Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Rules of Disengagement

A friend sent me the following in an email.  It’s pretty “liberal” so, if you aren’t, it’ll just upset you and you’re probably better off just watching some videos of clouds and waves and soothing images like that.  But if you’re in a mood to whine and moan about what’s wrong with this goddamn world, you might enjoy the following 20 Rules for being a Good Arch-Conservative:

1) You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

2) You have to believe that the US should get out of the UN, and that our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.

3) You have to believe that government should stay out of people’s lives but it needs to punish anyone caught having private sex with the “wrong” gender.

4) You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don’t pray to Allah or Buddha.

5) “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

6) You have to believe that a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, but that large multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind with no regulation whatsoever.

7) You have to believe that you love Jesus and Jesus loves you, and that Jesus shares your hatred of AIDS victims, homosexuals, and Hillary Clinton.

8) You have to believe that the best way to encourage military morale is to praise the troops overseas while cutting their VA benefits.

9) You have to believe it is wise to keep condoms out of schools, because we all know if teenagers don’t have condoms they won’t have sex.

10) You have to believe that the best way to fight terrorism is to alienate our allies and then demand their cooperation and money.

11) You have to believe that providing health care to all Iraqis is sound government policy but providing health care to all Americans is socialism personified.

12) You believe that global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are “junk science”, but Creationism should be taught in schools.

13) You have to believe that waging war with no exit strategy was wrong in Vietnam but right in Iraq.

14) You have to believe that Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney was doing business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

15) You believe that government should restrict itself to just the powers named in the Constitution, which includes banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

16) You have to believe that the public has a right to know about the adulterous affairs of Democrats, while those of Republicans are a “private matter”.

17) You support state rights, which means Ashcroft telling states what locally passed voter initiatives he will allow them to have.

18) You have to believe that what Clinton did in the 1960’s is of vital national interest but what Bush did decades later is “stale news” and “irrelevant”.

19) You have to believe that trade with Cuba is wrong because it is communist, but trading with China and Vietnam is just dandy.

20) You have to believe that the use of alcohol and tobacco are safe enough to be legally protected but the use of marijuana is so dangerous as to be unsuitable even for serious medical study. 

I think conservatives should be people who boil down fruit into a pectin-rich jelly.  Buttered toast with fresh conserves, direct from the conservatory where the conservatives toil… mind wandering… more work to read… desk yawning… rant winding down… so tired… so very tired…

Re 1: I’ve been reading Thomas Paine’s and Tocqueville’s writing, and the abolition of inheritance seems to be in strong favor with both of them. Makes me wonder.

Re 12: Neither global warming nor evolution are based in science. They are just widely accepted theories. I’d like to see someone come up with a reproducable experiment that proves evolution, or global warming. I still believe in both, but that’s because I was indocrinated in school.

Re: controlled experimental demonstration of evolution, see: http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/.  The papers they published at the 20,000 generation mark (in places such as The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) are fairly convincing.

As for global warming, I’m not convinced it *isn’t* junk science, despite being so non-conservative that I border socialist.  While many strong critiques have been presented of global warming research, I’m most swayed by the fact that such research is largely simulation driven; if those same simulations can barely predict the weather *for the later half of the week*, why would we possibly believe they could accurately predict centuries of change (especially considering the time-based compounding effects of chaos math)?

you raise an interesting point Gopi, and I almost deleted that line from the post before I put it up.  (I started with 25 reasons and cut it down to 19 ones I liked, and then added one for good measure.) If “science” is defined as knowledge determined through the scientific method with a test subject and a control subject, thereby proving or disproving a hypothesis, you can argue that global warming and evolution have not been experimentally proven and therefore aren’t scientific.  However, they are based on objective data that has been gathered carefully and with as much mathematical precision as possible.  These data are then subjected to the same manner of evaluation as data obtained by the pure “scientific method,” including peer review and revision.  Thus, Piltdown man was revealed to be a chimera - but no such corrective evaluation is available for faith-based theories.  If objective evidence cannot be adduced either to prove or disprove the hypothesis on which a theory is based, I would call it unscientific, and if the opposite is true, I would call it sufficiently scientific for my purposes.  I can’t prove evolution, but it could be disproven given the right evidence.  Creationism isn’t susceptible to proof or disproof - it’s an article of faith.  Faith has its place, but in my opinion the biology and geology textbooks arent it.

Josh, the E. coli experiment proves merely that evolution occurs. But the extent to which it happened was tiny. Similarly, the individual aspects of Darwin’s theory (which has very little to do with evolution, btw), i.e., natural selection through survival of the fittest etc. are each scientifically sound.

How far it can take life, for example from prokaryotic single-cell to complex organism, and if it can go that far, whether that was indeed how all life on Earth arrived at its current state is what has not been proved.

(I really need to learn how to write shorter sentences.)

And I suppose somebody will claim that curve balls don’t really curve.  Or that the earth is flat—like a quarter.

And is there some philosopher who said, “Nothing existed before I became aware, and nothing will exist when I cease to be aware.” If not, that will be my theory of everything.

Creationism is simply an effort to bring religious teaching into public schools in the guise of “science.” If that is allowed, there are some pretty funky “theories” out there about the origins of man, morons, and the universe which should get equal billing.  And what about the Earth on the turtle’s back?  Where does that fit in?

And is someone still espousing the steady-state theory of the universe?

It’s incredibly sad how accurate the “Rules” are. Just reinforces my plea on my site to vote, but for those who are conservative to disregard said post.

Look, I’m as liberal as the next guy, but doesn’t everyone kind of hate Hilary Clinton?

Wow...Dan you have some pretty intimidatingly smart commenters...and not only that they can discuss something without getting bent out of shape...YOU PEOPLE ROCK!

But I gotta say, can we just give Hilary a break?  She’s got that really bad hair to deal with, and Bill doing Godknowswhat in Harlem and a daughter that is constantly trying to get as far away from both her and Bill as humanly possible.

I don’t know what’s better - the original post, discovering Josh is an almost-socialist entrepreneur, or Gopi’s use of the word “Prokaryotic.” Happy Days.

Excellent stuff. I often think that conservatives are creatures that never matured from the schoolyard.

I just want to put in a good word for my many conservative friends.  I’m socially liberal but fiscally centrist, so a lot of conservative money theory resonates with me.  I respect opinions most when they are open to evaluation and revision, and you need to look both left and right to make sure you’re headed in the right direction before you wind up elsewhere.  Some of my conservative friends have “turned” liberal, and some of my liberal friends went conservative on me.  As long as you are willing to discuss the issues intelligently, you are welcome to present your viewpoint here.

However, this damn post sure got away from me.  Protokyretic?  What the hell?  You’re phytoblasting my neurons!  I thought I was supposed to be the one using words no one else knew!  When I’m driven to the dictionary while reading my own blog, I know I went too far.  Lesson learned, my friends.  Next post: something vaugely salacious.  I can’t take another one of these ones.

Nooooo, anything but burritos!

evolution is science.  global warming is science.  you can have opinions about whether or not evolution created man or whether pollution is causing a world-wide heatup, but there’s no question that the findings are based on observation and experimentation, hence, they are science.

and gopi smells like burritos.

Bryan, global warming is pretty much like the stock market: past performance is no guarantee of future results. Besides, we don’t even have good data about past performance. In geological time, we have hard data for oh, maybe 300 years. We have speculative data for 4 billion years. And based on this, we’re trying to predict what’ll happen in the next 100 years? Sorry, that’s not science, that’s faith. And I believe in it.

Evolution is on better standing, because the theory of the present is sound. We just can’t prove that that’s what happened millions of years ago, because we have no hard data; only speculative data. Once again, I believe that’s how it happened, but I have no proof.

It’s okay to have something in common with bible-thumping conservatives. We just believe in different things. The reasoning is all the same: the data fits the model. It fits their model too.

i think you just made my point for me, gop (can i call you gop?  i like the pun). 

if you say that you think claims about global warming are wrong because there isn’t enough data, that’s fine—a valid argument.  i don’t necessarily disagree with you.  but that’s a long way away from saying it’s “not science.”

the distinction is important because it colors the way the arguments are made.  if you say something is “not science,” then you don’t have to examine the data, you don’t have to come up with alternative hypotheses, you don’t have to deal with the issue.  you just basically throw an unjustified blanket over the whole thing and call it hogwash because you disagree with it.

if you make the latter claim, which you’re making, then you’re agreeing that it’s science, you just question its predictive power.  which is great—that’s how science works.  einstein questioned the predictive power of newtonian physics, and suddenly we have relativity.  did he claim that newtonian physics were “not science” because they were wrong in some cases?  no.  he came up with his own theory, tested it, and the cause of human understanding was advanced.

all i’m saying is that it’s important to play fair in this arena.  you may or may not agree that pollution is causing a global warmup, but your disagreement doesn’t invalidate the data.

Ummm, just because the data is valid doesn’t make it science.

That the stars and planets are in certain positions is universally accepted. That does not make astrology science. That there is man-made change to the atmosphere is not disputed. That does not make climate theory science.

It’s not the data, it’s what you do with it.

Obligatory insult: I resent being called a Republican, and that he did is further proof that Bryan is a doody-head.