John Derbyshire, over at Secular Right, has a post speculating on whether the left or the right is more hostile to science.

there are two sides to the Left’s claim to be the more science-friendly faction. It’s not just conservative politics that is hostile to science, it’s any politics, though the particular scientific topic objected to may be different for Left and Right.

A fair point, I thought, but a reader follows up with this demand:

identify a finding — not a practice, like embryo-destructive stem cell research, but a finding — that is obnoxious to conservatives.

His top two candidates for science finding that causes hostility on the left (doesn’t that kind of miss the point of the question -ed) are:

• The whole nature/nurture thing
• and (related) the idea that there are regional variations between human populations

Those two bother me too but I wonder if they are a left/right thing *shrug*

Derbyshire dismisses the obvious one on the right:

Since science is mostly carried out in places where Right Creationists, Geocentrists, etc.  have no influence, but blank-slate Left “culturists” and po-mo words-have-no-meaning deconstructionists have tremendous influence, I’d guess the Left has the potential to do more damage, at least in the human sciences

but, given that almost two thirds of americans believe in some form of creationism, the amount of space free from creationist influence is probably somewhat limited.

With a few seconds thought I came up with a few that conservatives are likely hostile to:

• The climate is changing
• Climate change is caused by human activities
• Species are disappearing species
• Rainforest is disappearing
• Sonar interferes with whale migration
• Lead, MTBE, sulphur dioxide (etc) has harmful effects
• (let’s just say environmental issues in general)
• Abstinence education is counter-productive
• (let’s say reproductive issues in general)
• Origin of the species/descent of man
• Geological age of earth/universe
• Drug X has side-effects
• Crime is linked to social environment

It’s true that not all conservatives are hostile to all these findings but I might say the same about Derbyshire’s list wrt liberals. It’s certainly true that some very prominent conservatives are hostile to them and have been instrumental in affecting policy as a result.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’d like to welcome to the microphone Georgia congressman Phil Gingrey, who ended up being quoted yesterday by Jonathan Martin and somebody else at Politico.com.  Congressman Gingrey asked to come on the program today to address that and we are happy to have him here.  Congressman, welcome to the program, sir.

GINGREY:  Rush, thank you so much.  I thank you for the opportunity. Of course, it’s not exactly the way I wanted to come on, but I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.  Mainly, I want to express to you and all your listeners my very sincere regret for those comments I made yesterday to Politico.  Basically the intent of my words to them was to discuss the unique position of congressional Republicans and our leadership, particularly John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.  I clearly ended up putting my foot in my mouth on some of those comments (laughs) and I just wanted to tell you, Rush, and — and all our conservative giants who help us so much to maintain our base and grow it and get back this majority that I regret those stupid comments.

He must’ve said something really bad to be grovelling like that.

“I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach,” Gingrey said. “I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn’t be or wouldn’t be good leaders, they’re not in that position of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell.”

See what David Frum has to say at his shiny new website.

Rush and Hannity and O’Reilly and Ann Coulter and the others have their place and their role. They spoke for an important section of public opinion, and it is a section our party needs. But it is only a section, and not the whole. The more our party allows them to become our public face, the more embattled and endangered our party becomes.

I’m against the prez on this one.

Obama told her story over and over when he campaigned for president: How Ledbetter, now 70, spent years working as a plant supervisor at a tire factory in Alabama. How, when she neared retirement, someone slipped her a pay schedule that showed her male colleagues were making much more money than she was. A jury found her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, to be really, really guilty of pay discrimination.

But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision led by the Bush appointees, threw out Ledbetter’s case, ruling that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers.

I think it’s immoral and, worse, probably to inefficient to pay someone less because of the colour of their skin or the contents of their underpants - but it shouldn’t be illegal.

“There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now’s not that time”

President Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” on Thursday for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out some of the nation’s most prominent financial institutions.

I’m with the prez  on this.

It’s one thing to get germongous bonuses when you’ve earned your company massive profits but….don’t you get the feeling that they are just mocking us now?

There has been a lot of talk on the interwebs about whether the people who authorized torture should be prosecuted or whether we should just forget the whole thing.

On conservative blogs, they talk of how torture is not only

necessary, it is moral and it is ethical. We can defend it not just on pragmatic grounds, but on moral grounds as well.

and besides, only about thirty people were tortured.

Ross Douthat (conservative blogger) suggested that, if members of the former administration really believe that torture is justified, they should welcome a full investigation because it will vindicate them and help to keep us safe in the future.

Time and again, Cheney has insisted that any gains the U.S. has made in its efforts against Al Qaeda have depended on information from “high-value” detainees like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah that could only be extracted through extreme measures. But so far, the evidence marshaled to support his contention has been distinctly limited - and most of the insider-ish testimony on the subject, usually filtered through the work of the administration’s critics, has tended to support the argument that torture is both morally wrong and largely ineffective. This is a high-stakes debate, to put it mildly. And if Cheney (or any of the many conservatives who share his perspective) believes what says he believes - if he thinks the future security of the United States depends on a willingness to take a consequentialist approach to, say, the waterboarding of leading terrorists - then he ought to be willing to advance a public and detailed case, before an independent commission, that the consequences were and are worth the moral costs.

Kristoff just wants a commission so we can come to some consensus and, if we agree that it was wrong, agree not to do it again.

As a nation, we’ve repeatedly trampled on individual rights during moments of national fear — the Palmer raids after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the McCarthy hearings at the dawn of the cold war. We may well do so again after the next major terror attack, particularly if it turns out to have been planned by people who were released from Guantánamo.

We’ll be better off if we come to some consensus on these issues. The Kerner commission on race and the 9/11 commission are both examples of how we as a nation used such panels to gain a better understanding of our shortcomings. Such a commission would also help heal the divisions with the rest of the world and help renew America’s reputation.

and he wants McCain to head it.

This wouldn’t be a bipartisan commission, with Democrats and Republicans offsetting each other in seething distrust. Rather, it would be nonpartisan, dominated by military and security experts.

It could be co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft and John McCain, with its conclusions written by Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who wrote the best-selling report of the 9/11 commission.

If the three most prominent members were all Republicans, no one on the right could denounce it as a witch hunt — and its criticisms would have far more credibility.

I’m with Kristoff. We need to get this out in the open and decide whether America is the kind of country that should be torturing people.

Bruce Sterling:

As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That’s bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people’s solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?

Let’s consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.

I remember how excited I was the first time time I saw Ronaldo (Ronaldo of the magic feet) in a red shirt.

I think I was even more excited when I saw our new, 18 year old right back, Rafael.

So imagine how excited I was when I saw our new left back, Raphael’s twin brother, Fabio.

They are really rather good.

The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.

We all know that teenage are having sex all the time,right? Turns out we are wrong.

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

There’s a lovely essay in the NYT celebrating the restoration of scientists into the halls of goverment.

The article makes the usual case that science is a way of thinking about the world rather than a collection of facts

Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.

but then takes a surprising turn and compares the values of science with democracy itself.

But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue over.

So if you’re going to get gooey about something, that’s not so bad.

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Last week’s economist has a ferocious review of the Bush years.

HE LEAVES the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

Well worth the read. Keep it around in case you ever start to think maybe he wasn’t so bad…