“I was a political science major and I agree with Coburn. Government funds should go to real science not a bunch of academics sorting over theories that really mean little to most people. Did Jefferson or Plato or Aristotle need government funding for their political theories?”

This is doubly funny, because not only were Plato and Aristotle funded by their respective governments, their governments were funded in large part by slave labour. So I guess following the cited logic that sort of makes for a good defense of slave-labour as well as government-subsidies for political science.

Well, Coburn is an MD, believe it or not. members of his tribe obviously deserve funding.

The U.S. Senate may have some interesting theories about democracy, but Americans who have an interest in democratic politics can turn to the House of Representatives, the White House, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who actually do shit and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Oh, I just love the possibilities of that paragraph.

There’s plenty of evidence on TV that praying is the most effective therapy against tumor growth, and that depleting CD4+ T helper lymphocytes are homosexuals getting what they rightly deserve for their depravity. By what virtue, then, is there even a National Science Foundation? Copy and paste if needed; the National Endowment for the Arts should come next.

Demagogues never disappoint me for being demagogues. It’s just that they never push the argument to its end.

I’m not calling out those who have an honest argument about what “science” means, and whether what we do is “science.” For one thing, I have a big problem with the idea that prediction is a criterion for a good theory. But this debate is pitched to a higher level than Coburn’s ganglia (what humans have evolved into a brain) can grasp. Clearly, Coburn is playing to his base, and, if his views on this amendment are a perfect reflection of his base, God help Oklahoma. Clearly, Coburn is playing small p politics, and for a shockingly large number of people, it resonates—not because it strikes a nerve in our discipline, but because it riles up the booboisie that constitutes what’s left of the hard core political right in this country.

Evolution, anyone? The NSF spends a lot of money on it, and I bet a lot of politicians don’t like it. So I wouldn’t be too quick to abandon the political scientists to their fate.

Interestingly enough, Sen. Coburn brings up the point that political behaviourists and political psychologists often pathologise conservatism, which we were discussing in the lab just yesterday. This is a potential problem for researchers, but it’s an issue that ought to be worked out in academia, rather than chopped off by a senator on a political tirade.

And, incidentally, I would really like to study the effect of youtube.com on the 2008 election… where was this conference held and where can I get the proceedings?