns out that Sailer does, somehow, find that Diamond came up with the wrong answer.
Sailer manages to simply hand-wave part of Diamond's argument out of existence by claiming, without evidence, that surviving in a murderous society doesn't select for intelligence.
Diamond also goes into a discussion of the sophisticated New Guinean understanding of flora and fauna. If he were using Sailer's terminology, he'd describe it as selection for "nerd traits."
Not only does Sailer ignore that part of Diamond's argument, he denies - again without evidence - that such a thing is possible.
Somehow, in Sailer's mythology, New Guineans' alleged inferior intelligence is a result of the fact that "female farming economies" don't select for intelligence. That part of the argument is really weird, even by Sailer's standards. Surely even in Sailer's world, women are contributors to the human genome.
318: Shearer is quite ready to be convinced by empirical evidence that doesn't yet exist. (He is after all a Republican.) It's just actually-existing empirical evidence that he disregards.
318: I believe it's called projection.
318
Tough talk from the man who's admitted on this very forum that he is unmoved by empirical evidence
I have? Maybe I was having a bad day.
Generally speaking I give weight to empirical evidence. For example I think asset price bubbles exist.
319: I don't recall it before and it certainly seems like the kind of thing I'd remember.
305
I just heard about a large-scale genome-wide association study looking for correlates of IQ. They didn't find dick. Which doesn't mean they won't keep trying, of course, but I don't think this story will end the way you think it will.
You think IQ is all environmental? That would be much more surprising than a failure to find major differences between ethnic groups.
You think IQ is all environmental?
No.
And I'm a semi-functional part of the global enterprise that is science.
326: Could be hundreds or thousands of tiny incremental switches, and a healthy dose of confounding effects from environment and early childhood nutrition and the health of the mother, which I'm guessing is the case with height as well.
Which would make it hard to find any one gene that does it.
326. I don't know what Sifu thinks, but I suspect that a large part of it is epigentic, and that the genetic contributors are extremely complex and are very likely not all or even mostly primarily expressed in "ability to do IQ tests". So I wouldn't be at all surprised if the non-environmental aspects of the mechanism can't be identified by any technology we're likely to deploy in the next 30 years.
310
I mean, unless it turns out that whites got the short end of the stick. Jared Diamond, a great public intellectual, is a bit of a crank on this subject. He contends that indigenous New Guineans are at or near the top of the intelligence ladder. I wonder if Steve Sailer has publicly pondered Diamond's evidence - it really would fit in neatly with Sailer's theories and methodology, but maybe Sailer wouldn't find the result so comfortable.
Sailer types are willing to rank Jews and Asians above whites, New Guineans seem a small, obscure and distant enough group that they could be added at the top if necessary without undue anguish.
There was something making its way through the internet recently claiming that there's increasing consensus that intelligence has a large genetic component (more than half), but that this comes from small affects from a very large number of genes. I haven't read the research so I'm not sure how much consensus there is, but it certainly seems like a plausible possibility.
To be fair, the people doing the large-scale study I linked above (which is probably James's best hope) are perfectly willing to believe that a large part of it is epigenetic, and think they should nonetheless be able to find the genetic contributors by throwing a ton of sequencing hardware (and a large subject pool of high-IQ individuals) at the problem. Personally, I suspect that the genetic contributors will turn out to be so common in the population that finding meaningful individual or group differences by sequencing will be basically impossible. Also, I don't think "IQ" (or g) measures a meaningfully characterizable endogenous cognitive property. The people I linked above (or at least some of them) think that it can be characterized as the slope of the decision diffusion function, but acknowledge that doesn't really explain performance on e.g. raven matrices.
Meaningful meaningful meaningful meaninging.
New Guineans seem a small, obscure and distant enough group that they could be added at the top if necessary without undue anguish.
Come on, if I find out some of the darkies are smarter than me I'm allowed at least a little anguish, right?
Within a few years I expect the (main) genes influencing IQ will be determined and their incidence in various groups will be measured. I doubt liberals will care for the results. It will be interesting to see how they go about ignoring them.
I probably shouldn't speak about this among Gentiles, but liberal Jews will secretly be a little bummed when it turns out they aren't actually smarter than everybody else.
"Professors are inclined to attribute the intelligence of their children to nature, and the intelligence of their students to nurture."
-- Roger Masters
The other thing is that even if there are specific genes with large IQ affects (never forgetting that IQ scores change a lot of you learn how to take IQ tests), it seems unlikely that there would be large differences on the level of "races" because there's not much in the way of consistent selection. You'd need something like a gene that's selected for say because of its advantages in cold winters, which coincidentally happened to also give intelligence benefits. It seems much more likely to me that selective migration would be the cause of variation. E.g. if chinese people in the US turn out to be genetically smarter than white people, I'd bet good money that it'd be because *smarter people tended to move to the US*, not because of differences on the level of "ethnicities."
I also think that if there are "ethnic group" level differences in IQ it's just as likely to be uncomfortable for conservatives. Namely, slavery must have produced some really strong selection pressures. If there's differences in intelligence between ethnic groups in the US, it could be caused by slavery and not by "racial differences." Now there's a strong case for reparations and affirmative action.
Citation from the linked presentation:
Davis, O. S. P., Butcher, L. M., Docherty, S. J., Meaburn, E. M., Curtis, C. J. C., Simpson, M. A., Schalkwyk, L. C., & Plomin, R. (2010). A three-stage genome-wide association study of general cognitive ability: Hunting the small effects. Behavior Genetics.
doi: 10.1007/s10519-010-9350-4
Dr. Oz says that white grains and pizza are huge killers, so shouldnt Herman Cain be up there near Pol Pot?
336
... Personally, I suspect that the genetic contributors will turn out to be so common in the population that finding meaningful individual or group differences by sequencing will be basically impossible. ...
I don't see why this would be a problem. To take a simplistic model suppose there were 900 genes each with two forms with 50% prevalence and the favorable form added 1 point to IQ. So for any individual you look at his genome, count the favorable genes and substract 350 to get his predicted IQ. And for two groups you look at the average prevalence. So if it is 51% (instead of 50%) in group A then the predicted average IQ will be 109, and if it is 49% in group B then the predicted average IQ will be 91.
I am hopeful that we will soon identify the major genes influencing "talking ignorant rubbish about how genetics works".
344: it would not be a problem if a simplistic model of purely genetic, linearly additive contributors was true, yes. What I'm saying is that I believe it is unlikely such a model will be true.
Our social ideas of "ethnicities" and "races" just aren't very scientific. Black americans have a lot of European ancestry. (Speaking of uncomfortable for conservatives, maybe there are stupid genes that are prevalent in the south in both white and black people.) The oldest splits in the human evolutionary tree are within Africa, so there are "black" people who are as distantly related to each other as any two humans. Northern east asians and southern east asians are on very different branches despite most people thinking of them as the "same race." There's tons and tons of migration and admixture in humans.
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that Ashkenazi Jews were smarter on average, it's a small group that had strong and unusual selective pressures on it for a long time and which has unusually low genetic variation within the group (see the prevalence of genetic disorders). But groups like "Asians" is just a whole different ballgame.
Francis Galton going "meta" on the hereditability of teh smart:
On my part, however, I felt little difficulty in connection with the Origin of Species, but devoured its contents and assimilated them as fast as they were devoured, a fact which perhaps may be ascribed to an hereditary bent of mind that both its illustrious author and myself have inherited from our common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.
Does anyone know how researchers suss out the differences between the impact of genetics versus prenatal development? Do you look at children with the same father but different mothers? I mean twin studies don't say anything at all about the differences between genetics and prenatal development.
(My personally goofy bias is that way more things are results of infections than we currently think.)
Speaking of uncomfortable for conservatives, maybe there are stupid genes that are prevalent in the south in both white and black people.
I recall that in one of H. L. Mencken's essays he outlined a comically racist theory about how Southern whites were dumber than American blacks.
My personally goofy bias is that way more things are results of infections than we currently think.
Infections that make us smarter? Intelligence is a disease! I like it!
Sailer types are willing to rank Jews and Asians above whites, New Guineans seem a small, obscure and distant enough group that they could be added at the top if necessary without undue anguish.
So you would think! But it's precisely their obscurity to Americans, along with their external resemblance to a hated group of Americans, that makes it very difficult for an America-centric racist to rank them highly.
Sailer is pretty much stuck with Asians, because Asians have done well in America by Sailer's measures, and Sailer can ignore their performance elsewhere when it doesn't fit his narrative.
Jewish intellectual superiority is entirely consistent with standard racist tropes.
New Guineans are genetically distant from Africans, so there's an easy avenue to find New Guineans superior if you base your racism on genetics. But Sailer doesn't really have much interest in genetics - he's into skin color and money. People with dark skin and no money are inherently inferior. For Sailer's purposes, New Guineans are de facto Africans and therefore can't be equal, much less superior.
Here's one GWAS looking for intelligence, failing to find significant association:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21694764
Here's the full text of the article cited above:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2992848/
Epigenetics is an unlikely avenue, I think. Imprinting excepted, it is not at all clear if variation in methylation or acetylation between individuals is heritable, true for both histone modifications and nuclear modifications, imprinting excepted.
Like height (also heritable and polygenic without definite alleles responsible for outlier phenotype), the penalty for deficit in g has been much greater than the reward for surplus. For intelligence, this has been true until the very recent past.
Epigenetics is an unlikely avenue, I think. Imprinting excepted, it is not at all clear if variation in methylation or acetylation between individuals is heritable, true for both histone modifications and nuclear modifications, imprinting excepted.
Not quite sure, but this doesn't sound nearly ignorant enough for this thread.
Like height (also heritable and polygenic without definite alleles responsible for outlier phenotype), the penalty for deficit in g has been much greater than the reward for surplus. For intelligence, this has been true until the very recent past.
So what would the implications of this be in terms of prevalence of contributing alleles? (Or in terms of whatever, I guess. Not sure what this specifically would mean.)
(My personally goofy bias is that way more things are results of infections than we currently think.)
Sullivan posted on this recently. I found the brief, linked piece unpersuasive, but it does suggest an interesting possibility: You could have genes directly linked to intelligence (via susceptibility to infectious disease) that would nonetheless suggest an environmental solution to the genetic problem.
But that's just me making up stories in Sailer-mode. I could as easily come up with a narrative in which people who are less susceptible to disease are also less intelligent. The problem with these narratives is that you can prove whatever you want to with them.
Jewish intellectual superiority is entirely consistent with standard racist tropes.
So now it's the Jews who are the racists? Thanks for that, Minister Farrakhan.
More seriously, have the IQ-obsessed folks reckoned with the thorny question of whether IQ measures anything worth measuring? I mean, let's say that some group of scholars finds a genetic marker that apparently leads to increased IQ, so what? Are we so convinced that IQ is an important measure? Because I find myself assuming it's a historically (or culturally, if you prefer) contingent measure of who knows what.
But then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about. I last took seriously the debate about IQ many years ago -- in the era of the Bell Curve controversy -- and even then I don't recall paying all that much attention. I'm sure there's been a lot of interesting research since then.
Also, a la Peep*, I've always been struck (dumb!**) by how many Jews, including some pretty smart folks, genuinely believe that as a race/nation/people we're smarter than the average bears out there. How this links up with the mythology of being "chosen" by god, I have no idea. Post-Hitler, you'd think my tribesmen would recognize the problems inherent in this kind of thinking.
* Yes, I have a recipe for this dish.
** Get it?
If: in the evolutionary past, large stature or high intelligence don't confer much advantage while small stature or low intelligence carry a cost,
then: you wouldn't expect to find positive selection for alleles that increase stature or intelligence, while you would find negative selection against alleles that decrease the trait.
People have looked for all alleles subject to positive selection in primates. The results may turn out to be interesting when population variation among many primate species is available. If there were a few alleles that gave humans a clear advantage, they would have been identified. In my opinion, so far there's nothing there, though the limitations imposed by only having human population variation and a few reasonable clean nonhuman primate genomes mean there's not much that can be said yet. This is a good study by a strong group with pointers to earlier results:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20140238
So what would the implications of this be in terms of prevalence of contributing alleles?
I would guess that the distribution would be left censored, and the lack of reward would not hold the right tail up.
Censored would probably be a term of art there that I ought to take back. I'll say "left squished down" instead.
More seriously, have the IQ-obsessed folks reckoned with the thorny question of whether IQ measures anything worth measuring? I mean, let's say that some group of scholars finds a genetic marker that apparently leads to increased IQ, so what? Are we so convinced that IQ is an important measure? Because I find myself assuming it's a historically (or culturally, if you prefer) contingent measure of who knows what.
In theory g should get around this, and I think most psychologists who study intelligence are fairly convinced that there is something or other that is reducible to actual biological brain function that's being measured. I'm not terribly convinced, myself, but I guess we'll see. The most plausible theory I've heard is that general intelligence is related to the ability to convert between internal brain representations and transformations and the kind of serial, turing computable functions that are expressible in symbolic language. Which wouldn't lead to it being terribly important in the greater scheme of cognitive ability, but there you go.
312 Some associated people are starting a larger scale follow-up study (with different methodology, maybe?) discussed here.
The link goes to the blog of someone who has a faculty job in my field, not anything related to genetics, psychology, or any other topic bordering on that study. Weird.
363: weirdly I know that guy. Perfectly nice. Well, he was, 10 years ago.
364: Still is, as far as I can tell. I met him earlier this year when we both happened to be visiting the same department at the same time. I just wonder how one manages to have that sort of career -- tenure helps, obviously, but how do you keep your colleagues from getting pissed off that you're not doing the kind of work they hired you to do? (I'm pretty sure I'm going to get hopelessly bored with my own field sometime in the next decade, if it even continues to exist, so knowing how to pull that off seems like it would be useful....)
365: That's when you start making rap albums, essear.
363: yep. I've wondered how he got involved as well. He might know the people at BGI? Or maybe he has worked on relevant math?
366: Or writing publicly about my desire for "sublime and funky love"?
Infections that make us smarter? Intelligence is a disease! I like it!
ObSF: the luck virus in Red Dwarf.
That's when you start making rap albums
Or write the screenplay for a quirky field-related sitcom starring you and Tom Hanks: Boson Buddies.
370, 371: Try not to fight. Everybody needs a boson for a pilot.
365
Still is, as far as I can tell. I met him earlier this year when we both happened to be visiting the same department at the same time. I just wonder how one manages to have that sort of career -- tenure helps, obviously, but how do you keep your colleagues from getting pissed off that you're not doing the kind of work they hired you to do? (I'm pretty sure I'm going to get hopelessly bored with my own field sometime in the next decade, if it even continues to exist, so knowing how to pull that off seems like it would be useful....)
If his research interests are to be believed he hasn't stopped doing physics.
357
More seriously, have the IQ-obsessed folks reckoned with the thorny question of whether IQ measures anything worth measuring? ...
IQ-obsessed folks generally don't find this a thorny question, they tend to think IQ obviously measures something important.
Right, James, that would explain their obsession. Much appreciated.
IQ-obsessed folks generally don't find this a thorny question, they tend to think IQ obviously measures something important.
It's true! And it's fascinating, because (at least for the people doing actual research on this) in many other respects they really try to be rigorous, but they don't seem to often address the question of why IQ per se is particularly important to understanding the brain except to say (paraphrased) "duh, stupid. Of course it is."
Yeah, that was what I was getting at. But James's willful obtuseness has its own charms.
People often just assume the topic of study in which they are interested is important and are unable to comprehend why anyone would think differently. Just the other day, I asked why we focused so much on reducing knee pain without any study of how much knee pain people wanted. Nobody was interested in funding that research.
I couple of times somebody has asked me what I'm going to be researching, and I tell them the probable answer, and they say "huh, so what are the applications? Why is it important to know this?" That was not a question I'd expected.
"Why it's your hand on my ass?" was probably just too difficult to lead with.
374: Yeah, he's still writing some papers. I guess that is important -- developing other interests in parallel is more acceptable than abandoning your original field.
History training constantly reminds you that you have to be able to answer the "so what?" question, but since most non-historians stop at "why bother with history at all" you usually don't have to explain it to non-historians. With historians, pretty much any answer seems to do as long as a few people continue to support you.
381 cont'd: which is not to say it's not a good question. It just seems entirely self-evident to me why it's important.
It's important because DUDE THIS ROBOT WILL EAT YOUR FACE.
"You know how in the Terminator movies the machines take over? I just thought that sounded like a really good idea."
Slow to the comments section. First, today's evangelical Christians believe in Social Darwinism, that's what the prosperity gospel is.
Second, call me cynical, but I suspect the importance of IQ lies in it being a numerical measure which statistically is lower for the poor and non-model minorities and higher for wealthy white people, and thus of great help to those to vested in justifying the status quo (kind of like ev psych). Given IQ patterns in my own family, I wouldn't be surprised if whatever it measures is at least partly heritable, but that in this measure is not important. I read somewhere that no one can really find a correlation (and certainly not causation) between IQ and success in a conventional manner, beyond the fact that statistically IQs tend to be higher for rich white people, who also happen to be conventionally successful. (Though in-group comparisons of rich white people show no correlation whatever between IQ and success).