Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004936.html, the “Rev. Terry Fox”:http://www.ljworld.com/section/gaymarriage/story/201237 of Wichita, KS:
bq. Fox helped turn defeat of the amendment in the Legislature in 2004 to victory for his side at the polls Tuesday night. The amendment passed by 70 percent to 30 percent. “We never dreamed we would have this margin of victory,” he said. Next in his sights, he said, is “keeping an eye on evolution and abortion clinics.”
Evolution clinics? Hey, that’s not such a bad idea. We could get “P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/ to run them as a franchise:
Walk-in: Well _I_ think that evolution is just a _theory_.
PZ: Step in to this room, please.
Meanwhile, Tad Brennan finds the Washington Post describing the “unusual educational careers”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32379-2005Apr6.html of Howard Dean supporters:
bq. More than half (54 percent) hold post-graduate degrees and a quarter have graduated from college.
Tad says that if he’d known you could get a post-graduate degree without graduating college, he’d have saved years of his life.
{ 14 comments }
albert 04.07.05 at 11:06 am
That’s Wichita, KS, by the way.
PZ Myers 04.07.05 at 11:09 am
I think I want to be more the CEO type, and farm out the on-site treatment to my franchise-holders.
Maybe I could offer personal attention for an extra fee, though.
Kieran Healy 04.07.05 at 11:17 am
_That’s Wichita, KS, by the way._
Whoops, fixed.
joel turnipseed 04.07.05 at 11:45 am
Dean numbers are not surprising — Christopher Lasch wrote about his supporters in depth some time ago.
sidereal 04.07.05 at 12:46 pm
“Next in his sights, he said, is “keeping an eye on evolution”
I’m keeping an eye on it, too. The sad thing is that the Rev. Terry Fox of Wichita is being selected for.
Alex Halavais 04.07.05 at 12:52 pm
Oops. The report from Pew is only marginally clearer. If you look past a strange sentence in the summary you find this later: “An overwhelming majority (79%) are college graduates; 41% have earned a graduate or professional degree.” Oh and by the way, 56% is not the same as 41% (I just checked), and so… ?
Alex Halavais 04.07.05 at 12:53 pm
Sorry about that. I lacked closure.
Morat 04.07.05 at 1:39 pm
See, it used the phrase “internet surveys” which immediately make me suspicious about the sample.
It DOES explain the demographics — white and educated — easily enough.
I’d like to see details of how the poll was done before I closed it out as ‘undoubtably not worth squat’, but that’s unlikely. I know Zogby’s experimenting with Internet polls but he has an edge — he knows the demographics of the population.
Since this was an attempt to [i]determine[/i] the demographics of the population, you can’t weight the thing to reflect reality. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from this poll.
albert 04.07.05 at 3:40 pm
Kieran-
You’re half way there: it’s Wichita. Common mistake.
BobbyV 04.07.05 at 5:30 pm
Replacing evolution with intelligent design in their schools will ensure that Kansas remains at the bottom of our cultural gene pool.
Mary Kay 04.07.05 at 6:51 pm
Well, the survey certainly described ME to a tee. White, 40-59, never attend church, Iraq war was wrong, yes on same sex marriage, disapprove of Bush and critical of Democratic leadership, postgraduate degree etc. Describes my husband too — and yeah, I ‘d like to see him run again but hope Kerry stays the hell out. Conflicted on Gore.
MKK
Peter 04.08.05 at 1:29 am
Oh, puhleez! Suggesting that PZ Meyers, whose whole blog is about denying evolution’s documented effects on life and behaviour, lecture *others* on Creationism would blow up Prof. Frink’s sarcasm detector faster than Comic Book Guy’s barbs.
Saint Fnordius 04.08.05 at 2:10 am
About the Dean supporters:
I read it as such: 54% have a post-graduate degree, and approx 25% have a college degree, but not a post-graduate degree. That makes for a total of over 3/4. Sloppy wording , but still easily parsable.
Overly spun thingies like this make for things like the old “I am a jelly doughnut” joke about “ich bein ein Berliner” being a grammatical error. Guys like this are, to quote Michael Mittermeier, “gross gewordene AK-Kinder”.
Mrs Tilton 04.08.05 at 4:17 am
Peter,
I don’t know PZ Meyers, so it’s entirely possible he has a blog devoted to ‘denying evolution’s documented effects on life and behaviour’. If you are thinking of PZ Myers, though, it’s hard to square your contention that his blog denies E.’s effects on L. and B. with the notion that you have ever actually read the blog. It’s true, PZ does spend a lot of time growling at IDists and bitch-slapping the godly. Happily, he has built in a ‘science articles only’ filter and, if you use it, you will soon discover that his blog doesn’t talk about much anything else then evolution and its effects on life and behaviour.
I will take it that your statement may be parsed as meaning ‘As a mere developmental biologist, Myers is obviously not qualified to comment on these matters, whilst I, as an undergraduate reading PPE who has internalised the rantings of Steve Sailer and the grubbier contributors to GNXP, am.’
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