Just What We Need (Not)

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has identified yet another reason why Michele  Bachmann is just what we don't need in a national leader: more ignorance.  The latest dust-up is Bachmann's position opposing requiring (or encouraging?) adolescent girls to receive the effective human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.  The vaccine prevents acquiring HPV and, in turn, vastly reduces the future chances of being stricken with cervical cancer, most of which is caused by HPV.


Instead of even attempting to argue logically against the requirement, Bachmann chose to demonize her opponent (Gov. Perry of Texas, another member of the Republicant brain-trust, NOT), for signing a law requiring the HPV vaccination.   She didn't cite religious reasons, or even some sort of government intrusiveness reasons.   She chose to lump the HPV vaccine in with suspect un-named vaccines that cause "retardation."  She went off the rails and downhill from there.


As those friends of yours who think Bachmann is just what this country needs, why it is that we need more ignorance.

Why Care About The Weirdness In Texas?

The weirdness in question is the behavior of the Texas School Board, which has been in the news lately regarding it's curriculum adoptions.   The Board has been controlled by a group of what many refer to as extremist evangelicals who have determined that all school textbooks in Texas must follow their agenda, which apparently is not primarily based on facts, but on their beliefs.   Case in point: Texas textbooks must teach that the US was founded as a "Christian nation."   The historical evidence is quite the contrary, as this article in the Chicago Tribune points out in some detail.  The list of historical distortion and rewriting is long; read the NY Times article for the gory details.

Why care about what some goofballs in Texas are doing?   Because Texas is so large, and because it purchases so many school textbooks, what it says must be in those textbooks is closely followed by publishers.  The result is that those same books are used in most schools around the country, regardless of whether those other schools subscribe to the one-sided and less-than-factual "curriculum."   

What can you do about it?   Hope that most schools ditch large purchases of textbooks in favor of electronic media sooner rather than later.

Voting By The Uninformed

One of the benefits of a democracy is that the citizens have the right to vote.  One of the problems in a democracy is that the citizens have the right to vote even if they have no clue what's going on.   For the entire history of our Republic, there have been countless elections in which very few voters bothered to vote.  

Even during the formation of the nation, as school kids used to be taught, the populace didn't form a clear majority for a particular direction (we learned 1/3 of the late 18th century population was "loyalist" or pro-British, 1/3 were in favor of independence, and the remaining 1/3 didn't care one way or the other).  This break-down apparently arose from the writing of John Adams, and he may have been talking about support for the French Revolution, not the American dispute.   Other estimates give the Loyalists and Patriots in the neighborhood of about 20% each, and the fence-sitters the vast majority (around 60%) of the white population.  The point is, even during the American Revolution, there were a huge amount of people who either had no opinion or couldn't make up their minds. 

So should we expect everyone to vote in elections now?   I think not, and so does Stan Zegel in this Chicago Tribune article.   He makes the case that our country is better served by only encouraging the informed voters to actually vote, and let those who are uninformed stay home.  

In Illinois, the State that gave the nation Rod Blagojevich our impeached ex-Governor, and the State that recently had an unknown pawnbroker win the Democratic nomination for Lt. Governor (only to resign from the nomination after his criminal history became public), and the State that is rapidly lurching toward bankruptcy, the recent primary election had something less than 1/3 of the eligible voters show up.


Zegel rightly points out that "that the quality of the vote is more important than the quantity of votes."  He talks about the fact that a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor drew 7000 votes, despite the fact that he dropped out of the race before election day.  That implies that there were at least several thousand voters who weren't paying attention closely enough to understand who was still in the race.  In fact, the winner of that race still hasn't been determined, and the votes for the non-candidate are far greater than the distance between the top two candidates.

Those random or uninformed votes are four times greater than the margin separating the first- and second-place finishers in the cliffhanger race. In fact, carefree voting possibly changed the outcome of the race.

I have to agree with Zegel; our elections, whether they are for national or local offices, are too important for all of us to be decided by the ignorant.   We should be encouraging people to become informed and knowledgable about issues, rather than simply encouraging everyone to "get out and vote."

Most citizens have the right to vote, but not everyone should exercise that right. Voting is too important to be thrust into the hands of the uninformed...For good government we need good voting. The best election is not one in which everyone votes, but one in which everyone who voted cast fully informed ballots.

Welcome To The New Dark Age

Two newspaper articles this week highlight a growing problem: lots of people with opinions, but not necessarily much information. One is a local story and the other is a global one. And underlying this issue is the fact that a growing number of organizations, both mass media outlets (newspapers, television, and their web presences) and what I'll call non-media (everything else), feel compelled to give voice to every "Tom, Dick, and Harry" out there. And some are way out there.

The AP article starts by talking about the shouting going on at the climate change conference in Denmark this week. The author points out that there is little of traditional debate left in the mix, with both sides largely shouting at each other, beating each other with opinions. Facts, and science, are left in the dust. "And public debate shifts from the provable and the empirical toward the spectacle of argument."

There has long been a bias on the part of the public against intellectuals and science, and some feel this was because the public simply didn't trust intellectuals and scientists. This carries over to public perception of intelligence in general, and spawned those bumper stickers that read "My kid can beat up your honor role student." The pursuit of mediocrity at best.

The spawn of the Internet has made things even worse. Our electronic communications encourage the expression of opinions, whether or not the opinions are based even a little bit on fact. Facts and information are kicked to the curb in favor of "beliefs" and judgments, and truth is irrelevant.

"What you have is the (presumption) of expertise by ordinary people who feel their opinions are as valuable as anybody else's. And at the same time, you have experts behaving like gods beyond what they know," says Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent and author of "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?"

The second article is a story about a library in the Chicago suburbs that implemented a new online catalog of its holdings. Part of the new software provided for patrons to "tag" books "with terms they think other readers might find useful." All patrons have to do is sign up with a user name and email address and they can tag to their heart's content. The "news" in this case is that someone tagged the library's collection of Anne Coulter's books with the term "hate speech." This in turn, made another patron very upset. The upset patron felt that the library was letting people make "political statements" on the library's site and felt that was wrong. The library doesn't closely monitor the tagging and will only remove tags that are "explicit materials or racial slurs."

My question is why does the library feel it's a good idea to have patron tagging of books in their online catalog? Just because the new software enables this, what point is served? Does the library really thing it's a good idea for patrons to peruse one or two word "tags" in order to decide if they want to read a particular book? Not only is this not encouraging critical thinking skills, it's pandering to the lowest denominator. Other libraries allow tagging, but require the submitter to also provide a book review, which might at least be an indication the commenter actually read the book.

What makes a patron qualified to recommend or criticize a book or author with word tags? What makes a newspaper article reader qualified to expound about why the article is all wrong? What qualifications do either bring to the table?

My 11/22/09 post also dealt with this issue of ignorant opinions and news outlets.

The ignorant comments of the public after news articles (about ignorant comments of politicians) are even more worrisome than the politicians' statements. The anonymous public vitriol tends to discourage rational discussion, and is little more than online bullying. For an excellent post on what's wrong with the public comment sections of news related web sites, read Steve Dahl's excellent 11/11/09 article "Everybody is a know-it-all these days."

This issue is not going away and I remain convinced that society needs to find a way back to the process of debate based on facts. We need to abandon our apparently growing penchant for encouraging ignorant shouting by people unconcerned with knowing anything about the topic at hand. I'm not very hopeful.

Greil Marcus, an American cultural historian and co-author of "A New Literary History of America," remembers watching TV in the 1950s, "when there were all these TV dramas about science vs. religion." And, he says, "science always won."

No more, Marcus says. Instead, cacophony now prevails and the right to be heard trumps what is being said. "Welcome to the new Dark Ages," he says.

Politics and Global Warming

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that there seems to be a vocal minority in the US that still doesn't believe than humans created the world's pollution levels and that the pollution has caused global temperatures to rise over the years and that this temperature rise is a threat to us. If you use the commentary section on newspaper web sites as an indicator, it would appear that there are an awful lot of these folks out there; more on that later.

In a recent news report on the current Governor's race in Illinois, the Daily Herald reported that five of the seven candidates for the Republican nomination don't "believe" that humans have caused global warming. One candidate allowed that humans "contribute" to global warming, but wasn't sure how much. The seventh candidate hedged his bets and stated he believes global warming research is "still evolving." I'm surprised he was brave enough to use the word "evolve."

The question was raised to elicit comment from the candidates on their views of "cap and trade" legislation at the Federal level. As such, it's really of small importance to the potential Governor of Illinois, but these candidates felt the need to explain their opposition to cap and trade. Rather than simply stating that they felt that a cap and trade approach to reducing pollution would have an unacceptable detrimental impact on business and employment (presumably because they think cap and trade will add costs to doing business), these politicians felt that they needed to attack the very notion that humans caused the climate changes scientists are observing. The public comments these people made are positively stunning in the depth of ignorance they displayed:

"I don't accept the premise that man is the cause of global warming, if global warming even exists," Kirk Dillard, a state senator from Hinsdale, said at a candidate forum last week.

"Global warming is not created by man and anybody who says that, it's just bad science. It's not true," said Bob Schillerstrom, chairman of the DuPage County Board.

Dan Proft, a Chicago-area public relations consultant, said Al Gore and other global warming activists are "kind of enviro-terrorists."

The State of Illinois is staggering under huge budget deficits, a regressive state income tax that hasn't been changed in a generation, more corrupt politicians than you can shake a stick at, and a public education system that is going bankrupt due to its reliance on property taxes. One could argue that the position of a potential Illinois Governor on global warming, climate change, and whether humans or polar bears caused these problems is of little relevance to the Chief Executive of the State. One would probably be mostly correct.

On the other hand, the fact that five candidates for statewide office had no compunction making such patently ridiculous statements in a public forum is disturbing for another reason. These politicians are so busy pandering to the "GOP base," that they can't accept what every middle school student knows is true; there's no explanation for global warming and its impact on climate besides humans and the pollution we have generated.

Now back to the online comments made by newspaper readers. This article generated the same kind of vitriolic and ignorant rants that cause me to generally avoid reading such commentary. Virtually all of these comments are posted by people using pseudonyms and their anonymity empowers them to make broad assertions as if they were facts. While they lambaste other commenters for making unsubstantiated or false "liberal" or "left-wing" statements about global warming, these posters make just as unsubstantiated claims masquerading as fact. Some of them make simple blanket statements about how well wildlife is faring in the Arctic, as if to settle the fallacy of global warming for everyone.

The ignorant comments of the public after news articles (about ignorant comments of politicians) are even more worrisome than the politicians' statements. The anonymous public vitriol tends to discourage rational discussion, and is little more than online bullying. For an excellent post on what's wrong with the public comment sections of news related web sites, read Steve Dahl's excellent 11/11/09 article "Everybody is a know-it-all these days."

In the end, it's impossible to debate with these folks and expect that they will ever be able to modify their viewpoint. If they don't "believe" in global warming by now, they never will.