Cokie, you ignorant slut!

Actually, she is an ignorant jerk:

During coverage of the October 2 vice-presidential debate on PBS' Charlie Rose, Rose asked, "Did either of them make any mistakes that you noticed?" National Public Radio senior news analyst Cokie Roberts responded that Sen. Joe Biden "talked about the Bosniaks." Roberts later said: "[I]f [Gov. Sarah Palin] had said 'Bosniak,' everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know." In fact, Biden correctly referred to certain residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Bosniaks.

Why does Cokie Roberts have a job as a journalist? She is clearly not qualified to be a "senior news analyst" if she comments on things she knows squat about without doing any research. Actually, why does Cokie Roberts have any job at all? She is clearly not qualified to be a maid or a cashier if she lacks decency and respect for fellow human beings.

Physicist drinks Kool-Aid

When stupid people cheer Sarah Palin and accuse Obama/Democrats/liberals/"the left" of smearing her, you can almost feel sorry for them. But when intelligent people twist logic to discredit legitimate attacks on her positions and actions, it becomes tragicomic.

So here is Matt Springer, a graduate student of physics and ScienceBlogs contributor, leaping to Palin's defense against the accusation that, when she was mayor, her town had the policy of charging rape victims for forensic tests.

Let's see what the article actually says. Notice, contra Neurotopia, that it does not mention Palin at all. Nor does it mention tax cuts. It certainly doesn't say that "[s]he justifies it as necessary to cut taxes". That's simply fabrication. This is what the article says in its entirely about Wasilla:

While the Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies have covered the cost of exams, which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece, the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests. Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to cover the costs of the forensic exams. "In the past we've charged the cost of exams to the victims insurance company when possible. I just don't want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer," Fannon said. According to Fannon, the new law will cost the Wasilla Police Department approximately $5,000 to $14,000 a year to collect evidence for sexual assault cases. "Ultimately it is the criminal who should bear the burden of the added costs," Fannon said.

Oh my. It doesn't mention Palin at all, except that it mentions the town of which she was the mayor, the police chief who reported to her (in fact, she had hired him), and a municipal policy for which (even if it is from God), the mayor has some responsibility in this world.

And no tax cuts? Pedantically, no, but the police chief justified his opposition to the state law on budgetary grounds. I am not going to argue with Matt whether it was about cutting taxes or merely preventing tax increases; I'll let him choose his preferred interpretation.

The new law prevented departments from billing insurance: the departments bear responsibility themselves. The article says nothing to indicate that any actual victim was ever forced to pay money out of pocket.

Nothing? Let's see what Matt Springer calls "nothing":

Until the 2000 legislation, local law enforcement agencies in Alaska could pass along the cost of the exams, which are needed to obtain an attacker's DNA evidence. Rape victims in several areas of Alaska, including the Matanuska-Susitna Valley where Wasilla is, complained about being charged for the tests, victims' advocate Lauree Hugonin, of the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, told state House committees, records show.

In cases when insurance companies are billed, the victims pay a deductible.

The supreme irony is that Springer's blog is called "Built on Facts". He continues:

The only conceivable possibility is that there may have been cases for which insurance didn't pay (the article provides no evidence of this), in which case the most likely scenario would be the department paying as in the city of Palmer.

I guess uninsured rape victims are inconceivable (Is Matt related to Vizzini?) and his mere speculation suffices to determine the most likely scenario, despite what the "nothing" above says.

Besides, the town's policy, and its opposition to the 2000 law, is abhorrent enough on its face. Palin owes American voters an explanation regardless of whether any rape victim was actually charged for the test in Wasilla.

Apparently, Matt would ask the victims, not the mayor:

This could be easily checked by examining the individual cases: in the four years Palin was mayor before this law was passed, there were only five sexual assaults.

I guess it's also inconceivable that examining individual cases may raise some privacy issues. But the link Matt provided turns up some rather interesting information.

There were 8 sexual assaults in Wasilla in 1994 and 5 in 1995. In 1996, the year Palin became mayor, there were 3, and in the three subsequent years, 0, 1, and 1, respectively. Could it be that she was a miracle worker who made violence against women disappear? Maybe not; the number of sexual assaults increased to 7 in 2000 (when the law passed), 4 in 2001, and 16 in 2002, the last year of Palin's mayorship.

That does not look like mere statistical fluctuation; something is fishy about those numbers. I can only speculate, so what follows is not a conclusion, but merely a question I'd like to ask Palin, Fannon, and others who may know:

Is it possible that reporting of sexual assaults dropped in 1997-99 because the police became hostile to victims in some way? Was the policy of charging victims for tests just a symptom of a broader approach - the tip of an iceberg? After all, the evidence shows that the policy was instituted on Palin's watch, rather than being some forgotten relic from the past.

Matt probably thinks that's inconceivable, because he doesn't think Palin would be responsible even if victims actually were charged:

And even if the Police Chief turns out to have done something so horrible (again, no evidence), there's nothing at all to indicate the mayor would have been aware of a detail of police procedure for a crime that happened about once a year. There's no evidence that Palin was even aware that such a thing was even a possibility under the law.

It must not be relevant that she hired the police chief (she fired the old one allegedly over political loyalty), that he reported to her and submitted the annual police budget to her, and that she, as mayor, approved and signed the town budget. It must not be relevant that the contingency budget for rape kits decreased from $13,000 to $3,000 in two years, from 1996 to 1998. If she didn't authorize the change, wouldn't she want to know the reason for it? Wasn't it her responsibility to know?

If any of those things were true, you'd think the governor who signed that law would have brought this up as an issue when Palin defeated him, after all.

When Sarah Palin defeated Tony Knowles, he was not the incumbent. There was another governor in the meantime, Frank Murkowski. The Palin-Knowles race was 6 years after the law was enacted. A gubernatorial race in a small state doesn't have the same profile as a presidential race and it is not clear that bringing up the issue would have been helpful to Knowles. (Then again, to turn his style of arguments against him, does Matt have a proof that Knowles did not bring up the issue in 2006?)

All of Matt's debunking so far amounts to nothing more than stating that he doesn't believe Palin was responsible for her city's policy. His arguments certainly weren't stronger than those for the other side. But how does he conclude his post? Decisively:

I understand Palin is not exactly the queen of popularity here at ScienceBlogs. But that is absolutely no excuse for promulgating this kind of desperate garbage.

Up to that point, he was merely a fool, but now he promoted himself to a rude and arrogant fool.

A commenter soon pointed out the following detail:

the police chief says it'll cost 5 to 14 thousand a year, for tests that cost 3 to 12 hundred dollars each...
That's between 4 (= 5,000/1200) and 46 (= 14,000/300) tests a year...taking averages gives about 12 (= 9500/750) tests a year...
that seems distinctly at odds with your claim that rapes requiring rape kits is "a crime that happened about once a year.".

to which Matt responded

It's not my claim, it's the actual court data for crimes reported. That's why I linked straight to the source.

Um, okay, but we really don't care whose claim it was. We want to know if it is true.

My guess as to the high estimate is that there's a baseline cost for the ability to process kits which is much greater than the cost of the physical kit itself. The police would need to cover the cost of processing equipment and possibly qualified hospital staff. If I understand correctly, rape kits are fundamentally a medical procedure and regardless of who pays, it's the hospital which is actually conducting the exam. Though the fundamental nature of sexual assault certainly merits an exception, police departments don't (as far as I know) make a habit of paying for medical examination after a mugging or other non-sexual violent crimes either.

Nice rationalization, but how would those costs depend on who pays them? Remember, you are trying to explain a five- to tenfold difference in costs of tests paid by the police and those paid by insurance, and all you came up with is that there is fixed cost involved - in both cases.

Responding to another comment, Matt says

I am aware that sexual assault is underreported, however, the issue at hand here is the specific need for rape kits. Every unreported sexual assault is an awful thing, but obviously the whole issue of who pays for a rape kit is moot if the crime isn't reported in the first place.

But, as I mentioned before, reporting is influenced by the way the police treats the victim. And the Wasilla Police Department statistics show a so far unexplained dip in rape reporting in the years between Palin's hiring Fannon as police chief and the passage of the state law banning the practice of charging victims.

Matt's ability and willingness to process new evidence were tested when a commenter pointed out that TPM had linked to another article that included the following statement:

And according to former Gov. Tony Knowles, the law was passed specifically in response to Wasila's policy. "There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," says Knowles.

Matt found the following objections:

1. It quotes as its source the governor Palin beat in the AK governor's election. He's approximately the most biased source possible.

2. Especially given the small number (demonstrably 5 or less) of rape kits required in Wasilla before the law, it's unlikely Palin would have known about this police procedure for a rare crime, even if what the former governor says is true.

3. There's still no actual record that anyone ended up having to pay anything. If one ends up being found, the police chief certainly had an awful policy and it would reflect negatively on this particular hiring choice of Palin. Much less so however, than (say) someone like Tony Rezko.

Objection 1 is ridiculous. The original commenter poked two holes in it - Knowles appears to have said it in 2000, 6 years before Palin ran for governor, and he is no less credible than the police chief appointed by Palin. I would add that nobody - not Fannon, not Palin - ever contradicted what Knowles said, so what is the point in questioning his credibility?

I have already explained why the second objection is invalid: a mayor has a responsibility to know about his or her city's policies and important events. As the commenter put it:

What does it tell us about Palin if she ignored the follow-up of every rape in her small town during her entire mayoralty?

But Matt's third objection is bordering on pathological. As soon as he is cornered into admitting this could be at least somewhat relevant for Palin as a candidate ("it would reflect negatively on this particular hiring choice of Palin"), he throws a dung bomb out of the blue, bringing up Rezko. He may have realized it was stupid because he soon tried to disown his words:

The Rezko bit is a cheap shot designed to make a point: the people you hire sometimes do things you'd highly disapprove of, but you may not know about it until it's too late. That's life. I don't think it's Obama's fault Rezko turned out to be a crook, and if this police chief turns out to have put budget above compassion I don't think it would be Palin's fault.

However, even with that spin, it is still utter bullshit. Rezko's crimes are unrelated to his business with Obama. They have no more bearing on Obama than Enron's accounting had on other clients of Arthur Andersen. It is preposterous to compare that with the relation between a mayor and the police chief whom she hired and whom she had the power to fire at will. Even as a "cheap shot designed to make a point", Matt's argument is dishonest.

The theme that unifies Matt's arguments is that he insists on proofs when Palin's priorities and judgment are questioned, but at the same time, he has no problem calling those questions "garbage" and "smears" based on nothing more than his own speculations and wishful thinking. That is a profoundly hypocritical stance.

Finally, a word of caution for the confused. Palin's defenders (who, don't forget, are ultimately the defenders of McCain's judgment and integrity) are first trying to impeach all criticism as personal and sexist. When that fails, they try to frame the argument as if Palin was on trial and her accusers have the burden of proving allegations beyond reasonable doubt. That frame is completely bogus. When we, as voters, scrutinize politicians, we do not - we definitely should not - presume that they are innocent (good, right) until proven guilty (bad, wrong). We must hold them suspect all the time. We have the right to know the facts about any reasonable allegations that could be relevant to the performance of their duties if elected. Only in authoritarian regimes would citizens be required to prove their allegations before they could criticize a politician. What the Republicans are demonstrating these days is that a McCain-Palin administration would be authoritarian beyond anything this country has ever experienced.

UPDATE (9/24): This article tries to sort out the confusion over which budget item actually represents rape kits.

Attack of the Weathermen

It really pisses me off when a TV station interrupts regular program to tell us about bad weather. I don't mind weather alerts on the edges of the screen; I can deal with a smaller picture. And in a real emergency, say if a tornado was coming, it would be OK to interrupt the program just long enough to say what's necessary. "A cell is forming here and moving in this direction, so places X, Y and Z may be hit by a tornado." Thank you, we got the message. Now, if we live in X, Y or Z, we want to prepare for the approaching twister, and if we don't, we'd like to continue watching the show. You can still keep us informed on the margins.

So tonight a tornado was possibly forming about 20 miles west of where I live. But, instead of just giving us the necessary information, the station interrupted the regular program with almost 10 minutes of detailed explanations of observed weather patterns and how they conclude from those patterns that a tornado may be forming. Interesting stuff, if you wanted to see it; however, if you are seeing it, chances are you were trying to watch something else and would rather keep watching that. (More accurately, chances are you'd also like to wring the neck of the person responsible for the length of the interruption.) The unscheduled weather report is nothing but an intrusion.

No valuable public service is provided by a report that goes beyond necessary emergency information. Furthermore, it can't be good for business, as it will almost certainly annoy more viewers than it will keep glued to the TV waiting for updates. It may even have a negative net effect on public safety, as bored viewers surf away to channels not showing weather alerts. So why do TV stations do something so idiotic?

McImus for President?

OK, people, here is the pronouncement from the Politically Incorrect Gods.

The Chelsea Clinton joke was actually funny. Tasteless, rude, and crude, but funny. And "Bomb Iran" would have been funny, too, with a little better delivery. Those are fine jokes to tell your close friends while smoking pot. They just aren't something you should be telling in public as a candidate for political office.

On the other hand, the marvelous ape "joke" isn't even a joke; it's a splattering of vomit. If he really said that, it might have been more considerate of him to just puke on the audience.

The Gods have spoken.

Buck Ofama!

I've been Obama's supporter since he announced he'd run for President, but if he continues to degenerate into a spineless wimp, I'll be tempted to cast a write-in vote for Wesley Clark.

Conversation With Ed Brayton

Looks like I struck a nerve just enough and not too much: Ed Brayton wrote a long response to my previous post. It is a good response; he holds no punches, but doesn't hit below the waist. I think we have a decent conversation going, and, naturally, I disagree with various points he makes, so here goes my response. I'll address it directly to Ed, in second person. You (Ed) wrote:

The fact that it's "exactly like Dawkins" hardly changes my disagreements with Dawkins on the broader picture, especially on that subject. What human being, even someone deeply religious, would not agree with the statement that "religion provides a structure for people to divide into opposing camps, define themselves by membership in a camp, and kill the members of the other camp"? For crying out loud, Pat Robertson would have to agree with that statement; it's too bloody obvious for anyone to deny.

That's far from clear. Maybe Pat Robertson would say that all of those divisions and killing would be avoided if all people chose the right religion. Some religious people certainly would. Some others, not necessarily religious, would say that religion is incidental to those divisions, with no relevant role in generating them. Not Dawkins; he says religion is central to some of the world's most dangerous divisions. You seem to agree, at least with respect to Irish history. My point was that this is not a trivial agreement.

More importantly, it's not really a counter-argument to the claim that religion benefits the community. Only the staggeringly simple-minded think that there is a single simple answer to the question of whether religion benefits the community.

We agree here; the differences are purely semantic. So it isn't a counter-argument; it is a contrary statement that must be included for a truthful description.

Just as it is absurd to pretend that religion has nothing but positive effects, it's equally absurd to pretend that it has nothing but negative effects.

Right, but the symmetry is broken in American reality. The former pretense is the norm of public discourse, while the latter is considered impolite and offensive. In recent years, several authors have tried to rectify this unjustified asymmetry by giving public voice to the "impolite" side. Although such expression has a long tradition in America, from Tom Paine to Robert Green Ingersoll to H. L. Mencken, its recent professors have been called "new atheists".
Neither the name nor the classification seem very meaningful, but it has caught on, mainly because some other atheists have emphatically distanced themselves from this ill-defined group. And a similar division has arisen among those who defend science education from creationist subversion. I had implied that the two camps differ in how diplomatic they are; you say I am wrong:

The distinction between the two camps has nothing to do with being diplomatic; there is a serious, substantive disagreement between the two camps.

I am sure there are substantive disagreements, but I doubt that the flame wars and personal attacks on blogs can be explained that way. I think people tend to be much better at sorting out substantive disagreements than some barely perceptible character incompatibilities. It is also significant that the deepest hostilities arise between fellow nonbelievers and not between a believer and an atheist, who would tend to have deeper substantive disagreements.

I have one and only one concern and that is what is true. If I think an idea is absurd, I obviously have no problem whatsoever slamming it in very blunt language.

OK, but PZ Myers could have written the same thing. And Dawkins could have (and probably has) written the same first sentence. (He doesn't use "very blunt language", FWIW.) If you don't agree on what is true, perhaps it would be worth figuring out how to resolve the disagreements.

it is about the substantive question of whether religion itself - as opposed to the many stupid or repulsive beliefs within religion - is inherently absurd or dangerous. It isn't that I don't think it's diplomatic to call belief in God a delusion; it's that I honestly don't think it's delusional to believe in God.

The wisdom of Stephen Hawking's retort "I do not answer God questions" is validated if one observes that "God questions" are full of semantic traps that look like substantive issues. Is it possible that much of your disagreement is semantic? Both "religion" and "delusion" are used with so many meanings and shades of meanings that it is extremely easy for two people to talk about them and talk completely past each other, because they don't have common definitions of words.
Dawkins takes steps at the beginning of his book to avoid such misunderstanding, clarifying that he does not use "delusion" in a technical, psychiatric sense, and that the "religion" he is talking about does not include systems of belief, such as Unitarian-Universalist, with no doctrine about supernatural entities. But that may not be enough to avoid misunderstanding completely. After all, Sam Harris, another "new atheist", targets "faith" but not "religion"; in his understanding, "religion" requires neither dogma nor the supernatural. It may be that one has to write an entire book just to define one's terms enough to avoid most misunderstandings.

Now, there are particular conceptions of God that I think are inherently ridiculous and I criticize those ideas here every day.

I agree. But once you take that position, you ought to allow that it is not unreasonable to hold a similar position with a different threshold of ridiculousness. It is also not necessarily true that more ridiculous ideas lead to more dangerous behavior. I've sided with Cal Thomas against Hillary Clinton intellectually, but if I had to choose one of them to make important decisions, it's slam dunk for Hillary.

there are also beautiful, inspiring and, yes, true ideas to be found in religion as well.

Dawkins must hold the same view; if he didn't, then his strong support for teaching the Bible in schools - as literature, of course - would make no sense.

Just as religion can motivate almost unspeakable barbarism, it can also inspire great kindness. For every bigot quoting Leviticus to justify beating up gays, there's someone like my stepmother, a fundamentalist Christian who, while she believes homosexuality to be a sin, nonetheless spent years taking care of my uncle while he was dying of AIDS. And she did that because she takes seriously Jesus' words, "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me also."

That is clearly evidence that your stepmother is a good and kind person, but it is only circumstantial evidence for the positive role of religion. Like every Christian, your stepmother cherry-picked the parts of the Bible that suited her. (It is impossible to avoid cherry-picking because the Bible is too diverse and self-contradictory.) You dismiss the bigotry of Leviticus as if it was struck out of the Bible like the "3/5 of a person" abomination was struck out of the Constitution. But it was not; Leviticus is no less sacred to Christianity than the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (which, BTW, ends with a threat of eternal punishment, but OK, let's limit it to your quote). Your stepmother was driven by the latter because it fit her kind personality. But it does not follow that her religion caused her kind deeds. What role, if any, religion plays in that, is not a well-understood topic currently. (Note that the moral metaphors by themselves are not religion, in the sense Dawkins uses the word, without supernatural origin and retribution after death. Religious inspiration is presumably qualitatively different from inspiration from poetry.)

I simply know too many brilliant, well-educated people who believe in God to say that belief in God is an indication that someone lacks intelligence.

That's a straw man. Nobody relevant has ever made such a claim.

I've known too many good Christian people who spend their lives feeding the homeless, taking care of foster children and orphans, hiding political dissidents from death squads, etc, to believe that religion is uniformly bad.

And that is non sequitur. There are many good religious people (just as there are many good nonreligious people). That doesn't mean that religion made them good. It may have; but any such statements are mere conjectures at this point.

To give one obvious example, at the same time that some in the Catholic hierarchy were cooperating with the Nazis, hundreds of brave priests and nuns were hiding Jewish families from them, risking their own lives in the process. And I don't see how stupid arguments from creationists or vile statements from anti-gay bigots cancels that out.

And I don't see what there is to cancel out. Again you have people doing good deeds; and you and I agree that they are good deeds based on secular criteria. They may have been motivated by religion, but that is speculative. However, I challenge you to try to explain how the persecution of Jews would ever have happened without religion, Christianity in particular. Antisemitism is probably the most readily identifiable negative consequence of Christianity.

It simply doesn't have to be "religion is good" or "religion is bad"; religion is both.

Sure, but you can say that about everything. Love. Death. Democracy. Fascism. It means nothing without assigning it some value on the (possibly multidimensional) good-bad continuum. Which way does the balance tip?

And we can criticize all of those bad things and the ridiculous arguments used to rationalize them away without advocating, as PZ did recently, the "obliterating of religion."

Yes, we can, but what makes one approach inherently better than the other? Assuming that the balance tips toward "bad", would it not be reasonable to at least consider the desirability of disappearance of religion? (It wouldn't necessarily be desirable, it might still be better to preserve religion in a "safe, legal, and rare" form.)

As you see, we have considerable disagreements, probably many of them substantive. But I don't think you are an idiot or a dangerous person and you probably don't think I am. I don't think your opinions should be censored and I can't imagine you'd think mine should. Maybe this discussion can serve as a catalyst for ceasefire in some other web disagreements. As the commenter Sastra wrote on your blog about you and PZ:

But I love them both and want them make nice to each other. Won't hold my breath, though.

Perhaps Sastra and I can start a petition?

Ed Brayton is "New"!

Or should I say "fundamentalist"? Or "evangelist"? Whichever misnomer you choose to describe atheists outspoken in criticism of religion, like Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris or PZ Myers (But what about H. L. Mencken or Robert Green Ingersoll?), this post looks like it was written by one of "those people":

Talk about leaving out relevant information. Well yes, Christianity has certainly been a huge influence on Irish culture for centuries, but that hardly tells the full story. Making that vague statement without pointing out that two brands of Christianity have been murdering each other for much of that time is a lot like whitewashing the truth.

That's exactly like Dawkins warning that religion provides a structure for people to divide into opposing camps, define themselves by membership in a camp, and kill the members of the other camp. It would be a one-sided argument if taken out of context, but not if used (as by Dawkins and Brayton) as a counterargument to the dominant/prevailing/background argument that religion benefits the community. As Brayton points out, it is a necessary part of the whole truth.

I am glad to see Brayton arguing like Dawkins because I think he made a mistake when he declared himself to be a member of... well, the opposing camp:

I am firmly a member of the first group, as are the vast majority of those I work with on this issue. Genie Scott, Rob Pennock, Wes Elsberry, Nick Matzke, Jack Krebs and nearly everyone I consider colleagues in this regard recognize that the dispute is over evolution and creationism, not over theism and atheism. But some, like Larry Moran, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Gary Hurd and others, are involved in an entirely different battle. For them, it's not enough to protect science education from the attacks of some religious people; religion itself, in any form, is to be attacked and destroyed by any means necessary.

I thin Brayton's self-classification is a mistake not only because I tend to think that Dawkins has the better arguments than the "appeasers", but also because Brayton - much like Larry Moran or PZ Myers - is temperamentally not suited for charming the religious, so he can be more effective if he doesn't try. He is quick to call some types of religious arguments idiotic, and he is usually right, but the division among anti-creationists is not about who is right (they all are), but who is diplomatic. And Ed is not diplomatic, which, BTW, is one of the reasons I read his blog.

UPDATE: Ed Brayton responds here.