Political Irony

How can conservatives put up with their pundits, who are such self-righteous whiners?

Ironically, as Christians fight for the right to freely express their religion, they are opening up the door to free expression of other religions. After all, doesn’t the constitution guarantee the same rights to Muslims as it does for Christians?

Indeed, The Satanic Temple has requested that they be allowed to place a religious monument (which they promise will “be in good taste and consistent with community standards”) on the grounds of the Oklahoma statehouse, after the OK legislature OKed a Ten Commandments monument.

A spokesman for the Oklahoma Speaker of the House responded “Anything displayed at the Capitol should be a representation of the values of Oklahomans and this nation. The left-hand path philosophies of this organization do not align with the values of Oklahomans nor the ideals this country or its laws are founded upon.”

My question is, what does Oklahoma have against the left-handed?

Very interesting study done at Yale comes to some surprising conclusions about how our politics can override rational thinking.

The study did this by giving people a math problem to solve. The problem presented the results of a fictional medical trial for a new skin cream designed to treat rashes. Half the participants in the study were shown the following results:

On first glance it looks like more people who used the skin cream got better, but the real answer is based on whether your chance of getting better goes up if you use the skin cream. The correct solution is to compare those people who got better to those people who got worse.

People who used the skin cream had a 223:75 (less than 3 to 1) chance of getting better. But people who did not use the skin cream had a 107:21 (better than 5 to 1) chance of getting better. Put another way, 75% of the people who used the skin cream got better, but 84% (even more) of the people who did not use it got better. So the result is that you are more likely to get better if you do not use the skin cream. The confusion comes from the fact that more people (298) used the skin cream than did not (128), resulting in the misleading number that more people got better from the skin cream (if you ignore the number of people who got worse).

To remove any bias, they gave the other half of the participants the same problem with the results reversed, so the skin cream increased the chances of getting better.

This is actually a tricky problem to solve — 59% of the participants got the answer wrong.

They also grouped the participants in the study based on how numerate (“numerically literate” or “scientifically trained”) they are. Not surprisingly, numerate people did better on the problem.

Finally, they grouped the participants based on whether they are liberal democrats or conservative republicans. In this regard, there was no difference. Regardless of your politics, the more numerate you are the better you are at answering this question.

So far so good, but now we get to the interesting part of the study. They changed the problem, but only how they described it. Instead of a medical study, they presented it as the results of cities that had banned the concealed carrying of guns, and whether crime in these cities had gone up or down afterward.

Participants performed much differently on this version of the problem, even though all the numbers were the same. As in the previous version, they had two variants of the problem: one where the correct answer was that crime went down; and the other where crime went up.

Now here’s the ironic part. Here are two graphs plotting correct answers versus participant numeracy. The top one is for the skin cream / rash version, the bottom one is for the gun control / crime version:

Note how for the rash (top graph), the curves are pretty close, regardless of whether the participant is CR (conservative republican) or LD (liberal democrat), and also regardless of whether they solved the problem where the correct answer was that the cream decreased or increased the chances of the rash getting better.

But for crime (bottom graph) the participant’s answers strongly depended on their politics. Liberal democrats did best when the answer was that gun control made crime go down, while conservative republicans did best when the answer was that gun control made crime go up. So they did better if the answer agreed with their politics. But for people where the correct answer disagreed with their politics, the curves are mostly flat.

Ironically, the more numerate a participant is the more they are influenced by their politics. Numerate participants did 18% worse on the political problem. In fact the curves in the second graph are all over the place, sometimes even going down as numeracy goes up. It is difficult to guess what caused these crazy curves. If you are more scientifically literate, does it make you more sure of your answers, even when you are wrong? Are numerate people more likely to accept the incorrect answer on first glance, if it agrees with their politics? Or are they more willing to question an answer when it conflicts with their political beliefs?

At the very least it blows away the common idea that the smarter and more scientifically literate you are, the better you are at making correct decisions even when the right answer disagrees with your political beliefs. And this is true whether you are liberal or conservative.

This also helps explain why our country is so divided on the subject of climate change, regardless of the scientific research.

tl;dr — if this is too difficult to read and understand, here’s an infographic for you.

Big banks have gotten two new bills passed in the House of Representatives that roll back regulations that were put in place after the last financial meltdown to keep it from happening again. Yes, that’s right. After the banks nearly destroyed our economy in 2008 (forcing us taxpayers to bail them out to the tune of close to $100 billion) Congress passed Dodd-Frank, which even in its watered-down state on passing was a good step toward reining in some of the most dangerous forms of risk taking on Wall Street. Well, the Republican controlled House (with some help from Democrats too) is doing everything it can to get rid of Dodd-Frank. Why wouldn’t they? They need the money for their campaigns, and Wall Street is only too willing to oblige since keeping down regulations is what lets them take insane risks in the first place and make tons of money. And as long as we keep bailing them out when the risks go sour, there is no incentive for them to be responsible.

Here’s a great rant about it:

What he doesn’t mention is that this bill has passed only the House. The only things keeping it from becoming law is opposition in the Democratically controlled Senate (and even that opposition is not particularly strong, since Democrats depend on campaign contributions from Wall Street too), and from Obama’s veto power (ditto).

Yes, as I am going to great pains to point out, this is definitely a “lesser of two evils” scenario. We absolutely need to reduce the influence of money in politics, and especially to reverse the Citizens United decision. But until we do, the Democrats are the only thing keeping us from heading down the same road to financial melt-down and government bailouts that has repeatedly happened since we deregulated the banks. The diagram to the right shows out the House voted. Republicans are shown in red, Democrats in blue. The position in the diagram is based on an assessment of their ideology. Note that all but three Republicans voted for the bill, and it was mainly conservative Democrats who joined them.

Here’s a website that lets you find out how your representative voted.

Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz posted some nice words about Nelson Mandela on his website. He also reposted them to his Facebook page. Here’s what he said:

Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe. He stood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself, declaring in his autobiography, ‘Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.’ Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free.

We mourn his loss and offer our condolences to his family and the people of South Africa.

Unfortunately, some of Cruz’s followers on Facebook didn’t agree with him and responded with hateful vitriol. Here are a few comments, picked at random:

• Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and FDR are also dead. They don’t deserve a positive Eulogy either.
• He was a no-good, murdering communist. No wonder obummer likes him so much. He burned alive people who did not agree with him. No sadness here.
• You’re eulogized the inventor of necklacing and the head of a KGB marxist, terrorist organization?
• He was a murderer, plain and simple.
• Mandela is ant-White. [sic]
• This what you get when people are spoon fed lies from the American press. Mandela was a killer, history is a lie.
• I’d like to take this moment to pay my respects to the fallen Boers, now is the time to fight back! Let’s restore South Africa as a Boer nation!
• Ted im ashamed of you . Touting a known communist as a great person. I don’t know if I can vote for you now.

Then people supporting Cruz’s comments about Mandela jumped into the fray. And things got even more bizarre. Right now, there are over 900 comments on the post.

The most common complaints against Mandela are that he was a communist (um, so why didn’t he nationalize anything or do anything else remotely communist when he became president?), and that he was a terrorist because he was involved with groups that killed people during the revolution in South Africa (by that measure, so were the founding fathers of our nation).

They don’t seem to understand that Mandela’s greatness is that he used his time in prison to overcome bitterness and hatred, and managed to largely unite South Africa, both white and black, at a time when both sides were calling for terrible violence and retribution against the other side. Mandela turned sworn enemies into lifelong friends and admirers, including his jailers and the white president he ousted from office.

So, if this is too much for you to read, The Onion has an interesting counterpoint: “Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician To Be Missed”.

UPDATE: Rick Santorum invokes Mandela to compare Apartheid to Obamacare. Seriously:

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that. That’s the reason he’s mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed. But you’re right, I mean, what he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

What’s doubly ironic about this is that he slips in his claim that what Mandela “was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer”. Was that a Freudian slip about the Republicans, who are advocating for the repeal of health care reform?

It has been a few years since I’ve posted stories about the Department of Homeland Security’s “No Fly” list. Remember, the list that prevented Senator Ted Kennedy from flying, and countless other innocent people, with no way for them to contest being on the list. Things did eventually ease up a bit for a while, but suddenly they are back in the news.

Why? The first legal challenge to the no-fly list to actually make it to trial has started, and things have already turned decidedly Orwellian.

The plaintiff in the case is Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian citizen who was a PhD student at Stanford University. Ibrahim got married in the US, and her daughter, Raihan Mustafa Kamal, was born here and is hence a US citizen. Ibrahim, along with her daughter, were denied boarding on a flight from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur in 2005.

Ironically, Ibrahim herself is not allowed to attend the trial. She applied for a visa specifically to attend the trial, but it was denied … by the DHS, the plaintiff in the case.

The trial was supposed to start Monday in San Francisco, despite DHS lawyers attempts to get the case dismissed several times by invoking “state secrets”. But on the first day of trial, one of the plaintiff’s main witnesses — the daughter Kamal — was also unable to attend the trial. She was denied boarding Sunday night on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to San Francisco because she is now on the government no-fly list! Not only is the daughter a witness to the original incident, she is an attorney licensed to practice law in Malaysia.

Interestingly, Kamal was told by the airline that she was on the no-fly list, and was even given a phone number for DHS in the US to call. Normally, airlines are prohibited from telling the passenger why they are being denied boarding, or giving them any other information, putting them in a very strange situation.

When hearing this, the trial judge ordered the government lawyers representing the DHS to investigate what happened. Later that day, the lawyers reported back that they had been told (and confirmed) by DHS that “the plaintiff’s daughter just missed her flight”, and that she was rebooked on a flight on Tuesday.

But the DHS response is a lie. Kamal did not miss her flight, and she was not rebooked on another flight. Kamal even sent a copy of the “no-board” instructions which DHS gave to Malaysia Airlines. Again, normally the airline is not allowed to disclose this information to the passenger, but for some reason they gave this information to Kamal to explain why they were not letting her fly. As far as anyone knows, this is the first time an actual no-fly order has been disclosed to the passenger.

Ironically, the government is still trying to get the trial dismissed. Their reasoning? Because the evidence against them is secret, it is not allowed in court, so the plaintiffs cannot present evidence against the government. Initially, the government tried to claim that even evidence against the government that was public could not be used in the trial. For example, the government claimed that the 2005 SFO police report on the original incident (and which had always been publicly available) was inadmissible in court because the TSA “had subsequently determined that some of the information it contained was secret”.

That’s right, the government was claiming that they could retroactively declare public knowledge to be secret, and thus inadmissible in court. Luckily, the judge rejected this claim, saying:

That’s ridiculous. Are you saying that if the president makes a speech, TSA can retroactively make it a secret what he said? It cannot be the law that something that is publicly known later becomes hidden…

There are lots of interesting notes on this trial, which you can read on The Identity Project website.

But I warn you. If you start reading them, you might think you had fallen down a rabbit hole.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, Nelson Mandela was on the US no-fly list, and was not allowed to fly to the US, nor even fly on a US airline outside the US.