Jane Galt has a lengthy post in which she makes the following statement:

The humanities simply doesn’t have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can’t, although you can certainly be more rigorous than many of the programs devoted to exposing the obvious truth that Shakespeare and company did not have the same racial and gender sensibilities as 21st century Americans, yawn. In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it’s possible that you could, but don’t yet. That’s why discussions in those courses tend to revolve around the speakers’ opinions on human nature, interesting and possibly right but very difficult to either prove or falsify.

James Joyner took Jane to task for lumping political science in with the humanities, and in comments there the validity of political science as a science is being piled on by James and Steven Taylor. My comments at Jane’s place were a bit less temperate, but some of the other commenters got under my skin too; here’s what I said:

1. Yes, there is a giant pissing match in our discipline between the empiricists and the non-empiricists. Coupled with that is an internal war among the empiricists between the quals and the quants and the game theorists. But then again political science has really only existed as a separate discipline from history, sociology, psychology, and economics for about 50 years (despite the 100-year pedigree of the APSA), and it’s still trying to figure out what to do with those disparate heritages.

2. Not everybody plays with 2×2 contingency tables and single-variable explanations of political phenomena. We have this neat concept called “multiple regression” that can deal with more than one independent variable these days; we use that sometimes.

3. Explanation is more important than prediction in the long run. I’d rather have a wrong prediction than a wrong explanation. If we just wanted predictions, we’d do what insurance companies do: stick a bazillion independent variables in the model and stepwise-regress it. It’ll predict great to your original dataset but (a) will blow up if you apply it to anything else and (b) won’t make any sense anyway (“hey, it turns out people with purple cars and limps have more accidents than others”; yeah, so?). By contrast, I can tell you why almost 400 members of Congress voted for articles of impeachment and procedural motions leading up to it, and I did it with 9 independent variables—and some of the explanations would be quite surprising even to those who followed the public debate and talking heads.

4. There is no number 4.

5. I can build you a very simple probit model today that will predict how most voters will behave in the next congressional election, based on nothing other than their demographics. Heck, I already have; read this paper. It ain’t Galileo dropping stuff off the Tower of Pisa (apocryphal), but it’s pretty good for a then-2nd year grad student playing with a Heckman selection model (ok, not so simple) and 50-year-old theories of voter behavior.

Now, granted, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen running around pretending to have all the answers. Some of them (Larry Sabato *cough*) are in my discipline. Some of them (John Lott, Paul Krugman) are in more “respectable” ones. But just because some Ivy grad whose only exposure to The American Voter was that it happened to be on a bookshelf in someone’s office in his department can’t tell you who’ll win a local school board election doesn’t mean that nobody can.

For the record, no particular Ivy grad was being singled out above. I love all Ivy and non-Ivy grads.

I’ve finished up Foomatic-GUI 0.3; you can download it here. The main new feature in this release is that the XML parsing is now done using xml.sax instead of sgmllib, so it is much faster.

Also, I have uploaded this release to Debian unstable.

In a bid to avoid an impact fee on new development in Shelby County, the county’s politically-connected noble property development cum land speculation industry has come up with an alternative, according to Wednesday’s Memphis birdcage liner Commercial Appeal: a local 1% income payroll tax that allegedly would be deductable from property taxes by county residents.

No word in the article on how the county residents who don’t own their own property (a group that’s disproportionately African-American) would be completely screwed over get their income payroll tax back. Tuesday’s CA carried a longer piece that describes the blatantly unconstitutional scam idea in more detail, including the risible provocative assertion that renters will be able to credit their payroll tax against rent (or something, as it’s written in typical CA gobbledygook).

Particularly hard-hit by this monstrosity brilliant plan would be Shelby County residents who work in Mississippi, who not only will have to continue to pay Mississippi income tax but also will likely see their base property tax jacked up to compensate for the shell game redistribution of revenues.

Among the other loathsome brilliant ideas being considered by the scum of the county property developers is a poll tax that Maggie Thatcher would love per household fee for police services for county residents.

Why do I read How Appealing? For great paragraphs like this one:

The second case [decided by the Supreme Court on Tuesday] involved the question whether Congress could lawfully require aliens subject to deportation proceedings for having committed a crime to remain imprisoned pending the outcome of their removal proceedings. In the case under review, the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional to hold a lawful permanent resident awaiting the outcome of removal proceedings without the possibility of bail. Recognizing that a Ninth Circuit ruling was under review, the Supreme Court reversed, 5-4, in a decision that generated opinions totaling nearly 75-pages in length. Fortunately for me, those most interested in this ruling are in custody of the Attorney General and therefore won’t require an exhaustive rehearsal of the case here at “How Appealing.” For those readers who are aliens but are not yet in custody, my advice is don’t commit serious crimes. That goes for the rest of this blog’s readers, too. (And while you’re at it, don’t commit minor crimes, either. Why not take up blogging instead?)

Of course, to fully appreciate this paragraph, you have to recognize that the Ninth Circuit is by far the most-overturned appellate court in the nation. They apparently didn’t get the memo (I think it’s called the “Constitution,” by the way) about the Supreme Court being the principal and them being the agent.

Leave it to Jane Galt to explain, far better than I could, why I won’t be voting for any Democrats for federal office any time soon. Not that Mississippi Democrats are any better; they mostly combine the statist impulses of their federal brethren with a social conservatism apparently calculated to out-flank Pat Buchanan for the hearts and minds of voters. (In other words, it’s just like Huey Long, albeit 70 years later.)

Jane may have been inspired by this Daily Kos piece (which laughably describes the Democrats as “the party of personal liberty” — apparently, the only difference between me and Cynthia McKinney in Kos’s mind is that I like the NRA), or perhaps this Samizdata rebuttal, which includes in part this sensible summation of American politics circa 2003 (or, for that matter, circa 1938):

What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"… media control legislation described as "Fairness"… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of 'personal liberty issues' by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named 'Patriot Act' is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO’s The Corner posts an email that suggests that Mike’s Place, the bar bombed today in Tel Aviv, was a major hangout for both Americans and Israelis.

It seems that some Palestinians want the much-feared neo-con plan to come to fruition after all. My best guess is that Abu Mazen and Arafat have about one week to get serious about terrorism before W calls Ariel Sharon to tell him that the gloves can come off, and when that happens I wouldn’t want to be between the green line and the Jordan.