He's not alone. An earnest young progressive named Ryan Cooper, who has dutifully written for all of the left-wing sites proclaiming to be more science-y, put his partisan cards on the table with This is a perfect example of why scientists don't vote Republican : When it comes to climate change, the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement is stunning.
That makes no sense at all: Academia stopped voting Republican generations ago, when Ronald Reagan was president. He was the most pro-science president in history, basic research was one of the very few things he felt government should do.
Cooper must live in a confirmation bias bubble. He does not realize over 50% of US science is not done in academia and scientists outside the government grant system certainly do vote Republican - academia is far out of the mainstream politically and that did not happen because of Republican beliefs about science. He seems to think academics are more evidence-based and that is why they vote Democratic.And Michael Moyer, a progressive blogger at Scientific American, had this odd Tweet making the rounds of science media:
Went on Fox&Friends this morning. Kinda feel like I should take a shower. http://t.co/SjlFBPE0QE
— Michael Moyer (@mmoyr) April 30, 2014
It was a weird thing to write. Why go on it if you despise them? Dr. Neil Tyson said, about having "Cosmos" on the Fox network that they needed science the most. And his patronizing tone is why no one watches that show.
He then wrote a blog post that was the sort of cloying, pseudo-edgy rant that shows why Scientific American went out of business. He portrays himself as some maverick standing up to mean old anti-science Fox.
I don't know how many media appearance Moyer has done but his sentiment is not authentic to absolutely anyone who has ever done even one on any outlet. He knew exactly why they had him on the show, they had a pre-interview with him - suddenly he claims they surprised him with a veto of climate change? They wanted something original in the way of a future trends and then he decides he is going to talk about climate change, which is not original at all.
Sorry, only the people inclined to believe anything about Fox News is any different at MSNBC or CNN or anyone else. You are not there to educate the world, you are there to do some color commentary. You're young and thin and work at a magazine people have heard of. That's it. They actually did not have him on the show because of his Master's degree in philosophy.
I've been on everything from Glenn Beck's network to NPR and in no instance did anyone want me to talk about any science position that did not correlate to their audience beliefs - and I saw no reason to do otherwise because it's a turn-off and goes against the spirit of science outreached. NPR's audience is not going to accept GMOs, vaccines and energy science to the same degree the Fox News audience will not accept evolution and climate change. That is just fact. I am not going to go on NPR and then rant about their audience because they contribute to groups that are causing poor kids to go blind or even die.
What does this suddenly weird behavior in so many outlets tell you?
It tells you it's election season. It has been this way in every election season since 2000, though it was really in 2004, when blogging became mainstream, that science media shook off any semblance of objectivity and began to overtly do free public relations for Democrats. Obviously if science were important and blogging had existed in 1994, Democrats would be the anti-science party, they set out to kill both physics and nuclear science in America and did so quite successfully. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment which restricted stem cell research then and still does today.
You're not going to get tenure in academia today unless you match the political and cultural positions of your peers - the numbers are far too lopsided against conservatives to be dismissed as choice. The same goes for corporate science media.
How many of these mainstream publications mention Democrats when it comes to anti-GMO bills and the obvious hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment? None, but they mention Republicans every single time climate change comes up. 52 out of 55 members of Congress who tried last year to get warning labels on GMOs were Democrats, it is hard to say that is not a mainstream position for them the way climate change is for Republicans. The numbers are actually more lopsided when it comes to Democrats.
Strauss works for Smithsonian and used to work for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists so it isn't a surprise he is only going after Republicans about science - it would be a surprise if he didn't.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is, like Union of Concerned Scientists, not about science at all, it is about undermining science, and that partly means being a covert political action committee devoted to promoting the idea that Democrats, who are most likely to embrace their particular politicization of science, are more scientific. They hire people who will advance their political agenda and Strauss likely did just fine while there.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists exists to make sure that nuclear power in America is conflated with nuclear bombs - they have had a stranglehold on energy policy since President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry gleefully announced that their war on science was successful and nuclear power in America was dead. President Obama perpetuates their authority - the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has zero experience in nuclear science, she instead wrote a book lobbying against the science behind the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - written while she worked for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Anyone can quote mine stupid commentary from politicians - for example, Democrats have tried to claim using Styrofoam in the Congressional cafeteria will give them cancer - and writing snark is easy. It took almost no research to write this piece, for example, and if I wanted to claim Democrats are less scientific all I need to do is note that, when it comes to astrology, psychics, homeopathy, vaccines, food, energy and ghosts, they are far less rational than Republican beliefs about evolution and global warming pale in comparison if I frame it that way.
But I am not paid to write that stuff so it seems sort of pointless.
What about its merits, though? Strauss seems to portray Holdren as some sort of stoic rational scientist put upon by religious caricatures right out of an episode of Cosmos.
What he leaves out of his elitism narrative regarding how Republicans don't respect science is that Holdren himself doesn't respect science. He has been a Doomsday Prophet for all of the latest fads since the 1960s, where he started bemoaning the Population Bomb. Less than a decade later he and Paul Ehrlich wrote a book together calling for mandatory birth control, abortion and a world government to curtail the starvation his knowledge of science said was coming.
Immediately after his election, the president who had conceded vaccines might be causing autism picked this Doomsday prophet and for good measure surrounded himself with UFO believers and a guy who said girls can't do math.
That was restoring science to its rightful place?
I'm not trying to pick on Strauss, he has a job to do for Democrats and he does it by the numbers. Politics works by placing functionaries in lots of different roles. And I have no issue with io9, they are part of a media conglomerate and they have a pageview quota and the best way to make a quota is to endorse and insult both Republicans and Democrats and get everyone linking and commenting, so I am sure that if someone has not written a piece about why a bunch of Democrats in Congress want to put warning labels on biology they happen not to like, or rant about vaccines to the CDC, it is in the works.
Clearly, crackpot beliefs are not the sole purview of Republicans, but a senior editor at Smithsonian who used to work for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is never going to criticize a Democrat about science. Heck, the way he checks off all of the correct boxes and stays on message regarding who to insult and who to defend, we shouldn't be surprised if is managing all of the content at Smithsonian some day.
http://io9.com/this-is-what-the-gops-war-on-science-looks-like-15562020…
