Commitments

When do beliefs and facts collide?

When you decide at the outset that something is true, your commitment may blind you to contrary evidence and rational expectations. Let's compare the intellectual commitments of science versus, say, politics or religion: In science, we presume the uniformity of nature. This means we assume that the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, etc., are fundamental properties of the universe, rather than contingent features that are subject to change. This presumption is useful because it allows us to interpolate and extrapolate data. A simple example would be inferring the age of the earth from geological processes, or isotope decay, or measuring the distance to stars. This premise is very, very difficult to falsify.

And that's the beauty of skepticism: start with very basic assumptions, and continue to question them as new evidence and information arises. Religious belief is quite different for two main reasons: 1) some religions require obedience and faith that is defined as without evidence, and 2) the commitments of religious people are sometimes so complex that they don't even realize how difficult their position is to defend. The first reason is rather clear and doesn't need much elaboration, in the sense that belief in a Garden of Eden or Resurrection or whatever clearly defies common sense and every scientific principle known to man.

False comparison

I've said before that I think the mainstream conservative movement is a little nuts. And in that sense, it doesn't comport to say, "both sides have fringes," since on the right these people make up a giant chunk of the electorate/base:

I continue to think this is a mistaken approach to the ideological landscape. It plays into the conventional wisdom -- "both sides" have their share of nutjobs -- but it doesn't account for the qualitative differences or the reach/influence of both contingents.

It's easy, I suppose, to just assume that the left has some nutjobs, and the right has some nutjobs, but that all of this is unrelated to political mainstream of both major political parties. Wacky liberals said ridiculous things under Bush; wacky conservatives are saying ridiculous things now. Move along; nothing to see here.

But this surface-level look is, at best, incomplete. Code Pink and Truthers don't have, and never have had, any meaningful role in progressive politics or the Democratic Party. Love these groups or hate them, we're talking about a fairly small group, with limited-to-non-existent influence. Indeed, Democratic Party leaders and officials take pains to keep the groups at arm's length. It's not as if leading Dem candidates, seeking high-profile offices, go out of their way to seek Cindy Sheehan's endorsement.

On the other hand, leading Republicans at every level can't do enough to express their support for the Tea Party crowd, and love nothing more than talking to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. We have GOP members of Congress, even some of the party's leadership, endorsing all manner of unhinged nonsense, ranging from Birther questions to state nullification.

The point is, there's a clear and impermeable line between the progressive mainstream and the left fringe. The line between the Republican Party/conservative movement and the far-right fringe barely exists.

Whereas Dems kept the fringe at arm's length, Republicans embrace the fringe with both arms. Both sides have nutjobs; only one side thinks their nutjobs are sane.

Indeed. Cindy Sheehan never had a major media program. Or a minor one. I guess Olbermann is about as liberal as it gets on MSNBC, but compare him side-by-side with Bill "fuckin' thing sucks" Orally, who is considered a "moderate" on Faux News. On the right, the most popular figures are the ones who are ball-slapping, foamy-mouthed wingnuts. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh. It's time for all the GOP reps to learn to speak teabag.

Thanks, Beck

I really do lay the blame for stuff like this at the feet of the crazy wingnuts that get paid millions of dollars to terrify impressionable people about their government. Two of my favorites from MediaMatters are:

• On July 23, 2009, Glenn Beck tells radio listeners that people going “door to door collecting information” would be helping to create a “modern day slave state”.
• During a June 25 interview with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck stated that "there's a lot of people that are concerned" with the census "because they don't want to fill it out. They're not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information. They don't want to give the government all this kind of information."

Conservatives in the media are inflaming the right-wing crazies in a way that no left-wingers ever did or could.

PS: Salon has a fantastic detailed report on Beck's history and rise as a media figure. The most disturbing thing I read was when he called a station rival's wife after she had a miscarriage live on the air and asked her about it, then said that the man (rival) couldn't do anything right. I don't believe in karma, but one has to wonder when a short while later Beck's daughter Mary suffers strokes as she is born and gets cerebal palsy as a result:

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
...
Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."

Is being gored to death by a Minotaur really torture?

I could seriously see this on Faux News. Perhaps Glenn Beck's program?

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Crazy conservatives redux

Glenn Beck calls Obama a racist who hates white people (@1m19s into video). Popular media conservatives really are getting more and more unhinged.

Feldstein tells us that Obama wants single payer. That's news to me.

On another note, Orally explains that Canada doesn't have better healthcare than us, we just have more people. Their higher life expectancy is just a figment of statistical manipulation, see...

Are conservatives crazier than they used to be?

I really don't think conservatism is "dying" as an ideology. But I am afraid it's getting dumber and crazier.

I realize that as a left-of-center type of person I'm inclined to exaggerate the stupidity of conservatives in some ways. However, watching/listening to Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Hannity, and others just makes people go fuc#ing bananas. I mean they aren't just complaining about what Obama's doing, which is their profound right and responsibility. They are literally selling people on the idea that our country is turning into either a Nazi state or a Commie one. Some of them (and their followers) are so dumb that they don't know the vast difference between a free democratic capitalist country with some government intervention and Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.

I know that not all conservatives think this way, but the ones who represent the greatest danger to democracy do: the ones who don't think critically, or for themselves, and are constantly misinformed by idiots. And what's scary is just how influential and popular these idiots are. I mean Beck has one of the most popular shows on television. Faux News has almost quit trying to appear nonpartisan (or sane).

I also know that other liberals have commented on this trend lately and pointed to examples like this that go way back in time. So perhaps it's just that I wasn't informed/interested enough during the Clinton years to appreciate it, because this seems new. And one has to wonder, with the recent shootings by all these bigoted gun nut conservatives, if the combination of Antichrist rhetoric and Glenn Beck's rodeo clown antics aren't pushing more over the edge than before.

Last night at B&N I saw a lady ask where DeMint's new screed about the Nazi USA could be found.

Today I read things like the founder of Freeperland calling for a revolution that begins by removing every elected official in government. I have to agree with this guy's analysis:

There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.

Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.

This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.

You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.

Basically: is it just me, or are some conservatives just going fuc*ing nuts?

the climate change non-scandal

So, if you watch Faux News I'm sure you've heard a lot about this:

Fake EPA Scandal Of The Day
from Environment and Energy by Brad Plumer

Earlier this year, when the EPA was putting together its finding that carbon-dioxide endangers the public health, an economist at the agency named Al Carlin drafted a short report disputing the scientific consensus on global warming and asked his bosses to consider it. The bosses politely asked Carlin to leave climate science to actual scientists and didn't incorporate his insights at all. And with good reason: As NASA's Gavin Schmidt explains, Carlin's "critique" makes a bunch of very basic errors—no surprise, given that he's not a climatologist and was mostly just parroting right-wing pseudoscience.

Anyway, you'd expect the story to die there. Alas, no: The rogue's gallery of climate deniers—from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to James Inhofe—is now shrieking that the Obama administration suppressed The Truth about global warming. Inhofe has ordered a full investigation. You know how it goes. Over at Grist, Jonathan Hiskes has the whole sordid tale if you're in the mood. Personally, I'm holding out for a better fake scandal—this one's a little disappointing.

--Bradford Plumer

Ma' don't know Chuck

My mother recently forwarded me a link to Charles Krauthammer's wikipedia page with the note:

I thought you might enjoy sharing this. He is one of my favorite columnists and I don’t agree with everything he says, naturally but I find him brilliant for the most part. Love, Mom

Yes, dear old ma' is one of those Faux News sycophants.  She watches the talking heads and finds them brilliant.  Poor woman.  At least one of her children turned out all right.

She bristled when I forwarded her an article from McClatchy pointing out that the Faux News crew's analysis on Fannie and Freddie being to blame for the financial crisis was just plain wrong.

But I bet she doesn't really know Chuck and the way he's drifted right over the years.

Orally v. Obama

Bill Orally [sic] had a great informational segment called "Dubious Associations" where basically he got to live out Sean Hannity's wet dreams and ask Barack Obama all about Wright, Ayers, Rezko, etc.:

Gotta love Faux News!

The new skepticism

I was reminded this morning in thinking about things like climate change and evolution how starkly different the certitude level on issues in "pure" politics (like war, foreign policy and economic policy) is from scientific issues. I was thinking about how King W will come out and feign cautious, wise skepticism to reserve judgment on things like whether humans are causing global warming and on ID-creationism. The way these issues are framed appeals to American's sense of fairness and objectivity - "let's sit down and discuss all the rational possibilities, and at the end of it, since these issues are so complicated, we'll still have uncertainty, and thus cause for further debate," this frame says. And conservatives love to toe the party line on this in all discussions about climate change and evolutionary biology.

But look how starkly different these conservatives are when asked to discuss the realities of the Iraq war and our general muscular, hawkish foreign policies, or economic policies. Then, "debate" is not so welcome, and instead you become a terrorist sympathizer or a limp-wristed sissy whose idealitistic notions deserve the label of "flower child"...

Scientists have always been promoters of skepticism. The scientific method is conducive to doubt, as its goal is to provide explanations for natural phenomena which have been thoroughly tested in an effort to debunk their validity. Most of the progress we make in science, contrary to public misconception, is based on what we prove wrong. For example, if I have a hypothesis about how a cell regulates its own MAPK proteins, and I test it and falsify it, then we have progress in the form of eliminating possible rational answers. Cumulatively, these falsifications build up until there are only so many rational alternatives left, and these become, if you will, scientific orthodoxy. But even the most hardened orthodoxy, it is understood, is still subject to modification: that's the beauty of scientific knowledge -- it can always be improved and progress is the goal, not just a possibility.

All that said, I want to point out that it is this very tentative nature of science which those who want to exploit the lack of dogma seize on. Any "controversy" in science, real or imagined, can be created because people understand that a white lab coat is not the same thing as a Roman collar -- our lack of dogma makes it easy to challenge the status quo and current thinking. We eschew rigidity and faith in favor of evidence and questioning.

Those with agendas have exploited this feature of science to no end, emphasizing the fact that "all the facts are never in" -- that it is always possible to find new data that would modify our current interpretations of existing data. Sharon Begley explores this theme in climate change at length in an August Newsweek article, "The Truth About Denial". She carefully chronicles the years-long efforts on the part of energy and oil companies to inject doubt into the mainstream American consciousness about the science behind climate change. It is a powerful strategy, and difficult to overcome.

Just yesterday, I had a surprising conversation with a science teacher who told me that both she and her husband are "climate skeptics". I started a conversation with her, and she told me that the sorts of scientific issues she feels are unresolved involve such things as Mars warming and the decay of the magnetic field of the earth. What was amazing to me was that, although her degree and background are in mathematics and not physics, she certainly had the available faculties to look up and investigate the veracity of these objections for herself, but hadn't. I found out that she had heard this somewhere (Faux News, probably), and had simply believed her source enough not to even go check it out. Little did she know that scientists have addressed all these possible alternative explanations for years, and that they have all been found lacking in merit for various technical reasons.

I really recommend the following index and "guides" for point-by-point refutations of the common objections to man-made climate change:

• The IPCC AR4 report FAQ section (pdf)
  
• Coby Beck's How to talk to Global Warming Skeptic
• New Scientist: Climate Change: A guide for the perplexed
• RealClimate: Response to common contrarian arguments
• NERC (UK): Climate change debate summary
• UK Met Office: Climate Change Myths
• Brian Angliss A Thorough Debunking
• John Cross Skeptical Science

These are all excellent resources with scientific references that should be shared amongst all your friends and colleagues, especially those with whom you think contentious discussions on climate change could take place.

What is so amazing to me is how easily duped people are who feign prudent skepticism towards scientific consensus, but display credulity by swallowing and mindlessly repeating talking points in politics (such as "if we fight them there, we won't have to fight them here" &c.). Is it just that people self-select their news sources in accordance with their pre-determined policy positions, and refuse to budge? Am I the same way? Is it possible to be that way (ignore one side's perspective) if there are actual facts which we can analyze to determine who is right and who is wrong?

Upon further analysis, the president's rationale for invading has been shown a farce and a lie, and every single rationale for the surge and every claim and metric used to support that "the surge is working" falls apart. The central issue of, "Even if we make Iraq 100% safe militarily, that doesn't solve the ethno-sectarian conflict and magically create a unified central government," is continually ignored now, even though Cheney admitted this kept them out of Iraq in 1994.

The numbers get spun in order to keep current policies in place, and people get shuffled when they are no longer willing to spin the right way. As Greenwald recently noted, when Bush is unable to find generals who tell him what he wants to hear, he simply replaces them with those who will. And now, as war with Iran is planned by the right, precipitated by lack of diplomatic progress, and with Faux News dutifully banging the war drums, we need skepticism and cynicism more than ever before. Will it manifest itself? God I hope so.

Why is it that the new skepticism is strongly directed towards scientists, but not towards politics with the same intensity and fervor?

No War with Iran

It's been pretty clear for a while now that the Administration is pushing for another war in the Middle East -- this time with Iran.

Now, their media arm (Faux News) is in full swing helping to move the rapture base towards acceptance of the inevitability of another pre-emptive act of aggression by the U.S. FoxAttacks has put together a beautiful video juxtaposing the buildup for war in 2003 against Iraq versus 2007 against Iran.

Watch it HERE