Conservatives
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007Driftglass describes the racist horror that is the Republican base and which is becoming repellent to some conservatives:
The Base is pro-torture for the simple reason that they are sadists and imbeciles; because unless somewhere some Scary Brown Person is being beaten to death with a pipe wrench in their name, they feel empty and impotent and afraid.
Like their slaveholder great-grandfathers, their Jim Crow grandfathers and John Birch daddies, their entire identity is undergirded by an ideology that says - as hateful, cowardly, ignorant and covetous of everyone and everything as they are -…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
mikethemadbiologist | December 12, 2007...never fear, Jon Swift is on the case:
Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report, Curt at Flopping Aces and former humor blogger Ace of Spades (who recently won the Weblog Award for Best Conservative blogger) are three of the most respected conservative bloggers in the blogosphere. They will stop at nothing to protect America from terrorists. If they gave medals for bravery in a war you are not actually fighting in, these guys would win hands down.
And that's the nice part. Now go read the whole thing.
mikethemadbiologist | December 8, 2007Republicans are upset that, at the most recent CNN-hosted Republican presidential debate, a member of the audience who turned out to be a Democrat asked a question:
"My name is Keith Kerr, from Santa Rosa, California. I'm retired brigadier general with 43 years of service, and I'm a graduate of the Special Forces Officer Course, the Command and General Staff Course, and the Army War College. And I'm an openly gay man.
"I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians."
This is hardly an unfair question. Had he…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2007Between my original post about how to punish creationist politicians and ScienceBlogling Greg's discussion, several readers commented that I was making this a political issue. Quite simply, I am not the only doing that: the Republican theopolitical conservative base is. The issue is, do we fight back, or lose due to their political power?
The creationists might not be able to defeat the reality of the existence of evolution, but they can defeat every effort to teach and study that reality. So, like it or not, evolution has become a political issue, and it must not only be taught in…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2007Michael Kinsley sums up the ethical inconsistency of the Blastocyst Liberationists:
Third, although the political dilemma that stem cells pose for politicians is real enough, the moral dilemma is not and never was. The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, which otherwise would discard them. This has been a powerful argument in favor of such research. Why let these embryos go to waste? But a more important point is, What about fertility clinics themselves? In vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies") involves the purposeful creation of multiple embryos, knowing and…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2007No, I'm not talking about voting them out of office (fat chance of that happening in some places). By now, you've probably heard about the firing of the Texas Education Agency's director of science curriculum. There's not much to add to what others have already said about how stupid this is, so, instead, I want to propose one possible way to strike back at these bozos: federalize the issue.
This latest front in the Republican* War on Science illustrates how this is a political issue that revolves around power, not framing. One way pro-science citizens can influence what local and state…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2007Until Katrina hit, it had become increasingly fashionable to talk about the U.S. as a 'post-racist' society (and that fashion continues, albeit in abated form). Unfortunately, forced marches of desperate black people have a way of putting the kabosh on that. By way of digby, comes this heartwarming story from Arkansas about 'post-racist' America (italics mine):
The chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas called Wednesday for state Sen. Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, to apologize for e-mail comments attributed to the Senate GOP leader by a television station.
....In the e-mail on the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 24, 2007Tom Engelhardt asks the question I've wondered about Atlanta's drought: what happens if there literally is no more water? Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any answers.
The politics of a 'dry' Atlanta, or more accurately, a failed response to a 'dry' Atlanta, could really crack up the Republican coalition. One of the bulwarks of the Southern Republican base is conservative, white suburbs (and exurbs). What happens when they don't have water? FEMA rides to the rescue?
[the Mad Biologist laughs himself silly]
This essentially would be Katrina without the storm--and it would keep…
mikethemadbiologist | November 21, 2007I think there's a related disorder to Compulsive Centrist Disorder: Magnanimous Pundit Syndrome. It seems to have hit Kevin Drum pretty hard (italics mine):
I'm on record (several hundred times, probably) saying that Social Security is basically fine and that the best thing we can do is just leave it alone and then revisit it in a decade or so. At the same time, I don't think any of us would (or should) have any serious problem with, say, a 1983-style commission that beavered away for a year and then recommended a basket of modest tax increases and benefit reductions to keep Social Security…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2007Atrios wonders about William Saletan's and Andrew Sullivan's recurrent idiocy about IQ:
The thing about the perpetual attempts to claim that TEH SCIENCE proves that black people really are stupid is that there are two simple fallacies that they are based on.
The first one is that the "intelligence" tests used in the data actually measure some sort of immutable inherent or potential intelligence when in fact people can be educated to do better on the tests.
The second is that race generally or especially as understood in America bears any relationship to the concept of "population" as…
mikethemadbiologist | November 15, 2007When I discovered that Shakes, filling in over at Crooks and Liars, had linked to my post about Senator Obama and Social Security, I thought might get hordes of angry Obamaites*. Instead, what some of the comments repeated two common mistakes about Social Security (although thankfully other readers slapped them down).
The first fallacy is that Social Security is in crisis. It's not. Let's try this way of explaining it, since the other ways don't seem to have worked (an aside: why do I even put hyperlinks in my posts? The conservatives either don't bother to read them, or don't know how…
mikethemadbiologist | November 14, 2007ScienceBlogling Razib comments on Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's "very weak understanding of evolution, or, a purposeful misrepresentation" (bold Razib's):
...the whole article [by Jindal] is an illustration of the reality that extremely intelligent people can also be very ignorant. I have no doubt that Bobby Jindal has a world class mind; and he certainly succeeds and excels at any task which catches his attention. It seems clear to me that when it comes to science & religion he is out of his depth. His characterization of those who disagree with his own religious views is…
mikethemadbiologist | November 12, 2007One of the most successful anti-poverty programs ever created in the U.S. is the Social Security program. Despite that, conservatives and Republicans, primarily for ideological reasons, have attempted to dismantle the program--if not in one fell swoop, then incrementally.
One of the tactics that conservatives have used is to try to convince people that Social Security "won't be there" when they retire. To do this, they gin up the notion that Social Security is in crisis, even though that is simply not true. The reason for this is that, as mandated by law, the Social Security Trustees are…
mikethemadbiologist | November 10, 2007Rightwing nut David Horowitz just finished celebrating Islamofascist Awareness Week. One of the goals of Horowitz's exercise is to intimidate faculty and students into political correctness*. A while back, while reading Hanna Rosen's God's Harvard, this description of how one faculty member at Jesus mill Patrick Henry College**, Bob Stacey, was fired for teaching those heretical philosophers Kant and Plato struck as the kind of campus Horowitz would like:
Just before class, someone pointed out the window, where you could still see the outlines of last night's moon. "Please take your seats…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2007Not only does Conservapedia, which is like Wikipedia but stupid, spew idiocy about evolution, have some true hackery about evolution, but this part, pulled from the main page, says it all:
(here's a full-sized image complete with cheesy soundtrack)
Masterpiece? Are conservatives trying to destroy what culture the U.S. does possess?
Help Public School Kids by Funding my Challenge at DonorsChoose
mikethemadbiologist | October 29, 2007Onward Glorious Conservatives! Don't retreat from the librul modelers!!!
By now, you might have heard about the Bush Administration's massive 'editing' of the CDC testimony about the health consequences of global warming. Over at Science Progress, there is a copy of the unedited, original CDC text. At this point, no one in the Coalition of the Sane should be surprised that every single one of the specifics about what global warming would actually do was expunged--we wouldn't want the public to worry their purdy lil' heads about all of that scary stuff. What did interest me was the...…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2007Welcome to the world of Potemkin press conferences. FEMA held a press conference...with itself (italics mine):
Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices.
They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress Web site), MSNBC and other outlets.
Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2007By way of Shakes, this display made its way into the House debate on S-CHIP:
What does abortion have to do with healthcare for children? It's as if conservatives believe in the totemic power of the Fetish of the Fetus. As bad as the Democrats can be, when they usually try to make some semblance of an argument. This is just waving the Bloody Fetus around, and hoping it causes enough people's brains to shut down their ability to think ('cuz fetuses are icky).
This is completely insane. How does one have a national conversation about anything when one half is utterly incapable of a…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2007I know: who could possibly think that the Bush administration would censor a report on the effects of global warming? From the Washington Post:
Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.
Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and…