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 The War on Objectivity

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Artie60438




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PostSubject: The War on Objectivity   The War on Objectivity Empty10/28/2012, 5:17 pm

Paul Krugman responds to the right wing attacks on Nate Silver 538.com...
The War on Objectivity
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Brad DeLong points me to this National Review attack on Nate Silver,which I think of as illustrating an important aspect of what’s really happening in America.

For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

It’s almost besides the point to notice that the whole notion that Nate Silver is somehow serving Obama’s interests by skewing the results is bizarre. This race is going to be decided by actual votes, not perceptions of “momentum”. But then posturing and bragging seems to be central to the right’s theory, for reasons I don’t get.

Anyway, it’s another disgraceful episode. And the fact that the National Review ran with this tells you all you need to know about the publication.
At first I was going to post this in the "Has the GOP become the stupid party" thread. After I thought about it I decided that it deserved it's own thread. As Krugman points out,it's not just about Nate Silver. It's about anything factual that gets in the way of their talking points.


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Heretic

Heretic


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PostSubject: Re: The War on Objectivity   The War on Objectivity Empty11/4/2012, 3:59 pm

Artie60438 wrote:
It's about anything factual that gets in the way of their talking points.

Hence the attacks on peer review, scientists, education, teachers, academia, and the media... anything and everything that repeatedly tells them they're wrong. It's a fantastically powerful narrative.
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Scorpion

Scorpion


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PostSubject: Re: The War on Objectivity   The War on Objectivity Empty11/4/2012, 4:25 pm

Their problem is that they only get their views from the "Right Wing echo chamber."

I read a short, but excellent Op-ed piece from Salon a couple of weeks ago - it pretty much sums up the GOP approach to reality... This is about Benghazi, but I think that most thinking people will recognize the pattern that the author of this piece is pointing out.

Some excerpts... but I definitely recommend reading the whole thing...

Fox News cost Mitt the debate
Romney stumbled on Libya because the GOP is reliant on a right-wing media machine that has no ideas, just scandals


Quote :
Why did Mitt Romney embarrass himself on Libya in this week’s debate? One possibility: Because he, and the Republican Party in general, have opened up an alarming policy deficit between themselves and Barack Obama and the Democrats.

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What he’s substituted for policy is scandal, on the one hand, and symbolism, on the other.

Republicans’ reliance on a scandal framework is most obvious in their attacks on Barack Obama. The stimulus is reduced in this point of view to “Solyndra.” Energy? One pipeline to Canada.

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The other frame they’ve used, especially on foreign policy and national security, is pure symbolism. Often, as Paul Waldman pointed out this week, that’s reduced down to the level of individual words. It’s bad to apologize. It’s important to speak up for Iranian protesters.

It’s imperative to never, ever disagree with Israel. And Waldman missed the big one: It’s absolutely critical that the president always, always, no matter what, and in every possible way, refer to the United States as “exceptional.”

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And so, scandal and symbolism became a trap that turned the disaster in Benghazi from an opportunity to score points for Mitt Romney into a fiasco.

How? First, because instead of questioning the policies – including the initial intervention – that brought the Obama administration to the death of an ambassador, the immediate instinct of the Romney Republicans was to turn it into scandal. A coverup! Barack Obama and the State Department said one thing in the immediate aftermath, but some of those things turned out to be wrong. Now, a less scandal-obsessed party might have either moved quickly past that seemingly unimportant discrepancy and focused on how the problem happened in the first place, or investigated whether initial chaos was a sign of mismanagement. But neither of those fits the scandal frame as well.



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