| THE REPUBLICAN BRAIN The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality Chris Mooney Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, April 2012 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-118-09451-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-118-09451-4 | 327pp. | HC | $25.95 | |
| Page 3: | "Again and again it's a fruitless battle between incompatible "truths," with no progress made and no retractions offered by those who are just plain wrong—and [who] can be shown to be [wrong] through simple fact checking mechanisms that all good journalists, not to mention open-minded and critically thinking citizens, can employ.." |
| This is merely a matter of style affecting clarity. I think the sentence would be clearer with the two highlighted words added. |
| Page 14: | "...and often, I've quoted them on the point." |
| Missing comma: S/B "and, often,". |
| Page 28: | "Since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries have have further demonstrated..." |
| Number error: S/B "has" |
| Page 43: | "...(believing that society should be highly structured and ordered, including based on gender, class, and racial differences)..." |
| Missing word: S/B "including structures based on". |
| Page 43: | "And though sometimes the picture grows more complicated, broadly speaking, hierarchical-individuals correspond to U.S. conservatives, whereas egalitarian-communitarians correspond to U.S. liberals." |
| Missing letters: S/B "hierarchical-individualists". (I've left out the italics.) |
| Page 64: | "Extraversion" |
| One of the so-called Big Five personality traits, this is spelled correctly — but "Extroversion" is also correct. |
| Page 71: | "...—and above all, the example of Winston Churchill—..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "and, above all,". |
| Page 89: | "Chances are that what I've said in the last two chapters has ticked off, like, half of America." |
| Unneeded word: S/B "has ticked off". It's like nowsville, man... |
| Page 97: | "As noted before, hierarchical-individuals broadly correspond to U.S. conservatives, whereas egalitarian-communitarians broadly correspond to U.S. liberals." |
| Missing letters: S/B "hierarchical-individualists". |
| Page 109: | "Perhaps they need to switch the thinking off sometimes, and who could blame them." |
| Who (The Doctor) could blame them. But seriously, Punctuation error: S/B "and who could blame them?" |
| Page 113: | "This is science, not phrenology. But there's a lot of uncertainty." |
| Wording: S/B "not the discredited pseudoscience of phrenology". |
| Page 141: | "...engaging in increasingly sophisticated and convincing forms of politically motivated reasoning, and in effect, helping conservatives to construct their own reality." |
| Missing comma: S/B "and, in effect,". |
| Page 143: | "David Frum, the apostate Republican and former George W. Bush speechwriter who has increasingly fallen out with its party as it has turned more and more to the right..." |
| Wrong pronoun: S/B "with his party". |
| Page 144: | "This spoken by a conservative who was cut from his post at the American Enterprise Institute, the premier conservative think tank, after criticizing the Republican strategy on health care reform." |
| Not a sentence: S/B "This was spoken...". |
| Page 146: | "...University of California-Irvine motivated reasoning researcher Peter Ditto." |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "motivated-reasoning". |
| Page 154: | "There are reasons to think that Fox News viewers are both more informed than the average bear, and yet, simultaneously, more misinformed on key politicized issues." |
| Wording: S/B "more informed than the average citizen". |
| Page 165: | "Instead, the Fox "effect" probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept [...] but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose Fox to begin with." |
| Wording: S/B "and also because". |
| Page 172: | "There's no standard measurement, no meter or Angstrom or hectopascal for error or delusion." |
| Spelling: S/B "Angström". |
| Page 178: | "Looking a little more closely at these data, Republicans got nearly three times as many Four Pinocchio ratings as Democrats..." |
| Dangling Participle: S/B "Looking a little more closely, We see from these data that". |
| Page 189: | "For instance, liberals and progressives didn't do so hot when asked to agree..." |
| Wording: S/B "liberals and progressives didn't do so well". And why differentiate liberals and progressives? |
| Page 191: | "For their pledge notwithstanding, the truth about tax cuts can never be an absolute one..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "For, their pledge notwithstanding,". |
| Page 203: | "After touring Boston's Freedom Trail and the Paul Revere house in June 2011, Sarah Palin stated that Revere, on his famous midnight ride, 'warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.' The errors here are multiple." |
| Chris Mooney has a gift for understatement. Sarah Palin's illimitable prose still rings in my belfry. |
| Page 208: | "...the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla conclusively proved in1440 that..." |
| Missing space (I think): S/B "in 1440". |
| Page 217: | "Some of the most powerful liberal stories from the American past are about civil rights, about how much more tolerant of a place America has become..." |
| Extra word: S/B "a place". |
| Page 227: | "That is not to say that on such issues, particular individuals on the left never misstate..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "that, on such issues,". |
| Page 230: | "It is estimated that in the year 2010 alone, particulate air pollution from coal fired power plants killed 13 thousand people in the U.S. (alone)." |
| Format error: S/B either "13,000" or "thirteen thousand". (Also, I'd put a comma after "that" and remove the parentheses from "(alone)".) |
| Page 236: | Peter Ditto: "If scientists all came out and said something crazy, I think liberals would believe them." |
| Really? How about quantum mechanics? Indeed, the history of science is about scientists accepting things that sound crazy to the world at large — at first. (Stones falling from heaven?!) |
| Page 242: | "...holed up in a snowy hotel in Boulder, Colorado,..." |
| Ah, yes — the Hotel Whitefall. But seriously, S/B either "in a hotel in snowy Boulder, Colorado" or "and snowbound in a hotel in Boulder, Colorado". The first construction works better. |
| Page 243: | "...to learn further about this research..." |
| This sounded wrong to me; but it is perfectly correct. |
| Page 244: | "For question A, the 'spread' or difference between participants' persuasiveness ratings..." |
| Wrong word: S/B "persuadability". What's being tested here is their susceptibility to persuasion, not their ability to persuade. |
| Page 252: | "This finding was not very strong or statistically significant for all participants in the study. But it became increasingly strong, and increasingly significant, as our subjects' political knowledge increased. Thus for instance, global warming believers who answered one political knowledge question right were about ten percent more likely to call a view different from their own persuasive (p = .03), and those who answered two political knowledge questions right were 15 percent more likely (p = .006). Thus, you might says that as global warming deniers' level of political knowledge increased, so did their bias, leaving the more knowledgeable deniers considerably more motivated than the more knowledgeable believers on our first measure." |
| I don't think that the author here (from evidence down the page, it's Everett Young) confuses believers and deniers. Rather, it seems likely that some text was omitted. |
| Page 255: | ...self-identified general ideology (r = 0.30, p = 0.0003)..." and the remainder of this paragraph. |
| Presentation: all these S/B in a table. |
| Variable | r Value | p Value |
|---|---|---|
| Self-identified general ideology | 0.30 | 0.0003 |
| Self-identified social/moral conservatism | 0.31 | 0.001 |
| Self-identified fiscal conservatism | 0.21 | 0.03 |
| Issue-position-derived index of moral conservatism | 0.21 | 0.01 |
| Issue-position-derived index of fiscal conservatism | 0.19 | 0.026 |
| Issue-position-derived index of "toughness-issue" conservatism | 0.24 | 0.004 |
| Republican Party identification | 0.30 | 0.0003 |
| Authoritarianism | 0.32 | 0.0001 |
| Page 263: | "It is also clearly going to be important to get a better understand of the relationship..." |
| Missing letters: S/B "get a better understanding" (or "better understand", which may be what it started out to be.) |
| Page 268: | "This may sound a little Kumbaya—but I am serious..." |
| A Kumbaya is an African trombone, right? And so "a little Kumbaya" means a treble trombone. Did Sarah Palin know about this? Paul Revere might have tootled one as he rode through the streets to warn the British. "Listen, my children, to a tale of awe, about Paul Revere and his Kumbaya..." But seriously, this song — like the term "phrenology" — may not be well known to many readers. It is thought to be a Gullah spiritual from the islands off the southeastern U.S. In this context, it means something that sounds naively optimistic. |
| Page 275: | From the Acknowledgments: "And someone who will go unmentioned—you know who you are." |
| Oh, goody: now we can play guessing games. This has to be Frank Luntz, right? No? David Brock? George Will? |
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