Saturday, October 05, 2024

The dangerous chimera called 'scientism'

The crusade to discredit all fact-using professions is an existential threat to us all -- a deliberate effort to lobotomize-away any influence by folks who actually know stuff.  

One of the core elements of this campaign is to deride modern science as a 'mere religion'. A religion called "scientism'. That cult incantation - aiming to cancel out all nerds and every kind of 'expert' - is promoted in this article.

One raver, denouncing Scientific America's endorsement of pro-fact candidates, said: 

"...worshippers at this new altar seem determined to usher in a new post-modern utopia in which science and religion are fused once again. In that light, they cannot help but endorse Kamala Harris because their consciences won’t allow them to do otherwise. It’s not a choice dictated by science, but by theology."

Parse it. The fundamental goal is to demean fact-professions by their own standards, by calling them (without any hint of evidence, or irony) mere boffin-lemmings, yelping in unison as they worship the current paradigm and repress dissenting views.

Of course this is the masturbation-incantation of morons who know nothing about how science works, but desperately seek to justify their war against it. To which I routinely reply:

"Step up now with $$$ wager stakes.
Let's start by forming an eclectic group to visit the research university nearest to you. 
There we'll knock on twenty random doors, to see if even one person matches your egregiously dumb and insulting slander toward those who strive to advance understanding of the universe.*

"If you knew any scientists at all, you'd know we are the most COMPETITIVE beings that this species - that this planet - ever produced. A young scientist only gets anywhere by finding some corner of a standard model and poking at it until something gives. And thus the model improves... or else gets replaced.

"In fact RIGHT NOW I demand that you name a fact-based profession that is not warred upon by Fox n' pals. Go on, name one. One fact profession whose members aren't mass-fleeing your mad cult. (I can name one, but can you?)

"Not just science but also medicine and law and civil service, ranging all the way to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. *

"The latter, mostly lifelong republicans, can now see that the Republican Party has become a Kremlin-serving treason cult. Few of those current and former officers have become committed Democrats! But almost all have left the GOP madness in disgust and taken long showers."


*(And yes, as we enter the danger days of October surprises, even possible Reichstag fires and McVeighsions, we need to pray for the skilled dedication and good work of 80,000 fine men and women heroes in the F... B...I...)


== The underlying narrative of the 'scientism' schtick ==

The entire premise of this campaign to discredit every center of influence other than oligarchy is simple. It boils down to smart people are stupid. 

Parse it. Sure, we all know that:

"High intelligence and knowledge don't automatically make you wise." 

That's a truth we all understand. 

But today's Kremlin-led, foxite cult to sabotage the West has converted that truth into the following lie: 

"High intelligence and knowledge automatically make you unwise."

When it is parsed that purely, they always shrink back and deny it. But they also know that psychotically rephrased version is exactly the campaign pushed by the entire Fox-o-Sphere cult, in their war vs. all fact using professions. 

In their relentless yammer campaigns against universities! The flawed jewels built by the GI Bill generation, that have been responsible for most of the wonders that - for 80 years - truly made America great..


== The current U.S. struggle ==

 

Again, want super-strong evidence that the Republican Party has changed and been hijacked? Well, there are the Cheneys… and hundreds of former GOP officials, including almost every high ‘adult in the room’ during Trump’s Presidency, who have issued public denunciations with signature pages ten or more pages long. 


(There will be NO such 'adults in the room,' during any Trump II.)


And then there’s this…

…showing how likely it is that Ronald Reagan would despise today’s Republican love affair with the same ‘evil empire’ - 
(slightly relabeled) - that he fought against.  I show jpegs of Reagan’s own 1970 re-election flyer. Only jeepers, look at how progressive and liberal he was on so many issues, compared to today’s open Confederates. Golly.



== And finally, pictures are more persuasive! ==

 

I worked hard on this image, which encapsulates in one montage a partial panoply of deplorables who are best buds with Donald Trump. It has so much content, you may need to copy and expand, before you share it around. But in this case the sheer number makes it hard for residually sane Republicans (and we all know a couple) to shrug off. 


And peeling away just half a million such residual decents is really all we need. So use this!



Get them to look at the gloating faces of Trump & Lavrov & Kisliak in January 2017, when they were DT's first and most-beloved guests in the Oval Office, long before any ally, giggling that the USA had fallen to them so perfectly.


 Look at the faces up close and read the caption. And remember Trump raving that he "fell in love' with Kim Jong Un. 


 This is why almost all of DT's former national security folks, from Defense and State to intel agencies to serving officers have called him a direct threat to the nation. But that won't last if he's elected. Those folks will all be arrested and silenced. There will be no further 'adults in the room."

 But we proved resilient.  And we will, yet again. This renaissance is just beginning.

12 comments:

Tony Fisk said...

Sarah Kendzior (a journalist/author based in St. Louis) sums up Trump's character in one sentence:

"Who's friends with *five* pedophiles?"

Tony Fisk said...

That image of Trump and Saudis carressing their globe always reminds me of this scene from 'Sleeper', which the 'residually sane' might be aware of.

Larry Hart said...

Alfred Differ in previous comments:

Quantum mechanics has a baked in observer for wave function collapses and that confuses SO MANY students who fail to separate the human observer from the observer's test equipment.


I've often insisted that the cat in the Schroedinger's Cat scenario is itself an observer.

Tony Fisk said...

There is a meme showing a cat in a box, alongside another box with a cat in it.*
The caption reads 'Now things get interesting.'

* I do not believe any feline fatalities resulted from the creation of this meme.

Unknown said...

Tony,

There is no observer in this situation unless at least 1 cat is wearing a lab coat, Gary Larsen - style.

Pappenheimer

P.S. Regarding 'Scientism', this works strangely. I've met people who assured me that climate scientists are making it* all up for the grant money, but had no beef with science in general. Maybe it has to do selective ox-goring, or just propaganda against specific fields?

*'it' being AGW. Then again, One of these people had no awareness that the current human population was greater than at any previous era, and actually assumed it had fallen since biblical times....

Unknown said...

Then there was the born-again Intel LT who was irate at me for explaining that Iraq was majority Shia.
That is, USAF Intelligence Lieutenant. TBF, she spoke Russian, so that had probably been her specialty - but still, the CIA Factbook was right there online.

Pappenheimer

Larry Hart said...

Darrell E in previous comments:

It didn't help any that several of the notables that contributed to QM in the beginning thought that the observer had to be a mind, an agent. And that assumption persisted for decades among QM experts.


I can buy that in one sense. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The correct answer (IMHO) is that it doesn't matter if it made a sound or not. Only when someone hears the sound does the distinction make any difference.

What it it's a bunny or an insect or another tree that "hears" the sound? Again, it doesn't matter because none of them are asking the question as to whether a sound was made or not. It only matters to someone interested in the answer.

If there is a sapient observer, then that observe knows the answer to the question. Another potential observer does not (yet) know. So the waveform may have collapsed for person A, but not yet for person B. Or in Schroedinger's case, the cat knows it is still alive, but the person outside the box does not. The waveform has collapsed for the cat, but not (yet) for the human.

My wife is as much a nerd as I am, so we can say things to each other like this. Before our child was born and we (purposely) didn't know its gender, we said the baby existed as a probability wave that would only collapse when the birth revealed its gender. Now, because of the physical position of the body, I knew we had a daughter a non-zero number of seconds before my wife did. And she only knew because I said something out loud. So there was an interval of time in which the waveform had collapsed for me, but not yet for her.

In Our Host's uplift novels, the Traeki Asx is able to forestall waveforms collapsing when its* memory wax have not yet congealed. Or it thinks it can, anyway. A part of it knows that it is only fooling itself.

* Yes, it would have been too confusing for many listeners to keep saying "ers" instead of "its".

Larry Hart said...
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Larry Hart said...
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Tony Fisk said...

There is no observer in this situation unless at least 1 cat is wearing a lab coat

... suggesting that the lab coat is the true observer: an (n-1)-dimensional 'brane seeking answers to the n-dimensional space in which it finds itself embedded.
----

Oh dear, the people who get it so wrong on climate change (yet who can control the weather) are predicting another hurricane for the Gulf. This one may be sending the Caribbean surging into Tampa by mid-week.

Larry Hart said...

Dr Brin in the main post:

The fundamental goal is to demean fact-professions by their own standards, by calling them (without any hint of evidence, or irony) mere boffin-lemmings, yelping in unison as they worship the current paradigm and repress dissenting views.


It reminds me of a scene in Atlas Shrugged * when the villains realize that the need John Galt's expertise, so they attempt to suck up to him and bribe him as if his goal was to have "his gang"--the industrialists--given special privileges by the government. They could not conceive of someone having different motivations from their own.

The religious fundamentalists I've encountered can't conceive of anyone not worshipping a supreme being. They assert that atheists worship the Devil or a leader like Stalin in place of God, or else place themselves as God.

* Yes, this devil can quote Ayn Rand when it suits my purposes

Larry Hart said...

Tony Fisk:

This one may be sending the Caribbean surging into Tampa by mid-week.


I wonder if Florida still gets 30 electoral votes if it is under water.