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In my opinion, this technology gap will exist as long as the Republican party embraces social conservatism to the point of scientific ignorance. Consider Todd

by nhashem 14y ago

In my opinion, this technology gap will exist as long as the Republican party embraces social conservatism to the point of scientific ignorance. Consider Todd Akin’s comment: "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to just shut that whole thing down." While "legitimate rape" ended up being the colloquial reference that got hammered, what was so utterly offensive was the second part of the sentence. Implying the female body had some sort of magical spermicide. It's not just insensitive, it's scientifically ignorant. There are a lot of reasons why almost 2/3 of college students and recent college grads voted for Obama, and one of them is because of this complete idiocy that Republicans spew. At the "Family Values Summit" earlier this year, Rick Santorum said, "We're never going to be the party of smart people." If you’re not the smart party, what are you? The party that claims the HPV vaccine causes retardation? The party that considers evolution a myth? Sure, but then you won't be the party with constituents that embrace science and technology. Sure, they can throw money at the problem. Even if they intellectually objected with the platform, lots of engineers would work for the Republican party if they paid enough. But successful political campaigns are all about connecting a widespread media message to the individual visceral feelings of voters. If your staff has no idea who that voter is because they aren't actually one of them, then you're not going to have the same quality of campaign. I don't think all is lost for the Republican party. For an example off the top of my head, it would be very easy to philosophically adjust their stances on "economic freedom" to support reforms to copyright and patent law. But until then, Rick Santorum is right. They won't be the party of smart people. Which means they won't be the party that has smart technology talent helping them run campaigns.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
temphn 14y ago
This true up to a point. Intelligent people go to college, and in addition to technical education they are getting other stuff as well. I'd hope it's not too controversial to posit that (a) most university humanities cultures are more similar to Harvard than West Point, and (b) it is obvious that Harvard's math dept. teaches objective truth, and not so much for Harvard's history dept. Many, perhaps most students care primarily about a job and won't read history on their own time. So in order to get a job they get that technical degree, and receive the humanities content alongside. They never feel the urge to uninstall that humanities content, or to check it against Google Books primary sources. It's just the default. The default today is heavier on the Nazis than the Gulag, as one example, and this difference in emphasis has many downstream effects. Weimar is less likely to be studied than dependencia theory, for another example. With MOOCs, this package deal of tech + humanities is going to end soon. People will take classes a la carte, and one might predict that new grads in 5 years time will start shifting to the right. (It is hard to see the smart shifting even further left!). Time will tell.
sneak 14y ago
Republicans don't believe in evolution, Democrats don't believe in the danger of the NDAA. Toss a coin.
- veidr 14y ago
  In case anybody doesn't know what the NDAA is, it is the law that allows any person (US citizen or not) to be incarcerated for an unlimited duration (including until death) without being charged with any crime or wrongdoing. The euphemism used to name this piece of legislation is the National Defense Authorization Act. http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa
- dlitwak 14y ago
  Republicans and Democrats voted almost in equal measure for the NDAA, and I agree, I don't like it one bit. I remember a few people from each party stood up, and being honest here the only notable person I remember was Rand Paul, so I give a little credit there, but very very little since most of his party still voted for it as I remember.
  - sneak 14y ago
    It was the democratic candidate in this election who signed it into law. http://www.cracked.com/blog/ndaa-biggest-election-issue-no-ones-talking-about/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/ndaa-biggest-election-issue-no-o...
gojomo 14y ago
You're ascribing things to the whole GOP that are just examples of its outlier (and loser) candidates. While they each have followings, both Akin and Santorum are far from the average or median GOP candidate/officeholder. And using Akin's ignorance as an example of anything that "Republicans spew" is especially unfair: not only did his party widely condemn him afterward, but even beforehand I doubt you'd find any prominent GOPers believing that 'rape pregnancy immunity' theory – it was an Akin peculiarity, not a representative belief. However, the current GOP may be doomed by such fuzzy perceptions and slurs. Most media is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Dem party, and so even when consciously trying to be fair, they're prone to oversimplifying the GOP based on caricatures and headline-grabbing outliers. Actual strongly-partisan Dem campaigners are happy to assist this process. Among other things, this is an example of "Out-group homogeneity bias" – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity – the idea that among 'us' there's variety but 'they' tend to be all alike. Highlighting outliers in key negative dimensions (like Akin and Santorum) as if they were representative, central examples of the whole category is part of that biased process.
- _delirium 14y ago
  Sure, some of those are outliers, but they're merely the most outrageous outliers from already quite right-wing "mainstream conservative" positions. I've been observing Republicans fairly closely for a while, because I first started voting in a rather GOP-heavy district of Texas (southeast Houston), so in some cases voting in the GOP primary was the only way to have any impact at all, by voting for the more-moderate candidate. And the people I've seen are, by and large, shockingly unacceptable. When I was in high school (late 1990s), they opposed repealing Texas's anti-sodomy laws, which made it a criminal offense to engage in "immoral" sex. We're not talking about same-sex marriage here, but about actually being arrested for having sex in one's own house. When that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, the state GOP was outraged, and put into its platform a condemnation of "activist judges" and the "homosexual agenda", and a demand that homosexuality be somehow re-criminalized. Not just a few fringe representatives: that was the consensus position of the statewide party. That specific demand was finally voted out of the platform just this year, in 2012, though my own local congressman (TX-36) still speaks darkly of "homosexuals" more often than you might think necessary, along with "anchor babies" for good measure. I don't see how I could possibly find that kind of rhetoric appealing. As far as rape goes, what was sort of surprising is that Akin wasn't even the only outlier among Senate candidates in this election alone in having a "rape-comment scandal": Mourdock in IN also somehow found it necessary to mention that pregnancy from rape is a "gift from God".
rndmize 14y ago
I don't think it helps the Republicans that many of the young, tech-savvy people today came of age in the Bush years. I still remember from when I was 13/14 wondering why we were pushing to go to war with Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11 etc. Hear the narrative change over the years - WMDs, then terrorism, then freedom - caused me to develop a strong dislike of what struck me as a party of liars. I think the moment that epitomized the problems with the Republicans was on election night a few weeks ago, when Fox's own statisticians and analysts were ready to call Ohio for Obama, and Rove refused to accept it. That's them in a nutshell - a refusal to deal with reality. Such an attitude doesn't mesh too well with a scientific/technological approach to things.

by nhashem 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

temphn 14y ago

This true up to a point. Intelligent people go to college, and in addition to technical education they are getting other stuff as well. I'd hope it's not too controversial to posit that (a) most university humanities cultures are more similar to Harvard than West Point, and (b) it is obvious that Harvard's math dept. teaches objective truth, and not so much for Harvard's history dept. Many, perhaps most students care primarily about a job and won't read history on their own time. So in order to get a job they get that technical degree, and receive the humanities content alongside. They never feel the urge to uninstall that humanities content, or to check it against Google Books primary sources. It's just the default. The default today is heavier on the Nazis than the Gulag, as one example, and this difference in emphasis has many downstream effects. Weimar is less likely to be studied than dependencia theory, for another example. With MOOCs, this package deal of tech + humanities is going to end soon. People will take classes a la carte, and one might predict that new grads in 5 years time will start shifting to the right. (It is hard to see the smart shifting even further left!). Time will tell.

sneak 14y ago

Republicans don't believe in evolution, Democrats don't believe in the danger of the NDAA. Toss a coin.

veidr 14y ago
In case anybody doesn't know what the NDAA is, it is the law that allows any person (US citizen or not) to be incarcerated for an unlimited duration (including until death) without being charged with any crime or wrongdoing. The euphemism used to name this piece of legislation is the National Defense Authorization Act. http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa
dlitwak 14y ago
Republicans and Democrats voted almost in equal measure for the NDAA, and I agree, I don't like it one bit. I remember a few people from each party stood up, and being honest here the only notable person I remember was Rand Paul, so I give a little credit there, but very very little since most of his party still voted for it as I remember.
- sneak 14y ago
  It was the democratic candidate in this election who signed it into law. http://www.cracked.com/blog/ndaa-biggest-election-issue-no-ones-talking-about/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/ndaa-biggest-election-issue-no-o...

gojomo 14y ago

You're ascribing things to the whole GOP that are just examples of its outlier (and loser) candidates. While they each have followings, both Akin and Santorum are far from the average or median GOP candidate/officeholder. And using Akin's ignorance as an example of anything that "Republicans spew" is especially unfair: not only did his party widely condemn him afterward, but even beforehand I doubt you'd find any prominent GOPers believing that 'rape pregnancy immunity' theory – it was an Akin peculiarity, not a representative belief. However, the current GOP may be doomed by such fuzzy perceptions and slurs. Most media is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Dem party, and so even when consciously trying to be fair, they're prone to oversimplifying the GOP based on caricatures and headline-grabbing outliers. Actual strongly-partisan Dem campaigners are happy to assist this process. Among other things, this is an example of "Out-group homogeneity bias" – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity – the idea that among 'us' there's variety but 'they' tend to be all alike. Highlighting outliers in key negative dimensions (like Akin and Santorum) as if they were representative, central examples of the whole category is part of that biased process.

_delirium 14y ago
Sure, some of those are outliers, but they're merely the most outrageous outliers from already quite right-wing "mainstream conservative" positions. I've been observing Republicans fairly closely for a while, because I first started voting in a rather GOP-heavy district of Texas (southeast Houston), so in some cases voting in the GOP primary was the only way to have any impact at all, by voting for the more-moderate candidate. And the people I've seen are, by and large, shockingly unacceptable. When I was in high school (late 1990s), they opposed repealing Texas's anti-sodomy laws, which made it a criminal offense to engage in "immoral" sex. We're not talking about same-sex marriage here, but about actually being arrested for having sex in one's own house. When that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, the state GOP was outraged, and put into its platform a condemnation of "activist judges" and the "homosexual agenda", and a demand that homosexuality be somehow re-criminalized. Not just a few fringe representatives: that was the consensus position of the statewide party. That specific demand was finally voted out of the platform just this year, in 2012, though my own local congressman (TX-36) still speaks darkly of "homosexuals" more often than you might think necessary, along with "anchor babies" for good measure. I don't see how I could possibly find that kind of rhetoric appealing. As far as rape goes, what was sort of surprising is that Akin wasn't even the only outlier among Senate candidates in this election alone in having a "rape-comment scandal": Mourdock in IN also somehow found it necessary to mention that pregnancy from rape is a "gift from God".

rndmize 14y ago

I don't think it helps the Republicans that many of the young, tech-savvy people today came of age in the Bush years. I still remember from when I was 13/14 wondering why we were pushing to go to war with Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11 etc. Hear the narrative change over the years - WMDs, then terrorism, then freedom - caused me to develop a strong dislike of what struck me as a party of liars. I think the moment that epitomized the problems with the Republicans was on election night a few weeks ago, when Fox's own statisticians and analysts were ready to call Ohio for Obama, and Rove refused to accept it. That's them in a nutshell - a refusal to deal with reality. Such an attitude doesn't mesh too well with a scientific/technological approach to things.