I was interviewed by humanistischer pressedienst about the New Atheism and American politics and religion. I am amazingly erudite auf Deutsch, so much so that I can only read what I said with considerable effort.
OK, I confess—the interview was in English, and it’s the fluency of the interviewer we ought to praise. I’ve put the original text below the fold for those of us who’d rather not read slowly with the aid of a dictionary.
Here’s a graphic illustration of how the presidential election turned out. These are the results by county, with color reflecting the percentage that voted Republican (red) and Democrat (blue).
Here’s what it looks like when the counties are scaled by population size; the smear of reds is greatly diminished.
It’s striking how the emptiest places in the country are enriched with fervent conservatives. People are always fretting over how conservatives are outbreeding liberals, but it seems to me that that actually works in liberals’ favor — as communities become larger and more interdependent, as people grow up aware of social support systems, as their numbers create richer opportunities for education, there’s a trend towards embracing liberal values. There are, of course, historical contingencies that can counter that pattern — Utah has been growing, but isn’t becoming more Democratic, for instance — but it’s interesting that fast-growing urban areas in even the reddest states somehow end up favoring the Democrats. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Quiverful movement, that strange idea on the religious right that women ought to bear swarms of children, was a policy that would simply breed new generations of liberals?
Of course, there is the alternative explanation: this distribution is an indirect measure of prosperity. People tend to move towards areas with more upward mobility and better economic prospects, so population is only a proxy for opportunity—and it’s broadly distributed wealth that produces more liberals. Then it would be the case that pumping out a dozen babies that you can’t afford to educate properly would still produce more minions of the Republicans…by impoverishing the region. I’m sure the religious right would find that notion reassuring, since it also seems to be one of their goals to wreck the political and economic health of the nation.
Whatever the explanation is, I want more blue in these maps. There are more election cartograms to peruse.
Yikes, this is an image to spark nightmares. Remember the little fly squeaking, “help me, help me” at the end of the horror movie, The Fly (the original, not the remake)? And it’s Palin!
I just have to reassure myself…this time, the flies wrested the swatter out of her hands, and shooed her back to Alaska.
PBS has an article on poll crashing, which interviews yours truly and Greg Laden about our curious penchant for sending mobs out to vote on silly online polls. They also interview some of the recipients of the floods…and no one seems to mind.
I just looked up all bleary-eyed from staring at papers all day to notice that we suddenly have an inch or so of snow piled up on the ground. I was wondering why my wife was so late getting home from work — she’s probably creeping along on slushy roads trying to make it home safely.
And—oh, no—I have to drive to Minneapolis tomorrow!
All violence in this video is intended entirely metaphorically.
Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?
Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?
Be honest now.
I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.
That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?
What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.
And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.
And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.
I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.
It isn’t at all unusual for the authors of scientific papers to leave a comment at a blog discussing their work — it’s happened here quite a few times, and it’s a good thing. It’s a plus when they confirm what you’ve said or add more information to the discussion, and it’s also wonderful when they correct you on errors. I think most scientists are getting the idea that blogs are tools to help disseminate scientific ideas to a wider audience than the science journals can. They certainly don’t replace the journals, but add a way to inject the results into the public sphere, where they can be part of a popular conversation.
Sometimes you do find scientists who don’t quite get it. Dr Isis wrote a critique of a paper in the NEJM that reported a correlation between the change to daylight savings time and heart attacks; she thought the data was interesting, but the interpretations were sloppy. She pointed out some observations that were glossed over, suggested that some specific interpretations were a bit off, and listed some other articles on similar topics.
The authors took exception to the criticisms and left a comment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of informative comment, pro or con, that advances an argument — it was more of a condescending dismissal that ignored her comments and suggested that she needed to learn some basic epidemiology. And then there was this bit:
There can be many other explanations and pathways not written here (again we had a strict limit). The reviewers and editors agreed to our interpretation as probably the most likely one. So were experts in this field all over the world who commented our study so far. We would actually encourage you to write a comment to NEJM. NEJM is well known for its devotion for scientific debates on recently published papers. That would be a normal way to debate and discuss scientific findings. We would also have a possibility to answer on an “equal ground”.
The first part is a particularly annoying misconception. Peer review is only a first, preliminary hurdle for a paper to cross; passing peer review and getting published does not mean that your work is right. Some incredibly awful papers get through the review process, somehow. Getting published only means that now your paper is going to be opened up to wider criticism. Don’t take the attitude that publication means vindication; I know reviewers, and I’ve reviewed papers, and I know that reviewers are sometimes lazy, sometimes susceptible to croneyism, and always overworked, and that publication doesn’t mean you are right.
The last part shows that the authors have the wrong idea about blogs. A blog post is different from a letter to NEJM; it can reach a much wider audience, for one thing, and uses a little more stylistic variety than dry academic writing to appeal to a larger group (Dr Isis is definitely guilty of that — she uses humor, which is often sadly lacking in medical journals). I get the impression that the authors would prefer criticisms be made in the journal, not because it would directly target the best people able to understand the argument, but because it would limit the number of people who would see the disagreement.
The attitude that this is the “normal” way to discuss science is also aggravating. It is a restrictive view that contributes to the popular conception of scientists as aloof and unengaged with the culture, and it’s not true. We need to change the idea of normal so that talking about science over breakfast is normal, that having a conversation about science around the watercooler at work is normal, that guys at the bar get into arguments over science instead of football (sometimes) is normal. Change normal!
And finally, a blog is equal ground. The authors could have easily thrown in a few observations and explanations that supported their position, rather than treating Dr Isis like some ignorant nobody they could swat away by telling her to take a course in epidemiology. Explain your answers as you would to an undergrad or bright high school student. If you can’t, it implies that you aren’t looking for an equal opportunity, you are looking for a way to avoid probing questions.
(via DrugMonkey)
Besides spending some time with the good people of Americans United, I’ll be giving a talk at George Mason University at 7pm on Saturday night. Here’s the flyer:
If you can’t quite read that tiny print, the information is also online at the Beltway Atheists Meetup Group and on Facebook.
Say, does anyone want to invite Obama to show up?
By the way, you should read AU’s post-election analysis of the state of the religious right. You will be disappointed to learn that they did not simply evaporate after the election.
