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aliciathompson1

Ted Cruz Lives On Another Planet Where His Fight Against Obamacare Is Working - Busines... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/t-obamacare-is-working-2013-10

cruz obamacare politics

shared by aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • On Planet Cruz, there is a massive outpouring of public support for a government shutdown over Obamacare and it's scaring the hell out of Democrats.
  • Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the public hates the shutdown, Americans are 20 points more likely to blame Republicans for the shutdown than Obama, the Republican Party is scoring its worst poll numbers on record, Cruz's colleagues in the House and Senate hate him, and they're preparing to cave to the president by reopening the government and funding Obamacare.
  • When constituencies become aggrieved minorities, seeing themselves as under attack by the establishment, they are vulnerable to hucksters like Cruz, because they disregard outside warnings and evidence that they are being had.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Losing one election wasn't nearly enough to wake Republican voters up to this problem. Ted Cruz isn't alone on his strange planet; much of the Republican Party is right there with him. And that's likely to be true for a long time
aliciathompson1

Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are authentically wrong - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...anders-are-authentically-wrong

politics cruz bernie

shared by aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Both candidates have whipped up voter passions by offering ideologically comforting — and strikingly similar — narratives promising political revolution. Both would fail to achieve such a momentous national transformation because popular opinion and the country’s system of checks and balances would get in the way.
  • This is partially because both candidates are telling bits of their parties’ bases what they want to hear. But another reason is that they have the “credibility” that comes from spending years angering “establishment” politicians — that is, people who have been sullied by having to govern in the real world of constraints and tradeoffs.
  • Cruz and his acolytes blame corruption or weakness for the failure of Republican leaders to make good on the conservative agenda — rather than the fact that those leaders had to govern a country that is not as conservative as they are and that faces challenges that lack pat solutions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But political puritans such as Cruz and Sanders tend to make policy the way they explain the world — with unwarranted, clumsy simplicity.
  • Authentically believing that the whole country secretly agrees with your agenda and will join you on the barricades is not a virtue, it is a fantasy. Sincerely proposing poorly thought-out policy does not change the fact that it is poorly thought-out policy.
carolinewren

Politicians, others on right, left challenge scientific consensus on some issues | The ... - 0 views

www.dispatch.com/...-consensus-on-some-issues.html

politicians science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Often, pronouncements about either subject are accompanied by the politician’s mea culpa: “I’m not a scientist, but ... ”
  • It’s the butthat has caused heartburn among scientists, many of whom say such skepticism has an impact on public policy.
  • “They’ve been using it as if they can dismiss the view of scientists, which doesn’t make any sense,”
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • ‘Well, I’m not an engineer, but I think the bridge will stand up.’  ”
  • “Not just as a public figure, but as a human being, your fidelity should be to reality and to the truth,”
  • Among those agreeing that climate change is both real and a man-made threat are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the Defense Department, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society
  • giving parents a “measure of choice” on vaccination is “the balance that government has to decide.”
  • murkiness of those comments caused alarm among public-health officials, who say the impact of the anti-vaccination movement is being seen in a measles outbreak in a number of states and Washington, D.C.
  • Climate change also sparks tension.
  • He said he was galled by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul’s recent assertion that the government should not require parents to vaccinate their children because it’s an issue of “freedom.”
  • “There is an unwritten litmus test for GOP officeholders” to express some form of skepticism about the phenomenon, he said.
  • However, Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul all voted against another amendment that said human activity contributes “significantly” to the threat. Cruz has asserted to the National Journal that climate change is “a theory that can’t be proven or disproven.”
  • In a separate vote, 98 senators — including Cruz, Rubio, Portman and Paul — acknowledged that climate change is “real and not a hoax.”
  • The group that denied climate change is occurring has pivoted, acknowledging that it exists. Still, the group questions whether it is a man-made phenomenon.
  • As for the caveat I’m not a scientist, “What they’re saying they implicitly think is that scientists don’t even know about climate change,”
  • Conservatives felt more negative emotions when they read scientific studies that challenged their views on climate change and evolution than liberals did in reading about nuclear power and fracking, but researchers believe that’s because climate change and evolution are more national in scope than the issues picked for liberals.
  • “The point is, to a very high level, scientists do know.”
  • Even those who agree that climate change is real and is man-made might not support government action
  • He said the disconnect between the public and scientists isn’t necessarily a bad thing
  • Such a slowdown “gives the science time to mature on some of these issues.”
  • most would-be candidates want to appeal to as many people as possible.
  • “And if you can sort of try to obscure your actual position but not offend anyone, that’s what I think they try to do,”
  • But it’s possible that their comments reflect a growing disconnect between the views of the public and the scientific community.
  • 86 percent of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said childhood vaccines such as the one for measles-mumps-rubella should be required, 68 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
  • larger gap on the subject of climate change: 87 percent of the scientists said climate change is caused mostly by human activity, while 50 percent of U.S. adults did.
  • The divide is not necessarily a conservative one
  • For example, while 88 percent of scientists said it is generally safe to eat genetically modified foods, only 37 percent of U.S. adults agreed.
  • And the vaccine issue is one that has united some liberals, the religious right and libertarians.
  • The study found that conservatives tend to distrust science on issues such as climate change and evolution. For liberals, it is fracking and nuclear power.
  • didn’t stop 39 Republicans — including GOP presidential contenders Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — from opposing an amendment last month that blamed changing global temperatures on human activity.
  • liberals showed some distrust about science when they read about climate change and evolution
  • “Liberals can be just as biased as conservatives,” he said.
  • Rosenberg said the Internet can provide affirmation of pre-existing beliefs rather than encouraging people to find objective sources of information, such as peer-reviewed journals.
  • Often, attacking science is the easiest way to justify inaction, Rosenberg said.
mcginnisca

Republicans have a candidate who could take back the White House. They're just not voti... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...asich-clinton-general-election

social science politics

shared by mcginnisca on 14 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • John Kasich may be running a distant third in the primary, but he's the Republican presidential candidate best positioned to beat Hillary Clinton in a general election matchup
  • The researchers then took the results of those interviews and combined them with voter demographics and economic data to forecast an outcome in each state. These models, as expected, show Clinton pretty easily winning Electoral College majorities over Trump and Cruz, the two Republican frontrunners.
  • Yet she still loses overwhelmingly — she trails Kasich in a couple of traditional swing states (Colorado and Kasich's home state of Ohio), and even narrowly trails him in bluer states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • By contrast, both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump would lose to Clinton in a general election battle, according to the Morning Consult projections — though, interestingly, not in historic blowouts but instead by similar margins to Mitt Romney's 2012 loss
  • "If the election were held today, John Kasich would receive 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 234, largely due to strong performances in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic,
  • Trump would get just 210 electoral votes, and Cruz would get 206.
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
kushnerha

The Trump Effect, and How It Spreads - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...effect-and-how-it-spreads.html

new york times racism Trump politics refugees fear

shared by kushnerha on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • do not make the mistake of treating him as a solitary phenomenon, a singular celebrity narcissist who has somehow, all alone, brought his party and its politics to the brink of fascism
  • The things he says are outrageous, by design, but they were not spawned, nor have they flourished, in isolation.
  • They have been harshening their campaign speeches and immigration proposals in response to the Trump effect. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to allow only Christian refugees from Syria to enter the country, and Mr. Cruz has introduced legislation to allow states to opt out of refugee resettlement.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In 31 states, governors — most but not all Republicans — have formed an axis of ignorance, declaring their borders closed to refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Syria.
  • defending the displaced against blatant discrimination. That it is even necessary to protect the victims of Islamic extremism from being victimized again, in the United States, is a national disgrace.
  • the danger right now is allowing him to legitimize the hatred that he so skillfully exploits, and to revive the old American tendency, in frightening times, toward vicious treatment of the weak and outsiders.
  • The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, as some Republicans have either forgotten or never understood, was a dark episode in American history. It is remembered today with regret, as something the nation struggled with, learned from, and moved beyond. But there are millions of Muslims who have good reason to fear that the darkness is falling again.
  • The time to renounce Mr. Trump’s views was the day he entered the race, calling Mexico an exporter of criminals and rapists.
  • He played to the politics of nativism and fear that was evident last year
  • The racism behind the agenda of the right wing on immigrants and foreigners has long been plain as day. Mr. Trump makes it even plainer.
proudsa

Hillary Clinton Says A Republican President Would 'Break' The Supreme Court - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...court_568fbb2fe4b0a2b6fb6f9ec5

shared by proudsa on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • "The stakes are clear," Clinton wrote of the slate of cases now pending before the court. "In a single term, conservative justices could undermine virtually every pillar of the progressive movement."
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 09 Jan 16
       
      How one small group can undermine an entire larger one
  • "Those who care about the fairness of elections, the future of unions, racial disparities in universities, the rights of women, or the future of our planet, should care about who appoints the next justices," Clinton wrote.
  • The current demographics of the Supreme Court are what make the coming election such a relevant issue.
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  • In debates and on the trail, various GOP candidates have spent time discussing the merits and demerits of specific justices. 
  • He has vowed to pick "rock-ribbed conservatives" to the court, and has also said that Chief Justice John Roberts -- whom Cruz himself once supported -- is actually a bad choice to lead the court because he lacks a "true conservative record."
  • Clinton's op-ed is also notable in that she argues how Republicans see this election as their chance to "pack the courts with jurists who will turn back the clock" on progress -- apparently an acknowledgement that some of the more controversial cases to go before the justices got their start in lower courts that were willing to hear them.   
  • "After years of accusing liberals of judicial activism, conservatives are wholeheartedly relying on Republican-appointed judges to undo progressive achievements," Clinton wrote. "They’re using radical legal strategies to accomplish through the courts what they’ve failed to do through legislation, like dismembering the Voting Rights Act or attacking unions."
  • they're voting for many things at once.
Javier E

What that Cruz-Rubio 'He doesn't speak Spanish' thing was about - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-speak-spanish-thing-was-about

spanish culture foreign language language white supremacy

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • America, this was one of those moments full of history and emotion and deep social meaning that a good portion of the audience likely did not fully comprehend. But, it’s worth noting because that entire exchange was made possible by decades of misguided, scientifically unsound and bigoted thinking that plenty of Americans continue to laud every day.
katherineharron

Trump's absurd projection reveals his anxiety (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Let's talk about projection, the psychological impulse to project on other people what you're actually feeling. Webster's dictionary defines it, in part, as: "the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety." Here's one recent, relevant example: "The one who's got the problem is Biden, because if you look at what Biden did, Biden did what they would like to have me do except there's one problem: I didn't do it."
  • Cruz was pretty quick to diagnose the problem: "This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying."
  • When Clinton raised questions about Trump's erratic and impulsive behavior, he called her unstable, unhinged, lacking the "judgment, temperament and moral character to lead this country." And who can forget his, "No puppet ... You're the puppet," response when she accused him in a debate of being a puppet for Vladimir Putin.
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  • Because tone comes from the top, you see the President's surrogates and even Cabinet officials echo it. But sometimes they go too far and give away the game. Case in point, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on "Face The Nation":
  • "If there was election interference that took place by the Vice President, I think the American people deserve to know."
  • An analysis by The Washington Post's Philip Bump found that his top five insults were "fake," "failed," "dishonest," "weak" and "liar."
peterconnelly

House Democrats look to pass gun control legislation by early June - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...legislation-by-early-june.html

gun control legislation

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • House Democrats will try to advance a raft of gun control bills on Thursday in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings that rocked the nation earlier this month.
  • The Democratic-led package will likely fail in the face of Republican opposition in the Senate. However, Democrats have acknowledged a hope — however slim — that bipartisan talks among senators can lead to lawmakers passing a more limited bill with support from both parties.
  • The Raise the Age Act would lift the purchasing age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21, while the Keep Americans Safe Act would outlaw the import, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of a large-capacity magazine.
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  • Senate Republicans have for years blocked progress on any gun safety legislation. They opposed efforts to tighten gun regulations both when they held the majority, and even now when they can threaten an indefinite filibuster if Democrats can’t come up with the 60 votes required to circumvent the stalling tactic.
  • “It’s much easier to scream about guns than it is to demand answer about where our culture is failing,” Cruz added in a separate social media post on Saturday.
  • Disapproval from Cruz and other Senate Republicans will likely doom any legislation Nadler and other House Democrats manage to pass.
  • Democrats dispute the claim that lawmakers need to target mental illness more so than the availability of guns to reduce shooting violence in the U.S. They say that similar rates of mental illness in other developed nations across the globe prove that mental illness alone cannot fully explain the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S.
Javier E

Don't Do TikTok - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...dont-do-tiktok

social media bias TikTok propaganda china disinformation manipulation culture policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • The small-bore concern is personal data. TikTok is basically Chinese spyware. The platform is owned by a Chinese company, Bytedance, which, like all Chinese companies, operates at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party.1 Anyone from Bytedance who wants to look into an American user’s TikTok data can do so. And they do it on the reg.
  • But personal data isn’t the big danger. The big danger is that TikTok decides what videos people see. Recommendations are driven entirely by the company’s black-box algorithm. And since TikTok answers to the Chinese Communist Party, then if the ChiComs tell TikTok to start pushing certain videos to certain people, that’s what TikTok will do.
  • It’s a gigantic propaganda engine. Making TikTok your platform of choice is the equivalent of using RT as your primary news source.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government have accumulated millions of followers and tens of millions of views, many of them on videos editorializing about U.S. politics without clear disclosure that they were posted by a foreign government.
  • The accounts are managed by MediaLinks TV, a registered foreign agent and Washington D.C.-based outpost of the main Chinese Communist Party television news outlet, China Central Television. The largest of them are @Pandaorama, which features cute videos about Chinese culture, @The…Optimist, which posts about sustainability, and @NewsTokss, which features coverage of U.S. national and international news.
  • In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the @NewsTokss account criticized some candidates (mostly Republicans), and favored others (mostly Democrats). A video from July began with the caption “Cruz, Abbott Don’t Care About Us”; a video from October was captioned “Rubio Has Done Absolutely Nothing.” But @NewsTokss did not target only Republicans; another October video asked viewers whether they thought President Joe Biden’s promise to sign a bill codifying abortion rights was a “political manipulation tactic.” Nothing in these videos disclosed to viewers that they were being pushed by a foreign government.
  • any Chinese play for Taiwan would be accompanied by TikTok aggressively pushing content in America designed to divide public opinion and weaken America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.
  • With all the official GOP machinations against gay marriage, it seems like if McConnell wanted that bill to fail, he could have pressured two Republican senators to vote against it. He said nothing. Trump said nothing. DeSantis said nothing. There was barely a whimper of protest from those who could have influenced this. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz engaged in theatrics, but no one actually used their power to stop this.
  • They let it pass because they don’t care and they want it to go away as an issue. And that goes for the MAGA GOP as well. Opposition to it in politics is all theater and will have a shelf life in riling up the base.
  • Evangelical religious convictions might be for one man + one woman marriage. But, the civil/political situation is far different from that and it’s worth recognizing where the GOP actually stands. They could have stopped this. They didn’t. That point should be clear, especially to their evangelical base who looks to the GOP to save America for them.
Javier E

J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671704

dignity collapse politics us got leadership virtue extremism populism cruelty boorishness juvenile better politicians

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
  • ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
  • Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.
  • Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
  • These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them
  • The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.
  • consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
  • This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.
  • The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.
  • Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
  • Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.
  • I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
aliciathompson1

US election 2016: Marco Rubio wins big in Puerto Rico - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...election-us-2016-35741360

election politics

shared by aliciathompson1 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Marco Rubio has won the latest contest in the battle to be the Republican presidential candidate, a day after being urged to quit the race.
  • While the win in Puerto Rico - a US territory - will boost Mr Rubio's campaign, it sends just 23 delegates to the Republican convention which nominates a presidential candidate. Republican hopefuls need the votes of 1,237 delegates to get the nod for the presidential race proper.
  • Meanwhile, Texas Senator Mr Cruz - who won Republican caucuses in Kansas and Maine - said he believed that "as long as the field remains divided, it gives Donald an advantage".
aliciathompson1

Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...471714

donald trump politics

shared by aliciathompson1 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The first story about the typical Trump buyer was simple: These were poorly informed voters, swept up by a modern circus act orchestrated by a mass-media-age P. T. Barnum with arguably worse hair. But Trump’s appeal has proven to be more than a passing fad.
  • Back in December, a Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support skewed male, white, and poor.
  • The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If there were one question to identify a Trump supporter if you knew nothing else about him, what might it be? “Are you a middle-aged white man who hasn’t graduated from college?” might be a good one. But according to a survey from RAND Corporation, there is one that’s even better: Do you feel voiceless?
  • They Want to Wage an Interior War Against Outsiders
  • They Live in Parts of the Country With Racial Resentment
sandrine_h

A Psychologist Analyzes Donald Trump's Personality - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...480771

shared by sandrine_h on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents “disgusting” and writes them off as “losers.” By the standards of reality TV, Trump’s disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.
  • Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism, although the cool rationality does not always seem to fit, probably because Trump’s disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated by anger.
  • Research shows that people low in agreeableness are typically viewed as untrustworthy. Dishonesty and deceit brought down Nixon and damaged the institution of the presidency. It is generally believed today that all politicians lie, or at least dissemble, but Trump appears extreme in this regard. Assessing the truthfulness of the 2016 candidates’ campaign statements, PolitiFact recently calculated that only 2 percent of the claims made by Trump are true, 7 percent are mostly true, 15 percent are half true, 15 percent are mostly false, 42 percent are false, and 18 percent are “pants on fire.” Adding up the last three numbers (from mostly false to flagrantly so), Trump scores 75 percent. The corresponding figures for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, respectively, are 66, 32, 31, and 29 percent.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.
grayton downing

Retracing Steps | The Scientist Magazine® - 1 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38241/title/Retracing-Steps/

scientist research science

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • growing body of research has highlighted scientists’ inability to reproduce one another’s results, including a 2012 study that found only 11 percent of “landmark” cancer studies investigated could be independently confirmed.
  • “Some communities have standards requiring raw data to be deposited at or before publication, but the computer code is generally not made available, typically due to the time it takes to prepare it for release,”
  • Sage’s solution? An open-source computational platform, called Synapse, which enables seamless collaboration among geographically dispersed scientific teams—providing them with the tools to share data, source code, and analysis methods on specific research projects or on any of the 10,000 datasets in the organization’s massive data corpus. Key to these collaborations are tools embedded in Synapse that allow for everything from data “freezing” and versioning controls to graphical provenance records—delineating who did what to which dataset, for example.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It was indeed the connecting data framework that held the entire project together,” said Josh Stuart, professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is part of the TCGA-led project.
  • “It provides a framework for the science to be extended upon, instead of publication as a finite endpoint for research,”
Javier E

The Triumph of Obama's Long Game - 0 views

nymag.com/...iumph-of-obamas-long-game.html

politics US policy foreign policy israel gender obama health care strategy conservative

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.
  • This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.
  • And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track).
  • Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule.
  • We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”
  • I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.
  • But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.
  • the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all.
  • It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?
  • Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well.
  • Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?
  • Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy.
  • Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity.
  • the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.
  • The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism.
  • You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”
  • One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?
  • And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans.
  • it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it!
  • I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal?
  • Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled.
  • pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.
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