by James Hanley
Thanks to all who took the time to take the IDEALog survey and report their results to me, and my apologies for taking so long to present the results. I’ll present the findings in a moment, but first some background and development (just to make this an excruciatingly long post).
Background: Liberalism v. Libertarianism
There has been an on-going discussion in comment threads between Stillwater and me about libertarianism, in which he has been pushing me on where I define the boundaries of libertarianism and I have been pushing him on what I see as “lumping” all libertarians into a group defined by a particular set of policy positions. Recently a comment of Stillwater’s made clear one way in which I had managed to confuse him about my argument, which is that I have claimed both that there is a fundamental difference between liberals and libertarians and that the two groups can come down in the same place on particular policies. As Stillwater wrote:
[Y]ou keep insisting there is this significant difference between our theories, our policies, our preferred values, our analytical methods. If there isn’t a category difference captured by all those distinctions, then we’re talking about subtle shading on the edges of things. But if there is a category difference captured by all that, then the lumping [together of all libertarians] seems entirely appropriate since there are clear-cut divisions distinguishing two schools of thought on these matters.
So which is it, a distinct category difference between the groups, or just shadings at the edges? Continue reading this post…
~by M.A.
Conor P. Williams, in Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”, argues that there is a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu involved in shifting frameworks from argument to argument. An interesting test of this very case came up this morning with the local radio talk host bringing up the topic of the death penalty in conjunction with a Time Magazine story covering the execution of one Carlos DeLuna, who a 5-year investigation has shown was almost certainly innocent of the crime he was executed for.
The argument from the talk host was that this was about “law and order” (framework #1), “justice” (framework #2), and “a state’s right to fulfill the sentence handed down by the judiciary” (framework #3, which also might involve dog-whistling of racist sentiment regarding court cases such as Leal Garcia v. Texas and Medellin v. Texas). A final framework, “the bible says an eye for an eye”, was brought up by many callers with an insistence that there is no way DeLuna was actually innocent (framework #4 the bible, framework #5 rejection of the results of the very thorough investigation).
Continue reading this post…
by Sam Wilkinson
Once, I was a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Political Science, a stupid idea for at least a thousand different reasons, perhaps most importantly my aversion to political science in general. I took a comprehensive exam in which I was expected to cite literature that the department had decided was important to the field. As I am wont to do, I insisted upon including a reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s “A Southern City With Northern Problems,” an essay he wrote about Louisville, Kentucky. It was an evisceration of his hometown, something written shortly after a more expansive and more widely read piece he wrote about the Kentucky Derby (“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”). Needless to say, my professors were not impressed, I was sent a not-so-subtle message that it might be time to move on, and I agreed.
Political science made a point of informing me via sledgehammer about the importance of its own literature. This isn’t a point that’s worth debating; every field has its books that greatly matter. I have to be honest though – political science books are painfully boring, especially the more modern ones, the ones that decided that emotion made books worse, the ones that decided that math made books better. This also isn’t a point worth debating, because I know that analysis matters and I know that math makes analysis easier or better or both.
But the appeal of “A Southern City With Northern Problems” is that we’re not forced to waste time, first on understanding the dataset, and then on understanding how we’re going to flog it to death. Instead, we have a simple article in a writer makes one conclusion absolutely clear: this is bullshit. Continue reading this post…
~by M.A.
Fresh off of reading Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent op-ed concerning the ever-shrinking GOP tent, I had the occasion to sit around for a while listening to one of the local highly-rated talk radio hosts for my area. After about 5 minutes, I decided to grab a notepad, write down the key words and phrases, and start keeping track of how often they were uttered by either the host or call-in guests.
This is all completely unscientific; it is possible it may not be all that representative of the show, being a randomly sampled segment on a random day based on those things I found interesting. Based on the limited listening I do, however, I am reasonably certain it is relatively representative not only of his show, but of a good percentage of right-wing talk radio in general.
Continue reading this post…
~by Sam Wilkinson
This was the quote that got me:
“If the GOP is going to win elections, it’s going to win them fair and square with real Republicans, not fake ones.”
That’s from (the apparently controversial) Tom Van Dyke. referring to Senator Richard Lugar’s loss in Indiana’s Republican primary. Lugar was beaten soundly by Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party favorite who is far more conservative than Lugar. This thrills Van Dyke, as Mourdock is the “real Republican” in the quote above. Lugar, we’re lead to believe, was fake.
Continue reading this post…
Miss Mary 
Will Truman 
Mali Hawthorne 
Snorkle 
b 
areawoman 
