The price of populism in the republican party

I have no opposition to genuine science, I oppose the kind of dogmatism and fundamentalist thinking that has tried to replace religion with science.

You know, the kind of science religion angry and resentment filled former theists spew...

 

you are such a spineless troll, you remind me of someone else on this site.
I am pro science. I happen to understand it better than you. You are closed minded to new facts.

let me break it down for - nobel prize winning scientists and one of the worlds top physicists (a chair at stanford and co-founder of string theory) note that our universe looks designed. To combat that conclusion they have postulated that there are trillions and trillions of alternate universes. Now here is a quote for you bozo:

"How do you respond to critics who see the anthropic approach as quasi-religious or unscientific?

I cannot put it better than Steven Weinberg did in a recent paper:

Finally, I have heard the objection that, in trying to explain why the laws of nature are so well suited for the appearance and evolution of life, anthropic arguments take on some of the flavor of religion. I think that just the opposite is the case. Just as Darwin and Wallace explained how the wonderful adaptations of living forms could arise without supernatural intervention, so the string landscape may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator. I found this parallel well understood in a surprising place, a New York Times op-ed article by Christoph Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna. His article concludes as follows:

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human nature by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of "chance and necessity" are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

There is evident irony in the fact that the cardinal seems to understand the issue much better than some physicists.

David Gross of UC Santa Barbara says, "Science has managed to explain lots of other weird numbers—so why shouldn't we expect eventually to explain the cosmological constant and other key parameters?"

David is entirely correct in one respect. The views that I have expressed are far from rigorous scientific facts. The observational evidence for a cosmological constant, for inflation, and the mathematical evidence for a string theory landscape could all evaporate. So far they show no signs of doing so, but surprises happen. It is certainly premature to declare victory and close the question. I would be very worried if all theoretical physicists "gave up" (as David puts it) looking for a mathematical explanation for the "weird" value of the cosmological constant. But I think David exaggerates when he claims that science has explained anything like the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant."


http://www.americanscientist.org/bo...eonard-susskind

 

If I wanted to educate you on evolution, I would do it in an evolution thread.

By changing the subject, I take it that you have given up on debating the original point that Republicans are anti-intellectual.

 

you came in here with your baseless insults - i prove them baseless and you suggest we return the point of the thread you hijacked. Nice.... routine.

 

so, you guys are getting the band back together?



... Let Us All Agree ... we, generally, wish good fortune for everyone

 

October 19, 2008 [Today's NYT Week In Review Section]
The Nation
Unease in the Conservative Commentariat
By PATRICIA COHEN
In recent weeks some prominent conservative intellectuals seem to have discovered they have two hands after all. In column after column, these writers have alternately praised the virtues of John McCain and Sarah Palin and lamented their shortcomings.

The syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote in National Review on Sept. 26 that Governor Palin is “clearly out of her league” and should bow out of the campaign. (The conservative biweekly chose not to run a subsequent column in which Ms. Parker offered advice to Senator Barack Obama on how to win votes in Appalachia.)

On Oct. 4, one of the most influential conservative pundits, the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, rapped Senator McCain for his “frenetic improvisation” and, in what some interpreted as an endorsement of Senator Obama, praised his “first-class intellect and a first-class temperament,” adding that these strengths “will likely be enough to make him president.”

This came after another conservative beacon, George F. Will, compared the “Palin bubble” to the irrational exuberance of the deflated high- tech and housing bubbles and said Senator McCain was “behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high” in the way he responded to the financial crisis. He all but pronounced the Republican ticket finished after the final presidential debate last Wednesday night.

And then, to top it off, the novelist and humorist Christopher Buckley endorsed Mr. Obama. This decision, coming from the son of William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, climaxed what seemed to be a mood of growing discomfort on the right.

No doubt these are all significant voices. But it seems fair to ask whether — in an election in which many millions will vote — the assertions of the opinion and chattering class really matter.

One answer is that for more than half a century the conservative movement has insisted that “ideas have consequences,” which implies that writers and thinkers have played a major part in shaping the fortunes of the right.

William Buckley created National Review in 1955 largely because he believed that liberal magazines like The Nation, The New Republic and similar journals had achieved a “monopoly on sophisticated information” and so had been able to set the political agenda.

For this reason, contributors to National Review and other conservative publications have long been careful about reaching agreement on fundamental principles. Of course, total unanimity was an impossibility. But the strength of the movement, as it gained power, rested on discipline. Conservative writers and thinkers might disagree, but usually within limits — and they were careful to emphasize their points of agreement and also to modulate their differences. Hashing them out in public would only weaken the movement and give ammunition to the other side.

This mindset may be at least partly responsible for the more than 12,000 e-mail messages Ms. Parker said she received after her column appeared, many of them insulting and even threatening. Mr. Buckley also said he had heard from angry readers after he declared his apostasy in The Daily Beast, the Web site edited by Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and a certified member of the “liberal media elite.”

Of course, it is hardly in the nature of political commentators, whatever their affinities, to keep their views to themselves.

In 1964, for example, well-established conservative publications, including all 10 Hearst newspapers and The Saturday Evening Post, broke with longstanding practice by endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.

A decade later Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus, all onetime liberals or leftists, led the charge against the Democratic Party, which they accused of being soft on the Soviet Union and a partner in cultural and moral decline at home.

These neoconservatives — and others like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak and Ben Wattenberg — did not just express opinions. They also helped lay the intellectual groundwork, from supply-side economics to foreign policy, for Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.

This was a classic case of ideas having consequences. While the actual number of neocons was small, they were “intellectually significant,” said Allen Matusow, a professor of American history at Rice University and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s.” This was a case of intellectuals being in step with the broader culture. “The neoconservatives were merely a symptom of a widespread feeling that America had lost its edge in the Cold War,” Mr. Matusow said.

The next generation of neoconservatives — including Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Post, and William Kristol (Irving’s son) and Robert Kagan, writing in the pages of The Weekly Standard — helped lead the campaign for the war in Iraq and championed the idea that America should use its might to press its vision of democracy around the world, an idea that has split both liberals and conservatives.

Today, President Bush’s policies and the collapse of Wall Street have led longtime conservatives to conflicting conclusions about where the Republican Party should be headed. And the disillusioned commentary of credentialed conservatives like Mr. Will, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Krauthammer may be the sound of a movement splintering at its foundation — a movement whose intellectuals have long been uneasy with, for example, the rising power, in the Bush years, of evangelicals, with their categorical faith in creationism and distrust of scientific reason.

The Times’s Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, who recently described Governor Palin as a “cancer on the Republican Party,” explained in an interview that the movement is now embroiled in a debate: “Should it go back to the core principles of Ronald Reagan or should it go on to something else? That’s the core issue.”

Resolving such fundamental questions can take years, Mr. Brooks said, noting that in Britain, the Conservative Party spent a decade and a half reinventing itself after Margaret Thatcher left office. Following Goldwater’s rout in 1964, American conservatives struggled for 16 years before Ronald Reagan finally was elected president.

With the election only two weeks away, it is impossible to say whether the disillusionment of the conservative intelligentsia is evidence of a similarly widespread disaffection on the right or is merely the rumblings of a handful of high-profile critics.

“In every election you’re going to find some people who are opposed to their party’s candidate,” Mr. Matusow said. “The question is, when is it significant?”

Even as some within the Republican camp — including those who support Mr. McCain — have warned of substantial disaffection among party members and seem girded for a disappointing loss on Nov. 4, others insist that the despair is premature. This, in turn, may point to yet another emerging schism on the right — between rank-and-file conservatives and the movement’s own “media elite.”

“The migration or desertion of the intellectuals does not reflect the base,” said Mr. Matusow.

Pundits, after all, tend to travel in packs and form their own constituency. They may be wringing their hands. But, Mr. Matusow said, “The average Republican will turn out” on Election Day.

An earlier version of this article misspelled Jeane Kirkpatrick’s first name as Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

 

Monday, October 20, 2008

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PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
The Barack backlash
Pat Buchanan: Will Obama return to the hard left or practice moderation if elected?

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Posted: October 17, 2008
5:13 pm Eastern



By Patrick J. Buchanan



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As Americans render what Catholics call temporal judgment on George Bush, are they aware of the radical course correction they are about to make?

This center-right country is about to vastly strengthen a liberal Congress whose approval rating is 10 percent and implant in Washington a regime further to the left than any in U.S. history. Consider.

As of today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, anticipates gains of 15-30 seats. Sen. Harry Reid, whose partisanship grates even on many in his own party, may see his caucus expand to a filibuster-proof majority where he can ignore Republican dissent.

Headed for the White House is the most left-wing member of the Senate, according to the National Journal. To the vice president's mansion is headed Joe Biden, third-most liberal as ranked by the National Journal, ahead of No. 4, Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders.

What will this mean to America? An administration that is either at war with its base or at war with the nation.

(Column continues below)


America may desperately desire to close the book on the Bush presidency. Yet there is, as of now, no hard evidence it has embraced Obama, his ideology, or agenda. Indeed, his campaign testifies, by its policy shifts, that it is fully aware the nation is still resisting the idea of an Obama presidency.

In the later primaries, even as a panicked media were demanding that Hillary drop out of the race, she consistently routed Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania and crushed him in West Virginia and Kentucky.

By April and May, the Democratic Party was manifesting all the symptoms of buyer's remorse over how it had voted in January and February.

Get the book that started it all – Jerome Corsi's "The Obama Nation," personally autographed – for only $4.95, available today, but only from WND!

Obama's convention put him eight points up. But, as soon as America heard Sarah Palin in St. Paul, the Republicans shot up 10 points and seemed headed for victory.

What brought about the Obama-Biden resurgence was nothing Obama and Biden did, but the mid-September crash of Fannie, Freddie, Lehman Brothers, AIG, the stock market, where $4 trillion was wiped out, the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street that enraged Middle America – and John McCain's classically inept handling of the crisis.

In short, Obama has still not closed the sale. Every time America takes a second look at him, it has second thoughts, and backs away.

Even after the media have mocked and pilloried Palin and ceded Obama and Biden victory in all four debates, the nation, according to Gallup, is slowly moving back toward the Republican ticket.

Moreover, Obama knows Middle America harbors deep suspicions of him. Thus, he has jettisoned the rhetoric about the "fierce urgency of now," and "We are the people we've been waiting for," even as he has jettisoned position after position to make himself acceptable.

His "flip-flops" testify most convincingly to the fact that Obama knows that where he comes from is far outside the American mainstream. For what are flip-flops other than concessions that a position is untenable and must be abandoned?

Flip-flopping reveals the prime meridian of presidential politics. If an analyst will collate all the positions to which all the candidates move, he will find himself close to the true center of national politics.

Thus, though he is the nominee of a party that is in thrall to the environmental movement, Obama has signaled conditional support for offshore drilling and pumping out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

While holding to his pledge for a pullout of combat brigades from Iraq in 16 months, he has talked of "refining" his position and of a residual U.S. force to train the Iraqi army and deal with al-Qaida.

On Afghanistan, he has called for 10,000 more troops and U.S. strikes in Pakistan to kill bin Laden, even without prior notice or the permission of the Pakistani government.

Since securing the nomination, Obama has adopted the Scalia position on the death penalty for child rape and the right to keep a handgun in the home. He voted to give the telecoms immunity from prosecution for colluding in Bush wiretaps. This onetime sympathizer of the Palestinians now does a passable imitation of Ariel Sharon.

No Democrat has ever come out of the far left of his party to win the presidency. McGovern, the furthest left, stayed true to his convictions and lost 49 states.

Obama has chosen another course. Though he comes out of the McGovern-Jesse Jackson left, he has shed past positions like support for partial-birth abortion as fast as he has shed past associations, from William Ayers to ACORN, from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to his fellow parishioners at Trinity United.

One question remains: Will a President Obama, with his party in absolute control of both Houses, revert to the politics and policies of the left that brought him the nomination, or resist his ex-comrades' demands that he seize the hour and impose the agenda ACORN, Ayers, Jesse and Wright have long dreamed of?

Whichever way he decides, he will be at war with them, or at war with us. If Barack wins, a backlash is coming.