Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

Toss a coin.

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

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.

It was the democratic candidate in this election who signed it into law.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/ndaa-biggest-election-issue-no-o...

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 – 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.

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".

Well, that's Texas. (I grew up in northeast Houston.) These 'unappealing' candidates are reliably winning there, so it's hard to say they're not locally appropriate, on (small-d) democratic principles. And even the (big-D) Democrats are more conservative in such places, steering clear of gay/abortion rights. For example, you mention Mourdock in IN. He lost to a pro-life, anti-gay-marriage Democrat who'd co-sponsored a bill that included the same extra 'forcible' qualifier about rapes that GOPers are attacked about.

Also, all "rape-comment scandals" are not alike. (Fuzzing them together is again deploying 'out-group homogeneity bias' for partisan electoral advantage.) Mourdock's gaffe was clumsy, but a genuine attempt at expressing a philosophically consistent position, common among religiously-motivated abortion opponents, that follows naturally from the idea that all life is a supernatural gift, and all abortion an unjust taking of a life. (I've heard strongly pro-choice people say they respect this position, for its consistency, more than the 'convenient, popular exceptions' pro-life position.)

If Mourdock had said it more artfully -- for example keeping the words 'rape' and 'something god intended' much further apart -- many voters may still have disagreed with his 'no exceptions' approach but it would have been a lot harder to tarnish him with Akin-like ignorance and insensitivity. (Harder, but not impossible: more than ever before partisans and 'outrage farmers' selectively quote and rearrange statements to make them maximally-inflammatory before reporting, to score quick points before the full original context is known.)

Even your word choice that Mourdock "found it necessary to mention" this makes it seem like he was going out of his way to inflame. If you watch the clip yourself -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgDgub8X6DQ -- I think it's pretty clear he was struggling with a dicey issue (especially for those who believe in a 'good' and omnipotent diety who allows evil to happen), and trying to be responsive to a direct question during a debate. And his reward for being honest and engaging (but unpracticed on the exact word choice)? Being lumped together with ignorant Akin, forever.

You don't get to say they are "Outliers" when Santorum wins 11 (I think that was the number?) Republican presidential primaries. When audiences at those primaries boo gay soldiers. When their candidate wants to get rid of planned parenthood.

A major party's senate candidate is an "outlier" ???/ You'd be hard pressed to find anyone this nuts on the left.

Half of the Repubs members of the congressional committee on science don't believe in evolution. The moderates who you refer to have left: Richard Lugar, Arlen Spector etc., haven't you noticed they've been cast out of the party/defeated in primaries.

Frankly, the media is too "fair." Not all opinions deserve to be treated equally. If media is sympathetic to the Democratic party it's because ours is a party based on reason, evidence and logic, not 2,000 year old myths.

Winning only 11 primaries, compared to 42 won by the nominee, is evidence of a regional/minority-factional 'outlier' candidacy. (And even for those wins, Santorum needed the 'anybody but Romney' dynamic: it was far from broad GOP love for Santorum. Though if you're suffering from the out-group bias I mentioned, it might look that way.)

And yes, a major party's Senate candidate can be an 'outlier'.

In the US, the parties don't pick the candidates, voters do through primaries. Only 36% of Missouri Republican primary voters gave Akin a slim plurality in a no-runoff 3-way primary. Two other candidates in that primary, each with a broader base of national Republican support, got a combined 59% of the GOP vote. So Akin is even somewhat of an outlier in his home, conservative Missouri GOP.

An bigger outlier was the 'major party' Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee, Mark Clayton:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/2012s-wo...

Still, Clayton won the primary and got to run as the Democrat, over the protests of the state party, because that's how the system works. A plurality of voters who show up in low-turnout, often unrepresentative primaries pick the candidates, not the parties.

Yes, the GOP has lost a bunch of its moderate candidates, and that's a problem for the GOP and the country. The causes are both internal GOP malfunctions, and the portrayal-biases I've been mentioning from the media and casual poltical observers. (The moderates rarely get their due respect/coverage as equal Republicans, the Republicans don't get due recognition of their internal diversity. So the breadth of the party has decayed compared to the past, before year-round cable-news/internet politi-tainment narrowed and hardened the party identities.)

bullshit. I don't care how many primaries Romney won, 11 is a lot. And the fact that the one logical candidate in the race (as much as I dislike him), who was the least bit moderate, even evoked that "anyone but Romney" feeling only proves my point. The fact that people thought that crazy was better than Romney only proves my point.

And the fact that Romney had to tack so far to the right to even win the nomination proves my point yet again.

Look at polls: way too many Republicans believe stupid things like Obama is Muslim, he wasn't born in this country etc..

It's funny, I was going to bring up Mark Clayton as an example of a real outlier: the party completely ignored him (not this Akin stuff, Huckabee supported him, then the SuperPacs poured money in at the last minute when it had cooled down), it was in a state that Democrats have low turnout in since they have no chance of winning anyway, so an idiot managed to make himself the nominee. Every once in a while these things happen, yes, but over the past few years you guys have elected as your candidates Christine O'Donnell ('I'm not a witch'), the legion of legitimate rape morons, and a bunch of other memorable idiots like Bachmann who accused a Clinton staffer of being a highly placed Muslim Brotherhood operative.

You purge your party of anyone who says anything remotely conciliatory or logical/moderate.

If you were talking about one state rep, or even one senator, you would have a point. But the numerous crazies and the fact that you considered people like Bachmann and Santorum legitimate contenders for the presidency does not give you the right to call the crazies the "outliers" in your party: the inmates are now running the asylum.

Interjections like 'bullshit' are not convincing. Your fondness for derogatory labels ('idiots', 'morons', 'crazies') and personalizing hyperbolic allegations (like "you purge your party of anyone who says anything remotely conciliatory or logical/moderate") suggest you have strong, fixed, partisan, emotional feelings about this which make further discussion unproductive.

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.

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