Archive for September 20, 2010

One Lump or Two?

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2 years ago
by filistro in

If we want to be an actual, legit­i­mate “shadow blog,” I guess (sigh) we need to for­mally address the issue of the Tea Party, since Nate is now tack­ling that naughty prob­lem (sorry, I meant knotty prob­lem, I must have been think­ing about Chris­tine O’Donnell) over on his front page.

There’s really no telling what the com­ing elec­tion will bring, Tea-​​Party-​​wise, though the­o­ries abound. What will poten­tial Teaper suc­cesses mean for the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal land­scape? I fore­see only two pos­si­bil­i­ties in that event… either they will become a legit­i­mate third party, or they will drag the exist­ing Repub­li­can party sig­nif­i­cantly to the right. Either result will, I think, mark the begin­ning of quite a long period in the desert for the GOP.

More inter­est­ing is what con­se­quences we might see from elec­toral fail­ures caused by off-​​putting Teaper activism…to say noth­ing of really, really  weird can­di­dates. Again, the­o­ries abound. Right here at Log­a­rchism, shrinkers thinks the Teapers will be sim­ply embold­ened by any tiny suc­cess  and use the vic­tim­hood aspect of defeat to their advan­tage, and they will just keep…on…coming…at…you. I dis­agree. I think if they are seen as sab­o­tag­ing this huge oppor­tu­nity for Repub­li­cans, the furi­ous weight of the right-​​wing estab­lish­ment will come down on them with crush­ing force and we’ll barely hear a muf­fled squeak out of them afterward.

Nate, that sly diplo­mat, is strad­dling the fence:

If Repub­li­can can­di­dates do well on Elec­tion Day — and par­tic­u­larly if Tea Party-​​backed can­di­dates like Rand Paul of Ken­tucky and Shar­ron Angle of Nevada win their races — the Tea Party will be cred­ited with hav­ing revived a mori­bund Repub­li­can Party. But if the Repub­li­cans fail to live up to expec­ta­tions — and expec­ta­tions are exceed­ingly high — the Tea Party will be blamed for curb­ing the Repub­li­cans’ abil­ity to cap­i­tal­ize on his­toric lev­els of voter dissatisfaction.”

Still, I believe Nate is com­ing down some­what more on my side than shrinkers. He IS… isn’t he?

I’m inter­ested in what all of you think on two fronts: how will the Teapers impact the com­ing election…will their con­tri­bu­tion ulti­mately turn out to  be a net pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive? And look­ing ahead, what impact (if any) do you think they will have on the national scene going into 2012 and beyond?

All opin­ions wel­come. Ref­er­ences to witch­craft, dinosaurs, birth cer­tifi­cates and 2nd Amend­ment Reme­dies warmly encouraged.

Three Summers

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2 years ago
by dcpetterson in

Gen­tle­men, progress has never been a bar­gain. You’ve got to pay for it. Some­times I think there’s a man behind a counter who says, ‘All right, you can have a tele­phone; but you’ll have to give up pri­vacy, the charm of dis­tance. Madam, you may vote; you lose the right to retreat behind a powder-​​puff or a pet­ti­coat. Mis­ter, you may con­quer the air; but the birds will lose their won­der, and the clouds will smell of gaso­line!’
– Henry Drum­mond, Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Remem­ber the sum­mer of 2008. We dared hope a black man could be elected pres­i­dent. After the long, dark years of a Repub­li­can Admin­is­tra­tion – per­haps the most inept and dam­ag­ing admin­is­tra­tion in our nation’s his­tory – we dared hope the world was about to change.

Go to YouTube, and lis­ten to Dave Stewart’s “Amer­i­can Prayer”, and see if you can’t recap­ture, for just a moment, that sea­son of awe and wonder.

That was the sum­mer many of us dis­cov­ered Nate Silver’s FiveThir­tyEight. The math, after a while, seemed unde­ni­able – but we’d all been fooled before. Then, when Barack Obama actu­ally won, it amazed, it thrilled, it excited. Do you remem­ber watch­ing the rally in Chicago on elec­tion night? Can you return to that moment, even for an instant?

By the fol­low­ing sum­mer, things already had changed, not always for the bet­ter. The Sum­mer of Hope gave way to the Sum­mer of Town Hall Riots. The back­lash was in full swing. Never under­es­ti­mate the human capac­ity to mis­rep­re­sent and to bear false witness.

In the midst of the attempt to fol­low through on the sig­na­ture promise of the cam­paign, the crown­ing achieve­ment of three gen­er­a­tions of Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dents – real health care reform – the response from the right was noth­ing short of insane. But we should have expected it. Progress has never been a bargain.

But health care reform was enacted, the biggest and most excit­ing change in pub­lic pol­icy since the 1940’s. Yet it was embed­ded in a toxic polit­i­cal atmos­phere, and in the midst of the worst world­wide eco­nomic cri­sis in nearly a cen­tury. it required com­pro­mise. It was not all we’d wanted. Yet the fear-​​based response of the right con­tin­ued to mount.

Thus we came to the sum­mer of 2010, the Sum­mer of the Tea Party Rebel­lion. The world has indeed changed. Chil­dren grow­ing up today will live in an Amer­ica that has always had a black pres­i­dent. The Demo­c­ra­tic major­ity in Con­gress, large as it was, never had a coherency or dis­ci­pline. For a brief six months, there were sixty Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tors – Al Franken won his recount — and then the con­science of the Sen­ate, the last of the Kennedy broth­ers, fell to cancer.

Did Drummond’s “man behind the counter” say to us, “You may have Barack Obama; but you lose Ted Kennedy. You may have the most excit­ing pres­i­dent in a gen­er­a­tion – but you get a Con­gress of Repub­li­can obstruc­tion­ists who will grind gov­ern­ment to a halt. You get real and mean­ing­ful Health Care Reform. But you get a back­lash against it all, a mind­less resur­gence of hate and of reac­tionary fer­vor we have not seen since the days of Lincoln.”

Per­haps that last is a bit overblown. Cer­tainly, today’s Tea Party has rivals in things more recent than the 1860s – we prob­a­bly need look no far­ther back than Selma, or than the McCarthy hear­ings and the Red scares. Oddly, those peri­ods also involved mas­sive progress for our nation.

But then, the fear from the 1950s and 1960s did even­tu­ally sub­side – or per­haps we should say, it fell back to a low sim­mer rather than a full boil. Per­haps it is not so much that vio­lence and hatred are the cost of progress. Per­haps progress is a response to the fear that lies beneath the hate.

And what will the Sum­mer of the Tea Party beget? If the pre­vi­ous two sum­mers mean any­thing, we will con­tinue for­ward – but at a cost.

She Blinded Me With Science!

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2 years ago
by Monotreme in

Once upon a time, I was a work­ing sci­en­tist. I made dis­cov­er­ies; I pub­lished dozens of sci­en­tific papers; I man­aged a lab­o­ra­tory that was sup­ported by Fed­eral grant monies. I would approach elec­tions with pro­foundly mixed emo­tions. For many years, the Repub­li­cans would run on plat­forms of reduc­ing Fed­eral spend­ing, but the Repub­li­cans would always strongly sup­port the National Insti­tutes of Health and National Sci­ence Foundation.

On the Demo­c­ra­tic side, there was plenty of lip ser­vice pro­claim­ing the value of sci­ence, but when it came time to fund the rel­e­vant Fed­eral agen­cies, Demo­c­ra­tic Con­gresses gen­er­ally had other pri­or­i­ties. Still, I voted (mostly) Demo­c­ra­tic and my bosses lob­bied (mostly) Repub­li­can con­gress­men, suc­cess­fully, for increased Fed­eral spend­ing on non-​​defense R&D. Later I became the boss and did the lob­by­ing, but that’s another story.

That is, up until 2000. That year the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science (SfN) meet­ing was in New Orleans. Before that, SfN meet­ings were delib­er­ately held dur­ing the late fall but always avoided Elec­tion Day. That year, for per­haps the first time, sched­ul­ing the meet­ing (with over 30,000 atten­dees) had become so cum­ber­some that we had to take the week we could get, and that included Elec­tion Day.

I voted absen­tee (not easy to do in those days in Mis­sis­sippi) and went off to the meet­ing to present my work. I stayed up late into the night watch­ing elec­tion returns, and sat­is­fied with the out­come, went to bed. The next morn­ing I grabbed a cup of cof­fee, walked the sev­eral blocks from my hotel to the cav­ernous con­ven­tion cen­ter in New Orleans, and to my sur­prise, there were lit­er­ally hun­dreds of peo­ple crowded around a few TV sets mounted into the atrium ceil­ing.  I remem­ber think­ing, “What are these peo­ple doing? The elec­tion is over.” But of course, it wasn’t nearly over. There was plenty of elec­tion left, as I found out a few min­utes into join­ing the group and star­ing at ‘The Morn­ing After’.

Some­thing else had changed. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and his bud­dies were no friends of sci­ence. I began to hear dis­turb­ing reports from my col­leagues, espe­cially those in the envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences, of out-​​and-​​out fab­ri­ca­tions and whole­sale cen­sor­ing of sci­en­tific research. I had din­ner with a grants review panel in a Bethesda restau­rant, and a pro­gram direc­tor for the National Insti­tutes of Health who I had known for many years went nearly postal (I was happy he wasn’t pack­ing heat) in his crit­i­cism of Bush Admin­is­tra­tion poli­cies on stem cell research. “Grass­roots” orga­ni­za­tions such as

Defend Sci­ence sprung up to, well, defend sci­ence, which had never needed defend­ing before in my post-​​Sputnik lifetime.

It was a sin­gu­lar moment. So I thought.

But along with other sci­en­tists, I’ve been dis­ap­pointed as the field is sub­jected to a blis­ter­ing attack from the Know-​​Nothing right. At the same time as the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion, occu­pied with other bat­tles, has offered only a weak defense, if any.

The Tea Party move­ment, in par­tic­u­lar, has exhib­ited a strong anti-​​intellectual ten­dency which not only scares me (as it would, since I’m an unabashed egghead) but even scares com­men­ta­tors from the right such as Rod Dreher (then a Dal­las Morn­ing News colum­nist, now a blog­ger for Belief​.Net)  and Kath­leen Parker.

It was Palin that sent the cat amongst the canaries. Sarah Palin (and her “intel­lec­tual” suc­ces­sor, Chris­tine O’Donnell) are the embod­i­ment of this epistemically-​​closed-​​and-​​proud-​​of-​​it New Pol­i­tics. At least Rea­gan seemed to wink at the idea that he wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, and he knew it. These guys (and gals) are stu­pid, they’re proud of being stu­pid (“can I call you Joe”) and they’re appeal­ing to all the stu­pid peo­ple out there that some­how feel that the child­like state of stu­pid­ity is some­thing to be aspired to.

I will let oth­ers opine on the global warm­ing aspect of this debate, but I will just drop a lit­tle fac­toid which I believe to be true but will leave for him to inves­ti­gate: all 37 Repub­li­can can­di­dates for the US Sen­ate believe that global warm­ing is a fal­lacy. As a sci­en­tist, I fought epis­temic clo­sure with every­thing I had. (Unsuc­cess­fully, I might add. We’re all closed.) What scares me are the peo­ple run­ning for state and national offices in 2010 who embrace it.

Refugee Status

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2 years ago
by filistro in

Yes­ter­day I sub­mit­ted a post to the NYT site about this blog. It was a straight for­ward promo and not even slightly on topic, and I was aston­ished to see it pub­lished today. Also, Jean’s only accepted post over there was one that con­tained our URL.

I think Nate has instructed his mod­er­a­tors to let us push our web­site, that he feels bad about the loss of the old site’s lively inter­ac­tion and knows that he owes us in part for dri­ving traf­fic through years of help­ing him attain the high pro­file he now occu­pies. At any rate, they cer­tainly don’t seem to mind. It might even be a good idea to test this the­ory by hav­ing few more of you post there in the com­ing week and include ref­er­ence to this site. It could well be more attrac­tive to peo­ple if they know some of you really smart folks are here… and not just light­weights like me. *g*

Also, I sus­pect a lot of the reg­u­lars have already pretty much given up on the NYT com­ments site, so we’re not going to gather them in with­out a few more sign­posts to help them.

So while I’m on the topic…what DO you all think of the new site? Has it been a good move for Nate, do you think? Do you like the com­ments over there? I actu­ally do, quite a lot. They’re much more infor­ma­tive than our old com­ments sec­tion used to be…but not nearly as much fun. I think both sites serve a dis­tinct purpose…the NYT site is meat and pota­toes, this one is dessert and cock­tails. It’s hard to achieve a per­fectly bal­anced site, but these two together are going to be just about perfect.

And while I’m at it… what do you all think about Murkowski’s write-​​in effort, and how it will play in Alaska? At the NYT, even the Alaskans seem hugely divided on the impli­ca­tions of her lat­est move. Par for the course this elec­tion cycle, I guess.

Any­how, enough ram­bling. If you’ve just arrived here from the NYT, wel­come. Stop in and say hi. If you’re one of the old crowd, we’ve missed you. (I even miss Muley and Charles. It seems to be some kind of men­tal ill­ness.) If you’re new and sim­ply curi­ous, we’re happy  to see you, too. Pull up a chair, grab a drink and jump in. Anywhere.

But be warned…we’re really, REALLY addictive!

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