My twin has a piece up at the Huffington Post arguing that the veto of Hawaii's civil union bill by its Governor Lingle was not motivated by the reasons that Lingle gave. I'm having some qualms about linking to the Huffington Post. The website has had a long history of pushing anti-science and fringe medical beliefs, including homeopathy and claims that vaccines cause autism. Most recently, they've branched out into anti-evolution propaganda with a piece by David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute claiming that evolution was the root cause of Nazism. These issues with the Huffington Post are discussed in detail in this Salon piece and this statistical analysis. I'm concerned about driving traffic to a website which has such attitudes towards science and the scientific consensus. Moreover, it raises serious questions about their otherwise apparently good political coverage. In particular, if they cannot deal with empirical issues well, why should one think that they can deal with issues involving politics where far more cognitive biases come into play? I'm curious what readers think about this issue.
Meanwhile, I can without any concerns link to my father's recent piece at the Oxford University Press blog which discusses what lessons that the United States should take away from the Greek financial crisis. The piece gives a balanced view about the economic and demographic issues that face the United States today and how they compared to Greece.
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I think Huffington has tried to be "diverse", but all they've really done has been to sacrifice what little credibility they had. If I wanted to present the "tinfoil-hat-wearing-alien-conspiracy-theorist" point of view, I could probably get a regular column there.
Anyone who would give Klinghoffer a platform, for any reason - what more needs to be said?
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