Brooding over the city
Attn: if anyone knows the creator of this – the logo is unfamiliar to me – I’d like to link to the original.
Tyson Adams
Putting the 'ill' back in thriller
Book Review: Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If blasting rods and staffs are standard wizard fare, what do they use for euphemisms?
Harry Dresden is having a bad day, or is that week, month, and year? His girlfriend has been semi-turned into a vampire, it’s raining frogs in the park, a ghoul is trying to assassinate him, the vampire Red Court want to torture him to death, the Wizarding White Council are tempted to let the vampires have Harry, the Winter Court of faeries want him to investigate a murder, he has no money, and his house is a mess. Oh, and a war is about to start if Harry can’t find the killer; so there’s that as well.
This is my first foray into Jim Butcher’s much vaunted Dresden Files series. Summer Knight indicates that there is a lot to like about this Harry’s world. The story could be described as an urban fantasy thriller: with thriller being a selling point for me. Butcher doesn’t shy away from piling on the hardships for Harry to overcome, and keeps the action coming thick and fast. I’m honestly wondering why I took so long to dive into this series that has been repeatedly recommended to me.
Banned Books Week 2016
Source: ALA.org
Banned Books Week is an American event, but us Aussies have been known to ban books for silly reasons as well. As such, I think this should be a global event. So read something that some overbearing busybody decided was offensive today.
Book Review: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“YOUR CANDLE…WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT – A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED…YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT…NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT”
Tiffany Aching has a lot on her plate. She is the witch of two areas, she has some big boots to fill after the passing of Granny Weatherwax, and trouble is brewing with the elves. The elves love a bit of mischief, and with the passing of Granny Weatherwax, the barrier between their world and the Disk is weaker. With iron and steam now coming to the lands, they want to strike before they lose a place on the Disk. Only the Witches and Nac Mac Feegles stand in their way.
This was Terry Pratchett’s final instalment in The DiskWorld novels. There will be no more. As such, I really wanted this to be better than it was. Unlike other novels in the series, this lacked the levels of humour and satire you would expect from Pratchett. Where he was normally brilliant, this was only okay. Of course, okay for a Pratchett novel is still better than most novelists could ever hope to achieve.
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Book Review: Nemesis Games by James SA Corey
Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Let’s split up, we can cover more plot that way.
With the Rocinante in desperate need of repairs, Holden and the team take the chance to spend some time apart and do their own things. That goes swimmingly for them all. Between ships going missing, someone dropping rocks down the gravity well, people trying to blow them up, and the start of another war, they start to wish they’d never left the Roci.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (James SA Corey) have excelled themselves. In a series that has managed to serve up stories that don’t head in the direction you expect, here is a novel that takes the series in a direction you don’t expect. In hindsight, the plot for this fifth instalment is a logical one for The Expanse universe now that the Stargates have opened up a ‘goldrush’, but it wasn’t the step you expected. I expected to be covering the wave of frontiers people in their wagon-trains to the stars, but instead we cover the repercussions of that social change. A nice little twist. It was also great to have the entire Rocinante crew be viewpoint characters in this novel. For characters that have been with us from the beginning it was about time to get to know them all properly.
The only real downside of this novel is that I can’t just pick up the next instalment in the series to continue the adventure. I have now caught up. I have to wait 3 months for Babylon’s Ashes to hit the shelves. Guess I’ll read the novellas while I wait…
How Long Did it Take to Write the World’s Most Famous Books?
Let’s be honest, Lord of the Rings did feel like it took 16 years to write, but I was surprised Stephanie Meyer took a whole 3 months to write Twilight.
Original courtesy of PrinterInks.com.
Book to Movie: Harry Potter part 2 – What’s the Difference?
Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix are covered in this month’s instalment of What’s The Difference? from CineFix. Previously they covered earlier books and movies, this is part 2 of 3. Grab a butterbeer and enjoy.
For me Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire were when the series really took off. The earlier two books were clearly aimed at a younger audience than my snobbish adult reading ways would allow me to fully to enjoy. And when you look on your bookshelf, you’ll notice how much thinner those first two books are – yes, I am assuming you have them in paper on a bookshelf in your house. You aren’t weird, are you? The extra length of the later books in the Harry Potter series also signals a narrative that has matured with its audience – those pre-teens were going to become teens at some stage, just like their favourite book characters.
This extra length also makes the novels harder to adapt faithfully. As the video covers, there are some interesting ways they achieve this, but it also means they have to make other changes that are troublesome for the later movies in the series. For me the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare being skipped over in the movies is an obvious choice, but also one that removes an important layer to the narrative. It is, after all, the Elfish uprising that helps turn the tide in the fight/war against Voldermort. This element can help you see the conflict as more worldly, rather than focussed on one school in the UK. Unless the Wizarding World is only confined to Europe and the UK is the centre of the EU….
There is probably an argument to be made for Harry Potter to be turned into a TV series that faithfully adapts the books to the small screen. HBO would be interested for sure, as long as they could cast +18 year olds with no nudity clauses in their contracts.
The Best Comedian On The Planet!
The audience were a bit remote.
Book review: Cibola Burn by James SA Corey
Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“I’m gonna need to shoot that guy at some point,” Ahhh, Mondays.
Book 4 of The Expanse series has Holden and the Rocinante crew sent to a new solar system as UN Negotiators. Displaced Belters have taken up residence on a newly discovered planet through one of the Stargates (they’ll always be Stargates to me), only to have an RCE research vessel arrive, necessitating Holden and Amos to smooth things out. They get along as well as you’d expect, but their conflict is the least of their problems.
Cibola Burn thoroughly impressed me. At a stage in the series where the quality would usually take a nosedive, James SA Corey has managed to keep it onwards and upwards. Part of this is giving us a great villain in Murtry; someone who is the antagonist but not necessarily the bad guy. The other part is that Corey’s plots are much more extensive than you initially expect. I’ve seen other reviewers complain about this aspect, in that the story starts off headed in one direction but ends up going somewhere else entirely. But I see this as a strength and a justification for a novel that cracks 600 pages.
I enjoyed Cibola Burn more than Abaddon’s Gate – although it was still a great read – and there are no signs that this series will rest on its laurels. I started the next instalment, Nemesis Games, immediately after finishing Cibola Burn: that should tell you everything you need to know.
Book review: Tier One by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson
Tier One by Brian Andrews
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If an operator isn’t wearing 5.11 Tactical clothing are they really an operator?
Tier One are the elite SEAL Team on the black side of ops. They are too good for their own good, as they manage to piss off the wrong terrorists: the kind that hold an explosive grudge. Now former Tier One SEAL, Jack Kemper, must become intelligence operative John Dempsey and take out the terrorists before they strike again.
Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson have created a taught and realistic military thriller in Tier One. Much like other ex-military authors (Chris Ryan and Andy McNab being two of my favourites) they pepper the novel with details and perspectives you just don’t get from other authors. This is both the strength and weakness of the novel.
As much as I found this novel to be an enjoyable and fast paced read, it also overused expository military details, and presented clichéd terrorist characters. For me this held the novel back from being a great novel to merely good. Other readers may find the details interesting, or think that terrorists really can be simply defined as “shitheads” à la Fox News, and enjoy this novel more, but it is still an entertaining read.
NB: Thomas and Mercer provided a review copy for my reading pleasure.
Let’s Get It On… I mean, fight!
I’ve been a fan of martial arts for as long as I can remember. While I’m not a fighter (I’m a pussy) I have great respect for the athletes that beat the crap out of each other for our entertainment. I also love a bit of choreographed hijinx in films as well.
But for some reason there are people who don’t share my love and respect for people punching each other in the face until someone carts them off on stretchers. They decry boxing and MMA as bloody and violent sports that should be banned – won’t somebody please think of the children! At the same time they blithely ignore the injury and deaths from good old harmless football et al.
So I thought that I would run through a few of the statistics and studies on those violent sports to see if the claims stack up. Yeah, you know what’s going to happen: don’t you!
Let’s start by looking at boxers and MMA fighters: just how likely are injuries and knockouts? Well, a study of 1181 MMA competitors and 550 boxers found that boxers were less likely to suffer the cuts and bruises of MMA fighters, but they were more likely to be knocked out.
Boxers were significantly more likely not to experience injury (49.8% vs 59.4%, P < 0.001), whereas MMA fighters were significantly more likely to experience 1 injury (typically contusion/bruising, P < 0.001). Boxers were more likely to experience loss of consciousness (7.1% vs 4.2%, P = 0.01) and serious eye injury (1.1% vs 0.3%, P = 0.02).
This makes sense given that there are more ways to win an MMA bout than by points, KO, or bookmaker arranged dive. Also the overall injury rate in MMA fights of 8.5% is surprisingly low for two people beating the crap out of one another.
The overall injury rate was 8.5% of fight participations (121 injuries/1422 fight participations) or 5.6% of rounds (121/2178 rounds). Injury rates were similar between men and women, but a greater percentage of the injuries caused an altered mental state in men. Fighters also were more likely to be referred to the ER if they participated in longer bouts ending in a KO/TKO.
Other studies have found higher rates of injury, 28.6%, but have similar conclusions regarding the types of injuries – facial cuts and bruises – being higher than boxing, but knockouts being lower.
Part of this is down to the small, fingerless gloves used in MMA. Less padding, that is mainly there to protect the hands from breaking with every punch, leads to a different force being applied to the opponent’s face.
All padding conditions reduced linear impact dosage. Other parameters significantly decreased, significantly increased, or were unaffected depending on padding condition. Of real-world conditions (MMA glove–bare head, boxing glove–bare head, and boxing glove–headgear), the boxing glove–headgear condition showed the most meaningful reduction in most of the parameters. In equivalent impacts, the MMA glove–bare head condition induced higher rotational dosage than the boxing glove–bare head condition. Finite element analysis indicated a risk of brain strain injury in spite of significant reduction of linear impact dosage.
Okay, so how do these nasty violent sport stats compare to less violent sports? What is the chance of dying in MMA or boxing compared to, I don’t know, horse riding? Well, a 2012 study from Victoria found motor sports, fishing, equestrian activities, and swimming all led to more deaths in a year than boxing. That’s right, riding a horse or going fishing is deadlier than standing in a ring getting punched in the face. That brutal and nasty boxing didn’t even make it into the top ten. Hell, even real life is more dangerous, as another study found motor vehicle accidents and falls were far more likely to kill people than boxing or any other sport. It’s almost as though the controlled forum of a boxing ring or MMA octagon are somehow stopping things getting out of hand.
The Victorian study is only looking at one state in Australia, so hardly representative of the entire world, and only looked at 2001-2007, which isn’t a huge time span, but the results are still very interesting:
There were 1019 non-fatal major trauma cases and 218 deaths. The rate of major trauma or death from sport and active recreation injuries was 6.3 per 100,000 participants per year. There was an average annual increase of 10% per year in the major trauma rate (including deaths) across the study period, for the group as a whole (IRR 1.10, 95% CI, 1.06-1.14). There was no increase in the death rate (IRR=0.94, 95% CI, 0.87-1.02; p=0.12). Significant increases were also found for cycling (IRR 1.16, 95% CI, 1.09-1.24) off-road motor sports (IRR 1.10, 95% CI, 1.03-1.19), Australian football (IRR 1.21, 95% CI, 1.03-1.42) and swimming (IRR 1.16, 95% CI, 1.004-1.33).
Did you take that in? I’ll let the authors summarise:
The rate of major trauma inclusive of deaths, due to participation in sport and active recreation has increased over recent years, in Victoria, Australia. Much of this increase can be attributed to cycling, off-road motor sports, Australian football and to a lesser extent swimming, highlighting the need for coordinated injury prevention in these areas.
But is this representative? UFC boss Dana White likes to compare his sport to NFL, as MMA fighters are kept sidelined after concussions for longer than their football (should be hand-egg, but let’s not quibble) counterparts. And under all that protective gear used to play rugby, NFL players are hitting each other with the (padded) equivalent force of a car crash. Studies of brains show that all contact sports are bad for the brain. Even Soccer (or is that Football?) players are at risk of brain injury. MMA like to keep their fighters healthy, whilst most sports want their players back next week to go again.
I keep seeing these claims about MMA or boxing being dangerous to health. Meanwhile, football, rugby, gridiron, that skating sport that Canadians jizz over, all seem to have just as much chance of injury or death. Essentially, we can easily list a dozen sports more dangerous than fight sports (seriously, cheerleading: WTF!). But that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is to know the actual risks so that athletes (and spectators) are making a well informed decision. Because as much as horse riding is bad for your health, it is also boring to watch (NB: personal opinion and quite a snobby one at that) so people won’t really care about another death in that sport. Whereas a death in an exciting sport like MMA is much more visceral and likely to have spectators on hand. Hard to compare horse riding to MMA, unless we had Kentucky Thunder step into the octagon.
The main problem I see with the “MMA is violent and dangerous” or “Boxing is a brutal sport” and “They should be banned” (please, think of the children!) is that it assumes fighters are unaware that being punched in the head is bad for their health. Do people really think that fighters love being knocked out or injured? Even UFC and Boxing acknowledge that they need to understand the risks of a career of head-butting people’s fists.
It could be argued that young athletes are unaware of the risks of being an athlete, what with the naivety of believing they are bulletproof and will be young forever – don’t worry kids: you’ll be cool your entire life. People do have a fascinating ability to ignore long term risks in favour of short term gains. UFC champion George St Pierre reportedly retired from MMA due to persistent headaches (maybe). So it is important that athletes are made aware of the risks of injury and long term debilitation, with further research in this area being essential – yes, there is an echo in here. But it also has to be acknowledged that athletes aren’t exactly unaware of the issue. George Foreman was aware of the risks of eponymous naming of kitchen appliances, but the money was good. He was also aware of the risks of being a boxer, and named his kids George so he wouldn’t forget them – “You have to plan for memory loss in boxing.”
Then there are those that see fighting as entertainment for lowlifes and thugs. That somehow only the uneducated or the uncivilised enjoy seeing two people belt each other around the head. This is, of course, just more of the “I don’t like it, therefore it is bad and only poo-poo heads like it” argument that snobs like to make. Nothing like playing the moral and intellectual superiority card to denigrate something. Ignorance is always funnier when someone thinks they are superior.
Some argue, as the AMA does, that the intent of boxing and MMA is to belt each other senseless. If all you see in fighting is two people trying to kill one another, then you aren’t watching. You’re distracted by the superficial aspects of the events. Insights that shallow just show an ignorance of what is happening in the ring. In MMA and boxing there are many ways to win a fight, as already alluded to above. Take for example this famous clip (more here from my friend Stick):
Now the superficial view of the video has us watching Ali wailing on a guy against the ropes. Obvious, but not the reason this is classic boxing footage. Boxing fans would point out Ali’s footwork, the athleticism and skill involved, the amazing speed, and the fact that his opponent is seriously outclassed. Boxing isn’t just about punching your opponent. Watch what happens when someone tries to reverse the tables with a flurry of punches thrown at Ali:
This is athleticism defined. This is why Ali is still regarded as such a great fighter, as it takes far more than turning your opponent’s brain to mush to win a fight. And that is what non-fight fans don’t understand. They can’t get past the superficial to see the sport. They are so caught up in being snobbish and outraged that they missed the amazing athletes doing amazing things.
That and the beating the crap out of each other.
Other articles:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-11/uoa-mma110515.php
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/boxing-mma/more-brain-injuries-caused-by-sparring-than-real-fights/news-story/258aa1bd5e7d7823d3ddb102310f1dba
https://theconversation.com/should-boxing-be-banned-38907
http://www.thejournal.ie/the-journal-factcheck-mma-boxing-safety-injury-2713577-Apr2016/
http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i389 and http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i389/rr-0
Can you recommend more authors like Dan Brown?
I adore reading. I read very often, my bare minimum being 4 books a week. But ever since I read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown, I do not feel satisfied with any book I read. I am hungry for more yet no book seems to satisfy me. What books could satisfy me?
Can I recommend more authors like Dan Brown? Hopefully not. In the Pantheon of thrillers authors, Dan Brown sits proudly atop a pile of money that is only rivalled by James Paterson. They are both great at getting people to read their books, for a reason that is unclear to me.
I have a love hate relationship with Dan Brown. Dan writes very entertaining novels that are well paced with interesting plots. But he also manages to bash readers over the head with plot points and squeeze in a lot of useless exposition. At times you honestly think he is just bashing at the keyboard like a drunk monkey taking dictation. Personally I think that Steve Berry and James Rollins, who write a similar genre of thriller, are far better authors. If you haven’t read them already, I’d recommend anything they have written to sate your Brown problem.
There are other authors who dabble in that same genre of thriller who are worth mentioning. I’m a huge fan of Matthew Reilly, who writes insanely fast paced novels that are great fun. His Jack West Jr series have similar “find the artefact to save the world” McGuffin adventures and has a new instalment in the series coming out in September (2016). Andy McDermott also writes fast paced Artefact McGuffin Adventures* which are also humorous in parts.
A tool that might help is the Literature Map. While it doesn’t have every author, it does link them together and give you some good ideas. Or they might lead you astray.
This post originally appeared on Quora.
*I think that should be the official classification for this sub-genre of thriller.
See also:
http://bookwag.com/2013/05/like-dan-brown-then-you-will-love-these-seven-authors/
What does the Australian term “sheila” mean?
The term sheila means you have strayed far from the path of modern Australian society and have found yourself in the backwaters of the outback. In these dark hollows near stringy-bark trees and billabongs you will find yourself at risk of flamin’ Alf Stewart.
It is generally recommended that you quickly reverse the ute back up that dusty track winding back, turn at Gundagai, and head straight for the nearest inner city cafe, preferably one in Melbourne. The main thing is to pay lots of money for coffee and sit near people wearing corduroy pants or cyclists clad in lycra bodysuits. If the cafe does regular poetry readings, more the better.
Remember, once you have escaped the outback of Australia do not use any of the language you heard on your travels. Referring to a woman as a sheila, or an old person as codger, is likely to see you arrested for stoning the crows.
This post originally appeared on Quora.
Book to movie: The Warriors – What’s The Difference?
Did you know that the cult classic, The Warriors, was based on a novel? How about that the novel was based on the ancient Greek tale Anabasis? Cinefix explain in this month’s What’s the Difference.
I can’t really comment much on this instalment as I’ve not seen the entire movie, nor read either the novel by Sol Yurick nor Xenophon’s tale. But it is interesting that even a cult action film about street gangs has pedigree origins. This reinforces a point I’ve often made here; that we shouldn’t be snobby about the things other people like. We might like to think that our subjective taste is better but often we don’t even appreciate how biased we are in that taste. A book/movie about a gang on the run could be one person’s retelling of a Greek tale, or it could be another person’s mindless genre piece. Or it could be both.
6 Story Arcs
I’ve written before about plots and how there aren’t as many of them as you’d think – somewhere between 1 and 36 depending upon how you want to break them down. Recently there was some research published that analysed 1,737 fiction novels to figure out how the story arcs are constructed. Let’s pretend there is a big difference between a plot and a story arc…
The study used Project Gutenberg – i.e. public domain works – and the results suggest that there are only really six story arcs:
Fall-rise-fall: ‘Oedipus Rex’, ‘The Wonder Book of Bible Stories’, ‘A Hero of Our Time’ and ‘The Serpent River’.
Rise-fall: ‘Stories from Hans Andersen’, ‘The Rome Express’, ‘How to Read Human Nature’ and ‘The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali’.
Fall-rise: ‘The Magic of Oz’, ‘Teddy Bears’, ‘The Autobiography of St. Ignatius’ and ‘Typhoon’.
Steady fall: ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘The House of the Vampire’, ‘Savrola’ and ‘The Dance’.
Steady rise: ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’, ‘Dream’, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and ‘The Human Comedy’.
Rise-fall-rise: ‘Cinderella’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Sophist’ and ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’.
The most popular stories have been found to follow the ‘fall-rise-fall’ and ‘rise-fall’ arcs.
Or for those that prefer to read graphs because it makes them feel intellectual:
For those that just saw a bunch of squiggles in those graphs, what you are looking at is the story arc plotted over time for each story analysed. They’ve broken these into similar groups then added an average (the orange line). You can see how some of the story arcs follow the average more, whilst some types vary more. To see an individual story arc, they picked out Harry Potter as an example in the paper, but have the rest archived here (Project Gutenberg books) and here (a selection of classic and popular novels). As they note:
The entire seven book series can be classified as a “Rags to riches” and “Kill the monster” story, while the many sub plots and connections between them complicate the emotional arc of each individual book. The emotional arc shown here, captures the major highs and lows of the story, and should be familiar to any reader well acquainted with Harry Potter. Our method does not pick up emotional moments discussed briefly, perhaps in one paragraph or sentence (e.g., the first kiss of Harry and Ginny).
This is all nice and good, but why is this interesting? Well, aside from using my favourite statistical technique – principal components analysis – this study shows that authors create, and the audience expect, structures that are familiar. The fact that two of the story arcs (rise-fall and fall-rise-fall) are the most common emphasises this point. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful and familiar to us. There is scope to play within the formula, but ultimately we desire stories that fit conventions.
So yes, there is no original art being made.
What one Aussie expression says the most about who Australians are and how they live their lives and why?
Mate.
Everyone is referred to as a mate. We may have never met, we may be worst enemies, we may be firing them for sleeping with our partner at the Xmas party, but we will refer to each other as mate.
This achieves many things:
- We don’t have to remember everyone’s names (or nicknames),
- We can say something incredibly insulting and have it taken as a joke,
- We can use it to be more passive aggressive, which really riles people up,
- We can pretend there is a level of egalitarianism about our society,
- And the egalitarianism displayed allows us to utilise Tall Poppy Syndrome.
These points are underlying cultural values that Australia holds dear. We love being able to get along with people and insult our friends.
This post originally appeared on Quora.
Book review: Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ever wonder what Waterworld would have been like with supervillains in it? Yeah, me neither.
In the second instalment of The Reckoners, David Charleston has become Steelslayer: killer of Epics. Which means that Newcago, whilst freed from tyranny, has regular visits from Epics intent on killing Steelslayer. The Reckoners discover that the ruler of Babilar (Manhattan) has been sending these assassins, so they go to confront Regalia, an Epic from Prof’s past. Because that will end well.
Firefight is an interesting sequel to Steelheart in that the first book was about revenge, whilst this novel was about trying to understand your enemy. In fact, it even flirts with the idea that evil can’t be addressed with killing but instead requires compassion. Pretty heady stuff for a YA novel. Don’t worry, there are fights, guns, and even some swords in the story too.*
This was an enjoyable read. If anything it had more humorous similes (or is that metaphors?) that were such a welcome feature of the protagonist’s narration. I’m looking forward to finishing the series with book three: Calamity.
*Can’t sneak the moral indoctrination in without a bit of violence to hide it.
Are liberals more tech-friendly than conservatives?
Tech and science acceptance isn’t really a political thing, it is more about your ideology. Ideology creates idiots out of everyone, no matter their political leanings. For example, if tech were solely the domain of, or even dominated by, liberals, then you wouldn’t have Donald Trump using his smart phone to tweet this on Twitter:
It is quite interesting that whilst disagreeing with 97% of experts on climate change Trump has managed to propose a xenophobic conspiracy whilst preaching nationalism and conservative ideology on an iPhone.* He really is a master of manipulative language. Of course, that isn’t the only brain dropping of anti-science nonsense from the Republican Presidential nominee. It is probably easier to list the science Trump and his supporters do believe** than cover all of the topics he has tweeted denial of. I will now list the science Trump has endorsed:
NB: he probably doesn’t support plant biology either.
We’d be mistaken to assume that science and technology denial or rejection are the sole domain of conservatives. On the liberal side the Greens presidential nominee, Jill Stein, has taken several anti-science stances, such as supporting not-medicine, and opposing genetic engineering (e.g. GMOs) and pesticides in agriculture. Often people like to divide science denial into conservatives denying climate change and evolution, whilst liberals deny vaccines and GMOs. But, as with most things, it isn’t quite that cut-and-dried. Take for example the topic of GMOs:
This really highlights that anti-science numpties are across the political spectrum and deny the scientific consensus for very different reasons. Some deny it because they find corporations scary (Greenpeace), some deny it because they are selling something (Joseph Mercola), some deny it because they are arrogant bloviators (Nicholas Taleb).
On the topic of climate change this spectrum also exists. We keep hearing about how liberals are all climate change supporters and how conservatives are all climate change deniers… Except that isn’t true.
You can see that there isn’t 100% agreement or disagreement from either side of US politics. You don’t even got 100% agreement from climate scientists (97% consensus), despite the overwhelming body of evidence. The Pew Research Centre has similar figures for other countries. Politics isn’t the real predictor because it is too simple. At the hard end of conservatism, the above chart suggests you would be wrong half of the time if you were to call a conservative a climate denier. Even if you call fence sitters deniers as well you are still going to be wrong over a third of the time. And that’s with all the misinformation that the conservative media pumps out (USA, Australia).
If we were to look at a proper political compass that didn’t oversimplify into left vs right, or were to take into account some other factors, then politics could be a better predictor. For example, free market ideology can be a good predictor of climate change denial (67% confidence). The ideology of the free market isn’t going to allow people to admit the market’s failure to account for the externality of carbon emissions. Similarly the ideology of anti-corporatism isn’t going to allow people to admit that companies might make life saving vaccines or develop safe biotechnology food.
The only thing political affiliation can really do is give you a general idea of why or how someone will be biased toward/away from certain technologies. It is definitely not the whole story.
A version of this post originally appeared on Quora.
*interestingly Trump may actually be anti-technology despite having embraced social media. Although, his ego probably doesn’t allow him to not use social media, so of course he has a work-around.
**not that science is about belief.
Idioms don’t always work
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Broken Record: the ancient idiom
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