Heresiarch in #117 does a good job of summing up some of what I was trying to say. My job in drug research, if I'm doing it right, consists of looking at data and saying "Hmm. I wonder what that means?" and at other people's conclusions and saying "Hmm. I wonder if that's true?"
It's not a lot of fun to do that to your own beliefs, but there are a lot of necessary things that aren't much fun. Still, I'm sure there are large tracts in my own opinions that haven't felt the plow in a while.
That's science for you, and I'm pretty sure that it was my personality that led me into it, rather than science making me the way that I am. The political beliefs (and the political writers) that I can respect are the ones that are willing to do it the hard way. For instance on the right, I don't agree with John Derbyshire about a number of things, but I respect him for his account of how he lost his religious faith (and for getting it published in National Review Online).
Which reminds me, tangentially, of Teresa's comment #77, the part where she talked about the lip service paid to right-wing evangelicals. That doesn't surprise me a bit - the same goes for anti-abortion activists on the right as well (Reagan was particularly good at this). Any influence these groups have is proportional to their ability to go somewhere else.
Given the alignment of the Republican and Democratic parties, the main threat evangelicals can make is to stay home. As long as they don't do that, they can be taken more or less for granted by the Republican establishment and bought off with meaningless pieties. A similar situation obtains with the Democrats and the black vote.
Of course, the two halves of this comment demonstrate the gap between Political Theory and Opinion and Politics As It Is Practiced. Growing up in Arkansas gave me a reasonable education in the latter - nothing Bill Clinton could do could surprise me all that much.
JC, there's always the possibility that "several sentences of vile homophobic ranting" would not completely represent the other side of the issue. Perhaps it does, but it also could be a way of saying something like "And by contrast, here's some ignorant craziness from the unenlightened".
JC, I'm referring to Ed Darrell's belief (comment 91) that reporters are indeed more liberal, because they read a lot more and know more. Now, whether reporters are more liberal or not is a point worth arguing (I think that they tend to be, at the national level), as is whether they read and/or know more. I'm going to let those go by, though, as side issues.
It's the assumption that reading more and knowing more just naturally moves your opinions more to the left that struck me.
Unfortunately, I'd have to adduce Ed Darrell's comment right before mine as well. "Reporters are more liberal than most Americans because reporters read a lot more, and they know a lot more, on average." There's the problem - I read a lot more than the average, myself, and I like to think that I know a few things. But I have somehow managed not to be politically liberal, at least by Ed D.'s standards, I'm sure. How's it possible?
Teresa, thanks very much for your reply (#73). I don't think that it's exclusively a regional thing, although I am originally from the South. My accent is nothing like it was when I was a teenager, but people here in the Northeast can still tell that I'm not from here.
But at the same time, I have a PhD, and make my living as a scientist. I'm writing this from a room nearly walled in by books of all sorts (and in several languages). So, anti-intellectualism doesn't seem to be the problem, either. I'm uncomfortable with the way your reply lumps "college professors" together. I mentioned the president of Ivy universities, actually, which was a reference to what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.
I think the feeling I get is more from the unspoken assumptions. As far as I can see, in the NY Times/NPR worldview, Any Decent/Intelligent Person is in favor of certain things. Of course, I think that any decent or intelligent person is indeed in favor of certain things (like the things found in, say, the Bill of Rights), but the bien pensant list is much longer.
For example, and I'm not for a moment proposing to debate these topics here, I am deeply opposed to making ownership of guns illegal, but would very much support having them licensed to the degree that cars are (including a periodic competency check). I am extremely pro-free-trade, and think that agricultural subsidies (for example) are abominable. At the same time, I am in favor of stem cell research, having no religious objections to it since I have no religion. I think the idea of a constitutional amendment to make flag-burning illegal is ridiculous. I think that Terri Schiavo was irreversibly brain dead. And I supported the invasion of Iraq, and regard proposals to negotiate with Syria and Iran over its current situation as dangerously naive.
OK, then. By the standards of the New York Times, I do not seem to exist. If I oppose gun control and am suspicious of Iran, I must oppose stem cell research, right? Yahoos who hold the first two positions always do. This cuts both ways, of course. By the standards of, say, Rush Limbaugh, I probably don't exist, either, but he's an entertainer, not a Newspaper Of Record.
As for specific examples of the irritation I feel with some media outlets, just about any NPR commentary by Daniel Schorr would be a good starting point. Maureen Dowd's columns would be another. Both, to my sensibilities, seem almost unable to believe that anyone without severe cognitive disabilities would find anything to disagree with in their views. I don't hear the "These are the best solutions we know of to a set of fairly intractable problems" tone from people like this.
The right has plenty of this as well. I don't watch Fox News, for example (but I don't watch any cable news channel). I can see how someone on the left would want to take any radio playing Rush Limbaugh and throw it out the window. Hey, I don't watch Fox News, either - but I don't watch any cable news channel, for that matter.
It's interesting that many conservatives feel almost exactly the same way about the media and about the political elite. I know, I know - how can they, when that's who they really are, etc.
But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on the right who trusts much that comes from CBS, the New York Times, Reuters, etc., for many of the exact reasons that this post details. These people are similarly estranged from what are seen as "the only opinions worth having by decent people", decent people being defined as (e.g.) reporters at the above outlets, presidents of Ivy universities, commentators at NPR and other upstanding types.
This persists even with Bush in office, Scalia on the Supreme Court, and all the other examples of overwhelming-conservative-control that I'm sure folks here can adduce. Whether this is nuts is a topic for discussion, but it does exist. And it does so to the degree that Teresa's post would (without the specific examples of, say, Glenn Beck) be perfectly acceptable to readers of "The Corner" at National Review Online.
I should know - I'm conservative myself, and I feel like throwing things when an article in the Times, a piece on NPR, or a remark by Hillary Clinton or any of a long list of elected or appointed officials goes the mode of: "We know what's best for you - don't trouble your little head, and if you were as good as we are you'd think the way we do, anyway."
Bill Hooker - yep, I survived the de-blogrolling, and although I'm not happy about the slow rate of progress in Iraq, no, I haven't changed my mind. I realize, though, that this qualifies me to many people here as some sort of delusional maniac who is unaccountably roaming free.
I think that Schlesinger is going to have a very odd campaign indeed, as the state Republican party exerts itself on his behalf in much the same way as Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka exerted himself to save Augustus Gloop.
Well, we'll see how things work out in November. For my part, I find it extremely unlikely that many Republicans, of any species or plumage, would line up behind Lamont.
It's certainly not going to be a dull election season. Probably the happiest people in the state this morning were the advertising managers for the local TV and radio stations.
It'll be interesting to see what the state Republican party does with Schlesinger - I know almost nothing about him, and have no particular desire to vote for him over Lieberman.
What they *might* do is just leave him there to wither on the vine. The reason I think that the current situation could be unfavorable to Lamont is that nearly half of his own party has shown itself more inclined to vote for Lieberman. Meanwhile, the Republican voters, for the most part, won't care nearly as much about the choice between Lieberman and Schlesinger, and can be freely opportunistic (there's an opening for you) in trying to defeat Lamont.
But it's true that these arguments could be swamped by what the registered independents do. Lieberman might be wise to play to their non-affiliation.
I live in CT, but (to get this out of the way up front), I'm very far from being a Lamont supporter. In fact, I often vote Republican.
For those still reading after that confession, my belief is that this primary result probably means a loss of a Democratic Senate seat. (I realize, though, that Lamont's supporters didn't think it was a Democratic seat as it stood).
While it's a long time to November, I think that the general election will probably divide the Democratic vote between Lamont and Lieberman, while the Republicans will be more likely to go with whichever candidate looks most likely to defeat Lamont.
I know that this is not going to be a popular viewpoint here, but I believe that the number of general election voters for whom the Iraq war is their absolute defining issue has perhaps been overestimated.
Penicillin, acetominophen, and others, too. It's enough to make you think that our tolerance of side effects has decreased just a bit over the years. I actually wrote an opinion piece about this very thing a couple of months ago, although anyone here with an anaphylactic reaction to the Manhattan Institute and its works might want to skip it.
As for pemoline: although I work for a drug company, I'm not an expert in regulatory affairs (having never had a drug of mine get that far, damn it all). But my guess is that the best approach with the FDA would be to get it declared an orphan drug for a subset of narcolepsy patients (and some of the other indications, too, perhaps). A motivated generic drug company would be a good partner in this effort, and to that end, the more publicity that can be generated about unmet medical need, the better.
Oh, I didn't mean that the island-hopping war was conducted in an incomptent manner. I don't think it was any more or less so than the other major parts of the war. I referred to the fighting itself, which became (I believe) more savage than the Western Front war did (not that that wasn't plenty bad enough, and I'm putting the Eastern Front in a separate category for a reason).
The Japanese fight-until-the-last-man ethic made taking each of those islands a horrific task. And it just got worse on the way to Okinawa, which was the worst yet.
I agree that if the US had maintained its resolve that we would have defeated the Japanese, although losing Midway would have prolonged things terribly. Even as it was, the island-hopping campaign towards Japan was horrible, and got worse and worse as we came closer to the home islands. I wouldn't want to think about what a more prolonged war with Japan would have meant. (E.B. Sledge's memoir "With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa" is a good, though understandably sickening, source on what the Pacific conflict was like).
But my comment on the closeness of the war also meant the European theater - starting with the classic "If Hitler hadn't invaded Russia" and on from there. Perhaps I should have said "not winning", because there are many plausible ways that the European and/or Pacific wars could have ended in some sort of negotiated settlement. With, one would think, an even worse (likely atomic) war to follow in another ten or twenty years.
I've long thought that history books in the future will have chapter titles like "The Disastrous Twentieth Century." At least, I hope they will. . .
Those carriers certainly did, but that was a close thing, too. The Yorktown was nearly sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and was fixed with everything short of chewing gum to make it to the decisive battle at Midway. And even with the code-breaking that was going on, Midway was nowhere near a foregone conclusion.
It's easy to forget just how close we came to losing the war. . .
TC: "I believe there was legislation pending at some point to move the US towards the European standard of "First to File" rather than "First to Invent."
That's still going on, although who knows when it'll ever become law. I don't see it happening soon, but I feel pretty sure that eventually we'll get around to the change.
There are good arguments on both sides, but it's important to realize how rarely a patent fight comes down to invention date. The "first to invent" rule seems to favor the underdog, but it only favors the underdog who keep meticulous, witnessed records. Many of them don't.
And most large US companies work at least partially with a first-to-file mentality anyway, since that's what you need for protection in the rest of the world. Priority for applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which can cover a huge swath of the globe, are strictly by filing date.
FranW: "They are now applying for a US patent that states this product will have a positive functional effect on *all* immune cells in *all* mammalian species of *all* ages and genders....and they'll get it. No proof required to expand your claims once you've got a bit of data showing one claim. (In case you can't guess, I've got issues with this.)"
Ah, but they won't have enabled any of that, will they? Nor will they have taught how to do any of it, unless they get lucky and the procedure you found works without modification for all the other things they're claiming. Those are two key requirements for a patent claim to stand up. You can claim all sorts of things; defending them is another matter.
A competent examiner (which as this thread shows you, cannot be assumed) will restrict those claims during the application phase. Even if some bozo grants them all, though, they won't hold up against someone who's really motivated to move in on them. This stuff will only scare off the faint of heart. Not that we all wouldn't be better off without all this gibberish in the patent system, mind you. . .
Perianwyr, you'd think that that would be true, but a substantial amount of the PTO's revenue is diverted by Congress into other spending. There have been any number of complaints about this over the years, but a recent court case held that it was at least constitutional. There have been several bills introduced to stop the practice, but (as noted here), these bills tend to die quietly in committee. Congress loves the revenue stream too much to give it up.
Greg Aharonian, who writes a well-known IP newsletter, makes support for ending fee diversion an acid test for determining if anyone is serious about improving patent quality.
Nope, if they let everything through, the volume of these things would go up by at least an order of magnitude. A search for odd phrases here will probably illustrate the point. I think that some of the patent examiners are good at their jobs, and some of them are clueless.
Which makes a story I've heard sound semi-plausible: that some tech companies have submitted multiple copies of the same application simultaneously and waited to see which examiner is assigned to each one. Then they dropped all but the one assigned to the examiner that they knew was a pushover. . .
I have a whole file of these damn things. Working as a drug discovery chemist, I have to think about patent issues very carefully - people have made mistakes on drug patents that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So you can imagine my joy when I see the patent examiners letting stuff like this through. Many people still think that you have to have a working model to get an issued patent, but all you need is money and patience.
Try, for example, the patent issued in 2000 (US6025810) for a faster-than-light radio. The applicant isn't trying to hide the FTL part, either - it's right there in the abstract. The PTO granted it. (That link has details of the patent, but under the wrong number - the number given at the top of the page is for an presumably slightly more useful patent for a portable toilet seat, as it turns out).
All sorts of crank space drives have made it through - US5197279 ("Electromagnetic Propulsion Engine") is a good example, but at least that one seems to stop at lightspeed. And it's hard to make out just what US6404089 ("Electrodynamic Field Generator") is for, but it smells of a free-energy device. There are others.
Another handy device is found in US5280864, a "method for transiently altering the mass of objects to facilitate their transport." Yep, antigravity. Haven't heard of this one being licensed out yet; you'd think there would be a market.
Then there's the infamous "hydrino" patent, US6024935, granted to Blacklight Power, who've been scamming people for years with stories of a supposed lower-energy state of the hydrogen atom. The PTO at least caught on after this, and their follow-ups seem to have stalled. The Guardian recently ran a credulous article on these folks, which wasn't well received by people who've been following the story.
While we're on impossibilities, try US5533051, which purports to detail a method for infinite lossless compression of data files. But bad software patents are a whole other ugly subject.
These are just the ones that make it through. The list of insane patent applications is much, much larger, including incomprehensible 300-page screeds about reincarnation and invisible hormones that you just know were filed in green ink on brown paper towels.
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