Presidential Election 2012 (BG straw poll)

[test123]

Donald Trump wants to be president and trashes Ron Paul

[Talint]

Donald Trump wants to be president and trashes Ron Paul

...this is a fascinating speech, even though in typical Trump fashion, he delivers it horribly.

Foreign policy at CPAC? That's rarely a good move, but he's pushing his celeb status to rally middle voters knowing that they'd watch clips of it.

[test123]

He thinks foreigners are screwing the US but infact it is the Fed that is screwing the US.

[ZarakiKujata]

It's a generalization and obviously not entirely accurate, but the sad truth is that most soft science research is so open that is fails to adhere to several of the basic tenants that separate science from philosophy/perspective (mainly the standards applied to experiments, sources, data points, and conclusions). The key point here is deciphering between armchair political pundits and true "political scientists". There are much much less of the latter. The simple truth arises that social/economical predictions have a VAST amount of contributing factors, and any "predictions" that are made usually incorporate far too few of these factors. It would be like a physicist attempting to predict the dew point in Atlanta Georgia two years from now, based entirely on today's dew point and the what his horoscope told him that day.

Richard Feinman had a really great essay about this in Surely You're Joking Mr Feinman.

[test123]

Ron Paul delivers his CPAC speech

[test123]

FoxNews is Butthurt

[Yugl]

It's the responsible thing to do, naturally. You can't just predict things when you don't have high correlations or casuality, and analysis needs valid data.

However, useful science HAS TO be able to analyse and predict things.

The things Political science tends to focus on are governance issues rather than campaign issues. This includes fields such as corruption, legitimacy, economic growth, the effect of leadership, corporatism, government structure (Bicameral, Presidential v Parliamentary, Centralization), and so forth. I personally find these studies more interesting than elections, which really amount to nothing (The opinions that is) once each side's argument is fleshed out.

[Plow]

*real* election predictive political science tends to go hand in hand with manipulative political science/sociology

karl rove is an amazing political scientist in that regard

unfortunately that aspect is literally one of the worst things about politics, always has been and always will be