Category Archives: politics

Mad as hell, and entertaining

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Via Twitter/BillCorbett: Back in 2002, John Scalzi pretty much nailed the three major strains of American political thought:

Liberals: The stupidest and weakest members of the political triumvirate, they allowed conservatives to turn their name into a slur against them, exposing them as the political equivalent of the kid who lets the school bully pummel him with his own fists (Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself).
…
Conservatives: Self-hating moral relativists, unless you can convince me that an intellectual class that publicly praises family values but privately engages in sodomy, coke and trophy wives is more aptly described in some other way.
…
Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board.

Prefiguring, it turns out, the best entry in the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2008, #43: You.

You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree.

Boycotting Louisiana over creationist law

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In the wake of Louisiana’s passage of a back-door Creationism “education” law, the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology is canceling plans to hold an upcoming conference in New Orleans. Good for them. The new location? Salt Lake City.

Funding creative science

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Stephen Quake laments the grant-approval process of most U.S. federal funding agencies, and suggests making room for risky proposals:

I wonder if this should also be the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded. Could we stimulate more discovery and creativity if more scientists had the security of their own salary and a long-term commitment to a minimal level of research support? Would this encourage risk-taking and lead to an overall improvement in the quality of science?

The NIH model Quake describes – which sets aside specific funding sources for out-of-the-box proposals – seems sensible, given additional funds for such use.

Dear Senator, part II

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Just found a follow-up email from Science Debate 2008, reporting that previously planned cuts to science funding in the still-under-debate economic stimulus bill have been reduced or withdrawn. Still no obvious coverage on ScienceDebate2008.com, which is frankly weird.

Dear Senator

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Sheesh. Of course science is the first thing they try to cut from the pending stimulus bill. Text free for the taking to anyone who wants to pester their congresscritters – which you should, if you care about science in the U.S.

OK, so it gets a little melodramatic at the end there, but I’m trying for impact. Edit as you see fit – individualized letters are more likely to have an impact.

Dear Senator,

I’m a graduate student in biology at the University of Idaho, and I’m writing to ask that you support President Obama’s stimulus plan, with full funding for basic scientific research.

Science and technology – the fruits of basic scientific research funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and other government scientific agencies – are responsible for half of all U.S. economic growth since World War II. Yet today, after years of virtually no increases in basic research funding, laboratories across the country are at risk of shutting down, with untold consequences for our long-term competitiveness in the global economy.

Basic research makes economic sense over the short term, too – with the increase in funding proposed in the stimulus bill, granting agencies would immediately be able to fund more of the grant requests they’re considering right now. That’s money to pay lab staff, and buy reagents and equipment – most often from American companies like Thermo Fisher and Qiagen.

For these reasons, the stimulus bill before the Senate originally contained vital increases in basic scientific research funding. Now, however, a group of senators, including Susan Collins and Ben Nelson, are proposing cuts to the stimulus bill that would eliminate much – and in the case of NSF, all – funding for science. Considering what a tiny portion of the bill’s proposed spending was already devoted to science funding, and the immediate and long-term value it would have brought our economy, this is a shortsighted idea at best.

So I hope you will give full support to President Obama’s stimulus bill, and reject the Collins-Nelson cuts in science funding. The scientific and economic future of our nation depend on this.

regards,
Jeremy B. Yoder

[I should also note that the talking points above come from an email sent out by Shawn Otto over the ScienceDebate2008 e-mail list; I can’t find coverage of this issue on the SD2008 site, however.]

Assuming the conculsion

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Yesterday I posted this exchange between Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and Attorney General nominee Eric Holder without comment. Thinking about it since, it occurred to me that, apart from its tremendous satisfaction for those of us in favor of the rule of law, this mini-argument sums up a lot about how we think about violence in general, and not just the kinds that are, technically, illegal. As a starting point, here’s the Cornyn-Holder exchange in summary:

Cornyn: If torture were the only way to prevent a terrorist attack that could kill bajillions of innocents, would it be OK to torture?
Holder: Uh – that never actually happens.
Cornyn: But what if it did?

Cornyn’s logic should be familiar to any of us who believe that violence is unacceptable, because it parallels (or, indeed, directly copies) an argument every pacifist has faced from skeptics at some point. It typically goes something like this:

But what if some guy broke into your house and put a gun to the head of your [pick one: child, wife, grandmother – or really any helpless (usually female) loved one], and there was no way to stop it except to shoot him? Wouldn’t you kill to save her?

Apart from how much this question tends to lean on certain ideas about gender roles (I once had a skeptic directly question my masculinity in the course of a conversation about this scenario), its weakness is that it assumes its own conclusion. That is, it asks whether you’d use violence if there were no other option but to use violence. But those of us who refuse violence do so because we’re convinced that there is never such a condition.


Photo by julianrod.

The best elaboration on this position is John Howard Yoder‘s pamphlet What would you do?, which points out that the grandmother-under-threat scenario assumes you have perfect knowledge of the attacker’s motives and intentions, that negotiation is impossible, and that Grandma has no moral interest in the situation besides her own survival. (Both my grandmothers are pacifists, too.) In other words, it’s nothing like real life.

It is, however, a lot like television. It almost seems facile to say this, but most of the plot of your average cop show, thriller, or other “action” drama is an exercise in creating assumed conclusions of violence. Excuses, that is, for violent, exciting, entertaining stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that as entertainment – how much of, e.g., science fiction is about coming up with a plausible explanation/excuse for why our heroes are, e.g., on another planet? There is something wrong with using the logic of a television show in real life, as a matter of national policy. Fortunately, the era of television-show logic for torture seems likely to end on 20 January, 2009. Here’s hoping it puts the U.S., and the world, a little closer toward ending the use of television-show logic for all violence.

Founding faith

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Jon Rowe profiles U.S. founding father Benjamin Rush, who, though generally cited as an orthodox Christian, showed ample evidence of freethinking. Rush wrote, for instance, that he “never doubted upon the subject of the salvation of all men,” and seems to have been far more interested in the spirit of the Gospel than proof-texting justifications, opposing both slavery and capital punishment. My holiday reading prominently featured H.W. Brand’s excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin – maybe Rush would make a good followup.

History’s first draft

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With nine days to go before the Inauguration, NPR sums up the outgoing administration, focusing on its favorite date.

Government

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In a rant set off by a billing dispute with his monolithic and uncaring local electric company, Slacktivist muses on the essential self-destructiveness of opposition to government qua government in a democracy:

Reflexive or visceral anti-government sentiment, in a democracy, is strangely popular given that it is both a form of self-loathing and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right now, for instance, there’s a pseudo-libertarian reading this very paragraph and shouting, “How naive! The government isn’t of, by or for the people — the government is against the people!” He’s wrong, of course, but if everyone believed that, then his nightmare could become reality. If all the citizens of a democracy abandon any belief in government as the servant of the people for the common good, and if they oppose every attempt to make it so, then they’re not going to remain the citizens of a democracy for very long.

In a democracy, government is, by definition, what the People do together – if government isn’t doing what it ought, whose fault can that be, exactly?