Amy Sullivan’s bad advice

Amy Sullivan is not one of the people I want advising the Democratic party…unless, that is I suddenly decided I wanted to be a Republican, and was feeling too lazy to change my voter registration. She’s got one note that she plays loudly over and over again: Democrats need to be more religious. Why? So we can get more religious people to vote for our candidates, and so we can steal the Republicans’ identification as the party of faith.

Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived as benefiting people of faith. Republican political dominance depends on being able to manipulate religious supporters with fear, painting the Democratic Party as hostile to religion and in the thrall of secular humanists. That image would take quite a blow if the party of Nancy Pelosi was responsible for bringing back Bible classes—even constitutional ones—to public schools.

By golly, she’s right! If the Democrats led the way in abandoning the principle of separation of church and state, if we institutionalized the teaching of Christianity in our public schools, and if we out-preached and out-prayed the Republicans and put up bigger crosses ad bigger flags in our front yards than they do, we’d win!

Let’s keep going with this. If we also pandered to big business more and did things like endorse strip-mining national parks and ditching those annoying safety regulations in the work place, we’d get more money and could fund bigger, bolder PR campaigns. Why not? Sullivan is simply endorsing the strategy of racing to the (religious) right, with the winner being the one who gets there the fastest and the farthest. Screw liberal and progressive values—all that matters is winning.

And it’s so easy. If we embrace faith-based policy, we can just ignore that hard reality stuff and believe whatever we want. For example, Sullivan seems to buy into that abstinence nonsense:

A sign that Democratic leaders are beginning to get it is the plan—promoted by leaders such as Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton—to lower abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Full-throated support of this effort, and a recognition that abstinence education plays a role in lowering teen pregnancy rates (along with birth control), puts Democrats alongside the majority of voters on this difficult issue, and it is especially appealing to moderate evangelicals.

Well, our current abstinence programs don’t work and people are
urging that the programs be abandoned. Birth control works, abstinence programs don’t. That’s one difficulty, that awkward suggestion that we should be on the side of programs that actually accomplish something. For another, it’s delusional thinking to believe that the reason abortion is such a hot-button issue is because of some desire to help babies: it’s mainly about controlling women and controlling sexuality. I would like at least one political party in this country to be willing to say that sex is fun and an important part of being human. Two sets of prissy prudes shaking their withered fingers at me and vying for leadership is just too much to take.

Kevin Drum is smart enough to recognize what he’s being asked to do, but doesn’t seem to be willing to think about what it means.

Religion has been a big topic in liberal circles for a while now, and I have to admit that I always feel a bit like a bystander when the subject comes up. It’s not like I can fake being religious, after all. Still, no one is really asking people like me to do much of anything except stay quiet, refrain from insulting religion qua religion in ways that would make people like Brinson unwilling to work with us, and let other people do the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading moderate Christians to support liberal causes and liberal candidates. That’s not much to ask, and Amy makes a pretty good case that it would make a difference.

Yes, Mr Drum, that’s correct: we freethinkers are being asked to sit down and shut up and stay away from politics, and allow the evangelicals to shape the party. Let’s let both political parties be vocally religious and give up the whole idea of a secular America.

Not much to ask, huh?

No thanks. I’ve got another suggestion. How about if we reassure the evangelicals that they will always be free to worship as they please, there will be no interference by the government in their religion, but that in a nation with so many different religions floating around, we must and always will be a secular state and religion must stop interfering in government. Your belief in Jesus or Odin or the FSM is not a qualification for service in government (nor is it an obstacle), and isn’t even a testimonial to the quality of your character. The small-minded bigots who would like to see the non-religious effectively disenfranchised are not the solution to the Democratic party’s problems: they are the problem.

I’m not alone in this opinion—Atrios picks up on some of the same things.

Short takes

Never mind me, I’m running around with classes and meetings today…here are a few quick links.

Bush lied

And it’s caught on tape. He was briefed the day before Katrina hit, heard Brown say this was “the big one”, that it was a bigger threat than Hurricane Andrew was, that there was great risk of loss of life, and that the topping of the levees was of great concern, and then would say with a straight face several days later that he didn’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees. He assured everyone that they were fully prepared to deal with the disaster.

Liar.

That’s our president: a useless, worthless lump who declaims platitudes in response to dire warnings, does nothing, and lies about it afterwards.

(via Neurotopia)

Powerline spouts the party line. It was overtopping, not breaching! It’s the usual fine-grained parsing to avoid the real issue: callous neglect and incompetence and CYA evasiveness by our duly elected Republican leadership. Soon they’ll be arguing that it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

I thought we were winning this war

Afghanistan doesn’t look pretty, and this cuts awful close to home for a teacher.

Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes.

The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taleban rule has produced a “lost generation” in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.

Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taleban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.

Shooting kids on playgrounds? Butchering teachers for daring to instruct girls? When we fail to protect a whole generation like this, face it: you’ve lost the war.

The expected Powerline slapdown

Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they’re doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You’d think they’d learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.

Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket’s conclusion?

The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value politics over truth. So any time you see a news report on a “scientific” journal article that ostensibly has political implications, you should greet it with skepticism.

Wow. So any science article that discusses, say, evolution, climate, energy, reproduction, conservation, petroleum geology, glaciers, pesticides, extinction, wetlands, materials science, transportation, agriculture, neurobiology, HIV/AIDS (shall I go on?), demographics, deforestation, habitat loss, human genetics (I could keep this up all day), influenza, psychiatry, ethanol production, sexually transmitted disease, medicine in general, stem cells, weather, sex (OK, enough), all issues that have political implications, and which are therefore automatically suspect and tainted by <hiss>liberals? Jeez, John and Michael, why not just say, “Science is EVIL” and be done with it?When all the scientists are disagreeing with you, though, maybe instead you should wonder if you, people with no scientific competence at all, might just be wrong.

I’m pleased to say that we here at scienceblogs.com seem to be presenting a united front on this one, unsurprisingly. Chris Mooney also points out the absurdity of rejecting in its entirety the so-called “liberal” academy, and Tim Lambert rips into the bogus interpretations of the Fumento article. I’ll have to gnaw on a few scraps that are left over.

Here, for example, is an instance of Fumento illogic.

Consider a report
by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between
1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably
blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going
back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious
reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out.

Look at that bit where he cites public data, with a link to a report by the CDC. He claims that the interpretation of the report is that “gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason”—I can only assume that he figures absolutely no one who reads his column will actually, like, look at his links. The report says nothing of the kind. Right at the top of the report is a graph that shows year-by-year variation, with trend lines on it to show that there is an overall decline in the number of males born. The report specifically discusses the reasons for it, explaining that it only looks at a few relationships and listing others. Here’s the CDC’s conclusion, plainly stated in the final paragraph.

Changes in the sex ratio at birth in the United States have been
attributed to many different factors. The factors examined in this report
include age of mother, birth order, and race and Hispanic origin of
mother. Other factors not examined here but cited by others in determining the sex of a child and, thus, the sex ratio at birth are weight
of mother, stress, age of father, family size, geographic and climatic
conditions, environmental toxins, and a preference for male offspring.
As such, the effect of these factors should be considered in under
standing the annual variation and overall decline in the sex ratio at birth.

How does he get away with this? He cites a report and claims that its conclusions are the exact opposite of what it actually says!

Assrocket just gullibly swallows it all whole. There is a whole parade of similarly mangled science results in Fumento’s article, and another is the recent Hwang Woo Suk scandal.

Fumento’s second example is embryonic stem cell research, where the most important “science” underlying public enthusiasm for cloning turned out to be fraudulent:

Even Science’s awful stem-cell embarrassment wasn’t purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior — namely adult stem cells.

Neither Powerline nor Fumento understand this result. It was an important and expected step in stem cell research, but it was only one result, and certainly wasn’t the foundation of public or scientific enthusiasm for this line of research. Nor does it in anyway invalidate the promise or past results of stem cell researchers, and the claim that everyone is sitting around wondering “How could I have been fooled?” is ridiculous.

  • Hwang Woo Suk flat out lied. I don’t know how journalists, editors, and scientists are supposed to know that until it gets worked over by other researchers, as it was. Of course we can be suckered by someone who is malicious and dishonest, for a while at least; the point of science as a community enterprise is that there is frequent cross-checking and examination of result, which means the truth will eventually out.
  • The Korean teams have had a string of successes in stem cell technology that are valid and have been double-checked. This wasn’t some nobody coming out of nowhere, but a research team with a good track record.
  • This technique of transforming somatic nuclei has worked in other animals than humans. There is no reason to think it isn’t doable—and I expect the work will be done someday. The fraud picked a good target, one that is just within our reach, nothing too outrageous, and all he did was nudge himself over the finish line first, not invent something outrageous.
  • the ridiculous cheering over adult stem cells from a scientific ignoramus is absurd. Probably one of the most prominent researchers in adult stem cells is Dr Catherine Verfaillie, right here at the University of Minnesota, and she has flatly said that she thinks the embryonic stem cell research is an invaluable complement to her work. Get that? She’s a person with a strong vested interested in AS work, and SHE is saying we need more ES work. Do Hindrocket and Fumento think they know better than a genuine researcher in the field? (yeah, probably. Incompetents don’t know the limits of their competence.)

This happens every time Powerline mentions anything about science. I think we ought to encourage a new reflex: every time Powerline mentions the word “science”, come check out scienceblogs.com, and you’ll find several of us howling with laughter.

It’s not just Phelps

i-9c1fbdc986607debc8fb455f8ff88457-intolerance.jpg

Followers of that hateful lunatic, Fred Phelps, have been making the news for picketing military funerals in Minnesota. Apparently, because the US tolerates (sorta) homosexuality, they feel that they should hit up random funerals and cuss out the dead for dying for homosexuality. Now our state legislators are considering laws to block that kind of behavior, because it “flies in the face of Minnesota values.” The values they’re talking about aren’t tolerance, though, but simply an opposition to meddling with the military.

Eva makes a very good point: the Republican leadership in this state seems to share Fred Phelps’ values. She has photos of a rally at the capitol in support of Michele Bachmann’s anti-gay amendment, a rally that was approvingly attended by our Republican governor. Those signs aren’t being carried by crazed Kansans, but by people of our state with good ol’ “Minnesota values”.

I can’t see any significant difference between Bachmann and Pawlenty, and the nutjobs of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Another black mark for the Bush administration

We shouldn’t be surprised when the Bush administration jiggers the scientific books:

In short, Oregon State University scientists reported in Science magazine that some logging practices may contribute to forest fires, rather than curbing them as conventional wisdom leads us to believe. The report ran contrary to current federal policy under the Bush administration, and the funding for the research group was suspended.

When reality conflicts with your ideology, it must be reality that’s in error.