The Science is Settled?

This passage from pp. 235–236 of Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong, by Jonathan Wells, illustrates perfectly how the myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming was likewise perpetuated:

As we saw in Kevin Padian’s “cracked kettle” approach to biology, dogmatic Darwinists begin by imposing a narrow interpretation on the evidence and declaring it to be the only way to do science. Critics are then labeled unscientific; their articles are rejected by mainstream journals, whose editorial boards are dominated by the dogmatists; the critics are denied funding by government agencies, who send grant proposals to the dogmatists for “peer” review; and eventually the critics are hounded out of the scientific community altogether.
     In the process, evidence against the Darwinian view simply disappears, like witnesses against the Mob. Or the evidence is buried in specialized publications, where only a dedicated researcher can find it. Once critics have been silenced and counter-evidence has been buried, the dogmatists announce that there is no scientific debate about their theory, and no evidence against it. Using such tactics, defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy have managed to establish a near-monopoly over research grants, faculty appointments, and peer-reviewed journals in the United States.

Perpetuating an Entitlement Mentality

I received a letter in the mail today from the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau telling me that my response to the census will “help [my] community get its fair share of government funds”, which is to say “its fair share of” the money the government confiscates from me anyway.

I thought the point of the census was to be able to determine representation, both at the State and Federal level, to ensure that my interests were adequately protected. I didn’t know it was so that the redistribution of tax dollars could be “fair”.

 Is it “fair” to distribute the money to all communities equally based on population percentages? Is it “fair” to distribute the money based on relative income levels, so that communities with higher income levels get less (or more?) government funds?

What’s “fair”, anyway, and who determines what’s “fair”?

“Those are my government funds and I’m entitled to get them.” Yeah, right. How about, “Those are my tax dollars and I’m entitled to keep them.”

Insulation From Feedback

Here’s a three-page passage from Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, pp. 247 ff., that sums up the whole book:

Insulation From Feedback

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? In everything from avant-garde art, music, and drama to exotic animals and “radical chic” activities, the stress is on their own differentness, their specialness. A chorus of public outcry against what they are doing or advocating is not a reason to reconsider but music to their ears. To disdain “public clamor,” as it is called when court decisions are protested, is a badge of distinction. All this, of course, contributes to the sealing off of the vision of the anointed from feedback from reality.

Consistent with this pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all cost has been the adoption of a variety of anti-social individuals and groups as special objects of solicitude—which is to say, special examples of the wider and loftier vision of the anointed. From multiple murderers to smelly vagrants, these anti-social elements have been adopted as mascots, much like exotic animals. The stigmas put on these mascots by the rest of society merely provide yet another occasion for the anointed to blame society itself for failing to “solve” these people’s “problems.” Again, having committed themselves to this disdainful view of the benighted masses, the anointed have cut off their own path of retreat when evidence begins to pile up that their mascots have both richly deserved the stigmas they have received and are unlikely to be magically transformed by any of the innumerable programs and projects that the anointed have created for their benefit. Another avenue to reality is sealed off.

One symptom of divorce from the constraints of reality is the tendency to treat numbers as if they had a life of their own—for example, to make extrapolations from statistics without any serious analysis of the actual processes from which these numbers were generated. This has been common, not only in “overpopulation” projections and exhaustion-of-resources projections, but even in the claim that it is wrong to criticize the courts for the soaring crime rates that followed the criminal law revolutions of the 1960s because of “the abnormally low base from which the crime of the 1960s and early ’70s began.” In other words, these numbers were apparently due to go up anyway—not for any specific, discernible reason, anchored in reality, but simpley because they were “abnormally low.”

One could just have easily have said that the crime rate was abnormally high when the country was expanding, with a lawless frontier still being settled, and when its cities had an unprecedented growth of a crowded, polyglot population of immigrants—and that when these and other adverse influences faded over time, crime rates likewise subsided. But to say this would be to say that the numbers did not have a life of their own, but reflected actual social processes—and that in turn would suggest that the soaring crime rates which followed the judicial revolution in the criminal justice system were also a result of actual facts in the real world. but the reluctance to say that people are responsible for the consequences of their action—even in a causal sense, much less in a moral sense—is here extended to judges.

Such an approach is part of a more general pattern among those with the vision of the anointed, a pattern exemplified by the use of the word “epidemic” to describe chosen behavior, including drug use and such consequences of sexual behavior as pregnancy and AIDS. Without a sense of the tragedy of the human condition, and of the painful trade-offs implied by inherent constraints, the anointed are free to believe that the unhappiness they observe and the anomalies they encounter are due to the public’s not being as wise or as virtuous as themselves. Both their conceptions of social issues and the vocabulary in which they discuss them are pervaded by notions of “protecting” this group and “liberating” that one—in both cases, obviously from the benighted or malign actions of other people. It is a world of victims, villains, and rescuers, with the anointed cast in the last and most heroic of these roles. Thus, in this vision, the Third World is poor because the more prosperous nations have made them so, and problems within the black community are caused by the white community, women are less represented in given occupations because men keep them out—and so on and on. Alternative explanations of all these phenomena are neither lacking nor without evidence, but alternatives to the vision of the anointed are sweepingly and sneeringly dismissed.

Those with the vision of the anointed are especially reluctant to see human nature as a source of the evils they wish to eradicate. Instead, they seek special causes of particular evils. Nothing so exemplifies this approach as the perennial attempts to get at the causes—the “root causes,” as it is phrased—of crime. There seems to be no awareness that people commit crimes because they are human beings. That is, that people’s natural impulses are to favor themselves over others and to disregard the harm they create in trying to satisfy their own desires in the easiest way. If most people do not behave this way with complete shamelessness in most things, it is because they have been through a long process of becoming civilized—and because this process is buttressed by law enforcement. Civilization has been aptly called, “a thin crust over a volcano.” The anointed are constantly picking at that crust.

The dangers in a vision come not simply from the answers it gives, but from the very way it frames the questions. The concept of “income distribution,” for example, causes statistics to be looked at with certain preconceptions, so that the transient positions of individuals are seen as the enduring relationships between classes. The habit of looking at policy issues in terms of the goals they proclaim and the values they represent, not to mention the unconstrained options they assume, leads in a wholly different direction from an analysis of the incentives being created, within the constraints that exist, and the probable outcome of such incentives and constraints.

It is the intertwining of the intellect and the ego which is so dangerous in making the vision highly resistant to any facts that threaten the existing framework of beliefs and assumptions. Cultural wars are so desperate because they are not simply about the merits or demerits of particular policies. They are about the anointed’s whole conception of themselves—about whether they are in the heady role of a vanguard or in the pathetic role of pretentious and self-infatuated people.

“What’s Past Is Prologue”

From p. 156 of TOP:

Liberalism, according to Weber, means an end to illusions, including the “illusion” of human progress—along with an attitude of endurance, “endurance [in Lilge’s words] to bear the destruction of all absolutes, with no sentimental turning back or rash embrace of new faiths, only the strength to hold out in the radical though bleak veracity of a cleansed mind.” As to selecting the proper course of action, Weber told the gathering, each individual has to decide the ideals that are “right for him.” Since only questions of means, not of ends, fall within the province of science, he said, ends must be chosen subjectively, by reference to feelings.

Live-Blogging My Way Through The Ominous Parallels

I’ve been reading The Ominous Parallels off and on for about three weeks—I really need to start carving out some time to devote to it.

Several of my prior posts have been on the book; I have a couple of other posts to make on bits of it I’ve read recently. Part of the reason I’ve held back is the sense of live-blogging; another part is the fear that the book will disappoint me in the end.

I just read a passage, though, that demands a blog post of its own. This book is just full of what seem to be ominous parallels between conditions in Weimar Germany and current conditions in these United States:

The culture of Weimar Germany advocated irrational emotion. The economy demanded it. It provided conditions which allowed men no other mode of functioning.

The Republic was a mixed economy, the kind established by Bismarck and mandated by the nation’s new constitution. There was an element of economic liberty, and there were growing government controls—direct or indirect; federal, state, or municipal—over every aspect of the country’s productive life. The controls covered business, labor, banking, utilities, agriculture, housing, and much more. As a rule each new set of controls conferred benefits on some German group(s), at a cost. The cost was incurred by other groups, whose forced sacrifice paid for the benefits. The victims responded predictably.

Confronted with increasing British exactions one hundred and fifty years earlier, the American colonists did not decide to beef up their lobby in the English court; they heralded the rights of man and decided to throw off the yoke. There were no such ideas in Weimar Germany. The Germans did not question the code of sacrifice or the principle of statism. These ideas, they had been taught by every side and sect within their culture, specify how man ought to live and the only way man can live. They define the moral and the practical.

. . .

The authors of the Weimar constitution had believed that a controlled economy in the hands of a democratic government would foster peaceful cooperation among men, as against the “ruthless competition” and “war of all against all” which they held to be inherent in a free market. What the mixed economy produced instead was a ruthless competition among groups, a collectivist “war of all against all.”

. . .

Neither the warring groups nor the parties which courted them had any means to know what favors to insist on, when, or at whose expense, or when to yield to the demands of their antagonists, who also had to survive. By the nature of the system there was no principle to follow; no one could devise a rational way to divide a nation into mutually devouring segments, or an equitable way to conduct the devouring. Every group, therefore, swung at random from the role of beneficiary to that of victim and back again, according to the passions, the tears, the fears, the alliances, the front-page propaganda, the back-room deals, and the expediency of the moment.

Life, Spengler said, has “no system, no program, no reason.” It is not necessarily true of life itself. It was true of life in Germany’s mixed economy.

That kind of life has consequences. In 1923 the Germans discovered one of them.

Deceptive Advertising

I heard a commercial today hyping something called the “National Grocery Stimulus Program”; I heard another commercial today hyping a “bailout” program for credit card users.

I just love how some companies will latch onto terms in the public consciousness like “stimulus” and “bailout” to try to give themselves an aura of respectability.

It probably says just as much about the ineffective “stimulus” effect of the U.S. government’s own “bailout” programs—after all, the reason these terms are in the public consciousness is the hype given them by the mainstream media; if they worked, the media wouldn’t need to hype them.

An Apt Description

I’ve just started reading Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. I’m still in the middle of another book, so I don’t know when I’m going to read past Chapter 1, but I found something in the first chapter that seems to be an apt description of the strategy employed by the Left in hyping the AGW myth:

Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

Given that Thomas Sowell’s book was published in 1995, it’s amazing that Al Gore—and Barack Obama—can still get away with playing this game with regard to anthropogenic global warming; it’s amazing, in fact, that they can get away with playing this game at all.

How 747s are Made

I recently finished reading James Perloff's Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism.

I found the chapter titled “Dinosaurs, Dragons and Ice” to be a little far-fetched, but this was more than offset by the following chapter, titled “Trial by Hollywood”, on the differences between the movie Inherit the Wind and the actual Scopes “monkey trial”.

All in all, a pretty good book and an effective critique of the myth of Darwinian evolution.

The Mything Link

Why should anyone be surprised that the myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming turned out to be a fraud?

I’d like to know what percentage of people who think Anthropogenic Global Warming is settled science also think that the theory of Darwinian Evolution is settled science—and vice versa.

This is what happens when people allow their biases to cloud their judgment. And once people have accepted one lie, it gets progressively easier to get them to accept another and another and another.

We’re Skewed

I used to characterize my political views as “conservative centrist”. I saw myself as having political views that, while right of center, were for the most part moderate; I tend to use the terms “moderate” and “centrist” synonymously.

Recently, however, I decided that I could no longer call myself a centrist. It seemed to me from media reports that, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, centrism had left me—that is, that the normal distribution, rather than being a bell-shaped curve, had become skewed to the left, with nothing to the right anymore except a long tail.

Of course, everyone knows about the liberal bias of the mainstream media—as Bernard Goldberg says in his book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, it’s not that the mainstream media outlets are biased toward liberalism intentionally, it’s just that mainstream journalists are never exposed to anything else. Thus, I’d been able to take comfort from a recent poll showing that, “[d]espite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal.”

Now, courtesy of Andrew Thomas, comes word that Obama wants to claim the mantle of “moderate” for himself to avoid being “branded as a liberal by his own party.” As Mr. Thomas says, “If Mr. Obama is a ‘moderate’, then what is a ‘liberal’ in this brave new world?” For that matter, what is a “leftist”, a “statist”, a “socialist”, a “fascist” in this brave new world?

This from the man who claims that words matter.