John Allen Paulos has “Twelve Irreligious Questions for the Candidates Before “Tiw’s Day’s” Elections“.
His book just went on my reading list.
05 Feb 2008
Decidedly Undecided
I’m known among my friends as a politics junkie, so it comes as a surprise to many of them that I haven’t decided for whom I am going to vote.
I have done some elimination. The Republicans were ruled out almost immediately. All of the front-runners have one or more deal-breaker positions that make it impossible for me to support them. So at least it’s narrowed down to the Democrats.
When it comes to Clinton vs. Obama, I’m genuinely undecided. From my perspective, there’s not much difference between them, policy-wise. Sure, they have some differences, but they’re not significant enough to sway me to one or the other. When it comes to Iraq, I don’t care about what someone did in the past as much as what they will do in the future. They both want a withdrawal – that’s what’s important to me. As for health care, any legislation will have to go through Congress and will likely bear little resemblance to either candidate’s vision once the House and Senate are through with it.
My choice for president doesn’t really matter anyway because my vote is totally meaningless. My state’s primary is too late in the season; the choice will already be made by then. Also, my state has gone Republican for as long as anyone can remember. The GOP could nominate a bowl of oatmeal for president and it would carry my state.
In the end, the only thing my vote is good for is bitching rights. And I’ve been exercising that right quite often in the last 7 years.
More Discovery Institute Shenanigans
Casey Luskin has a new post up where he discusses a paper in PLoS Biology. While his ability to totally misrepresent the point of the paper is not surprising, his post is causing a huge furor in the scientific blogosphere with the use of “Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research” icon.
For those not familiar with the BPR3 effort, it’s a way for bloggers to tag entries that discuss papers that appear in the literature. What’s great about this effort is that it makes it easy for an interested reader to find out what people are saying about a particular article.
In order to use the BPR3 icon, one must register the site with researchblogging.org and follow a few simple guidelines when posting. Guess how many of these instructions were followed by Casey? If you guessed zero, you get nothing. Not because you’re wrong, but because the choice was obvious.
Instead, Casey copied the icon to the DI’s website and posted it without any link back to researchblogging.org. I’m guessing that he didn’t bother to ask permission to copy the icon, since the DI has been shown to be a bit fuzzy on the whole copyright thing.
But of course, the DI isn’t really interested in becoming engaged in thoughtful scientific debate. What they want to do is to give themselves a veneer of intellectual credibility for the benefit of their credulous followers. I’m guessing they left out the link so that none of their flock strays out of their tightly-controlled propaganda machine.
Of course, the post has been a source of discussion on BPR3. The general consensus is that (surprise!) the post fails to meet both the letter and/or the spirit of several of the guidelines.
I’m sure that Casey will be rectifying this situation promptly. And by “rectifying”, I mean “whining about”. One thing that the DI fellows are highly skilled at is whining.
UPDATE: Mr. Luskin has responded.
