At pretty much the same time as this was announced, Fred Bowen published a bizarre opinion piece in the Washington Post‘s kids’ section deriding MMA (or “ultimate fighting,” as he insists on calling it). “I’ve watched some ultimate fighting,” he writes. “It’s a brutal sport. In fact, I don’t think ultimate fighting is a sport at all. It’s violence presented as entertainment.” That’s pretty representative of the overall argument, both in terms of logical soundness and general writing skill. It’s sort of a self-evidently poor piece of argumentation, but I think what I find most distressing is the Washington Post sees fit to give this guy a public venue to spout off his random, half-baked ideas about things.

I was going to make a post noting women are not in fact more pro-choice in their attitudes than men, although those who are might care more about the issue than similarly pro-choice men. This certainly was true at least at one point. But then I decided to screw around in the 2008 American National Election Studies data and, according to two quick-and-easy bivariate logistic regressions, women are 8 percent more likely to agree that “[b]y law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice” versus the other three choices (in short: never/only in rape and incest/in some other cases beyond rape and incest). Women are also 15 percent more likely to say the abortion issue is “very important” or “extremely important” versus the other three choices (“not at all important”/”not too important”/”somewhat important”). These results are statistically significant at the .01 and .001 levels, respectively. Although this is incredibly rudimentary analysis, I’m left a bit less convinced of my prior position to say the least.

Thus the strategy of the boxer, as product of the encounter of the pugilistic habitus with the very field that produced it, erases the scholastic distinction between the intentional and the habitual, the rational and the emotional, the corporeal and the mental. It pertains to an embodied practical reason that, being lodged in the depths of the socialized organism, escapes the logic of individual choice. [from the footnote] One glimpses here in passing all that the strand of sociology inspired by game theory could gain by taking as paradigm a very “corporeal” game such as boxing rather than an eminently “intellectual” one like chess or military strategy. (2004: 98)

Jamelle Bouie describes the southern Christian identity politics of Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal:

Bobby Jindal’s persona is probably authentic — I have no reason to think otherwise — but it’s clear that his Christianity, his unassuming name and his recognizable accent are all part of his appeal to white Southerners. It’s hard to imagine a Piyush Jindal rising as rapidly through the ranks of Southern conservative politics. The same goes for Nikki Haley, whose birth name is distinctively South Asian, and who repeatedly stressed her Christianity in order to dispel rumors about her religious beliefs. This doesn’t make her any less authentic, but it does suggest that it might be difficult to succeed in Southern conservative politics if you insist on retaining the cultural markers of your ethnic heritage.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s relatively new “Talk To Me Like I’m Stupid” segment is pretty great. This week he explores hunting in the 19th century; naturally, at least one reader has been just waiting to unload his encyclopedic knowledge of this obscure topic.

Ezra Klein notes that U.S. inequality is back at record highs and, via Jonathan Bernstein and Richard Neustadt’s classic work of scholarship on the presidency, U.S. presidents actually aren’t as powerful as everyone seems to assume.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias discusses the problems of interest group pluralism when business is more powerful than other players.

In general, the Annual Reviews could be excellent resources for political journalists, but they do require a subscription.

The faculty in your department will not think less of you – I have been asked several times by fellow grad students some form of the following question: “Weren’t you worried what your advisors would think about your blog?” Of course, I never even thought about this question, as I started blogging before actually matriculating to NYU (note that ZIA’s anniversary is early-June and most universities begin the Fall semester in late August). This, however, is besides the point. No, I was never worried about what my advisors would think. The things I write about on ZIA are exactly the same kinds of things I say in seminar and write for term papers (in fact, these ideas often flow both ways). Furthermore, most of those faculty who might actually view blogging in a negative light are also those most unlikely to ever read your blog.

Well, maybe. I’d certainly like to think this is true, but I’m not quite as convinced as Conway. I blogged regularly for years before coming to grad school but mostly stopped upon my arrival. In part this was due to a lack of free time, but there was also a sense of professional concern. Political scientists tend to strive for an apolitical tone in their work and often frown on outright displays of ideology or partisanship. In this regard, political science can often seem far less, well, political than disciplines like comparative literature, history, or sociology. Blogging need not be intensely partisan, of course, but it does tend to lead to a more personal style of writing than standard academic fare, which lends itself to a bit more straightforwardness of expression. And at least at the more conventionally prestigious departments, there’s generally no clear reward for engaging in public discourse in this way, as hiring and tenure decisions tend to be based effectively on the number and quality of peer-reviewed journal publications. Blogging can be viewed as a distraction from the real work of grinding out research.

This is not to say that, normativelly, blogging shouldn’t be viewed as a good thing for social scientists to do more of. I think it should be. But, empirically, I’m not sure it’s always so easy.

Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71 (2), 2006.

The authors use survey evidence to demonstrate that as tolerance for religious diversity grows, it does so at the expense of non-believers.

The article is available from Gerteis’s website here (.pdf).

I have to agree with Jerry Coyne here: the program on Faith and Science at this year’s World Science Festival is a mistake. I went to last year’s Festival, and I have great respect for Brian Greene and Tracy Day for bringing together such a massive undertaking. It would be better if they didn’t take money from the Templeton Foundation, but money has to come from somewhere, and I’m not the one paying the bills. I don’t even mind having a panel that talks about religion — it’s a big part of many people’s lives, and there are plenty of issues to be discussed at the intersection of science and religion.

But it would be a lot more intellectually respectable to present a balanced discussion of those issues, rather than the one that is actually lined up. The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners — Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies — as well as two scholars of religion — Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

…

Four hundred years after Galileo turned his telescope on the heavens, it’s incredibly frustrating that we still have debates over whether the world can be described in purely naturalistic terms, rather than accepting that insight as an amazing accomplishment and moving on to the hard work of articulating its consequences.

It’s unsettling how the growing trend in science towards working with religious groups on scientific understanding (which, at its core, is of course a good thing) tends to contribute to the marginalization of atheism in public discourse.