Recent Comments

1. about 14 hours ago on Lisa Benson

   Poor gullible blinded-by-partisanship Lisa Benson is well beyond her capability to create a lucid, logical [, or humorous] political cartoon and does not realize it.

2. about 14 hours ago on Nick Anderson

   It matters naught what the Constitution asserts when your goal is to control the populace as you so desire and claim it was a “god’s will” to do so.

3. about 21 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   Somehow the GOP is going along with the wacky theory that infecting everyone will save the economy and no one will grieve the deceased?

4. about 22 hours ago on Signe Wilkinson

   Good thing all politicians are aboveboard, honest, and fair during campaigns/elections?

5. about 22 hours ago on Tom Toles

   The delusional herd immunity cohort [except for the deceased] grows and thinks that this coronavirus is different than all the others and won’t reinfect?

6. 1 day ago on Nick Anderson

   When the average voter does not know enough about the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and American history/mission to be angry about the disinformation propagated by those who despise our constitutional democratic republic and allows them to access positions in government, our nation is being set up to fall into the hands of self-serving malicious authoritarian dictators.

7. 1 day ago on Clay Jones

   Our impeachment process is dysfunctional in our 2 opposing party system, as we can readily see, but rather than elect altruistic country-first people to fix the problem, we just blame the other party. Is this what our 2 party system has done to democracy? Is it easier to NOT make the essential changes and just put up with continual dysfunction?

8. 1 day ago on Tom Toles
   Continued from above

   While elite cuing leading to partisan sorting and partisan social identity (see Dunlap & McCright, 2008; Iyengar et al., 2012) suggests that highly partisan individuals will defend their party regardless of issues, when a scientific issue becomes politicized, the messaging and debate around the scientific issue often focuses on the integrity and credibility of the science and scientists. Bolsen and Druckman’s (2015) definition of science politicization explicitly states this: “politicization occurs when an actor emphasizes the inherent uncertainty of science to cast doubt on the existence of scientific consensus” (p. 746).

   Because error and uncertainty are pervasive in all scientific endeavors and that science is falsifiable (see Chalmers, 2013; Popper, 2005), it is relatively easy to equate the unavoidable uncertainties in individual scientific studies to seemingly valid suspicions of the motivations of scientists and doubt in science as a whole (see Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

   Scientific information is always, to some degree, vulnerable to concerns about uncertainty because scientists are trained to focus on uncertainty, whereas the public, at least when using shortcuts and fast cognitive processing, equates uncertainty with a lack of sufficient understanding to warrant action. (Dietz, 2013, p. 14084).

   https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1075547018822081?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.3&

9. 1 day ago on Tom Toles

   FYI: science vs politics

   Even before Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was forced into house arrest for their heliocentric writings, science has been highly political. Novel ideas backed by science that challenge deeply held beliefs will always be threatening to certain groups provoking identity protection and motivated reasoning among members of the threatened group (see DiMaggio, 1997; Kahan et al., 2012; Kunda, 1990). Scientific debates often become politicized (Bolsen & Druckman, 2015, 2018; Druckman, 2015; Scheufele, 2013, 2014), fueling partisan and ideologically polarizing disputes where the legitimacy of science, scientists, and their research findings are called into question.

   Anthropogenic climate change is the exemplar polarized scientific issue in the United States with conservatives more likely than liberals to reject scientific evidence pointing to human-caused global warming (Dunlap & McCright, 2015; McCright & Dunlap, 2010, 2011). Because of the strong emotional attachments that partisans hold to their party, they often heed elite cues to “party sort” themselves on issues framed ideologically. Party identity becomes an individual’s salient social identity (Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012) that is activated when threatened, leading partisans to party sort themselves on issues above and beyond any cognitive engagement with the issue (Dunlap & McCright, 2008).

   Continued below …

10. 1 day ago on Doonesbury

    FYI:

    Even before Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was forced into house arrest for their heliocentric writings, science has been highly political. Novel ideas backed by science that challenge deeply held beliefs will always be threatening to certain groups provoking identity protection and motivated reasoning among members of the threatened group (see DiMaggio, 1997; Kahan et al., 2012; Kunda, 1990). Scientific debates often become politicized (Bolsen & Druckman, 2015, 2018; Druckman, 2015; Scheufele, 2013, 2014), fueling partisan and ideologically polarizing disputes where the legitimacy of science, scientists, and their research findings are called into question.

    Anthropogenic climate change is the exemplar polarized scientific issue in the United States with conservatives more likely than liberals to reject scientific evidence pointing to human-caused global warming (Dunlap & McCright, 2015; McCright & Dunlap, 2010, 2011). Because of the strong emotional attachments that partisans hold to their party, they often heed elite cues to “party sort” themselves on issues framed ideologically. Party identity becomes an individual’s salient social identity (Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012) that is activated when threatened, leading partisans to party sort themselves on issues above and beyond any cognitive engagement with the issue (Dunlap & McCright, 2008).

    … continued

    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1075547018822081?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.3&