In our blog we get useful comments about R programming, data sources, the philosophy of science, and even suggestions for book covers. But every now and then we get mentioned by big blogs, and then I’m reminded what real blog commenters are like.
Sudhir Venkatesh mentioned us in the Freakonomics blog. Among the 27 comments were:
Red State/Blue State is first and foremost a media concoction. I’m surprised someone from the Poli Sci department at Columbia would be taken in by this. More likely, he’s just trotting out the mythical dichotomy to sell books. . . . And while we’re at it, I didn’t realize we had a parliamentary government. I thought voters in this country voted for CANDIDATES, not PARTIES.
Convenient balderdash. red-state-, blue-state- corned beef hash.
What is this article doing here? One member of a university department plugging a book by another member? This is nothing but a commercial to help Columbia’s Political Science Department feather its nest and promote a particular personality to the department’s collective research interests. Academics being what it is, I would LOVE to be privy to the in-department politics behind this article. I’ll bet money Gelman and Venkatesh are allies in some departmental skirmish over the department’s vision for itself.
And Kevin Drum linked to us in the Washington Monthly blog, yielding 41 comments, including the following:
Maybe I should stick a crayola up my dog’s ass and have him drag his ass across the white tile floor in my kitchen and we can use that to interpret how liberal each state in the US of A is.
That exercise would be about as meaningful as this one.
The other 40 commenters actually made a lot of good points, but it was all worth it for the Crayola comment. Really, though, his dog would need both red and blue crayons to do it right.
But seriously, I’m just glad for more people to be aware of our work. Our statistical analysis is not for everyone, and I certainly realize that many aspects of voting and politics are not captured by surveys or state-level statistics, which is something that people are reacting to, I think.
But I always thought it was "yellow dog Democrat"…
"We're gonna need a bigger box of crayons."
Wow…you need a thick skin to write books!
No sign of Godwin's Law yet, though. So that's something.
Give his dog the red crayon and his cat the blue one.
In Economics you have your Random Walk, and in Political Science, you have your Random Drag.
Oh dear. It's a good job the US doesn't have proportional representation, otherwise the ASPCA would really be busy at election time.
Jon – I think my cat read your comment. He's now hiding under a chair.
I should have spotted that … that some people might take offense at liberal being represented with a negative number. Seems silly to us, I know, but that's the sort of thing I was trying to watch for. My bad.
What about purple crayons? Red merging with blue gets purple. TV commentators show maps going purple. Something to keep in mind Andrew when you begin speaking to the media during the book rollout.
I've found that comment quality is inversely correlated to the popularity of the blog.
It's like how you never get harassed by a parasitic panhandler when you go to an antique store, but have to wade your way through them in front of stores that draw large crowds for them to prey on.