Why Are Conservatives so Annoyed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Because, You Know, Science

This is so pathetic - the National Review thinks we have a "nerd problem."

Is it not enough to support a creationism museum, a publicly funded Noah's Ark theme park ($43 million dollars worth of tax breaks in Kentucky, while the state cuts social programs and education), and to have several states trying to eradicate evolution from the science classroom in public schools? How ironic is it that in some areas now, if you want your kids to get a good science education you have to send them to parochial schools?

So, the topper of all the toppers, the National Review (once seen as the intellectual mouthpiece for the conservative movement) is waging war on intellectuals, you know, those nerdy science types. So much for being intellectual. Now they are just dumb, and really afeared of them brainy folks.

Top of the list, of course, is Neil DeGrasse Tyson, along with Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow (not to mention Ezra Klein and Nate Silver), and anyone else who believes in science and thinks that "facts" should come with references.

This part of the article is funny...

Nerds used to be 90-pound weaklings who never got the girl. Then nerds built the Internet and personal computers. Now nerds rule the world. Or at least, that part of it that isn’t controlled by retrograde politicians.

The funny thing, to me, is that I am a nerd, and used to get called a nerd, or a geek, a lot when I was in 4th-7th grades. Then an amazing thing happened, my genetics kicked in and suddenly I was a nerdy 13 year old who was 6 feet tall and weighed 180 lbs (see what I did there? science!). No one called me names anymore.

But I digress.

This article from Salon is about how the right someone is so scared of science that they didn't just stick their heads in the sand, rather, they seem to have lost their heads in their collective arses.

National Review declares war against the nerds

Why are conservatives so annoyed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Because, you know, science

Andrew Leonard
Wednesday, Jul 30, 2014


Paul Krugman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Maddow (Credit: AP/Fredrik Persson/Richard Shotwell/Chris Pizzello/Photo collage by Salon)
If you prick a nerd, does he not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Like fire ants boiling out of their underground lair, overcome with rage at whatever dastard disturbed their slumber, nerds everywhere are taking to the streets, apoplectic at the most foul attack on entitled smarts this nation has seen since Dwight D. Eisenhower called Robert Oppenheimer a pencil-necked geek.

OK, I don’t actually have a link for that Eisenhower thing. Maybe it didn’t happen. But I do have a link for National Review’s cover-story assaulting nerd-dom, “Smarter Than Thou.” A cover story that begins by attacking none other than Neil DeGrasse Tyson — the Holy Roman Nerd-Emperor himself! — as the “the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up ‘nerd’ culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.”

Oh boy, them’s fightin’ words. I can tell you, nerds are spitting mad. They’ve got the torches and pitchforks ready to hand. They’re going to burn some shit down!

Well, actually, probably not. What they’re really going to do is craft some sarcastically amusing tweets, because you know, they’re nerds. That’s how nerds roll. And maybe they’ll write a clever smartphone app that can be deployed to mock people who don’t accept the science of climate change. Because, contra National Review’s Charles Cooke, who seems to believe that the new primacy of the nerd is some kind of collectivist scam by Ezra Klein and Nate Silver and Rachel Maddow and “anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics,” the cultural ascendancy of the nerd has nothing to do with who wears horn-rims on TV and everything to do with the massive technological transformation of society over the last 20 years. Nerds used to be 90-pound weaklings who never got the girl. Then nerds built the Internet and personal computers. Now nerds rule the world. Or at least, that part of it that isn’t controlled by retrograde politicians. The primacy of nerd culture is not an Ezra Klein affectation; it’s fallout from the fact that nerds are making an awful lot of money these days.

Cooke, after leading off with Tyson, fatally exposes his hand by defining the leaders of the new nerd menace as a group that, oddly, all share politics that National Review doesn’t approve of.

Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye…

Later, Cooke says that “the nerds of MSNBC and beyond are not actually nerds — with scientific training and all that it entails — but the popular kids indulging in a fad.” I’m not sure it’s all that smart to attack the likes of Dawkins or Krugman, (or even Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer who worked for Boeing) as lacking scientific training. But Cooke’s real problem is that the “real” nerds — the ones that aren’t on MSNBC, also, by and large, share the political beliefs he scorns.

Cooke never mentions Silicon Valley, which is odd, because the fact that the world’s greatest preponderance of nerds also happens to be the United States’ most formidable bastion of left-wing progressive politics would seem to support his thesis that nerds are pinkos. (And yes, I know, there are a lot of libertarian nerds — but guess what, those guys believe in science too!) There’s a reason for Cooke’s omission. Acknowledging that nerds — you know, the guys and gals who invented the microchip and the PC and the smartphone — actually do have a grasp of scientific fact, which leads them to take seriously the problem of historically unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions and the idiocy of rewriting school science textbooks to include dogma about creationism and intelligent design, is a disastrous dead end for conservatives.

If Cooke honestly wanted to grapple with the cultural cachet of nerd-dom, he’d have to answer questions such as why a poll by the Pew Research Service found that in 2009 that only six percent of scientists identify as Republican. He’d have to grapple with the true reasons for Tyson’s popularity, which have much more to do with how grateful a significant portion of this nation is for someone who can rebut ignorance and religious propaganda with humor and clarity than with any political identification. He’d have to face up to the sobering reality that the majority of people who understand how the world works in terms of biology and physics and mathematics also think that our overheating globe is a serious problem.

Instead, Cooke argues that leftists are embracing the nerd-designation because it says to the world what they are not: “… which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past.”

Oh NO! Cooke dares attack nerdish chart-love! That really stings. But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.

But this thing about attachment to the past — well maybe Cooke’s got a point there. Nerds love science fiction, in part because we love the promise of the future, a promise of Star Trek abundance and material prosperity for everyone. We look at the past, at centuries that included slavery and child labor and infant mortality and Inquisitions and the lack of female suffrage, and we think, we can do better than that. We can progress.

That’s why we like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Because we believe that civilization is going somewhere, and that if the future isn’t better than the past, then we’re just wasting our time on this planet.


Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

The Psych Files Podcast - Can We Teach Critical Thinking?

Image from Critical Thinking.org

This is a cool discussion on critical thinking that revolves around the decision of the Texas GOP to oppose the teaching of critical thinking in the schools. This is big enough news that even
Stephen Colbert had his entertaining take on this issue (click here).

This what their 2012 platform says:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

"I done wan nobody makin my kids think. Hell, I tell em wha they belief."

Here are a couple of other sections from their education platform:

Religious Freedom in Public Schools – We urge school administrators and officials to inform Texas school students specifically of their First Amendment rights to pray and engage in religious speech, individually or in groups, on school property without government interference. We urge the Legislature to end censorship of discussion of religion in our founding documents and encourage discussing those documents.

And this . . .

Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

Oy Vey! I guess they think that if they can make the population dumb enough and incapable of questioning what they are told, then they can do whatever they want. It has worked so far.

But this is the state that gave us Governor and then President Bush, not to mention that strangely incoherent man who ran for the GOP nomination this year, Governor Rick Perry.

By the way, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia), and author of Cognition: The Thinking Animal, argues that it cannot be taught in this 2007 article. Willingham defines critical thinking first, a defintion that feels hard to argue with, but must feel scary to the Texas GOP:

Critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: That’s what we mean when we refer to “thinking like a scientist” or “thinking like a historian.”

He then suggests that all the research to date says that we can't teach critical thinking:

After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill.

Finally, here is an expanded definition of critical thinking that helps set the stage for this discussion (and I highly recommend the paper these quotes come from, Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? From American Educator, Summer 2007).

Critical reasoning, decision making, and problem solving—which, for brevity’s sake, I will refer to as critical thinking—have three key features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction. Critical thinking is effective in that it avoids common pitfalls, such as seeing only one side of an issue, discounting new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning from passion rather than logic, failing to support statements with evidence, and so on. Critical thinking is novel in that you don’t simply remember a solution or a situation that is similar enough to guide you. For example, solving a complex but familiar physics problem by applying a multi-step algorithm isn’t critical thinking because you are really drawing on memory to solve the problem. But devising a new algorithm is critical thinking. Critical thinking is self-directed in that the thinker must be calling the shots: We wouldn’t give a student much credit for critical thinking if the teacher were prompting each step he took.

And now, your podcast.

The Psych Files Podcast, Ep 183: Critical Thinking – Important? Yes. But Can We Teach It? Well….

Podcast: Download

Why does it concern psychologists that the Texas GOP platform recently opposed the teaching of critical thinking? Most of us have been told since we were very young that critical thinking is very important. Psychologists certainly agree and a lot of time spent in most psychology classes is spent learning how to think critically. Why is it such a central part of our classes? And here’s a kicker: it might be a lot harder to teach it than we had hoped. Find out why critical thinking is so central to psychology. Sounds kinda dry? I think you’ll find this a lot of fun (in a mental kind of way…).

Resources on Critical Thinking

• Daniel Willingham’s article, Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?
• The concept map I created as notes for this episode can be viewed by clicking on the image below
  

  Click the image to view the map.
• Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really.
• The full platform of the Texas Republican Party can be found here.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. – 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas

School Health Care – We urge legislators to prohibit reproductive health care services, including counseling, referrals, and distribution of condoms and contraception through public schools. We support the parents’ right to choose, without penalty, which medications are administered to their minor children. We oppose medical clinics on school property except higher education and health care for students without parental consent. — 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas

Romney Chooses Ryan - Ends All Pretense of Empthy for the Not Wealthy

Mitt Romney's biggest challenge in the presidential campaign for so far has been likeability - he comes across as cold, insincere (look at the fake smile above), and disconnected from the harsh reality with which most Americans live. Many commentators have referred to it as the empathy gap.

With his announcement Friday night of congressman Paul Ryan (WI) as his Vice-Presidential running mate, Romney has given up on empathy it would seem, preferring instead to gamble that his wealthy backers will support his choice with enough Super PAC money to generate a barrage of misinformation that will scare Americans into fearing Obama enough to choose the white capitalists over the black "socialist."

As a progressive who values compassion as a political stance (and I am not a Democrat), I see this is almost the perfect pick to guarantee Obama's re-election. I have a lot of issues with Obama (his health care plan sold out the middle class to provide coverage to the poorest Americans; his use of drone attacks is not only illegal but morally problematic; his leadership style is to focused on consensus and not enough on getting the best legislation; the list could go on and on), but his understanding of how most of America is struggling is not one of those problems.

Obama's work as a community organizer put him at the center of poverty in large cities, giving him an understanding that Romney lacks completely. Obama values the one-on-one connection with individuals that seems to make Romney uncomfortable.

So what does Romney do to combat these challenges? He chooses Paul Ryan, the most divisive high-profile Republican congressman in the country, a man who is beloved by the racist Tea Party crowd, who is owned by Big Oil, who is vehemently opposed to gay marriage (or even gay rights), who is a virulent denier of climate science (and all other forms of science), who has one of the worst environmental voting records in the House, and worst of all, is pushing a budget plan that escalates tax cuts for the wealthy whilemassively cutting government programs such as social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other social programs.

Response from the Left has been what one would expect:

Think Progress: Meet Paul Ryan: Climate Denier, Conspiracy Theorist, Koch Acolyte
Mother Jones: With Paul Ryan, Romney Makes the VP Pick Obama Wanted
The Daily Beast: Romney-Ryan: The Rich Voter's Dream Ticket
Daily Kos: Introducing the Committee to End Medicare: Romney-Ryan 2012


The Right seems to be pleased to have a man Romney describes as a “person of great steadiness” and someone who “combines a profound sense of responsibility…with unbounded optimism,” and as the “intellectual leader of the Republican party.”

Obama's campaign team must be doing the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" Dance.

Who Owns Mitt Romney?

A site called The Economic Collapse used Tim Tebow's OT heroics in the Wild Card game against Pittsburgh as a jumping off point for a discussion of where the economy is right now (Tebow Time). They highlight some seriously messed up statistics, like the reality of the unemployment rate:

We should all be thankful that the employment situation in the U.S. has stabilized, but things are not as good as the mainstream media would have you to believe.

Instead of 8.5%, the "official" unemployment number put out by the federal government should be about 11 percent, and the "real" unemployment number is somewhere around 22 or 23 percent.

And if you take a long-term view of things, there is no reason to celebrate at all.  The truth is that the middle class in America is being systematically destroyed and we won't see much permanent improvement until this country fundamentally changes direction.

This is the reality of the 99% (give or take 10-20% or so).

The guy the GOP seems poised to run against Obama - Mitt Romney - is part of the top 1/10 of the elite 1% - but he is the closest thing the GOP has to an Obama clone, at least according to these folks.

And when you look at [Mitt Romney's] record (what he has actually done), it quickly becomes clear that he is basically just a more experienced version of Barack Obama.

When the mainstream media says that Mitt Romney has the best chance of beating Barack Obama, that is because they feel as though he is the candidate that is most like Barack Obama.

If it is Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney in the general election, we are basically guaranteed four more years of establishment rule.  Yes, there will be some minor changes, but everything will pretty much continue running the way that it is now no matter which one wins.

But here is the real problem - Romney is bought and paid for by the same banks that Bush/Obama bailed out. He represents the worst of the political game in this country - "the Romney tax plan would add 600 billion dollars to the federal budget deficit in 2015."

Big business and the banks LOVE Romney - as their donations to his campaign illustrate.

If Mitt Romney gets the nomination, it will just be another indication that the Republican Party is bought and paid for by the establishment.

Just check out who is giving money to Romney.  Did you know that Goldman Sachs is his biggest donor?  The following numbers come from opensecrets.org....

Goldman Sachs $367,200
Credit Suisse Group $203,750
Morgan Stanley $199,800
HIG Capital $186,500
Barclays $157,750
Kirkland & Ellis $132,100
Bank of America $126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers $118,250
EMC Corp $117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co $112,250
The Villages $97,500
Vivint Inc $80,750
Marriott International $79,837
Sullivan & Cromwell $79,250
Bain Capital $74,500
UBS AG $73,750
Wells Fargo $61,500
Blackstone Group $59,800
Citigroup Inc $57,050
Bain & Co $52,500

But the numbers above are nothing compared to the money being poured into the "Super PACs" that are backing Romney.  The financial elite are dumping tens of millions of dollars into these "Super PACs", and these "Super PACs" are playing a huge role in this campaign.

The following comes from an article posted on Economic Policy Journal....

The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to “Restore Our Future” before the Iowa caucuses. And “Restore Our Future“‘s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.

More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America — actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.

It’s his connections to the epicenters of big money in America — especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing  for handsome returns.

The way the political game is played in America today, the candidate with the most money almost always wins.

Mitt Romney and the organizations that are supporting Mitt Romney are sitting on gigantic mountains of cash.

Now that is change we can believe in.

Raw Story - New GOP laws could suppress five million Democratic voters

According to new research reviewed by David Edwards at Raw Story, the GOP has been systematically passing laws that disenfranchise five million "young, minority, low-income, and disabled voters, all groups that tend to vote for Democrats." In other words, business as usual for the GOP.

The report found that states that have already curtailed voting rights represent 171 of the 270 electoral votes necessary for winning the presidency. Five of the 12 likely battleground states have already cut back rights. Across the nation, 19 new voting restrictions have passed, 68 have failed and 42 more are still pending.

New Photo ID restrictions in Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin could disenfranchise up to 3.2 million voters, the study found. Another 2.6 million voters could be suppressed by proof of citizenship laws, laws restricting voter registration drives, election day registration restrictions, reduced early voting and restrictions on when convicted felons may have their voting rights restored.

Read more about this issue.

Read even more, from the original documents:

• The Brennan Center for Justice report, “Voting Law Changes in 2012” (PDF)
• Wendy R. Weiser and Lawrence Norden offer an executive summary (PDF)

Maureen Dowd - Egghead and Blockheads

When in doubt, I'm going to choose the egghead - the egghead is at least smart enough to learn something new, or to learn from mistakes. I don't know when ignorance and stupidity became a virtue for the GOP, but it's sad to see a field of candidates all struggling to be dumber than the rest.

Here are two excerpts from an excellent editorial by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

At the cusp of the 2012 race, we have a classic cultural collision between a skinny Eastern egghead lawyer who’s inept in Washington gunfights and a pistol-totin’, lethal-injectin’, square-shouldered cowboy who has no patience for book learnin’.


Rick Perry, from the West Texas town of Paint Creek, is no John Wayne, even though he has a ton of executions notched on his belt. But he wears a pair of cowboy boots with the legend “Liberty” stitched on one. (As in freedom, not Valance.) He plays up the effete-versus-mesquite stereotypes in his second-grade textbook of a manifesto, “Fed Up!”


Trashing Massachusetts, he writes: “They passed state-run health care, they have sanctioned gay marriage, and they elected Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barney Frank repeatedly — even after actually knowing about them and what they believe! Texans, on the other hand, elect folks like me. You know the type, the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”


At a recent campaign event in South Carolina, Perry grinned, “I’m actually for gun control — use both hands.”

And . . . . .

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.


Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.


Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.


So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?


The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

Oy vey.