Originally posted at The Five Pilgrims.
In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Father Christmas gives gifts to the Pevensie children, he gives both Susan and Lucy weapons. He cautions them, however, only to use them for self-defense in great need; he did not intend for them to use them in battle. This was no comment on their bravery, however: as Father Christmas explained, “battles are ugly when women fight.”
Battles are ugly when anyone fights, and Lewis, a survivor of the First World War, knew that. He was, through Father Christmas, getting at something deeper: that battles were particularly ugly when women were drawn in. It’s a position drawn from the Christian idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and that when God created male and female He didn’t simply toss together a collection of disparate traits. Men and women were created with distinct roles. Men were to provide first, women to nurture first. The difference in roles was reflected in the traits given to each gender: men, generally speaking, are physically larger and stronger, while women are able to give birth, and even slight differences in brain form and function suited men and women for their different roles. For millenia this difference in roles was also understood to mean that men had a duty to be the first to face danger in defense of their family, to sacrifice themselves if necessary, to allow women to be the caregivers they were designed to be.
This is what Lewis is referring to, and he’s right that it is particularly abominable when, in addition to the inherent ugliness of war, those designed to to give life and nurture it must take life or lose their own.
It was surprising, then, to hear three Republican presidential candidates at the New Hampshire debate speak in favor of expanding registration for the draft to women. Both already favored allowing women in combat roles, but this was something else entirely: opening combat roles to women applied only to women who chose to join the military, whereas the position advocated by Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio would, if the draft were ever reinstated, fundamentally change the distinction between men and women in American society. There would be no place for women who chose to live their lives in accordance with the longstanding normative gender role, while men who rejected their duty as guardians could cower at home while their sisters or daughters were forced to fight. It is the natural conclusion of a view of humankind that denies any functional difference between men and women, but it is no less wrong.
A country that forces women into danger when there is a man left alive is not a country worth fighting for. Unlikely as it is that the draft would ever be reinstated, Bush and Rubio’s position should be rejected. It is not pro-woman for those men to ask that women, designed to nurture, be forced into battle ahead of them, it is cowardly, and any man who would ask that is no man at all.
Originally posted on The Five Pilgrims
One
day before the Iowa caucuses, Emerson College released the final Iowa
poll. Its results were a little narrower than most of its immediate
predecessors, but it showed the same thing they did: Donald Trump, the
blustery real estate magnate who was firmly ensconced as the Republican
frontrunner despite his many departures from small-government
conservatism, with a lead over Ted Cruz. Real Clear Politics, likely the
best-known aggregator of polling data, had Trump with a 4.7-point lead
over Cruz, and the renowned political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight’s
most likely predicted outcome was a narrow Trump victory. A weighted
average of the polls showed the same thing, and better still, pulled
Trump outside the reported margin of error for the weighted estimate.
There was, perhaps, a little cause
for alarm within Trump’s camp. Both of the most recent polls from Iowa
showed Cruz narrowing the margin to within the poll’s error, but even
so, neither predicted that Cruz would take the lead. Trump’s
unconventional campaign focused on rallies and top-down momentum, rather
than grassroots and legwork, appeared to have upset conventional wisdom
and would notch up a victory before anyone else had a chance to go on
the board.
The polls were wrong. Cruz not only won, he won with a record number of votes and by more than 3%
– a commanding margin in a race with ten other candidates. The margin
between Cruz and Trump was actually wider than the margin between Trump
and the third-place finisher, Marco Rubio. Every poll showed Trump with a
lead, many with a lead greater than the margin of error, and every poll
was wrong.
The total breakdown of polling
isn’t necessarily a new thing – caucuses are hard to predict – but it is
worse this year than in the past. In 2008 a weighted average would have
predicted the actual winner, Mike Huckabee, and even in 2012, when Rick
Santorum pulled off one of the more shocking come-from-behind victories
in recent memory, polls showed the surge, and a plot of the pre-caucus
trajectory would have predicted the eventual outcome. This year neither
the actual numbers nor the trajectory would have predicted the winner.
The polls were simply wrong.
There will undoubtedly be many
post-mortems trying to explain why the pollsters failed today, but
there’s a simple enough explanation: Trump’s support is the political
equivalent of a rice cake – crunchy, usually very noisy, air. He
presented a platform as schizophrenic as his campaign, a muddled, angry
caricature of what a New York-liberal might imagine to be conservatism.
Pushing an isolationist view on the borders and a nationalist, even bloodthirsty, foreign policy, at the same time that he advocated positively socialist positions on issues like healthcare and a fascist stance
on religious expression, Trump simultaneously attempted to appeal to
the Republican conservative base and emphatically rejected crucial
elements of a conservative worldview. His campaign preparation showed
the same inattention to detail, eschewing hard work in favor of exciting
rallies and passing over a well-developed organization in favor of
slip-shod tweet-storms. He targeted a particular subset of voters, those
who had not thought out their positions clearly enough to recognize the
caricature.
It turns out, people too lazy to
think through a consistent, coherent philosophy of government aren’t
likely to be diligent enough to spend three hours casting a vote.
Trump’s no idiot, although he clearly thinks his supporters are,
and he’ll adapt. Future states will be primaries, which appeal to
Trump’s brand of voters more than more time-consuming caucuses, and
Trump will undoubtedly work to solidify his organization in the future.
Tonight, though, it doesn’t matter. Trump’s “yuge” lead in the polls was
finally put to the test, and it collapsed under pressure. There’s a
long road ahead – Iowa only controls a little more than 1% of the total
delegates – but first blood and the confidence to forge ahead regardless
of the polls goes to the underestimated senator from Texas.
Originally posted on The Five Pilgrims.
As Ben Carson’s campaign crumbles and Donald Trump’s oft-predicted collapse draws closer, the race for the Republican nomination has begun to boil down to two men: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Superficially, they share many traits: both of Cuban ancestry, both young, both first-term senators, yet their status as rivals has brought them into conflict on the few points where they differ — on immigration policy most stridently. Rubio argues for legalization and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, while Cruz favors enforcement of the law. Both sides came prepared for the skirmish, and why not? After all, they’ve done it before.
In 2013, three years into Rubio’s term in the Senate, he was already being eyed as a presidential candidate. His conservative positions gave him inroads with the Republican base, while his charm made him attractive to moderates. Perhaps searching for a way to differentiate himself in preparation for a run, Rubio accepted Chuck Schumer’s invitation to join the so-called “Gang of Eight” to advance “immigration reform” (S.744). It provided legal status and citizenship to illegal aliens who paid a fine and jumped through a metaphorical hoop or two. It also made a hodgepodge of modifications to the immigration system, engineered to ensure passage.
Rubio’s role was envisioned as that of a salesman. He had earned the respect of conservatives, so he was the natural choice to try to win them over. He did more than that, though, and Schumer would later say that Rubio was the architect of the path to citizenship. A gifted and experienced legislator, Rubio crafted the greatest challenge to conservative’s rule-of-law opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens. With John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Schumer and Dick Durbin combined with Rubio’s Tea Party support, the bill was a political juggernaut.
Combining Democrats and Republicans who chose to vote with the Democrats, the bill had filibuster-proof support in the Senate, and amnesty supporters would only need to win over 17 of 233 House Republicans to ensure final passage. Presented as a compromise measure and a necessary reform, given weight by Rubio’s conservative credentials, the bill was unstoppable. The stage was set for Rubio, the face of the Gang of Eight, to overwhelm conservative respect for the rule of law, notch a major bipartisan legislative accomplishment, and pave a path to the presidency for himself.
The year before, in a hotly contested primary fight, the little-known Solicitor General of Texas had already pulled off the impossible and beaten the most powerful elected official in Texas, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, in the race for Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s Senate seat. Ted Cruz won on a promise of doing as he promised, and he’d promised to fight for enforcement of Texas and US law on immigration. With less than a year of legislative experience, facing an overwhelming coalition, he faced a daunting task if he intended to keep his promise.
Joined by longtime hardliner Jeff Sessions and fellow first-term senator Mike Lee, Cruz kept his promise and stood on the frontlines of the opposition to Rubio’s bill. All three held positions on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee tasked with hearing the bill, where they were badly outnumbered.
Faced with long odds, the conservatives on the committee took a long view. Cruz set out to destroy the bill, not in the Senate, where its passage was a foregone conclusion, but in the House, where the Republican establishment’s electoral disaster in 2012 had done less damage, and where Cruz’s connections could help catalyze opposition. If the credibility that Rubio’s conservative credentials lent the bill could be destroyed, House Republicans’ own constituents would force them into opposition. The lynchpin of the effort was Cruz’s amendment stripping the path to citizenship. Rubio and the rest of the Gang of Eight claimed that the crux of the bill was merely a reform to the immigration system. They used the clearly broken system as a club to bring Republican opponents into the fold. If that was the goal, argued Cruz, then wouldn’t it be wiser to remove the path to citizenship while keeping the rest of the bill? His amendment was the “compromise that could pass,” so why not support it?
The answer was obvious and fatal to the bill: removing the path to citizenship could only make the bill more likely to pass, so the only reason to oppose it was that the purpose of the bill was not immigration reform, but a path to citizenship. When Cruz proposed his amendment, it gave conservatives in the House and Senate the ammunition they needed to fight it. The Senate was already a foregone conclusion, but the battle with the junior senator from Texas left S.744 crippled. House Republicans had to stand for reelection in little more than a year, and few Representatives found it appealing to have to explain a vote for a bill whose entire purpose was not just amnesty, but a path to citizenship. A companion bill was never considered by the House, and Rubio’s four-lane highway to the presidency died just past the Senate chambers.
It is, perhaps, fitting that it was a Texan who forced amnesty’s moneyed and powerful supporters into a Pyrrhic victory over the hopelessly outnumbered opposition in the Senate. After all, after a victory in Texas many years before, one of Santa Anna’s officers was said to remark that “another such victory will ruin us.” Ted Cruz and his cadre of Senate conservatives couldn’t stop Rubio’s bill, but in losing they defeated it.
More striking, though, is the symmetry on the two sides of the bill. Rubio, although allied with more senior colleagues, molded the bill and was to be the ramrod that forced it past any Republicans still loyal to the party platform. Cruz, also a first-term senator of Cuban ancestry elected with Tea Party support and also allied with more senior colleagues, provided irreplaceable contributions to the masterful strategy that ensured the bill’s failure. Without Rubio, the bill wouldn’t have been the juggernaut that it was, and without Cruz, according to Senator Sessions, Rubio’s bill would have been signed into law.
Two years later, Cruz and Rubio are once again matching wits. This time Cruz is far from the unknown senator he was in 2013, and has a campaign behind him every bit the equal of Rubio’s. Whether Rubio can better his performance and finally defeat his doppelganger or whether the Texan will once again lead a conservative coalition to victory remains to be seen, but voters should remember the two senators’ previous battle. Marco Rubio stood up as amnesty’s champion, leading the apparently unstoppable push for a path to citizenship, and Ted Cruz stopped him.
After yet another mass public shooting in a gun-free zone, certain people -- and honestly, we all know who -- have taken to castigating those who called for prayer for the victims and their families. "Thoughts and prayers" aren't enough, they argue, and instead our response should be to enact stricter gun-control laws to prevent future tragedies -- something like California's assault weapons ban, for example. One commentator asserted that we should "stop thinking . . . start acting."
Leaving aside the disgusting opportunism and shocking foolishness of explicitly calling for thoughtless action born out of unreasoning fear, and ignoring the fact that most of the gun control measures proposed were already in place in California, it's worthy examining the basic premise -- that reducing the number of guns not owned by the state would reduce crime -- in more detail. It's popped up not only after every report of a shooting (except the Paris attacks, where guns were already banned, rendering the argument silly), and on university campuses as the merits of allowing CHL holders to carry on campus were debated. The US, more than any other developed country, suffers from violent crime; alleviating that problem has value as more than a political prop.
Those calling for gun control were quick with statistics showing, as one article claimed, that more guns led to more deaths.
Convincing, no doubt -- they have graphs! The trouble is, this particular graph is deceiving. Indeed, it could only ever have been intended to deceive. It shows guns per 100 people on the x-axis, and "gun-related deaths per 100,000 people" on the y-axis, and a clear positive correlation between the two. "More guns means more deaths"! Except "deaths" wasn't on either axis, and what was is misleading. The catch-all "gun-related deaths" includes homicides, suicides, and accidental discharges, as well as justifiable homicides -- cases in which someone, either a private citizen or police, used a gun to defend themselves against a threat to their life. That, I would argue, is precisely the point of gun ownership, and yet it is lumped together with homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths when drawing conclusions. It would be possible to break through the deception and look at a more detailed breakdown -- gun homicide and suicide rates do actually increase with gun ownership rates -- but that's not actually the relevant statistic.
It is to be expected that more guns would lead to more gun deaths. That is generally conceded, and irrelevant. It would be far more telling to know how deaths in general change. Unless you have a preference which weapon you're killed with, that's what matters. Homicide rate is particularly interesting -- I've plotted the data myself in the past, but a more recent article from the Crime Prevention Research Center contains a much prettier graph, seen below.
In other words, as far as the data we have is able to show, gun ownership has no significant effect on homicide rates. Someone intent on committing murder will, regardless of what implements are available. Culture and economic factors, clearly, play a larger role in determining homicide rates.
Absent the placebo provided by pointless -- at best -- attempts at gun control, the best option for most of us truly is to keep the victims in our prayers.
The first major Republican presidential primary debate takes place in only three days. In an attempt to avoid hosting a circus, the debate’s sponsor, Fox News, capped the number of participants at ten, to be selected using an aggregate of the five most recent reliable polls - the top ten would be included; the bottom seven left out. The rationale is obvious: with seventeen candidates on stage, some of them with no chance, even in their own minds, of actually winning the presidency, none of the candidates would have time to convey any sort of message. After watching the debate, viewers would be left knowing just as little about the candidates as they did before.
As good as the argument for limiting the field is, there is an argument on the other side. The polls going into the average are generally very imprecise, with large margins of error. When distinguishing between the tenth and eleventh place candidate, a few percentage points could make an enormous difference; if the polling average includes polls with a six-point margin of error, how sure can we be that we really got the top ten?
The answer is that we can't be certain, but we can be reasonably sure, as long as we do the calculation correctly. Taking the weighted average of the polls, accounting for the margin of error of each one (strangely enough, Real Clear Politics, one of the leading sources of aggregate polls, does not do this), it's possible to guess at the actual value with much more precision than any one of the polls going into the analysis, as shown in the graph below (the red line marks the tenth candidate).
It should be clear that, although it's still difficult to make a noticeable difference between the tenth (Christie) and eleventh (Perry) candidates, the margin of error has dropped to 1.95 percentage points - enough that the distinction between one candidate and another, even in the middle of the pack, is not entirely arbitrary. It is, for example, possible to say with almost complete certainty that Cruz, the leading candidate from the lower tier, is polling well ahead of Graham, whereas this wasn't necessarily possible with every poll that went into the analysis.
It should also be noted that the values calculated here don't match those from RCP's averaged polls, and it does change the order: RCP incorrectly has Walker slightly ahead of Bush, whereas in reality the opposite is the case. As long as Fox does its due diligence and avoids falling into elementary errors, we can be reasonably certain that the ten candidates on stage will be the top ten candidates in national polls. Whether those national polls have any meaning at all this early in the contest remains to be seen, but the process, at least, is sound.
Slight of build, his once-dark hair first tinged with gray, then snow white, a Republican representative from the 14th Congressional District - Galveston and its environs - once walked the halls of the Capitol unbowed. Where others followed party loyalty, this man fought so singlemindedly and consistently for his view of limited government and personal liberty that he earned the nickname “Dr. No,” an homage to his medical degree and the frequency with which his convictions brought him into conflict with proposed legislation. Ron Paul was unbreakable, unshakable, and possessed of a kind dogged determination not to yield found more often in myth than reality. The modern libertarian movement that he helped father took the porcupine as an unofficial mascot, but it could just as easily have used a badger in honor of the congressman: it is an animal which, without being remarkable for its size or apparent strength, is, because of its persistence, a formidable adversary.
Political considerations, without fail, took a back seat to matters of conviction. Ron Paul was not afraid to be the only voice of dissent, and not afraid to call out the leaders in his own party when they strayed from his vision of conservative orthodoxy. His bills - whether or not they represented positions taken by the majority of his own party - died quiet deaths in committee, the clearest possible signal that party leaders intended to neutralize him. None of it mattered to the grandfatherly congressman, who would fight any battle. He was the politician the cynics tell you doesn’t exist, who will not engage in the dishonesty and underhandedness rampant in politics; Jefferson Smith, but shorter. His commitment to principle drew grudging respect from his enemies, even as they worked to sabotage him.
The cynics, however, are usually right. Ron Paul was an anomaly in American politics; his allies few and far between. With his retirement after yet another unsuccessful presidential run in 2012, politics lost a truly unique figure. For a time, it appeared that his son, Rand, might fill that void. Swept into the Senate in 2010 on a wave of conservative opposition to far-reaching regulation and subsidization of health insurance, freshman Senator Paul began as his father had. He was the in the first wave of so-called “Tea Party” senators, the first breach in the dam of political orthodoxy enforced by corporate interests in the major parties, and he lived up to that mission.
For a time - but Rand Paul was not his father. He would fight, but he did not share his father’s resignation to being neutralized. Where Ron Paul was content to do nothing at all before doing something he believed to be wrong, Rand Paul was not. From the beginning, even as he made party leaders uncomfortable, his sights were set on bigger goals. Compromise and political maneuvering were second nature to Senator Paul, just as they were anathema to Representative Paul. Senator Paul began more socially conservative than his father, recognizing that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the authority to ban abortion, and he pledged to fight for that as well as for his father’s goal of stripping the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction (allowing states to make their own laws). He attached personhood amendments to appropriations bills, reintroduced his father’s bill stripping Supreme Court jurisdiction, and held the line as bravely and as staunchly as his father had . . . for a time. As time went on and he realized that the young voters whose votes he was courting did not agree, however, Senator Paul did something his father never had: he backed down. His rhetoric grew quiet, his proposals shifted from personhood to the half-measures “pro-life” politicians content their constituents with, and he called for a “truce” on all social issues. Senator Paul was not his father.
It wasn’t just on social issues that the inherited obstinacy had crumbled. Even at the beginning of his campaign, all of the future senator’s positions were moderated to be more palatable to the traditional conservatives his father had never quite won over. Non-interventionism, but not the radical non-interventionism of Representative Paul. States’ rights, but returned to the political mainstream. Balance the budget, but in five years - not now. Once elected, Senator Paul began to bend back. Conservatives, he now saw, weren’t his ideal constituency. Instead, he began to move back toward the young libertarians who had supported his father. Social issues were unimportant to them - or they disagreed with Senator Paul’s stance - so social issues were unimportant to Senator Paul. Privacy and pot were important to young libertarians, so privacy and pot were important to Senator Paul. Where his father had worked to change minds, the younger Paul changed his emphasis.
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Unlike his father, Rand was going to play the game just like everybody else, and play it well. The reasoning was clear: Ron had a dedicated following that wasn’t quite large enough to win a national election. If a more palatable version who could keep that following while making deeper inroads into both the political mainstream and the libertarian movement, a President Paul would be well within reach. The reasoning was clear, but there was a mistake: Ron Paul had earned the respect of supporters and enemies alike precisely because he did not bend with the political wind. He didn’t pander, and when he took a position you could know that it represented his convictions, that he would fight for it. The same couldn’t be said for Rand. An endorsement from Ron Paul was a guarantee that Ron Paul believed he’d found the best man for the job - high praise indeed. Rand Paul, in contrast, chose to endorse his fellow Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, in his primary battle against a conservative challenger. Even before Paul’s staff admitted that the move was driven by political calculations (looking forward to the 2016 presidential election), no one believed that Rand Paul believed that McConnell, as bitter an opponent of conservatives as you’ll find in the Republican Party, was the best man for the job, only that Paul knew that McConnell exerted tremendous control over both the Kentucky GOP and the Senate.
Without the traits that made his father great, Rand is only another senator. A reasonably good one, and one whose policy positions appear more in agreement with most conservatives than his father’s, but one who embraced politics as usual. Representative Paul was more than his positions, Senator Paul, less. The father’s mantle fell to the ground, not to the son, and voters saw: where his father had a dedicated group of supporters who could break fundraising records despite their candidate sitting far back in the polls, the younger Paul has been in the middle of the pack of 2016 contenders in both fundraising and polling. Appropriately, Ted Cruz, the man whose disregard for “the way things have always been done” most closely matched Ron Paul’s, has carried on the tradition of building a band of zealous supporters whose passion and fundraising outpaces their numbers (although, in part on the strength of having called out Republican leadership in a style very reminiscent of the elder Paul’s willingness to take on any fight, polling numbers have begun to catch up with fundraising). It is Cruz and Representative Justin Amash and a few others who picked up the standard of opposition to politics as usual, while Paul found himself changed by the system, rather than changing it. The reckless courage that marked the Paul name is gone; the glory is departed - Ichabod!
Anatomy of a Failure: Andrew Wakefield and the Limits of Peer Review
0 comments Posted by Unknown at 1:17 PM One could argue that few, if any, medical studies have had the same impact as Andrew Wakefield's study, published in the British journal Lancet, attempting to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Certainly, no study has had the same impact with as small a dataset - Wakefield's twelve case studies, eight of which were claimed to show a temporal correlative link between autism and vaccines, were an incredibly small sample size for such a groundbreaking study. Still, from 1998, when the study was published, to 2010, when it was completely retracted (Lancet had already published a partial retraction in 2004), the study stood as ostensibly sound science. Of course, the scientific community, which had already viewed the small sample size with a jaundiced eye, saw the total inability of any other study to replicate Wakefield's findings (Hurley et al., 2010) as the final nail in the coffin of an already suspect idea, but that wasn't enough to stop the study from launching a new wave in the anti-vaccine movement. This new wave brought with it an increase in the rate of vaccine-preventable disease. Measles in Ireland, Whooping Cough in the US - declining vaccination rates inevitably brought the return of diseases previously reduced to a historical footnote. A single slip in peer-review brought hundreds of deaths, perhaps even thousands, by the time the movement runs its course. With this in mind, it is worth examining the course of events that led to the publication of something so resoundingly rejected by the scientific community and so harmful to the world at large.
When Wakefield started his study, he was working in conjunction with Richard Barr, a lawyer, to bring a lawsuit alleging that the MMR vaccine was the cause of autism, and seeking damages for nearly 1,500 families. His proposed bowel-brain syndrome was the centerpiece of the lawsuit; his study thus had the potential to be incredibly financially beneficial if it reached the desired result. To that end, Barr emailed the families he was representing, asking any families who had symptoms that matched the desired sequence (the MMR vaccine followed relatively closely by intestinal distress and then autism). Wakefield's twelve were selected from this group and from patients at the Royal Free Hospital, where Wakefield held a non-clinical position. This should have been the first warning sign: a doctor with an egregious conflict of interest selecting an exceptionally small sample. It would be difficult to imagine a situation more conducive to cherry-picking data.
Strangely enough given the opportunity he had to cherry-pick his data, optimistic data selection wasn't enough to prove Wakefield's point. His hypothesis was that the MMR vaccine brought on bowel-brain syndrome, which then lead to regressive autism. From NHS records, we know that his sample of twelve included between one and six examples of regressive autism - given his already-small sample size, not enough to even pretend to have reached a conclusion. To sidestep the issue, he committed the cardinal sin in science: he fabricated his data. In his paper, three patients who definitely did not have regressive autism, and five whose symptoms were unclear, were reported as having regressive autism. Nor did he stop there - the next two steps in his hypothesis were that the patients have non-specific colitis, a bowel disorder, and experience their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine. Only three of the twelve showed non-specific colitis, and only two showed their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (five even showed symptoms before receiving the vaccine). Wakefield reported that eleven had non-specific colitis, and that eight experienced symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (Deer, 2011). The data Wakefield started with matched subsequent studies almost exactly; the data he ended with, however, was a different matter.