My god, there are a lot of smug/reactive, insular and almost anti-intellectual neckbeards on this thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation

That works.

Well, that's one game. Another is "he (or she) who dies with the most offspring, wins." Which has been around a lot longer as a game.

The science and craft of political triangulation is such that popular votes are always going to be somewhat close. That, to some extent, is deceptive. If the popular vote was the way that elections were decide, both candidates would have campaigned quite differently.

What is surprising is how close the races in the "battleground states" *wasn't.* Only Florida was a squeaker - in all the rest, Obama won by a rather decent margin. Historically, the popular vote lead in this race is a bit larger than usual, and the largest for a re-election since Reagan.

SCOTUS / Roe V. Wade is one reason why so many women voted for Obama.

http://mittromneycentral.com/on-the-issues/same-sex-marriage/

He has set himself up on the wrong side of history. This is another moment in which the old Republican strategy has bit them on the ass. Gay marriage used to be used by Republicans to divide Democrats. Now it's a wedge issue in the other direction.

This was the election where the simmering misogyny - there's no other word for it - of the Republican base caught up with it. I'm not exactly a hardcore feminist - I even do agree with some of the men's rights issues (in things like custody battles, etc.) but characters like Akins and Mourdock set a tone that no one really sought to repudiate. Opposing the equal pay legislation is another.

The things that you see as respect for law - natural (abortion, contraception) or Federal (immigration) is seen, somewhat rightly, as a smokescreen for nativism and cultural chauvinism and a nostalgia for the dominance of men. When you see the videos of Romney backers talking about having lost "our" America, complaining about the loss of a white majority, it becomes more and more obvious.

The Republican party is paying the cost of the Southern strategy. It's become the party of the white south, of the Confederacy. It will have to reinvent itself to remain relevant. And it will have to realize that the perception that it has become the party of misogyny and lingering racism is not without basis.

What is foolish is to "vote for a person." You are voting for someone likely to implement one or another set of policies within the context of a rather established political system. You're voting that certain legislation be vetoed, certain political appointments are made, and certain political initiatives be promulgated. To a rather unfortunate extent, you are voting for a foreign policy with worryingly few checks on them.

Those are what you vote for. Not for the most likeable guy or even the person you agree with the most: you are trying to influence near-term policy decisions. No less and no more.

I am in a safe state for the one of the two candidates from the major parties that I would prefer be elected, so I can spend my vote to send a political message in the longer term, however. In that case, I am voting for a policy direction that is currently off the mainstream political radar, but which I'd like to see enter into the realm of actual politics at some point. If there were any doubts about my state's outcome, however, I would hold my nose and choose the major party candidate.

I think you might want to check into the statistics about smoking cessation. Government intervention has been extraordinarily successful in reducing smoking, in the US and elsewhere.

I'm not a libertarian, but I think it's worth noting one of the ironies of libertarianism: that the very class they think they are fighting on behalf of - job-creating entrepreneurs and the hard-working upper-middle class - has little interest in their ideas. Because they know that the status quo is already doing a good job of looking out for their interests.

And to be fair, I know some libertarians who seem to truly believe that corporations as we know them are an evil sustained by the government, and with the shrinking of government, we'd somehow return to the simple, honest capitalism of a century ago. (I don't share their nostalgia for that time, on a range of levels, from the conditions of non-white Americans to the status of women, but there you go.) I think that belief is naive: the wealthy castes of the US will always be able to reconstruct the kind of government that they want.

does that mean libertarians support regulations requiring the labeling of foods? public health warnings on cigarettes, as explicit as possible? that doesn't sound like any kind of libertarian platform i've ever heard. what other mechanism for producing "perfect information" - or even adequate information - would you suggest?

The article in its entirety explains itself: how the study became part of a wave of rhetoric dismissing the value of organic foods all around.

(Organic is also not about not-killing-insects. It's about avoiding the unnecessary use of pesticides to do so. Fly swatters - and natural forms of pest control, and even some other not-natural ones - are completely OK for organic food.)

"For a certain set of nutrients" = conveniently )or as the article put it, "curiously", not those nutrients which the research from Newcastle University found to be higher in organic foods.

For a meta-study, that's a pretty bad.

From TFA:

"Yet even within its narrow framework it appears the Stanford study was incorrect. Last year Kirsten Brandt, a researcher from Newcastle University, published a similar analysis of existing studies and wound up with the opposite result, concluding that organic foods are actually more nutritious. In combing through the Stanford study she’s not only noticed a critical error in properly identifying a class of nutrients, a spelling error indicative of biochemical incompetence (or at least an egregious oversight) that skewed one important result, but also that the researchers curiously excluded evaluating many nutrients that she found to be considerably higher in organic foods."

So, no, he doesn't have the wrong definition of nutritious. You just read the first two paragraphs or so.

Yep, you can train your pleasure center, which is what a lot of people who cut down on red meat consumption have done.