John Tierney: "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within"

John Tierney is one of the few writers on the NYT payroll I read with interest and occasional delight. He escaped marrying Maureen Dowd as an [urban?] legend has it, and remains an open-minded truth-seeker utterly unlike his near-miss spouse. Here's my two bits on the article, which is well worth perusing, and the NYT was gracious enough to put it among the published comments at the very end of the long comment thread:

I just went back over some of the comments at the beginning of this comment thread. The panoply of liberal self-congratulation and condescension toward what they project in their ideological academic ignorance as "conservatives" is breathtaking. I lived in France for several years and found that the French are far ahead of our own liberal elites, seeking to impose some sort of bureaucratic authoritarianism from above, but the completely solipsistic moral tribe of liberal narcissists on this thread are trying hard to catch up with French decadence and statist nonsense.

In the midst of their self-preening, the liberals should take into account that the ONLY way they can affect [infect?] society is through the federal government and a few benighted states seeking to appropriate individual rights held sacred by our Founding Fathers. But, of course, as a very young and wet behind the ears columnist named Ezra Klein noted, the Constitution is over a hundred years old and hardly relevant to these fast times and wondrous enlightenment...!

And a cloud no bigger than a man's hand was the elections in November, 2010, when buyers' remorse overtook youthful exuberance and gave us an indication that all that federal money may be drying up very soon for such sterile exercises as these liberal academics believe is their inherent right to pursue.

There are, out of 500 or so comments, some extremely perceptive observations about the difficulties that a conservative has in attaining a reputation among "social scientists," a term that is oxymoronic in itself, as it almost always veers into "social engineering due to the faulty and dishonest methodologies that psychology, sociology, and anything with the term "cognitive" before it in a scholastic discipline.