More stuph

[dreamer_easy]

Ricky Gervais and the British way. "Anyone from anywhere can be cruel, anyone from anywhere can be witty, but there is something particularly British about cruel wit." I didn't see the Golden Globes or hear any of Gervais' remarks - what interests me, always, are the cultural differences between the English-speaking nations.

"only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans". What the hell?

Words about "The Scream"

Jocularity: Crunks 2010: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections, in which we learn that Lizo Mzimba was not in fact taped to a wall. (The previous year's edition discusses the spread of amateur factchecking, a subject close to my heart. :)

Comments

[hnpcc]

There was an interesting discussion about the lack of Republicans (or openly Republican) in science in Obsidian Wings a couple of months ago.

Basically -- because even the short version is getting to be too long -- I think that in the 80s the Republican powers saw even the hardest of hard scientists, the physicists and geologists and NASA, take positions that impeded the core Republican value of Making Money. Then, once they stopped worrying about what a bunch of eggheads thought, they could turn up the music playing to a Christianist audience and be against evolution and the wrong sort of medical research. But the underlying drive, IMHO, was Republican resistance to the kind of planetary systems concerns that we currently lump under "climate change".

No idea if that's exact or not - and I'd be interested to know what the breakdown of Liberal:ALP is in Australian scientists. Or, more accurately, the breakdown of Lib:ALP:Green to be honest.

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that link - very interesting. I followed a link from there to the Frum Forum article, which said:

"Under Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, Republicans championed science and knowledge. But over the past 30 years, national Republicans have formed an intensifying alliance with religious conservatives more skeptical of science and knowledge. [...] In the age of Fox News and the Tea Party, the cultural war has heated up, and the anti-academic and anti-science rhetoric has intensified."

A positive feedback loop, with the GOP becoming more and more anti-science rather than changing its tactics (to the distress of moderate Republicans), could perhaps explain that extraordinarily low figure.