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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (260589)	9/14/2014 9:23:21 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542214

Science just "is". Actually, in the social sciences, which is where we are talking, it is not. All these "studies" are the products of human endeavor (as is work in the natural sciences but that's a slightly different argument) and thus those articles are not "science". Just lots of folk with all their flaws producing studies and writing articles. Social psychology (most of this work comes from that field) is notorious for conceptual difficulties and weak sample sizes. I should make it clear I'm not arguing that levels of fear don't translate into all sorts of actions, personalities, and so on. Just don't think my conservative friends are any more infected by those than my liberal friends. We just disagree. Sometimes passionately. And hit moments in which we can't talk politics. But we still just disagree. You seem to be basically arguing for ignorance, or ignoring science because you think it's going to be used incorrectly. You can say that about any science. It doesn't seem a particularly good rationale to me. Well, I'm not arguing about physics, chemistry, or biology, for starters. But, in this case, largely arguing about social psychology. In my own field, sociology, almost every thing that constitutes a "finding" based on lots of studies, exists in a sea of dispute. So the discipline is more about a point of view and a methodology than it is about some sort of settled "findings." Despite what text books argue. And, just to be clear, I'm not in the position of arguing that the findings of "science" are badly used. I'm rather arguing about the truthiness, to be a bit humorous, of "science" in this particular instance. We clearly disagree. Not the first time.

To: epicure who wrote (260589)	9/15/2014 1:37:00 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 542214

ISIS' New Recruiting Targets: American Women? MEANWHILE, ARAB COUNTRIES AGREE TO HELP WITH US AIRSTRIKES By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff newser.com Posted Sep 14, 2014 4:01 PM CDT (NEWSER) – America may now be at war with ISIS, but a handful of Americans are joining up with the Islamic extremist group—and not all of them are men. US law enforcement is looking into a recent spate of women allegedly seeking to join the jihad, Reuters reports. In the past six weeks, three families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have reported missing female family members who they suspect may be enlisting, one local Muslim community leader says. On Aug. 25, another 19-year-old from the area ran away from home, hopped a flight to Turkey, and joined ISIS in Syria. "The nature of the recruitment of these crazy organizations is how they use the element of surprise. Now they have surprised us again by going for the girls," the community leader said. The Twin Cities are a hotbed for such recruiting because they boast America's largest Somalian population, but the problem isn't entirely localized; in July, a 19-year-old Colorado woman was arrested for allegedly trying to join up. In other ISIS news: State Department officials tell the New York Times that several Arab countries have agreed to help with the US air strike campaign against ISIS—though some will only be providing supplies rather than running strikes of their own.Iraqi officials say that France has agreed to carry out airstrikes of its own, and Australia has announced that it will be as well. Australia will also be sending 200 troops to Iraq to serve as military advisers.Meanwhile ISIS has been enjoying a PR boon of sorts among extremists online thanks to its string of grisly beheading videos, the Guardian reports. "The wannabe foreign fighters are excited by these killings," the director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization explains. "People in Tunisia and Libya are particularly interested in the prospect of fighting American and now British enemies. This is turning on people who were radicalized before this conflict started but weren't particularly excited by the Sunni-Shia battle."