George Will

A Case of Intellectual Bankruptcy

It pains me to say this about a fellow alum of my high school, but George Will has apparently reached the point of intellectual insolvency.   A case in point: his recent Washington Post op. ed. about climate change. Will begins by setting up a straw man.  He slams climate advocates like Obama for supposedly basing …

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Nate Silver Denialism & Climate Change Denialism

It’s perhaps unsurprising that some of the same people that deny the overwhelming data on climate change also happened to deny the overwhelming data presented by Nate Silver of the New York Times about the likely outcome of the election yesterday.  Silver, the sports-statistician-turned-poll-analyzer, used aggregate poll data and analysis to show that Obama had …

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More On the Republican Anti-Fact Shield

So after I posted my tantrum about George Will the other day, I felt a little guilty.  Maybe I had been too hard on The Tory Bowtie.  After all, maybe his putting “facts” in scare quotes was just a slip. Then I saw this piece on the Washington Post editorial page by Republican pollster Ed Rogers, …

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(What Remains Of) The Conservative Mind Melts Down

Once upon a time, George Will had a reputation as the thinking person’s conservative.  No more.  He’s not only a climate denier, but a couple of weeks ago he smeared Elizabeth Warren with a kind of red-baiting that I haven’t seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now he’s at it again, sort of.  …

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The Washington Post versus George Will

The paper seems to be disavowing the views of its own columnist: The new evidence — including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s — contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington …

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Statistician contests George Will’s misguided climate op-ed

Nate Silver, the statistician who blogs at fivethirtyeight.com and made national news (and the Colbert Report) last year by being the most accurate and reliable predictor of the presidential election results, has turned his attention to climate change.  In response to an op-ed yesterday by George Will in the Washington Post, Silver analyzes temperature trends and debunks the …

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