it is actually only partly because of our culture. genetics found out many years ago that male and female brains are sort of preprogrammed trough evolution. man are stronger therefore they were more likely to survive risky endevors like hunting and in general experimenting. females in return had to cover the more manual, monotone and mostly repeating tasks without taking risks (collecting berries).
through this evolutional behavior men just have no fear “breaking” things and women are rather scared of breaking things and try to handle situations on the emotional level instead of putting in risk. a good example is that women are prefered in factories doind repeating work. our brains are just wired like that.

Just as inevitably, someone will reply to that guy like so:

Wow. And the fact that this sort of gender-essentialist, ev-psych nonsense is the VERY FIRST RESPONSE to an extremely thoughtful post? Oh, yeah, the constant messages that women should go back to their “natural” work (read: taking care of men and children) definitely have nothing to do with women’s challenges in technology. Nuh-uh, it’s all about our genetic adaptations to pick up berries. Go check the research, because you’re quoting a bunch of debunked bullshit.

This fight just won’t go away, and the reason it persistently avoids resolution is because the two sides of the argument represented above — I couldn’t have found a better archetype of it if I’d made it from whole cloth — are just talking past each other. Or maybe, to the members of their respective choirs. I’ll paraphrase these two sides, reducing them to absurdity.

Guy: There exists evidence that men and women are different when it comes to logical reasoning and mathematics. I have misplaced my references on this evidence. Women are inferior and nothing will ever change that.
Girl: Your evidence must be “bad science” because its conclusions contradict my very pleasant, egalitarian beliefs. You are obviously a sexist. [To be fair, the dude often is a sexist]

What really bothers me about this repeating argument isn’t so much the often blatant sexism expressed, but that it’s always immediately derailed by emotional rhetoric into a conversation that’s no longer about evidence. After all: it’s a scientific question. Without evidence, it’s just a particularly nasty sort of philosophy. I said as much when I wrote about the Larry Summers debacle back in 2005:

What is really at stake here is academic freedom. The job of a scientist is to discover and present facts, not to dictate which facts should and should not be presented. When the president of a prestigious university suggests a venue of research and is silenced and forced into retreat by ideologues, there is cause for concern.

I was taking poetic liberties in that opinion piece — Summers didn’t so much “suggest a venue of research” so much as talk off the cuff about his own personal beliefs, which include the probability that innate differences between the sexes plays some role in gender imbalances in various occupations. As evidence, he cited the much wider distribution of SAT math scores among men relative to women, despite a similar mean. In other words, many more men than women score very high or very low on the math SAT, although the average scores for each gender are relatively close. For scores above 700, it’s a ratio of 2:1.

What happened to Summers was a case study for everything people hate about the Political Correctness movement — the privileging and presupposition of certain thoughts over others. A torrent of media voices, his peers, and fellow academics called for his censure or resignation. A blog kind enough to link to my opinion piece paraphrases their outbursts:

The speech of Lawrence Summers was outrageous – everyone who has heard it should either black out or throw up. He has no right to speak in this way. Women are discriminated. You can see that they have a smaller representation in various professions – and most people (both men and women) believe that men are more likely to be successful in these professions. This proves that discrimination is everywhere around us because everyone with the right opinions about the world knows that the women are identical to the men, perhaps except for one organ. Note that this is not a circular argument because it is not a circular argument.

Several commentators at the time pointed out the irony of feminists shutting down a debate about the rational abilities of women with an emotional outburst, such as this lady.

I can think of few things more discouraging to any woman who lives by her intellect than the sight of some of the nation’s most highly credentialed female scholars attempting to use their emotions to cut off argument, rather than focusing on winning the debate. Political correctness is the opposite of thought. It proceeds by moral condemnation and emotional outrage: Anyone who can imagine such a thought must be a bad person, or a crazy one.

Because here’s the thing: when you disagree with someone about a potentially falsifiable thing they said, you’re supposed to disprove them with contradictory evidence, not angry rhetoric. That people agree to do so is the only reason the scientific community can function.

It saddens me to see people scorning evolutionary psychology because some of its findings reinforce gender stereotypes from the fifties. Evolution is the guiding light of biology, which is the root of psychology and behavior. Just as I didn’t really understand the unifying principles of life on earth until I understood evolution, I didn’t really get the unifying principles of the people around me until I understood evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. It probably says a lot about my own propensity for engineer-thought that I needed a formal, math-based framework to understand other people’s motivations, but there it is.

Of course, that’s not to say that out culture isn’t responsible for some part of the gender imbalance in science and engineering (but not all of it). The driving force behind these social pressures is illustrated nicely by the aforementioned bland essay, and is something I’ll call Male Privilege.

Most of my classmates were not that extreme, and from my experience, most mean well but are just socially awkward. They can say something so simple as “Oh don’t you know that command?” but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you’re the only person who doesn’t know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. I think women are more susceptible to these feelings of inadequacy, and it can deter some potential CS concentrators from the department. From my limited experience, the ones that stayed with it were pretty strong-willed and generally kept to themselves.

White Privilege means never having to worry that your apparent race is the cause of your inadequacy in the eyes of others. Male privilege is never having to worry your gender is the cause. Anxiety caused by such worries is a measurable demotivator and performance killer in academic contexts, so we know objectively (at least in the case of race) that it’s a real problem that we should try to correct. Note that I have absolutely no idea how to do so short of quotas in CS schools and corporate jobs, and good luck getting that one past the Fourteenth Amendment. Still, plenty of people want to fix the problem by doing exactly that, applying Title IX to the sciences. Yes, they are serious.

I think a large part of putting this fistfight to bed, or at least making it marginally more civil, is for the proponents of innate gender differences to stop referring to “ability” and start referring to “preference,” turning the argument from one about superiority into one about empowerment and choice. It’s not a misrepresentation — the data are entirely sensible in this light — and it reframes the debate to not sound so confrontational. Susan Pinker does so very eloquently in the same Times article about Title IX:

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

I don’t think the argument will get anywhere close to settled anytime soon, and sadly I see it getting worse in the face of more empirical evidence, but I do wish people would quit saying it was all my fault.

Apologies to Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart, but saying that Republicans want what’s worst for everyone isn’t insane partisanship; it’s called being informed. How many chances are we obligated to give Reaganomics before acknowledging that maybe it’s not working so well? Is thirty years not long enough?

I’ll do what mainstream pundits dare not and lay the blame for this flaccid outcome right at the feet of the ignorant, selfish, amnesiac public. I’m not saying their anger over the country’s direction isn’t righteous; I’m saying that they lack the temperance and knowledge of history (as recent as two years ago) to make an informed decision about what to do with it. In this case, they decided to cut off their own nose to spite their face. Their face being Democrats, I guess? Or maybe their nose is the job at the plant they lost eighteen months ago and blame Obama for? I’ll quit torturing this metaphor by eliding the rest of my rant and saying, without apology or equivocation, that Americans are stupid and we got exactly what we deserve.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Washington State, where we had the rarefied privilege of voting on a large number of ballot initiatives, almost every one of which demonstrated the single-minded avarice and ignorance of the public. Do you accuse me of exaggeration? Let’s do a quick recap.

• Initiative 1098, establishing a state income tax, was rejected 65% to 35%. Given that it lowered taxes for 98% of households and raised them for the 2% making more than $400K per year, this is a surprising outcome. It’s even more surprising given that the proponents far outspent the opponents. You could explain this result with fears of a slippery slope of income taxation, but personally I think it comes down to the old adage: that a poor man would rather have the chance to be rich than admit he’s poor.
• Initiative 1100, ending the state liquor sales monopoly, was rejected 52% to 48%. If you think that a state monopoly on anything is good, what kind of conservative are you? But then, if you’re a conservative, what do you care about the income generated by liquor sales, or about the right of a person to get drunk in the first place?
• Initiative 1107, repealing the recent sales tax on soda and candy, was approved 63% to 37%. This one’s pretty simple: we’re in the middle of a tax revolt, and Coke spent $16 million to put this on the ballot and pass it. It’s possible for reasonable men to disagree about whether governments should use tax policy to shape society; but if you’re on the other side of that disagreement, I suggest that you repay the Feds your mortgage deduction.
• Resolution 4220, amending the state constitution to deny bail for violent offenders, passed 85% to 15%. Tough-on-crime legislation is always popular, even when it means that an innocent person can be locked up for months or years without having been found guilty. Violent crime is perceived as an eminent danger of modern life, despite the fact that it’s declining and is now less common than any time since 1970.
• Initiative 1053, requiring a 2/3 legislative majority or voter approval for tax increases, passed 65% to 35%. This is perennial jackass Tim Eyman’s latest electoral stillbirth, likely to be struck down by the State Supreme Court, as it was when it passed in 1999, hidden in a ballot initiative about car tab fees. 12 years later, the citizens of the state still won’t acknowledge that taxes are necessary to run a massive industrial society. I saw a lot of ads about 1098 and 1053, all some variant of “We don’t trust Olympia with our tax money.” Yeah, they’d probably fill some potholes or pay a schoolteacher.

To be fair, citizens also declined to privatize worker’s compensation insurance. But on the whole, Washington residents continue to reap the benefits of their parents’ and grandparents’ investments in the Commons while feeling absolutely no responsibility to give any of that wealth back.

As for Congress: things aren’t that bad. Really. Republicans know they can’t roll back health care reforms, despite talk to the contrary, and even the most cynical part of me can’t fathom what they think they can gain by taking on the scientific establishment over global warming. What we’ll have is two years of total deadlock with mounting voter frustration, hopefully followed by a rueful admission that maybe, just maybe, the GOP doesn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart, no matter how quavering, corrupt, and ineffectual the Democrats happen to be. In the meantime, it’s not like there’s anything to fix in our society.

Let’s leave aside, for now, the fact that T-Mobile feels justified in differentiating text-message data from all other types of data, and charging separately for it. Enough has been written about that elsewhere (although I’ll return with my own screed later). I want to concentrate on the bottom weasel-text, reproduced here for the googles of the internet, which as of this writing don’t search inside images for text.

Fee we collect and retain to help cover our costs related to funding and complying with government mandates, programs, and obligations. [Oxford comma mine]

Let’s get something straight: despite the best efforts of Ronald Reagan and his idolaters of the last 30 years, every company must comply with government mandates, programs, and obligations. I’m talking about wasteful and oppressive regulations that cripple our job-creating small businesses, such as:

• Don’t dump carcinogens into rivers (ok, but not too much or we’ll fine you)
• Don’t charge an interest rate above 300%, no matter how dumb your mark (or if you do, at least call it a “payday loan” and make sure they’re a poor racial minority)
• Don’t employ children to mine coal (we know, their small hands can get more places, but people kind of hate child labor)

Every company must find a way to deal with the increased cost of doing business that regulation imposes, which may include passing the bill onto customers in one form or another. But few companies would be so gauche as to bill me a line-item for it. And it really does make my blood boil. In one asterisked footnote, T-Mobile has managed to neatly invoke 30 years of discredited free-market claptrap, that zombie ideology that just won’t die, no matter how many bullets to the head it takes. Their buck-passing reinforces this ideology’s central tenet, that government regulation of any sort is an unnecessary evil that raises prices for customers and fetters business. And of course, as with all invocations of this ideology, the potential benefits of such regulation aren’t mentioned, and certainly not in the same paragraph as the costs.

I don’t exactly envy T-Mobile and the other telcos their fate as the maintainers of expensive data lines with cutthroat operating margins, but that doesn’t excuse this kind of behavior. And in any case, their billing practices makes it hard to sympathize with them. Consider what I paid for voice, text, and data last month:

So for 138.37 MB of data (internet access), I paid $30.00. That comes out to $0.22 / MB. For the voice, assuming the most generous audio codecs in existence, I paid $39.99 for 222.89 MB of voice data, a rate of $0.17 / MB. For texts, I paid $10.00 for 0.015 MB of data (98 messages at 160B each), a rate of $668.73 / MB. It should be noted that since I spend nearly every waking moment in easy reach of a broadband connection and don’t have any friends, I use far less voice and data than most smart-phone owners, so the typical rates for those two types of data would be even lower. In summary, T-Mobile has no problem charging me:

• $0.17 / MB, if it’s a phone call
• $0.22 / MB, if it’s a webpage
• $658.73 / MB, if it’s a text message

Yessiree, nothing illogical or unethical about this pricing scheme, government regulators! Now go pick on the logging industry before we add some more anti-government propaganda to our next billing statement.

“Scientific racism” is a slur in the academy, roughly analogous to calling something “psuedoscientific” in the mainstream scientific community. Largely because there are observed differences in the results of IQ tests of different races, it is politically correct in many academic circles to refer to general intelligence under the euphemism “whatever it is that IQ tests measure.”

And, in fact, it’s solid science that performance on such tests is strongly influenced by individuals’ own perceptions of their ability. Blacks taking a test that is presented as a “laboratory exercise” outperform those taking the same test presented as an exam. In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely relates an even more intriguing experimental result. Researchers seeking to understand the effect that stereotypes have on math test performance decided to see if they could study the interaction between two conflicting stereotypes: that Asians are good at math; and that women are bad at it. They tested a large sample of Asian women, subconsciously priming a third of them to think about their womanhood (by asking questions about child birth, motherhood, etc.), another third to think about their Asian-ness (by asking questions about the language spoken at home, immigration, etc.), and leaving a final third as a control group. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that each test group lived up to the stereotype they were primed to think about — the Asian group did better, and the woman group worse, than the control group.

As a society, we find the very idea of cognitive differences between races so vile and reprehensible that anyone making such claims does so at the risk of their academic and scientific career. The Bell Curve, a book on intelligence distribution that includes a chapter on the black-white achievement gap and suggests it cannot be explained by social factors alone, has received more refutation (and its authors, more ostracism) than any other modern, mainstream scientific text.

I’m currently reading How the Mind Works, an aptly named treatise about how evolution designed the human brain to fill the “cognitive niche” that no other species does. The author, Steven Pinker, understands that any discussion about innate human behavior, no matter how polite, raises the hackles on many of his more critical readers, and so he spends the first couple chapters of his book hammering home the point that we, as a society, need to separate the concept of what is right from what is true. He warns about the dangers of the twin logical fallacies applied to this area of research: the naturalistic fallacy (because something is natural, it must be good); and its opposite, the moralistic fallacy (because something is good, it must be natural). He notes that in the 1980s UNESCO proactively refuted any scientific study that claimed humans have an innate, evolved tendency towards violence and war, asserting that it is “scientifically inaccurate” to make such claims.

But with the genetic revolution, any ethnic differences that do exist are inevitably going to come to the forefront. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia is concerned about our ability to keep this discussion civil:

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism…

The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event…

I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.

It’s getting harder every year to profess the standard social science model of the “blank slate” embraced by Piaget and Freud (and many others). The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more we learn that major aspects of our personalities and minds are determined at birth or earlier. For example, recent research suggests that executive function — one’s ability to control one’s thoughts and behavior — is almost entirely heritable. As time passes, the number of cognitive and behavioral traits in the “almost entirely heritable” list is guaranteed to grow, seriously challenging long-cherished beliefs about justice, merit, and agency.

Since this result is inevitable, it’s imperative that we begin, as Pinker suggests, to separate our moral disgust from our notion of scientific truth. It’s certainly proper to be passionately skeptical about results indicating inborn differences between groups of humans; but it’s not proper to rule out, a priori, the possibility that such differences could exist, as is the current fashion in the academy.

Yeah! We’re against the expansion of the federal government and fiscal irresponsibility! Seriously, we didn’t even notice that the president was of the negro persuasion until someone pointed it out to us, and then we were all “whaaa?” We’d be saying the same things about a white president — that’s why we were so overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush tax cuts and deficit spending, and the creation of the DHS, the single largest expansion of the federal government in a generation.

We wanted to show up to protest the Bush administration, too… well, about that. Jim’s grandma got real sick, and Lou there was busy with overtime at the slaughterhouse. Also, we couldn’t find any black markers or paint stirrers to make our signs. By a total coincidence, when Obama was elected we overcame these obstacles just in time to warn America about how the gubmint takeover of health care was gonna death-panel Jim’s grandma after putting her Medicare in the hands of some Washington bureaucrat.

You see, this movement is all about freedom, not racism! That’s why when Arizona passed a law to allow police officers to demand that anyone they suspected of being an illegal immigrant show their papers or face indefinite detention, we showed up in mass to protest this Nazi-like intrusion into American liberty. Actually hold on… in this case, we’re sure those government officials will not abuse their powers (we trust them), so we showed up to protest the overwhelming protests of the new law. You see, this law keeps America America-er. Any real American has nothing to fear. There’s no way that brown-skinned people are going to be targeted by this law; if they’re here legally, they’re one of us.

Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the [Tea Party] movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy.

Ok, yeah, if you’re talking about all black, and all latinos, sure. But the ones we know personally are great, and those other ones could be great too, if only they just applied themselves and quit looking to the gubmint for a handout.

Our movement welcomes all people of color! There’s no reason to imagine things would be any different if we were all negroes ourselves.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Hey, who are you going to believe, us, or the Jew-run liberal media? Now for the last time, quit calling us racists!

I don’t know if calling a Constitutional Convention is a realistic goal, but I agree with Lessig that’s it’s probably our best shot of fixing the system.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Some choice excerpts from the transcript:

On the economics of the drug war:

The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we– our economy doesn’t need them. We don’t need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it.

On institutional progress:

You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.

On why America doesn’t have the stomach to end the war on drugs:

Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don’t, as we said before, economically, we don’t need those people. The American economy doesn’t need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don’t think– since we basically have become a market-based culture and it’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad denouement, I think we’re going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

On the solution we absolutely won’t stomach:

Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we’re basically treating our underclass. The drug war’s war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.

On the myth that the internet killed newspapers:

And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us? I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet because I took the third buyout from the “Baltimore Sun.” I was about reporter number 80 or 90 who left, in 1995. Long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time– those buyouts happened when the “Baltimore Sun” was earning 37 percent profits.

You know, we now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. 37 percent profits. All that R&D money that was supposed to go in to make newspapers more essential, more viable, more able to explain the complexities of the world. It went to shareholders in the Tribune Company. Or the L.A. Times Mirror Company before that. And ultimately, when the Internet did hit, they had an inferior product– that was not essential enough that they could charge online for it.

I mean, the guys who are running newspapers, over the last 20 or 30 years, have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It– it’s even more profound than Detroit making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car in 1973. That– it’s analogous up to a point, except it’s not analogous in that a Nissan is a pretty good car, and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth doesn’t do very much first generation reporting at all. And it can’t sustain that. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. And to lose to that, because you didn’t– they had contempt for their own product, these people.

On the future of the American empire:

We’re not going to make it as a first rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. I mean, you know, empires end. And that doesn’t mean cultures end completely and it doesn’t mean that even nation states… You know, I mean, if you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys. You’d have said, “Man, you know, what’s going to be left?” But, you know, Britain’s still there. And they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do.

Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. And a lot of our foreign policy represents that. And a lot of our– you know, this notion that the markets were always going to go up. And that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity, out of magic. Out of nothing.

His [Obama's] economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn’t need jobs. Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain’t gonna sweat no mo’ no mo’ — just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day.

… the current regime’s definition of a recovery is more of the same as ever. A return of the mortgage market and credit to its former level — the level that blew us out of the water in the first place. Ah, but we’re gonna manage it better this time. There is no one-trick pony on earth equal to capitalism.

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren’t allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some “public option” that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Sure, it’s just a progressive’s laundry list of woes that no electable representative would ever endorse (Kucinich and Paul notwithstanding). But damned if it didn’t entice me to buy his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Judging from the reviews, it might just be more preaching to the choir, but we’ll see if I agree.

The idea that our economy of the last 30 years was a massive credit scam is being articulated in a growing number of places, notably James Howard Kunstler’s Long Emergency. Kunstler makes the argument that the housing boom was the only thing keeping our economy afloat as the manufacturing base moved to China and India; now it’s gone forever and those jobs aren’t coming back.

Of course, it’s easy to blame the shadowy “elite,” that one percent of the population we imagine has its foot on our throat. Don’t get me wrong — the foot and our supine posture are in no way strictly metaphorical. But they had help.

If you need me, I’ll be busy converting my wealth to beans, bullets, and bibles.

I’m not saying there isn’t reasoned conservative debate to be had on the issues of health care, runaway spending, size of government, etc. It just doesn’t seem to be out in force.

Six weeks ago, I wasn’t ready to write off the entire right wing as racists. It saddens me to say it, but today I’m forced to accept that the country these people want back is the one where a black man isn’t president. The fact that most people in the tea bagger movement, a movement most strongly characterized by inchoate, undirected rage rather than any specific doctrine, don’t even believe this of themselves is a large part of what makes it so insidious, so hard to combat directly, and so sad.

This is what tricks the unreflecting mad Libs: they don’t understand that Conservative principles are just that — principles. Principles are like natural laws: they don’t change with time. Yes, indeed, all kinds of changes spin and weave all around them. But Liberal are always looking for a new system. Well, all systems break down sooner or later. But principles never break down. They always work in any context to which they are relevant. Again, these are like natural laws. They are even like immutable spiritual laws.

I agree wholeheartedly. This inability to think in terms of values, rather than effects, is the biggest reason the right remains so inscrutable to the left. It’s why every democratic presidential candidate since Reagan has had such a hard time: the left’s inability to weave a compelling, coherent moral narrative. I often hear statements from friends on the left such as, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one!” I’m tired of translating this for them into what the right hears: “Don’t like murder? Don’t kill anyone!”

You see, Liberals hate that. They have no core, no center — and so, as another great poet said, “Things fall apart, The center cannot hold.” Liberals pervert the concept of being unlimited, as they pervert every concept they come across. That which is ageless and timeless means nothing to their limited minds. If it’s not new and always morphing into the next new thing, it’s no good for them.

This is obviously a false charge — the left has many guiding principles, such as civil liberties, social justice, and economic equity. Maybe it’s the fact that so few of these principles have ever been attempted in this country that leads the right to believe they aren’t held. In fact, the moralities that drive liberal and conservative values have much more in common than you might think.

So to return to conservative principles: just what are they? The site enumerates the usual hard line about immigration, Judeo-Christian tradition, military spending, and opposition to gay marriage that doesn’t even bear mentioning. Here are the principles I found interesting (emphasis theirs):

Private industry understands how and why do to (sic) things in a superior and more cost-effective way than anything the government can do, with the exception of military and law enforcement protection, emergency protection (such as local fire departments), and handling foreign affairs including immigration regulations. Therefore, private industry and private initiative must be allowed to run all affairs in this nation, including education and health care, with the exception of those few things enumerated here.

The federal government as it currently is, is a bloated joke. Conservatives must immediately begin screaming for it to be shrunk by not less than 75%.

The welfare state is to be abolished. People who are down on their luck can look to charities.

Keep in mind the sentences in bold above are not to be considered policy summaries, fed by reasoned analysis of the facts on the ground. They are, themselves, axioms in this worldview. By the site’s own assertion, these beliefs about what government is and what it can do are natural laws. They’re as unassailable as a triangle’s three-sidedness.

Is it any wonder that these people show up to town halls to shout down congressmen, rather than to engage in sober debate? There can be no debate on government-run health care. It’s not listed as one of the exceptions to the private-industry-knows-best axiom, and so it is simply inconceivable — literally, unthinkable — that it could be more effective, more equitable, more beneficial to society than private insurance. It doesn’t matter that Medicare has 3% administrative overhead, compared to 17% for private insurance. It doesn’t matter that insurance companies are obligated by law to maximize shareholder returns, which means denying care whenever possible. It doesn’t matter that “death panels” and forced euthanasia and rationed care are entirely fictional. Pointing out these objective facts to someone on the right won’t change their mind. At best, they’ll think you have been lied to. At worst, they’ll consider you part of the liberal conspiracy.

When you understand that these complex statements of policies are axiomatic to the right, it becomes easier to understand the man who yelled at his congressman during a town hall meeting to “Keep your government hands off my medicare.” It makes it easier to understand why scientists are seldom Republicans.

Only 12 percent of scientists in a poll issued last month by the Pew Research Center say they are Republican or lean toward the GOP, while fully 81 percent of scientists say they are Democrats or lean Democratic.

It’s not that scientists are smart and Republicans are dumb. It’s that, to practice science, you have allow the possibility of being wrong. You have to allow evidence to change your mind. The Republican party in its current form brooks no self-doubt, will suffer no evidence to alter their timeless, ageless principles.

Faith, as I’ve always understood it, is the belief in something despite a lack of evidence. To make sense of the current conservative mindset, you have to pervert that definition to include belief in things despite evidence to the contrary.

Our country is in dire need of evidence-based debate around federal policy, but all we get is shouting and sensation. How could it be otherwise, when one side is covering their ears so that inconvenient facts don’t cloud their world view? Now we get word that Obama is giving up on the public option, despite solid majorities in both houses of congress, in order to appease a bunch of shouting yokels who think he’s a foreign-born usurper. Obviously, this choice is infuriating to many on the left, myself included, who can’t help but feel that to allow Republicans any say in the process, when their reasoning is based on lies, distortions, and timeless, unquestionable beliefs, is a perverted, twisted definition of “bipartisan.” It’s letting bullies and demagogues have their way, despite their contributing nothing of substance to the debate. It’s a betrayal of the progressive movement that put him in office. And, despite what Senate Democrats might say, it’s a victory for the status-quo that’s funding so many of these astroturf protests, the same broken status quo that conservatives are defending as an ageless principle. And that’s really a shame.