Oregon Republicans walk out from state Senate, denying Dems a quorum. They did this over two bills: one was a gun control bill, the other was a strengthening of Oregon’s vaccination requirement that would have eliminated religious and philosophical beliefs/stances as grounds for exemption from the shots.
ETA: A Politico article from last month describes how Dems in several states are tightening vaccination laws, and Republicans are fighting against them.
More ETA: Seriously, just Google “republicans vaccination” for a quick survey.
Here’s that the Prof said "In class, though, some students argued instead that it is impossible to measure IQ in the first place, that IQ tests were invented to ostracize minority groups, or that IQ is not heritable at all. None of these arguments is true. In fact, IQ can certainly be measured, and it has some predictive value."
and my cites showed that :
IQ tests are or were biased against minorities
2.that we cannot truly define, much less measure, intelligence.
So, the prof is wrong, not the students. In fact the students were quite correct.
Jackmannii I will have to point out that while I do appreciate your efforts against the antivaxxers, I have to be fair with Buttigieg by noticing that he did put a escape hatch by saying early that those religious exemptions can be allowed only if the level of vaccination in a region was over the level where herd immunity was effective. IOW, as seen in many areas, the religion exception is SOL by noticing that. But that is a moot point, as the clarification in your cite shows:
In the case of Biden, AFAIK he never declared opposition to vaccine policies during the Obama administration years and he also roughed the feathers of many conservatives on recommending vaccines that do deal with cancers like the ones that can happen with HPV.
As me and RTFirefly (what was the T stood for Groucho’s character name?) noted, it is the Republican leaders who are picking the idiot ball and are in the process of institutionalizing it.
I asked My Beloved “You know that overbroad hammy scene-stealing character who thought he was in charge of everything, but fucked it up completely? What does the “T” in his middle name stand for”?
That was of course for James T. Kirk, but it seems that the middle “T” in Rufus Firefly was not assigned at the time of the Duck Soup movie, still looking for a cite but it may be just a letter “T” like the “S” for Ulysses S. Grant.
Claiming that vaccines don’t work, or that they have effects that multiple studies have shown they don’t have? *That’s *anti-science.
Opposing a government regime that (if I’m understanding you all correctly) would force people to have injections at the penalty of imprisonment? That’s not anti-science, just pro-civil-liberties. People have the right to be wrong, and dumb. If we are going to imprison people for creating impediments to public health, we’d better round up the executives at Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay, and the automobile execs who make cars that can go 100 mph, just for starters.
Seriously, no one else objects to using “him” as the generic pronoun? I thought we were past this decades ago.
Earlier this evening I heard an NPR interview with some kind of social scientist. I will paraphrase what she said as accurately as I can.
“There has been a move in recent years to shift from explicitly race-based programs to help African Americans, to class-based ones, on the theory that it will still disproportionately benefit black people, as long as they are overrepresented among the lowest socioeconomic tiers. But the data show that black boys raised in wealthy households are much more likely to become poor in adulthood than are white boys raised in similarly affluent families. Therefore, there must be something happening to those black boys that doesn’t happen to white boys, and which has a profound impact on their life outcomes. Our institution’s research is devoted to finding out what those environmental factors are.”
Is that really a dispassionate, clear-eyed application of the scientific method? :dubious:
Yeah pretty much. I would not say “must be something happening”, but then it’s your paraphrase anyway, so maybe he or she didn’t phrase it that way.
But yeah, suspecting environmental factors and then actually doing the research to try to find what those environmental factors are, is great science.
Presumably you think that black people is dumb is a better answer? Well, have you thought about why they might be talking about black boys specifically? I don’t know about the US, but in many European countries black women achieve the same or even better earnings than women of other ethnicities with parents at a similar level of wealth.
Imagining that only big scary black men have the dumb gene, stretches credulity and is yet another reason to suspect it is not a good hypothesis.
You think refusing to be vaccinated is victimless? Just ask the kids who have good medical reasons to not get vaccinated, and are at terrible risk for getting a disease, and who cannot safely go to school because some moron parents don’t understand science and think they are experts because of what they read on the Internet.
In many of these cases, no one is forced to be vaccinated - they are just not allowed in schools unless they are.
Do you think people with contagious diseases should be allowed in public to spread them so their civil rights aren’t violated. This is pretty much the same.
So you’re only saying it would be a requirement to go to public school. Not something everyone of any age would be forced to undergo? That isn’t nearly so problematic.
And no, I never said it is victimless. But neither is making a car capable of 100+ MPH.
Why does there have to be a single hypothesis? Ruling any avenue of exploration out due to political correctness is exactly what Steven Pinker so expertly calls out in his excellent book The Blank Slate. It not only might be fruitless, it’s a bad demonstration of how science properly works.
If this were the practice beyond humans, you’d have people saying “It’s a mystery as to why even Pomeranians raised adoptively with Husky mothers and trained with their adopted siblings from birth, still cannot effectively function as part of a sled team. There must be some environmental factor we haven’t uncovered yet, but we’ll continue to devote all our resources to finding it.”
It would also be reasonable, I think, to say “one of the avenues we might have to explore gets us into very uncomfortable terrain and is frankly rude and hurtful without offering any notable benefit, so let’s just not go there”. But that would also entail not making pronouncements like the one this researcher did on NPR, or wasting money on chasing down only one possibility while loudly treating it as the only possibility. This is similar to the complaint in the original piece, that the dearth of women in STEM fields is treated as, ipso facto, evidence of deep-rooted sexism among the gatekeepers of those fields.
ETA: And the “must”, or something that meant the same thing, was definitely part of the statement. That was what set me off. Similar to the expert they interviewed a few years ago who said that the only explanation for the fact that kids who are suspended from high school end up more likely to be in prison later, is that the suspensions are somehow causing the later imprisonments–and therefore we should eliminate suspensions from the toolkit of public school administrators. :smack:
This thread seems to be anti-scientific. You lack evidence for your hypotheses. So rather than accept that lack of evidence, you create this idea that someone is preventing that science from being done.
Even the beginning of this thread was bad. You made a claim that should, if true, be backed up by testing. It would be trivial to put out a survey that checked for both political beliefs and tested for attitudes towards science itself or the existing consensus in various fields.
Instead, all you had was an anecdote. That’s not scientific at all.
You instead are acting like the climate deniers. The data doesn’t fit, so it must be that everyone is biased against it. It can’t be that the evidence doesn’t exist for your beliefs.
There was literally nothing in those five short paragraphs I would call remotely close to being accurate, so I don’t even have a starting point to rebut you other than to marvel at the magnitude of your wrongness. In its way, that’s impressive!
Looking for evidence of X is not the same thing as claiming X must necessarily be the (only) cause. In fact it can be good science or bad science, dependent on other factors:
“My hypothesis predicts X, therefore I will look for evidence of X” – Good science, pretty foundational in fact
“I can’t find evidence of X, but my hypothesis must be right so I will keep looking” – Bad science. Or at least, bad approach
So the whole thing rests on your characterizing of what he said, not on the research itself.
Sure, and if I were to see that in a video or transcript I may also be set off.
I have absolutely seen some research or even higher “education” institutes that are agenda-driven.
When I hear about such things second-hand though, I tend to withhold outrage.
Because it is like with political correctness: political correctness is definitely a real thing, and sometimes even rises to the level of being a problem. But instances of people getting outraged about something which has been misrepresented (or worse) seems to vastly outnumber real instances in my experience.
Maybe so, but I’d say, “I have a right to go around in public without having been vaccinated” is more on a par with “I have a right to drive on public roads without a license.”
Either way, yes, the public has the right to restrict the harm one person can do to others. One can argue where the line should be drawn. But when you say, “my freedom to swing my arm around doesn’t end where your face begins,” that goes beyond any reasonable conception of freedom I’m familiar with.
There are, frankly, better arguments against gun control than against mandatory vaccination. At least the person with the gun can control what s/he does with that gun. The person who doesn’t get vaccinated can’t control whether they get a communicable disease, and can’t control whether they pass it on to someone who can’t safely be vaccinated.
Mijin, I can’t find a transcript of the show I heard, so that’s fair if you don’t want to take my word for it. I did however find a writeup of the study cited, which is very interesting and well-written, but does have some spots where it gets into unsupported territory, though not as egregiously as the woman on NPR. http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_summary.pdf
Any time you put “because” in a scientific paper, you’d better have your ducks in a row. This one is either not supported by any evidence they discuss, or is trivially true (if it is interpreted simply as “both groups live in these areas but the outcomes of each are not the same”) and therefore misleading.
They do find some environmental factors that matter, although only one of them is the kind of thing I would expect progressives to tout. That is the level of racial bias in the wealthy neighborhood in question. The other is the presence of black fathers in the community (interestingly, it doesn’t seem to so much matter whether any given boy grows up with a father in his own home). That’s the one that conservatives have been wagging their fingers about for decades.
ETA: On vaccination, we can have different views about the civil liberties issue and where you draw the line. That doesn’t make my position “anti-science”.
One area of science is apparently no longer under attack from a left-leaning source.
Democratic “megadonor” Albert Dwoskin (whose foundation bankrolled a bunch of poor quality antivax research) has seen the light:
*“After seeing a great deal of evidence, I have concluded that concerns about the safety of vaccination are unfounded,” he said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “The best way to protect children is to make sure they have all their vaccinations as recommended by scientists, doctors and other healthcare professionals.”
“The CMSRI, founded by my estranged wife, has been closed. I regret my participation in the CMSRI’s work and disagree with her views on the dangers of vaccination,” he added. “My foundation no longer supports work on this issue.”*
There have always been high school and college students who objected to being taught anything at all, much less anything they didn’t already believe in. In my day they were called “liberal arts majors.”
I thought we were past this decades ago.