A Ray of Hope For Americans and Scientific Literacy? 668
An anonymous reader with a snippet from Politico: "A finding in a study on the relationship between science literacy and political ideology surprised the Yale professor behind it: Tea party members know more science than non-tea partiers. Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative. However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn't, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said. Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him. 'I've got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I'd be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,' Kahan wrote. 'But then again, I don't know a single person who identifies with the tea party,' he continued.'" More at the Independent Journal Review.
Re:Medical professionals (Score:5, Interesting)
"This is only surprising if your idea of who supports the Tea Party segment of the Republican Party comes from MSNBC. Hint: most aren't social conservatives."
Perhaps even less surprising when you realize that the Tea Party itself did not identify with Republicans. It is true that they leaned somewhat conservative but there was a significant portion of liberals in their ranks, too.
The (modern) group that originally called itself the Tea Party was as fed up with the Republican Party as it was with the Democratic Party. It wasn't until later that the Republicans usurped their banner.
Re:That's unpossible! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be surprised too, as the Tea Baggers tend to think that climate change is some kind of made up science (Yale Climate Change Study [yale.edu]).
However, that result is consistent with the other study [yale.edu] which showed that people who hold a strong position only get more certain of that position as the get more information, regardless of what the information says. So you'd expect more scientifically-informed climate deniers to deny more strongly than less-informed client deniers.
It's also worth pointing out that the Tea Party movement as such has no position on climate change at all.
Re:actual "platform" (Score:4, Interesting)
First, that "Tea Party Platform" isn't THE Tea Party Platform, it's just one that some guy put together as a suggestion. There is no "official" platform, even though you can probably get most Tea Party members to agree with what's in it.
"Exactly what are 'excessive taxes?'"
Historically, the United States works quite well with a lower tax scheme - somewhere between 15% and 19% of GNP, and seems best around 18%. Every percentage point above 19, and the economy starts hurting. Every percentage point below 15, and we start having to cut essential services. Remember that "taxes" includes Federal and state and city-level taxes.
In short, '"excessive taxes" are the ones that reach the level where the US, as a whole, start saying "hey, that's too much money for what we get out if it." We passed that mark a long time ago.
"Because once you start cutting revenue you have to start cutting programs."
Yeah, but which programs? There are a LOT of programs, and quite a few of them are nowhere near necessary. Cowboy Poetry festivals, bridges to nowhere, shrimp running on treadmills, et cetera. Yeah, each of those are "small," but there are literally thousands of them. That adds up.
You might also note that most real Tea Party folks agree that we spend too much on the military - on the waste, that is. Medicare reform is also good, due to massive Medicare waste. Look up what the Tea Party folks are actually saying - and don't look at HuffPo or Kos for your quotes.
In other words, the Tea Party you have in your head isn't the Tea Party that actually exists.
You might have noticed that we had a "government shutdown" recently, in which only 17% of the actual government shut down. And almost nobody noticed outside of the bureaucrats who had to spend a week or so at home. People complained about the "losses" of the shutdown, but a fair amount of that "loss" was "money we didn't spend." We also just took out another $328 billion in loans to keep spending.
You don't think we could lost 5% or 10% of the US government without noticing? The last couple of weeks show that we can.
Re:What other variable were examined? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:actual "platform" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes indeed, this is how dirty politics works. Everyone votes for the whole pile of pork in order to keep the one program that actually benefits them personally.
The continuing resolution that reopened the government contained lots of pork, according to this. [dailykos.com] Another article talked about a spending increase of $1.2 billion. It's hard to tell, because the money is hidden in the final bill [thehill.com] as amendments to previous legislation, saying things like "in place of the number X substitute bigger number Y."
This is a continuing resolution that is supposed to be continuing the previous budget until a new one can be worked out. And wasn't supposed to be negotiated at all. Senate Democrats balked at the first CR that contained extraneous legislation, but this one was just fine. Nobody wanted to deny the widow of Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) her $174,000 payout.
Outrage for rent, nothing else (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got it backwards. That astroturf "movement" was funded and assisted so that large numbers of people that opposed the regulations that Koch and the other funders disliked could be bussed in to protests to give an appearance of a lot of support. The people that organised the transport, media releases etc were not "Tea Partiers" themselves but professionals paid to create events. Most of the tea party was literally a rented crowd which is why it has no cohesion and nobody within doing much in the way of organising anything. Left alone they do not appear to be able to organise a drunken party in a brewery.
I'm not knocking the individuals who stand for whatever they do, but instead that it's a disorganised mob that cancel each other out and ultimately don't really stand for anything. They are a weird "only in America" footnote whose time passed once the adult supervision driving the busses decided to do something else.
The ironies are many, the largest of which are the strident calls for replacing the United States with the sort of fuedalistic system that the Boston tea party was a protest against. "Getting the government out of people's lives" really means letting the rich and powerful run a country without interference from the people - just like those English Lords could do.
Re:Why even publish this study? (Score:2, Interesting)
2) Refused to even allow debate about gun-law reform as children are murdered in movie theatres and preschools. (2012)
That's because some of us are intelligent enough to have observed that criminals do not obey laws. We have also observed that governments which disarm their people become tyrannical. Want my guns? Come get 'em.
3) Held hostage the national debt forcing the most austere sequester in federal government history, leading to spending cuts and furloughs (2013)
Good. Any spending cut is a good spending cut. As it turns out, us fiscally conservative people you hate use our money more wisely than the government does.
4) Shut down the government and almost lead to the worst global economic disaster since the Great Depression (TWO DAYS AGO)
Funny. Two weeks of no government and I didn't notice a single difference. Global economic disaster? Melodrama much?
If you were to get a proper representation of the Tea-Party demographic (the three-C's: climate-change deniers, creationists, capitalists), you would find that there are more GEDs and high-school drop-outs than college elite. You would also find that multiple studies have proven that the college elite (read: EDUCATED) tend to be liberal.
You might not be patting yourself on the back if you'd stood in line to vote in my precinct. Obama's biggest constituencies seem to be welfare trash, non-English-speaking immigrants, drug addicts, and various other dregs of the big city. Conversely, everyone I know who owns a business AND a college degree votes Republican. The backbone of the American economy is not interested in the opinions of ivory tower liberals or Starbucks coffee-jerks.
Re:News Flash: Partisan Caricature Found Incorrect (Score:2, Interesting)
Just to add a bit to this, most of our perception of political entities we are not directly involved with are largely shaped by the wording others use to define and deal with them. In the recent shutdown episode, some of the conservative commentators have compared tactics by the president and democrats with Saul D. Alinsky's rules for radicals and found most of them to be in use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals [wikipedia.org]
I will highlight a few that specifically intend to instil a picture of a group that is not consistent with reality.
âoeRidicule is manâ(TM)s most potent weapon.â
âoeThe threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.â
âoeIf you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.â
âoePick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.â
If in fact these tactics are in use, it is no wonder people find out what they think about the other guy is often wrong or vastly over inflated.
progressives (Score:4, Interesting)
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he is suggesting that progressives (educated scientifically literate liberals) want a philosopher king. Woodrow Wilson could be considered the prototype of such a king. An authoritarian schoolmaster if there ever was one. Willing to trample the rights of the individual to make the correct decision *for* that individual. The fact he was very well educated and probably right quite a large portion of the time doesn't alleviate the effects of removing individual responsibility and freedom upon creative thought.
And the notion that a greedy optimization algorithm like a anarcho-capitalist pure free market is so incredibly elegant that it must work, neglects the nasty inelegant humans that are part of that market and screw everything up. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how elegant it is. I think that is the mysticism the gp was talking about. The faith Ron Paul has placed in elegant ideas often involves handwaving and appeals to common sense, rather than empircal tests. I think that is somewhat unfair as he does cite historical incidents, he just has different interpretations from his detractors. Also doing correctly scaled economic tests that control for all the variables is impossible. Still, he's kinda handwavy even compared to economists.
Re:News Flash: Partisan Caricature Found Incorrect (Score:3, Interesting)
Arguing that the federal government should not spend more money than it has in the depths of a recession is remarkably ignorant.
Re:Not Surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? George Washington lost to the French who were the only ones still operating with a system ran by Dukes, Earls (actually they didn't have Earls) and a Monarch who thought he was appointed by God.
Now the English at the time of George Washington had a Parliament who was partially elected (the elected House controlled the purse) by the land owners and larger renters but was in need of electoral reform with whole cities without representation and ridings (electoral districts) with only a couple of voters who were quite happy to sell their vote to a rich business man. It had been 80 years since the last King who thought he was appointed by God was booted out by Parliament which finally was in undisputed control (The Supremacy of Parliament). So the King had about the same political power as the current Queen though he was more vocal. The Lords did have one house of Parliament so they could slow down and affect the democratic process and do things like push for limited copyright when the elected people were going to make it forever.
It was Parliament that enacted the laws that pissed off the colonists, a partially elected Parliament who did not represent the colonists and truthfully represented the rich, who were a mixture of business men who didn't want competition and landed gentry who thought they were special because of their parents.
Doesn't trust (Score:4, Interesting)
My co-worker is a Tea Party advocate, and I generally consider him bright, although a tad stubborn.
His issue with "science" is that he believes people in general are motivated by their wallet; and climate science, for example, is allegedly heavily biased toward "alarmist" results in order to justify yet more studies of a (allegedly fake) growing threat. If there are no fires, then nobody hires fire-fighters.
And evolutionists are allegedly biased to "deny a creator" so that they can sin without penalty. He knows all the usually down-side talking points, like the Piltdown fraud, the relatively suddenness of the Cambrian Explosion, few if any new phyla since then, etc.
Complex topics are difficult to verify on one's own and one has often has to rely on expert interpretation of fossils, weather patterns, etc.
Perhaps if he really dug into the topics, he'd see the stronger evidence, but it's not his interest to do such. He likes military history the most and reads only cursory articles on science-related topics, usually from biased sources. You are not going to "get to the bottom" of the topic that way.
As a semi-side note, I once wanted to "get to the bottom" of the UFO mystery and purchased many books on the topic from both sides. Unfortunately I still can't come to a conclusion. The skeptics don't make a good enough case to stop exploring UFO's. I consider it an "open mystery" still. Not everything has an available answer. I would note that the top skeptics surprisingly don't claim witnesses to the top cases are lying, but rather propose psychological explanations. But those explanations are odd, full of a few contradictions, and untested.
Re:Medical professionals (Score:5, Interesting)
"One of the biggest reasons the libertarian and Green Parties get glossed over is that about 80% of their platforms are functionally identical or compatible to existing platforms of other parties."
Just no. First, the Greens are primarily a one-issue party. And second, while there are a few vague similarities between Libertarian values and the Republican platform, they are not even remotely the same. Especially when you consider that even when it comes to those similarities, the Republicans over the last few decades have been almost all talk and no walk. 80% is way, WAY off. If you are measuring actions, rather than words, try 10%.
Not that I blame you personally. The Libertarian party is widely misunderstood, in part precisely because of misinformation from both the Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, in particular, have frequently characterized Libertarians as being "far right", when nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, it's not even close. The Republicans, on the other hand, simply try to marginalize the Libertarians, because the Libertarians really mean what the Republicans only pretend, when it comes to "smaller government". (But again, that's only a part of the Libertarian platform.)
"That might be more believable if the Tea Party had not challenged republicans who held safe seats in government during the primaries just to lose the general election to political adversaries. What you are claiming would require the republicans to actually defeat themselves in an attempt to make themselves win under a false pretense. That's a little like a bank robber asking the cops to drive the get away car at his next heist."
You are arguing against yourself, and and making MY argument for me. Tea Partiers running against Republicans? Then how could Republicans BE Tea Partiers? This is actually part of my own argument. The Republicans saw the writing on the wall. They saw they were getting stiff opposition so they leaned in the direction the wind was blowing. But even those Tea Party principles they claim to have adopted, they adopted in weakened form. And they only did so because they were being challenged by the Tea Party.
"I think the recent government shut down proves you wrong on this. It was ineffective action but if you paid attention to the contents of Ted Cruze's speeches or the speeches of the Tea Party members who were behind it, you would understand that they did it specifically because the people asked them too do something."
No shit. I repeat: they saw the writing on the wall, and saw that the American public was highly supportive of the Tea Party. So they do those things. There is no conflict or contradiction there with what I was saying. Example: Ron Paul ran on the Republican ticket, yet few people would mistake him for anything but a Libertarian (although he does hold a few typical Republican values that conflict with Libertarian values). On the other hand, I don't think anybody would mistake Ted Cruz for anything but a Republican.
"So you suggest that the republican party put on masks and pretended to be tea part members for some sort of gain. What type of gain have they received? what gain has the republicans received when it only divided the party showing the difference between the establishment and the tea party conservatives? Your own president marks a clear distinction between the two, so which is it? One in the same or two separate movements?"
I'm not "suggesting" it. It's a statement of fact. Look it up. They had to adopt "Tea Partier" principles or lose elections. It's that simple.
Re:actual "platform" (Score:4, Interesting)
I was thinking about eliminating the Department of Education first. Merge Commerce, Agriculture,and HHS. If you really want an Education department, merge it into Labor. You could also merge Labor and Commerce, as they were up to 1913 or so.
Merge DHS into Justice as an extension of the FBI.
You could put Energy into Commerce also.
Now, to complete the initial reduction, radically overhaul the tax code and put half the IRS out of work, along with a third of the CPAs and corporate counsel. These are clever people, and will find a job on K Street if nowhere else.
Disbanding Social Security, Medicare, and such requires decades, as current/prospective retirees are locked into these programs. Leaving Medicaid to the States would not take much. The ACA is a major impediment, bit if we did all of the above, then we are probably killing the ACA also.
None of this will happen unless there is a cultural change in Washington, which is probably only going to happen when a third political party achieves significant victories in elections and changes the dynamic. I'm mildly optimistic, but very mildly.
Re:You've met many more than you know (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anyone ever told you you're an assumptive, arrogant ass?
Or maybe they'll be skeptical of your motives and your logic. Given how the Tea Party conveniently appeared only after Obama was elected, I'd be skeptical too.
But then are you a member of the Tea Party? It has no official representation or stance, so anyone can claim anything and be a "member" of the Tea Party.
There's a lot more to the tea party than just fiscal conservatism.
There you go again, assuming you know anything about the person you're attacking. Additionally, "conservative" these days isn't a very good label to apply to yourself, particularly since it's gotten tied pretty tightly to the social regressives.
You do, because I see sites like this: http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ [teapartypatriots.org] and I'm left to wonder if they have any plan other than "OMG FORCE THE COUNTRY TO DEFAULT AND DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" It's 100% anti-Obama, Democrats are bad, burn it all down nonsense with absolutely nothing presented as alternative solutions. You say fiscal responsibility, but none of these groups existed until Obama took office. Where the shit were they when Bush started dumping money into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
And even NUTTIER sites like http://www.teaparty.org/ [teaparty.org] claiming on the front page that "Ex-Navy SEAL: Government provoking vets to bring on martial law" - This is just part of why I cannot take the Tea Party seriously.
Re:You've met many more than you know (Score:3, Interesting)
The Tea Party appeared after Obama was elected because Obama is of the far-left and the Republican Party doesn't give a shit about ordinary Americans. Obama's mentor - the man who had the most influence on his life - should have gone to prison for bombing the US Capitol building. Yes, that's right, domestic terrorism of the Boston Bomber sort.
After the NSA revelations, who can really say that martial law is out of the question? The NSA stuff confirmed what a lot of "nutters" had been saying for a long time.
You're a prime example of why nobody besides the Tea Party is taking the Tea Party seriously. According to the standard political spectrum that the entire world has used for decades (at least), Obama is near-right and moving further to the right every year. If you ever met an actual "lefty" I have a feeling your brain would literally implode from an inability to comprehend what you're seeing. They're still around in Canada and Europe, if you want to observe some in the wild.
Also, you seem to be confused about what the term "martial law" means. Martial law is declared by the government, but you seem to be implying that private citizens should be declaring martial law on the government. I believe that's referred to as a "revolution" or a "civil war".
Having an upside-down and inside-out understanding of common political and legal definitions makes it really difficult for anyone to take you seriously. Even if we are fully in agreement about the NSA overreach and many other things.
Re:Medical professionals (Score:4, Interesting)
simple test.
just ask them to say the word, "Obama".
listen to how they say it.