Dan Balz of The Washington Post did an interesting story over the weekend, or so I thought initially. With all the polls showing a trend toward Obama, and the election only weeks away, what do political scientists...
Category: Republicans
Dan Balz of The Washington Post did an interesting story over the weekend, or so I thought initially. With all the polls showing a trend toward Obama, and the election only weeks away, what do political scientists say about who will win?
I'm not sure that expert are going to have the inside track on things, but I thought it would be interesting to hear what they had to say.
Balz began with numbers and percentages from people with impressive academic titles, and I was wrapped up in it until I got to the sixth graf. "Their projection, made 299 days before the election..."
What? They made these projections last year? Who cares what somebody thought last year; we didn't even know who the Republican nominee would be.
I felt misled. Balz might have better left all of this to moulder in the academic journal in which he found it. Or if...
Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker is surely more optimistic than I am that Paul Ryan, if elected, could mature into a Theodore Roosevelt-style conservationist, one whose desire to protect comes from his desire to explore and experience the wilderness.
Even so, his...
Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker is surely more optimistic than I am that Paul Ryan, if elected, could mature into a Theodore Roosevelt-style conservationist, one whose desire to protect comes from his desire to explore and experience the wilderness.
Even so, his post, "Paul Ryan: Master of the Land" is worth reading for what it says about the great TR and about current political calculations regarding conservation.
I would have entitled it "Paul Ryan: Master of the Land?" The question mark is important, because Thompson falls far short of making the case that Ryan will come to understand the importance of conservation. But it's a smart analysis.
-Paul Raeburn
In an appearance in May on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chris Mooney discussed, among other things, a new kind of denialism: Conservatives denying that there is a personality...
In an appearance in May on Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Chris Mooney discussed, among other things, a new kind of denialism: Conservatives denying that there is a personality difference, a psychological difference, between liberals and conservatives. In other words, they are denying the science he covers in his most recent book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. If conservatives admitted that we are all shaped at least in part by our personalities and our gut feelings, Mooney said on MSNBC, "we could agree that we all have strengths and weaknesses, and then we would just say, you know, some people are good at this, some people are good at that. You're not inherently better. You're not inherently worse. And then, actually, you may have a ground for cooperation."
...
It's a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing,...
It's a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing, and the conservatives another, that the truth lies somewhere in between. Where this doctrine comes from is a mystery. Where is it written that liberals or conservatives cannot sometimes be right? Or mostly right? Or completely wrong?
This is one version of a problem that Chris Mooney, our most prominent and adept critic of the political abuse of science, addresses in a post on his newly transplanted blog. Mooney's science and policy commentaries are now appear on a blog called Science Progress, part of the blog family of the liberal Center for American Progress. And he has...
Last year, The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that 55% of...
Last year, The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that 55% of scientists say they are Democrats, 32% say they are independents, and a scant 6% say they are Republicans.
Who knew? It's an interesting finding, and you might find yourself wondering, as I do, why that's the case, and what might explain it.
In an article in Slate, Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, concludes that the Democrats' scientist-majority is advancing findings that support a Democratic agenda:
Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by...
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