== The real war is against reality ==
All right, I keep returning to this recurring theme, but it needs to be hammered... it's about the War on Science… and against all smartypants professions.
Forty-three years ago, when Richard Nixon was president, almost forty percent of scientists and twenty-six percent of U.S. journalists (the people in society who interview and question the widest samplings of Americans) called themselves Republicans, only slightly fewer than called themselves Democrats.
Forty-three years ago, when Richard Nixon was president, almost forty percent of scientists and twenty-six percent of U.S. journalists (the people in society who interview and question the widest samplings of Americans) called themselves Republicans, only slightly fewer than called themselves Democrats.
Today, just 7% of U.S. journalists so identify and less than 6% of U.S. scientists. (The latter figure is in free fall and includes folks like me, who have kept their GOP registration for tactical reasons.)
What's changed? Similar steep declines are seen in nearly all of the professions that require extensive knowledge and skill, from teaching and medicine to economics, law, law-enforcement and civil service to university professors in almost every field, even to the U.S. military officer corps.
When I ask my GOP friends (and I remain a registered Republican) to explain this, they reply with blanket condemnation of each of these professions, calling them rife with pointy-headed drones and herd-following myopics, betraying their fields by plunging into political bias. Science, they declare, has been betrayed by the scientists themselves! (When dissing the U.S. military officer corps, they are careful to only condemn "the damn politician generals.")
Okay, then. So... every major skill and knowledge profession... is being betrayed by the folks who chose to devote themselves and their lives to it. That's... an interesting assertion, argued generally by that most-persuasive modern device, the mass-forwarded facebook jpeg! Today’s postage-free equivalent of a crazy-uncle chain letter!
How much more convincing that is, than actually talking to the people who -- for example -- while investigating climate change, can actually tell the Bernoulli and Navier-Stokes equations from a cellular automata gas-balance model… from a hole in the ground.
How much more convincing that is, than actually talking to the people who -- for example -- while investigating climate change, can actually tell the Bernoulli and Navier-Stokes equations from a cellular automata gas-balance model… from a hole in the ground.
(Name a single exception to this demonization -- mostly by the right, but also perpetrated by some elements of the radical left -- of folks who actually know a lot! Teachers, medical doctors, journalists, civil servants, law professionals, economists, skilled labor, professors… oh, yes and science. After asking this question publicly for a decade, I have seen just three professions listed as exceptions, that are of high intellectual attainment and skill, yet have escaped regular attack by the central cathedral of know-nothingness — Fox News. Can you name those three?)
The mass-desertion of the GOP -- and the crazy, anti-vaxxer far-left -- by all the smart people does not discredit Smart People. It discredits radical "sides" that have gone gibbering loony, by waging war on smart people.
They are voting with their feet, the smartest, wisest, most logical and by far the most competitive humans our species ever produced, who produced the cornucopia of technological wealth upon which we all rely. How can the Murdochians justify their campaign of hatred against scientists and nearly all other knowledge castes?
First, you must start with the inherent American cultural tradition of Suspicion of Authority (SoA), which we suckle from every Hollywood film and almost every novel or song. Liberals express SoA by seeing Big Brother emerging as tyrants did in 99% of human societies, from the entrenched owner-oligarchic caste... and the faceless corporations they now control, instead of armies.
A decent person of the right is no less afraid of Big Brother! He worries about other elites -- snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats. And fair enough! I am an Adam-Smithian Libertarian and I remember the USSR, so I can turn my head and fret about that threat! By all means stay wary of civil servants! Just because they did less harm than aristocratic cheaters have, across 6000 years, that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous!
But the rigidity of both sides, ignoring how their own, favorite elites might be dangerous too, is depressing. In is political fused-spine disease... an inability to turn your head and see that cheaters and would be tyrants loom from all directions.
Moreover, when one side goes into full-tilt rage-war against scientists and teachers and every other caste of folks who know stuff... WTF is going on?
It is Distraction of SoA. Americans need to fret over some cheating elite. And the last thing the Murdochians want is for poor whites to turn their ire toward the ancient enemies of freedom, who were dealt with firmly, by our parents and grandparents in the Greatest Generation.
So Fox must find some other elite (or several) to divert attention to. Just as the plantation lords diverted a million poor white southerners into marching to fight and die for their own feudal lords, against "yankee factory men."
How are they doing it? Trace the narrative.
We all know that being smart and knowing a lot does not automatically make you wise. Indeed, we all have known smart people who were ninnies. I know some top scientists who I would never hire as a babysitter. It happens. Even folks who know a field thoroughly must still bear burdens of proof. And they will always be wrong about something.
Only notice how that truth has been twisted into a new "truthy" truism.
If you are smart and know a lot, that automatically makes you unwise.
That transformed and warped message is the essence of the narrative. And it is deeply, deeply sick.
In fact, being smart and knowing a lot correlates moderately with being a somewhat wiser person. Not perfectly. Not reliably in any particular case. Always with a sense of contingency and burden-of-proof...
... but still... are you honestly gonna make a bet with me over the relative levels of wisdom and common sense displayed by - say - the folks in our research centers vs. those living in trailer parks? On average? Seriously?
Start with a truth. Twist it into a "truthy" lie. It is the methodology of the mad anti-vaxxers of the far-left... and it is the method of the puppeteers controlling today's loony entire-right.
If you have fallen for this scam, shame on you.
== These fellows must have read Adam Smith ==
== The narrative ==
First, you must start with the inherent American cultural tradition of Suspicion of Authority (SoA), which we suckle from every Hollywood film and almost every novel or song. Liberals express SoA by seeing Big Brother emerging as tyrants did in 99% of human societies, from the entrenched owner-oligarchic caste... and the faceless corporations they now control, instead of armies.
A decent person of the right is no less afraid of Big Brother! He worries about other elites -- snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats. And fair enough! I am an Adam-Smithian Libertarian and I remember the USSR, so I can turn my head and fret about that threat! By all means stay wary of civil servants! Just because they did less harm than aristocratic cheaters have, across 6000 years, that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous!
But the rigidity of both sides, ignoring how their own, favorite elites might be dangerous too, is depressing. In is political fused-spine disease... an inability to turn your head and see that cheaters and would be tyrants loom from all directions.
Moreover, when one side goes into full-tilt rage-war against scientists and teachers and every other caste of folks who know stuff... WTF is going on?
It is Distraction of SoA. Americans need to fret over some cheating elite. And the last thing the Murdochians want is for poor whites to turn their ire toward the ancient enemies of freedom, who were dealt with firmly, by our parents and grandparents in the Greatest Generation.
So Fox must find some other elite (or several) to divert attention to. Just as the plantation lords diverted a million poor white southerners into marching to fight and die for their own feudal lords, against "yankee factory men."
How are they doing it? Trace the narrative.
We all know that being smart and knowing a lot does not automatically make you wise. Indeed, we all have known smart people who were ninnies. I know some top scientists who I would never hire as a babysitter. It happens. Even folks who know a field thoroughly must still bear burdens of proof. And they will always be wrong about something.
Only notice how that truth has been twisted into a new "truthy" truism. If you are smart and know a lot, that automatically makes you unwise.
That transformed and warped message is the essence of the narrative. And it is deeply, deeply sick.
In fact, being smart and knowing a lot correlates moderately with being a somewhat wiser person. Not perfectly. Not reliably in any particular case. Always with a sense of contingency and burden-of-proof...
... but still... are you honestly gonna make a bet with me over the relative levels of wisdom and common sense displayed by - say - the folks in our research centers vs. those living in trailer parks? On average? Seriously?
Start with a truth. Twist it into a "truthy" lie. It is the methodology of the mad anti-vaxxers of the far-left... and it is the method of the puppeteers controlling today's loony entire-right.
If you have fallen for this scam, shame on you.
== These fellows must have read Adam Smith ==
"I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.” — George Washington
"The power of all corporations ought to be limited, [...] the growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”
– James Madison
== More Political Miscellany ==
If true, this is very disturbing: Google Is Removing Negative Coverage Of Powerful People from its search results.
This world survey of racial tolerance may surprise you and shatter your close-held impressions.
== And Finally ==
== And Finally ==
All right, this is just terrific. A generic “why I am right and you are wrong” anthem for our (insanely self-righteous) times.
