Now Roger Simon is getting pissy about ID. Good. He should.
Via the irascible Richard Bennett, who has a few things to say himself.
And before any accuses me of smearing Richard, let me just say that irascible in today’s idiotic world is a high compliment. At least from me. From one cranky bastard to another, I guess.
ppGaz
… says Simon.
He supports “separation of church and state”, but “has no objection” to throwing it aside in favor of feelgood crapola, or pandering to the weepy bathosphere. And of course, talking as though “the mall” and “the courtroom” are just two similar places where people hang out makes him sound like an uninformed gradeschool kid. Uh, duh!
Religious artifacts will not be displayed in courtrooms as long as those of us who actually do support separation have anything to say about it.
The gentleman may be a fine writer, but a fine political thinker, he ain’t.
circlethewagons
Silly ppGaz, don’t you know that the founding fathers were really a bunch of cutups and wiseacres and the whole Constitution thing was just them being satiric.
The line “Separation of Church and State” used to bring down the house back then.
Or so I have read.
On the Renew America website.
Oh,Boy.Stupidity!
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html
I’m sorry, where do you see Separation of Church and State in the US Constitution?
ppGaz
So, in today’s world, they’d be blog owners?
;-)
ppGaz
Right next to the passage where it grants rights of citizenship to zygotes, and right before it grants Congress the right to prescribe pledges of allegiance.
Mr.Ortiz
Since no one (none of the regular posters anyway) who visits this site believes in ID, let’s move the debate forward. The intellectual reason against teaching ID is obvious: it’s a waste of time and adds confusion to an already poorly taught subject (I didn’t really understand Darwin’s theories until I read his book in college). But is there a legal argument against it? If ID is creationism in disguise, that disguise may be enough to get around seperation of church and state. If it’s legal to say “under God” in the pledge of allegiance (debatable), then it’s presumably legal to teach that God created life, as long as you don’t specify whose god. As offensive as it may be to our intelligence, there’s no law I know of against teaching things that are wrong or controversial, otherwise we’d never agree on a History curriculum.
I almost hope ID wins in court. Once teachers are required to teach it, you can’t stop them from teaching WHY it’s controversial, WHY it’s not science, WHY it’s wrong. Then watch the religious nuts push to get religion out of school and back in their homes where it belongs. Or am I being naive?
Irascible Richard Bennett
It’s right here, in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
In the language of the 18th century, an “establishment of religion” was a state-sponsored church, like the Church of England, where even today the leader is chosen by the government. The framers probably made a mistake here, as a state-sponsored church would have killed religion in the US, whereas free exercise has given us all these fanatics on the far left and the far right.
But it’s more than mildly interesting that that this discussion of ID has immediately veered off toward religion, isn’t it?
circlethewagons
Oh,Boy.Stupidity!, I didn’t claim that the phrase was actually in the Constitution.
After all, everybody knows that the phrase comes from Jefferson’s infamous letter to the Danbury Baptists.
Geez.
jill
If anyone in Philly is interested, Chris Mooney, the author of, The Republican War on Science, will be giving a talk at the Friends Select School, 17th and the Parkway @ 7pm tonight.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Somebody should tell Chris Mooney he’s a vile partisan hack and then tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail.
The Democrat War on Science is just as bad, and probably has more severe policy consequences than anything the poor hapless Republicans are doing.
Marcus Wellby
Evolution is another liberal lie, like carbon dating and the whole “round Earth” theory.
jill
“The Democrat War on Science is just as bad, and probably has more severe policy consequences than anything the poor hapless Republicans are doing.”
You mean like wanting to listen to scientists over businesses?
DougJ
At least the Republicans *have* a plan to defeat science. Where’s the Democrats’ plan?
Irascible Richard Bennett
I mean like fabricating social science studies to support whatever the fashion of the day happens to be in social engineering, jill. Shall I name names? Start with the two Lenores, Weitzman and Walker, continue on through the Urban Institute’s child support studies, take a side-trip through the Taylor report on domestic violence and welfare, and continue on through some of the recent work on lesbian parenting.
The Democrat War on Science doesn’t even conform to Geneva Conventions.
jg
Exactly DougJ. All those liberals do is sit around criticising the Rovian machinations, where’s their machinationist?
Tim F
Folks who use ‘Democrat’ rather than ‘Democratic’ because focus groups thought it sounded more pejorative, have very little to say about partisan hackdom that I will care about.
Vladi G
Well, at least Richard knows his Republican code.
Tim F
Please, do elaborate. In what direction would you prefer it veer?
Tim F
Beat you by four minutes, Vladi. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
jill
Ah yes, the social sciences, how naive of me. Thank you for putting me in my place like a good repub, bennett.
Vladi G
I think my comment was more clever. :)
Tim F
Perverting social science research is a bit like corrupting a prostitute.
If I were our distinguished Republican visitor I’d regain some credibility by citing something from the hard sciences. I heard that Michael Crichton wrote a book recently…
Irascible Richard Bennett
Any time, heathen devil.
Irascible Richard Bennett
And who says Republicans have no respect for science?
jg
I liked the article that john linked to…….then the author showed up spoke. Ruined everything.
John Cole
A.) I don’t know who you guys think Richard Bennett is, but he is no fire-breathing social con fool.
B.) Anyone who thinks that all social science research is corrupt is simply being unduly unfair to the number of people who honestly attempt to research things fairly.
C.) Anyone who disregards the nasty policy outcomes that do come from the types of stuff Richard is discussing is making a mistake. Creationism or failing to believe in evolution hasn’t ruined any lives. Some of the things Richard refers to has…
D.) Tim F.- When Richard wrote:
His point was that even though creationists pretend ID is science, every discussion of ID veers to religion. Why?
Because it isn’t science, and everyone knows it. That was Bennett’s point.
Vladi G
Was there anyone here that didn’t get that the first time?
John Cole
Vladi- Read my comment again. I was talking to Tim.
Irascible Richard Bennett
I feel bad for jg:
so I’d like to cheer him/her up: “Democrats good, Republicans bad. Kill, kill, kill.”
Feel better now?
jg
No.
Idiot.
You assume I’m a democrat right?
Do you have any idea what ruined it for me? Wanna guess?
Tim F
Thank you for correcting me. On the internet it gets very easy to hear things in the wrong tone, since text has no tone at all.
Nelson Muntz
Lay down with dogs John Cole, get up with fleas. Enjoy your new ID bearing overlords.
Ha Ha!
Krista
I wouldn’t exactly call them poor or hapless. And while believing in creationism or ID may not have ruined lives, the mindset that tends to accompany those beliefs HAS ruined lives. Especially when you have people in a position of authority. And I know that there are probably many exceptions, but I think it’s rather safe to presume that a large percentage of those people in authority who believe in creationism or ID, are also likely to believe that the morning-after pill causes abortions, or that allowing new lines to be used for stem-cell research is wrong. Both sides can be equally guilty of applying their own agenda to science in order to distort facts.
So let’s not call them “poor and hapless” when they’re making people suffer because of their views on science. OK?
jobiuspublius
Speaking of terrorists:
I’ve asked a billion times, what to do about Iraq and stuff like that. This is what you guys get for not telling me. Nyah!
Tim F
Not saying that it’s all bad. But lord, much of it ain’t good.
John S.
If he’s the same guy who posts on Think Progress as ‘fake but accurate’ (which I’m inferring from the title of his blog Richard Bennett: Fake but accurate), then he may not be a fool, but he sure says some pretty foolish things.
When he calls the 22 Democrats who voted against Roberts “fanatics”, he only lives up to that reputation.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Well, duh.
Many Republicans are way off the mark on the hard sciences of climate change and evolution, and many more Democrats are making a hash of social science. The Republican failings are of very little consequence since climate engineering and genetic engineering aren’t within the scope of government control. Even if the US stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, India, China, and the rest of the world would keep on spewing out the CO2 so it doesn’t matter.
But a whole lot of what government does relates to social engineering, and to the extent that this work is guided by junk studies it produces junk results. Junk research on teaching kids to read and do math makes a difference when it leads to junk programs; junk welfare policy leads to massive rates of family dissolution, out-of-wedlock birth, and increases in poverty; it goes on.
So while it’s very gratifying to whack the Reeps on their failure to get down with stem cells, global warming, and evolution, these things don’t have nearly as much bearing on my personal little place in the world as the Dems’ addiction to junk social research.
Irascible Richard Bennett
What the fuck is Think Progress? I never heard of it. And yes, anybody who voted for Ginsburg and against Roberts can only be a fanatic.
John S.
Either you’re putting me on because I am right, or you’re being sincere about never having heard of Think Progress. I found it to be rather ‘coincidental’.
And you’ve just broken your own metric for “fanatacism”, since a good number of people on your list weren’t even around to vote for Ginsberg in the first place.
Also, Ginsberg wasn’t up for Chief Justice. She wasn’t particularly controversial, either. Especially since her name was put forth by Orrin Hatch, a Republican.
But why quibble over these minor differences?
Tim F
Republican policies today come directly from social science “studies” that don’t hold any more water than my favorite cappellini sieve.
Schools can’t accept federal sex-ed money unless they tell kids that AIDS passes through sweat and tears and that condoms don’t work, plus abstinence-only policies based on what exactly I’ll never know. Education policies based around the ‘Houston miracle’ that wasn’t. The unstoppable gun-crime researcher John Lott. Practically every pundit to the right of James Carville carries credentials from some cooked-up “think tank” where a casual visit will find more retarded GOP-friendly studies than you can shake a tree at.
Let’s please leave economics out of the ‘sciences’ for now. I really, really don’t have the time to go into how far our current economic policies, if you want to call them that, have divorced themselves from reality.
So you say tit, I say tat. Grand policy schemes always find some study to justify them, or they don’t and the policy happens anyway. If there’s a ‘war’ on the social sciences then they already lost because they won’t find an ally in any political party on the planet.
Krista
I agree that there is a lot of junk research out there, but I do think that you’re making light of the current Republican attack on hard science. Stem cell research, while it may not affect as many of us, certainly affects a sizeable number of people, and with devastating impact. There are also inexcusable delays in having the morning-after pill widely available, because of Republicans willfully disregarding scientific facts. I’m meeting you halfway here, by agreeing that the Dems have been responsible for a lot of expensive, worse-than-useless studies. All I ask is that you take the Republican attack on hard science a little more seriously than you seem to be.
ppGaz
Oh dear, that must the Irascible part coming out.
“Can only be” is probably the best lead in to a straightline ever invented. “Can only be.” My oh my, oh dear!
No, much more likely that they are just posturing and acting out whatever political games are being played now in the Senate. Fanatacism most likely has nothing to do with it. the Senate is peopled by millionaires, mostly, and by politicians, totally. These are not fanatics. They are game players, and compromisers, and tit-for-tat’ers, and …. legislators, one of the oddest species on earth.
Not fanatics. Fanatics don’t get elected to the Senate except in rare circumstances. And if they do, they don’t last long, because the old-boys’ power structure there eats things like fanatics for breakfast.
Tim F
Krista, you let them off too easily. Republican social policies have roots just as ugly as anything the Democrats cooked up.
Krista
Tim F – I try not to say anything unless I’m 100% sure about it, and could provide proof if required. I probably could have tried to research the history of Republican social policies, in time to make a response…but I just really didn’t feel like it.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Here’s the deal Krista: the Republicans could be all wet on stem cells, and still the private sector and the states will come up with the money to support the research; and worst case, it moves to some other country and we can import any worthwhile therapies that come out of it. But you’re wrong about why the Republicans are queasy about it: it’s not because they have an issue with the science, whatever it is, but it’s because of their values collision with something that to them looks like the involuntary harvesting of body parts. It’s not science, it’s religion and ethics; same goes for morning-after pills, which would lead to more casual sex, something abhorrent to Baptists because it looks too much like dancing.
Similarly, you can’t bash the Reeps on genetic engineering when most of the opposition comes from granola-eating hippie Democrats addicted to the notion that fear should guide public policy (the “precautionary principle”). And the big AIDS deniers are progressive Democrats; Christine Maggiore, the LA woman who gave AIDS to her little girl and killed her is the prime exhibit.
Tim F, the party of John Lott has nothing on the party of Belleisles, whose tract was timed to affect the 2000 election.
And ppGaz, they may be more cynical than practicing fanatics, but the anti-Roberts vote was calculated to appeal to fanatics, as you well know.
John S.
John, you may claim that this Richard guy isn’t a fool, but when he keeps spouting nonsense like this:
He does a pretty good job of proving you wrong.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Do tell; explain why, if you can.
ppGaz
Good lord. I guess the secret to blogosphere success now is to just make things up and sling ’em out there.
The “fanatic” wing of the Democractic party is a pretty small voting bloc. I seriously doubt that these boring millionaires are pandering to those people. As I said, much more likely that they are posturing to each other, paying back debts, doing what legislators mostly do, which is to trade votes with each other and play games with each other.
But of course, rather than having you make up some asinine scenario, or me make up a more sensible one, somebody could always ask them, or take them offline for a background conversation, do some reporting, and find out. Of course, that would require actual work, digging for facts, checking and cross-checking. Who wants to do that when it is easier and quicker to go online and just make shit up?
Another day in the blahsphere. I’m sure you’ll be a big success here.
Jon H
“If anyone in Philly is interested, Chris Mooney, the author of, The Republican War on Science, will be giving a talk at the Friends Select School, 17th and the Parkway @ 7pm tonight.”
Crap, I work three blocks from there, but only found out now (9 pm).
Vladi G
Yeah. Only, they know that crap won’t fly with mainstream America, so they try and shit all over the science to achieve what their religious message can’t. They don’t give a crap what the science says. They just want to make sure everyone else gets so damn confused by it that they’ll give up. What impeccable principles.
Jon H
“Creationism or failing to believe in evolution hasn’t ruined any lives. ”
Tell that to the Lysenkoists.
;^)
Irascible Richard Bennett
ppGaz, you’re not really up-to-date on judicial confirmation battles if you believe they’re about:
Shall I give you a list of names to research? Yes, I shall. Start with Alliance for Justice (Nan Aron), People for the American Way (Ralph Neas), National Organization for Women (Kim Gandy), and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (Wade Henderson). These are called “the groups” who oppose each and every high-profile Republican appointment on exactly the same grounds: wants to roll back Roe, hates affirmative action, isn’t nice to unions; note the absence of judicial reasoning.
The groups use every nomination as a fund-raising opportunity, as they each serve a fanatic base. By voting against the nominee, the Democratic senators enhance the groups’ credibility, stoke the fears of their supporters, and keep the money rolling in. This is the dynamic that’s made confirmation hearings so toxic since Bork.
Do your homework, dude, and some day your opinions might be worth something. Right now, they’re simply knee-jerk and an egregious waste of electricity.
demimondian
Tim F–
Oh, really, Tim? Would you like to back up that claim?
Is there bad pop psychology? Yup. Bad sociology? You betcha. But I would wager that if you went and started grovelling though _Psychonomics_ (which is not a journal on pyschology and economics), you’d feel right at home there. Today, if you look, you can find Women’s Studies journals which have high and rigorous standards and do reputable work. (Yes, much of the work in the 80’s and early 90’s was tripe.)
Before you go off making claims like that, you really ought to go look at the evidence. The republican war on science has focused on the social sciences for years, while the “hard sciences” have been immune from it.
Shygetz
Hey Richard Bennett–if the Dems are such enemies of science, why is it that scientists vote heavily Democratic?
jobiuspublius
And the party in power never does anything remotely like that. Oh, no no no.
Wasn’t Bork toxic enough all by himself? Aren’t you bolstering the image of his opponents, those great Bork slayers, by blaming them for Borks failure?
ppGaz
Get an education, dude. Correlation is not causation.
Shygetz
This statement clearly demonstrates how little Richard knows about bio-research funding. States and non-profits have very little funds for research compared to federal efforts. For-profit companies won’t spend money on basic science because the time to payoff and the risk is too great for the investors. And if we let someone else invent the technology, they control the intellectual property, and can charge whatever they want for us to use it (or just make it unavailable at any price). Not to mention that, given America’s preiminence in bio-research, waiting for someone else to get it done would take a long time.
Something we agree on; however, the Republican party has determined public policy on a science issue based on an ethical opinion held my a minority of Americans; that is anti-science.
Once again, the Republicans are ignoring scientific opinions regarding public health in order to pander to those who would like to control others’ private behavior. Anti-science.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple (btw, I am generally pro-transgeneic crops). There has been little independent research done into the environmental impact of transgenic plants. I agree that some ultra-liberal “Never under any circumstances” is anti-science. But until more independent research has been done showing the true risks of horizontal gene transfer from transgeneic crops, it’s still under heavy debate among scientists.
WTF? You name one new-age person, but ignore the throngs of “AIDS was sent by God to punish fags and fornicators” people that are guiding Republican social policy? The federal requirements for sex ed are pathetic and against much that both social and natural sciences has to say on the subject. Your pary brought us the long-distance neural diagnosis from a heart surgeon, and the lovely sight of the Senate Majority Leader (and MD) stating that AIDS could be contracted through tears. Your party ignores compelling physical evidence for global warming for years. Remove the plank in thine own eye, indeed.
Bill Seitz
Is Richard really irascible, or is he just pissed off because my (and Matt Welch’s) Angels bitch-slapped the A’s this week?
ppGaz
Uh, would “fanatic” be an adequate description?
ppGaz
Drat. To clarify, I refer to Bork as the fanatic. Not his opponents.
jg
This is remarkably similar to the thought that if you are anti-war you are in bed with the enemy, IMO.
TheocracyIsComing
Of course there are enormous costs to the Republican war on science and their predisposition to faith and blind patriotism. The war in Iraq was largely a faith-based endeavor (why plan for a post-war occupation!). The human and economic costs are already quite large.
Balanced budget? Naw, no need for that. You see supply side faith based economics says there is indeed a free lunch. We can increase government, cut taxes, and everything will be ok.
Richard Bennett
The liberation of Iraq was supposed to be an anti-science endeavor? Now I’ve heard everything.
Look, kids, it’s obvious most of you don’t understand how public policy is made, and the contribution that social science has to the process. I’ll try and explain that to you tomorrow, based on five years experience as a lobbyist. The shit’s too deep in here right now.
Shygetz
Based on eight years experience as a research scientist, let me tell you that there is little as amusing as listening to a lobbyist lecture me on science. But to save you the effort, I will tell you how science (both social and natural) is usually used by the Republican administration. You choose your position based on political or philosophical grounds. You look for any science that will back your position up, regardless of if it is representative of the field in general. If no such science exists and you must have it, you try to fund someone to do some kind of study or produce some kind of scholarly review bringing the current science into question. You then do whatever the hell it is you wanted to do in the first place, using the science as cover if you can, and trying to convince the public to ignore it if you cannot. In cases where you do not have a predetermined policy or when science manages to sway public opinion against you, you will usually follow the scientists’ recommendations until you do have a predetermined policy or are able to again undermine public opinion. Are the Democrats guilty of this? Not within the same order of magnitude as the Republicans. If you think I am lying, poll scientists (social and natural). You will find that they tend to agree with me, and that they tend to vote heavily Democratic.
Well, seeing as Theocracy never said that the War in Iraq was anti-science (he said that it was in defiance of reality), you have successfully erected and destroyed a strawman. I’ll also have to give you high marks on your not-so-subtle patronization. Unfortunately, you forgot to call us traitors or mention that we hate American and the troops, so you miss out on the Republican Debating Trifecta. Better luck next time.
John S.
Ok, John, maybe Dick isn’t a fool. He’s just another arrogant asshole who thinks he knows everything. I haven’t seen this much condescension and pompousity dripping off one poster in a while.
If the shit is too deep, Dick, it’s because you’ve been piling it up in here. I base that on fifteen years experience as a human cerebral waste specialist.
Tim F
Bennett,
Now you’re making value judgments. Looks to me like it comes down to whose perverted studies produce results you like and whose perverted studies produce results you don’t like. The myth that abortion causes breast cancer, for example, refuses to die in Republican government circles.
The social sciences are easy to pervert, and they touch on political issues, so it is inevitable that they will be perverted. Your argument that Democrats somehow own this problem makes as much sense as arguing that farting is bad and then assembling a massive list of Democrats who fart.
Tim F
Demimondian,
Your qualifiers:
and:
Tripe is one way of putting it. Sound a lot like my qualifier (posted in advance of yours, no less):
I won’t argue that the field as a whole is useless, only that it’s very easy to pervert if perverting is what you want.
jobiuspublius
I have to applaude Shygetz, et. al., for having the fortitude to respond to Richard Bennett. I find Bennet to be so outrageously delusional and partisan at all costs that I’d have an easier time talking to a rabid pitbull. And that is his purpose. To be so outrageous that people respond weakly if at all while he fosters anger and diverts it at the opposition. It helps him to have some grasp of the english language, but, as you can see he tires after a while and retreats.
OK, John, next.
Shygetz
The social sciences requires, more so that any science, that the researcher go in without any preconceived notions and with an unbiased viewpoint. Social science is SO much harder to do correctly than natural science, and much harder to interpret and review. It is so, so easy for someone to skew the results to say whatever they want to say. That is a big part of the reason why so much crap gets out there in the social sciences.
DougJ
Here’s some pretty thoughtful stuff on ID from the other side.
I guarantee that no matter how much of a militant Darwinist you are, this will make you think twice.
Shygetz
DougJ–I read that article, and it’s a bunch of crap. Those aren’t dinosaur remains they saw in those accounts. They are the remains of our alien overlords, who rule the galaxy from a couch in my basement. C’mon, let’s stick to real science here, please.
Slartibartfast
I think this is one of those cases where DougJ is saying exactly the opposite of what he thinks. Or at least, I hope so, for his sake.
tBone
From DougJ’s link:
He’s right. The answer has been out there for decades.
ppGaz
Oh my God, Doug bagged another one. Shygetz — DougJ frequently spoofs rightwing moronia. It’s his schtick, and he is extremely good at it.
tBone
No, in this case it was Shygetz getting you, ppGaz. You must learn to read past the first sentence, Grasshopper.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Shygetz, you seem to be slightly less a moron than your buddies ppGaz, jobiuspublius, Tim F, John S, TheocracyIsComing, and the fans of the San Diego Angels of Glendale, so I’ll address some of your slightly less demented points.
You offer your observation that most scientists vote Democrat as some sort of evidence for the alleged love of science in the Democratic Party. This is a bit odd, both logically and empirically. The logical fallacy should be evident in that most Democrats are not scientsts. So you’re arguing: “Socrates is a man, therefore all men are Socrates.” Sorry, that doesn’t fly.
But let’s break it down empirically: more scientists are teachers than researchers, and more teach secondary school than university; secondary school teachers are union members, and union members vote Democratic because the own that particular party. Secondary science teachers also outnumber university science researchers, so from that are we to conclude they’re smarter? I think you can see the problem with your argument.
You also claim that states don’t have the money to fund stem-cell research, quite an off remark in the face of the $6 billion fund that California created this year just for that purpose. States have more money available to fund all sorts of things thanks to the Bush tax cuts, of course.
But your biggest whopper is this one:
You’re finally bordering on a testable claim, after all that foaming. Previously I commented on public policy-making and the ignorance of the process I see here; some moron offered up a barroom fable about vote-swapping as a theory of how legislative bodies work, and you offer up a similarly uninformed fable about how they should work. Let me submit that science by itself can never dictate public policy. While it’s nice for policy-makers to be informed by science, by its very nature science doesn’t offer enough information to dictate policy.
Science, you see, is value-neutral, but policy is all about values. Bill Bennett observed, correctly, that black Americans commit crimes at a high rate, therefore killing them all would reduce the crime rate. We all want lower crime, therefore we should kill the black people, right? That’s the science on crime and race. However, policy makers have to consider that genocide itself is a crime, so limiting crime of one type by committing crime of another type isn’t sound policy, even if it’s sound science.
Similarly, we know that releasing CO2 has something to do with global warming, so it follows scientifically that we should stop releasing CO2. But that would imply economic collapse, mass starvation, riots, and death, so we don’t do it despite urgings from the scientific community.
Policy makers, you see, have to consider multiple factors and multiple consequences, while scientists are focused in their narrow field of expertise.
Now the larger question is how advocacy research influences public policy, and that’s pretty well-understood. I wrote a paper on it once upon a time, focusing on one area of policy. You’re welcome to read it and comment on it if you can, but this comment has gone on too long already so I’ll cut it short.
John S.
The irascible fool rears its ugly head…
Here are some of my favorite
ben-wa beadspearls of wisdom:Where from he gathers this ’empirical’ fact I do not know.
Commit crimes at a high rate, or are under scrutiny and caught at a higher rate?
Ah, what’s the point…asking real questions will only garnish more ad-hominem bullshit and pompousity from this clown.
demimondian
Tim F–
You used my comments out of context. Much of the work in Women’s Studies in the 80’s and early 90’s was tripe. Sorry, but there’s very little that I would recognize as psychology or sociology (and, yes, I’ve published in psychology, too…I did a lot of work as a young man) that you would think of as junk science. Given the amount of junk biology I got to read when my wife was working through her Ph.D. (in developmental genetics of Drosophila), I don’t think that there’s any real difference in crap.
It’s just that laypeople think they understand psychology, and don’t think they understand genetics.
Irascible Richard Bennett
Commit crimes at a high rate, or are under scrutiny and caught at a higher rate?
Commit crimes at a high rate. Bill didn’t say this, but it’s well-known. And thanks for proving my point: Democrats don’t want to look at data that offends their biases, even when it’s blazingly obvious.
ppGaz
Waste-o-time talking to this guy, John S.
He’s basically Darrell, without the attitude.
He’s a troll with a blog. Not to be confused with a blogger who trolls his own blog. Although he may, but I have no intention of spending enough time looking at his crummy blog to find out.
Irascible Richard Bennett
The prevalence of imprisonment in 2001 was higher for:
– black males (16.6%) and Hispanic males (7.7%) than for white males (2.6%)
– black females (1.7%) and Hispanic females (0.7%) than white females (0.3%)
TheocracyIsComing
Richard must be Bill’s son because only someone that close to the ethics peddler who pulls the one armed bandit in his spare time would defend his ridiculous assumptions about abortion and race.
DougJ
Richard, you don’t know the meanting of science of values, I’m afraid. First, of all, policy is all about pork and cronyism, not values. Then again, if you consider cronyism to be a Republican value, you’re probably right. (It really pains me to write that last sentence as someone who was a Republican for 23 years, but I guess the truth hurts).
DougJ
meant to write science *or* value