Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, December 30, 2019

Truth vs. the conservative movement

It isn't news, but the New York Times has done a retrospective summarizing the current Administration's war on science. Because of the paywall, you might want to go to this Daily Kos diary that summarizes it, with some supplementary links.

The story is that the administration has been systematically destroying the federal government's scientific resources, and purging scientific expertise and even generally known facts from the decision making process. To quote the Times story:

In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts said, could reverberate for years. Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Donald Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
I've discussed some of this before, in this space. The reason this is happening is simple, as Stephen Colbert has explained: Reality has a well-known liberal bias. If we believe that ultrafine particle pollution kills people, that toxins in the water supply sicken and kill people, then we would have to conclude that the Free Market™ does not magically make the world wonderful. We would have to draw the same conclusion if burning fossil fuels causes destructive climate change. If we were to believe those Chinese hoaxes, then billionaires would not be free to enrich themselves by poisoning us and destroying civilization. That would be a violation of the sacrality of the Free Market™, so none of it can possibly be true.

And those scientists must all be commies.

Well, if you voted for him, you must agree with all that. Too bad about all those hundreds of years of scientific progress since The Enlightenment. Obviously that was all a hoax. Things were so much better in the 14th Century.

8 comments:

Don Quixote said...

As I've mentioned, the funny (and hypocritical) thing is this: when a "conservative," Republican person goes to a hospital with a staphylococcus infection, s/he wants an antibiotic discovered by SCIENTISTS--using the same methods that have deduced man-hastened climate change, the efficacy of needle-exchange programs, and the effect of pollutants and toxins on our bodies--so that s/he can be cured. The same person wants a broken bone set, or targeted drugs for her/his cancer ...

Hypocrites. And criminals, for what they are doing to the planet and its people.

Cervantes said...

And these schtickdreck have children and grandchildren, about whom they give not a flying fuck. Very Christian of them.

Don Quixote said...

Yeah, that whole part is so weird. Christianity is fatally flawed--makes it possible to believe that nothing you do in this world matters, it's the "next one" that's waiting for you--just get it right with Jesus, and no apologies necessary to anyone.

If there's a world after this one, Jesus is flipping out at the folks who call themselves Christians. The ones who support the rapist/racist/Nazi liar fuck in the White House.

Sober Curious said...


"... as Stephen Colbert has explained: Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Now that's funny, but dismissive. It's likely there's some better explanation that might have more than one sentence to explain these changes from the last administration.




Don Quixote said...

Colbert makes the point effectively. But, yes, what is happening is the "normalization" of our fascism in the mainstream media and population-at-large that drives their ratings. Many of us saw it coming, and many of us are still fighting against it. This is how fascism happens--with an initial shock, and then creepingly, constantly, with the powers in charge chipping away daily at our freedom and safety and security and humanity--first by installing cabinet members antithetical to the very responsibility of the offices they inhabit (DeVos, Pompeo, name your cabinet member), to the installation of right-wing, racist judges by McConnell, to the brazen commitment and denial of treason on the part of Shitler and McConnell and Barr.

Fight. Shitler is on his way out, either through resignation, impeachment, or some other way, and we have the structure for a progressive and human government to take the place of the now-defunct Republican party. Be part of the solution. Fight the effects of the Kool-Aid--or, in our case, the Kook-Aid. Give a shit! Life matters. Fight the Thanatos-urge-driven power grabs of the Republican haters.

Don Quixote said...

For Sober Curious: an example of reality's well-known liberal bias:

In the 1970s I went to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. There was a world map, in large, lit globe form, of climate heating. I was stunned, even though I was about twelve years old. What on Earth was going on to heat the surface of our planet, more in some places than others, with projections into the coming decades that were alarming? Even a twelve-year-old could figure that oceans would rise and places would become uninhabitable, due to heat and loss of land space.

It turns out (widely published on the internet) that ExxonMobil was conducting its own investigations in the 70s about climate change due to the use of their product. And then, in the 80s, they directed their scientists to "spin" the findings. In other words, their mindset changed from REALITY to "We're a billion-dollar-industry and our profits are driven by suppressing our findings."

So REALITY has a liberal bias--in other words, reality would prompt us all to pursue renewable energy use, liberal social practices that make living the Golden Rule a possibility, stop burning fossil fuels, end war, reroute food distribution so that all the people in the world have enough to eat, etc.

But billionaires and Republicans and fascists generally think it's in their "interest" to pursue policies that get them the most profit at the end of the day. They don't seem to think,"Uh-oh, this will lead to human extinction ... ohmigod, my grandkids will die! We must stop what we're doing!"

I had a friend in Chicago in the 1990s who'd worked on the Merc exchange as a futures trader. (As he put it, he had "a bad year one week" and quit, bankrupted). He told me that at the end of each trading day, it didn't matter whether he'd made or lost a million bucks. None of it ever mattered.

That's the mindset of capitalists.

Bob Bachtell said...


I think everyone can agree that extremes of any system can happen and can be addressed by laws. Such extremes in the past have been child labor, 40 hr work week, dangerous workplace conditions, etc.

Also, no one is claiming that all socialism results in gulags, Nazis or reeducation camps, either.

I think it's a mistake to attribute only bad things to capitalism and none of the good such as creating so much wealth that even the poor in my country are rich by world standards.


Don Quixote said...

To write that, " ... even the poor in my country are rich by world standards" shows a lack of knowledge about the world. The commenter obviously has not lived and worked in other countries, as I have. When working and living abroad in, for example, Canada and Spain, I never, ever saw the kind of abject poverty and homelessness I saw in Chicago, Boston, LA, and other towns where I lived.

There is this myth that "we are # 1" (whatever that means). As has been shown on this blog, life expectancy in the US is dropping, as opposed to other developed countries, where people have health insurance provided for them (and yes, it works). Also, there's the myth that there aren't people living in incredible poverty and destitution in the US, as opposed to "world standards" (whatever that means--are we talking Aleppo or Zurich?).

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Also, the myth that "capitalism creates wealth" completely ignores the fact that US capitalism includes amazing socialism for corporations, whereas in a country like, for example, Spain, there are many wealthy people but the income disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest is, in general, much narrower.

Americans need to travel and see how so many other developed countries perform the "miracle" of providing for their people. It's no miracle. It's the fact that these so-called "socialist" countries are, just like the US, a blend of socialism and capitalism. There's just a helluvalot more emphasis on the socialistic aspects--because life matters more than money, property, and power.