I've been tempted to propose a law to the effect that people who cite Betteridge's law almost never actually check first to see if the article they are responding to is actually one of the cases where it is right.
That appears to be the case here, since the article concludes that there is, and they state this in the first paragraph.
In this case, you can't argue that it's not right.
>The libertarian case for Bernie Sanders is simply that Bernie Sanders wants to make America more like Denmark, Canada, or Sweden … and the citizens of those countries enjoy more liberty than Americans do.
So, those countries are more libertarian than the United States, despite imposing top-heavy government on its people with the goal of taking a sizeable percentage of their income. Right...
In any case, the author himself then seems to conclusively answer No, without explicitly saying "no":
>The lesson Bernie Sanders needs to learn is that you cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax increases on the middle class. If you want Danish levels of social spending, you need Danish middle-class tax rates and a relatively unfettered capitalist economy. The fact that he’s unwilling to come out in favor of either half of the Danish formula for a viable social-democratic welfare state is the best evidence that Bernie Sanders is not actually very interested in what it takes to make social democracy work. The great irony of post-1989 political economy is that capitalism has proven itself the most reliable means to socialist ends. Bernie seems not to have gotten the memo.
If you buy the author's argument that Denmark's brand of democratic socialism is the closest to the libertarian ideal we have in the world, then the logical conclusion is that Bernie doesn't understand what makes Denmark's brand of democratic socialism work, so there is no libertarian case for Bernie Sanders.
You are conflating the rightness or not of the article itself with the rightness or not of Betteridge's law applied to the article. As Betteridge himself explains [1]:
This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that
any headline which ends in a question mark can be
answered by the word "no." The reason why
journalists use that style of headline is that they
know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t
actually have the sources and facts to back it up,
but still want to run it.
When you have an article like this one which uses the question style of headline and then answers the question "yes" it is not a Betteridge headline even if others might argue that the answer should have been "no". Even if the article answers "no", it still isn't necessarily a Betteridge headline if there was actually some reasonable question over whether the answer was "yes" or "no".
Do you disagree with the measurement of liberty, done by the libertarian Fraser Institute (by Wilkinson's former Cato colleagues)? Because if you accept it, then yes, in fact there is more liberty Denmark, Canada or Sweden, because of heavier taxation on the middle class (relative to the US).
Have you ever been poor? Then perhaps you will understand how not having access to affordable health care, or good public transit viciously limits your liberty.
It depresses me that people get so easily excited without checking what is going on. This will only encourage more sloppy research and vague reporting on said research in the future, slowing down actual progress.
See my post in this thread about how they admit not being properly blinded, and also decided in some unspecified way when a mouse was "moribund" at which point the mouse was killed. The former is maybe ok (shit happens), but the lack of details regarding "moribund" are unacceptable. For that info to be missing, we can deduce this paper was not approved by a honest/competent group of reviewers.
> Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence...
Maybe the first, certainly not the second.
There's an unfortunate correlation between sloppy science and popular journals that's been shown again and again. Nature is one of the journals with the highest rates of retractions[1]. Thinking "it's been published in Nature, it must be good science" is certainly not reasonable in any way.
>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence..."
What does that have to do with the quality of this paper?
>'And it's sort of mean to say that my naive response to this SENS stuff is "slowing down actual progress."'
Sorry for that, it is not really your fault, rather the fault of those involved in the publication of this paper. But don't shoot the messenger, it is also not my fault this study was apparently poorly peer reviewed yet got a bunch of press coverage. I just wish people were doing their jobs and acting with proper skepticism because I want medical research to be successful.
"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth. Which is relevant.
>"Nature is perhaps the most prestigious and respected academic journal in existence" implies that this paper was vetted by what is likely the best peer reviewing process that exists on the entirety of Earth.
It would be nice if this were true and we could have a easy to use heuristic. But, as pointed out by others, the evidence seems to point to either no, or even an inverse, relationship between journal prestige/respect and the quality of peer review and journal articles.
More people lie about attending church which is the only way you can get the 40% figgure. But actual attendance has not been keeping up with population growth.
"Q: How many people go to church each Sunday?
A: For years, the Gallup Research Organization has come up with a consistent figure — 40 percent of all Americans, or roughly 118 million people, who said they attended worship on the previous weekend. Recently, sociologists of religion have questioned that figure, saying Americans tend to exaggerate how often they attend. By actually counting the number of people who showed up at representative sample of churches, two researchers, Kirk Hadaway and Penny Marler found that only 20.4 percent of the population, or half the Gallup figure, attended church each weekend.
As added proof for the accuracy of this smaller percentage of churchgoers, if 20.4% of Americans (approximately 63 million in 2010) attended the nation's 350,000 congregations weekly then the average attendance would be 180 people per congregation which is almost exactly the figure that numerous research studies have found."
This is a study of dishonesty more then attendance. You can't go and just ask, "Do you go to church every weekend. People will lie. Also read the table of church growth over the past 40 years on the page you just quoted. Christianity falling is just as much a "Known Truth" as much as above 50% divorce rate of first time marriages.
Care with studies. Most Christians "just know" Christianity is falling away and pay big money to people who predict the death of the faith (George Barna AKA father of Christians divorce rate is the same or higher then non-Christian divorce rate though the one issue is his numbers were all a lie). The truth is that it has grown in mind blowing numbers and really hasn't slowed down except in Mainline denominations and Catholic Churches. The vast majority of stats are if people were honest to the question did they go to church. The surprise is most people are dishonest that they attend church weekly. Case in point East Sunday attendance is huge compared to normal weekly attendance.
I think people are just being blind to the meteoric rise of Christianity in the past 100 years. In 1910 more then half the Christians in the world were European.
