While listening to today's broadcast of On Point with Tom Ashbrook on NPR I encountered that feeling libertarians and conservatives occasionally get when listening to members of the political left.
The show was on falling vaccine rates as a result of the anti-vacc movement. As the first guest reporter Michael Booth said, the anti-vacc movement is not contained within a single political group. It encompasses both drum circle dregs on the left and compound-dwelling crazies on the right.
Still, both the anti-vacc callers on the show were from the left. As Booth said, they tend to be considered "well-informed," which really means they read a lot of things online and went to college at some point.
Listening to them talk I realized that Alice and Kilea make perfect examples for my friends on the left to feel what it's like to listen to a silly progressive blowhard who has no idea what they're talking about, such as an English professor who speaks about Marxism or a women's studies major who talks about how to change tax rates.
It's not merely a case of the speakers being wrong, but that the speakers are so in love with their own irrelevant credentials while saying something grossly ignorant. They keep insisting they are right because they are smart.
If you want to see what that feeling is like, jump to 17:20 where Alice introduces herself as a "well-educated individual" then to 17:15 where she brags about her binder full of anti-vacc studies as if it means something.
Kilea startes out the same way, saying at 28:45 that "I'm well-educated" then describes herself as "well-informed and well-educated." This is just before she starts talking about her love of herbal supplements and homeopathy.
At 33:50 Kilea says that the solution is for everyone to get together and incorporate her phony beliefs into modern medicine, much the way anti-capitalists believe their mere existence warrants means their views need to be incorporated into changes to the financial system.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what it feels like.
By the way, before any conservative readers laugh to hard, this is also what its like to listen to anti-global warming advocates speak. That binder full of Internet research didn't help Alice, and it doesn't help you.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
How it feels to disagree with left wingers
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I have to disagree with the last part. I'm just not convinced that global warming,(to the extent that there even is any) is our But whether it is or isn't our baby, I'm leery of advocating 'solutions' that are hideously expensive and often unreliable (wind turbines), not to mention the ones that are simply impractical (electric cars).
ReplyDeleteThe last thing I'll give you is this: none of the models have been used to successfully predict a damn thing. That isn't science, it's voodoo.
Nate, I think a lot of the "solutions" to global warming are bad ideas, like wind turbines. Too often people make a false dichotomy between doing nothing and doing a specific proposed solution.
ReplyDeleteThat still doesn't excuse people who act like global warming isn't real. It is, and the evidence is clear that man-made causes play a significant role.
Until they can produce a model that can make accurate predictions, it isn't evident at all. It's become the "science of the gaps".
ReplyDeleteI tend to side with Fellows on this one. Climate science, while a worthwhile concern and endeavor, has quickly devolved into an incestuous, politically-maintained hokum.
ReplyDeleteI'm not (and I don't think Fellows is) claiming that man-made global warming ISN'T a thing. But, until there are truly open minds tackling the issue and a transparent, authentic peer-review system for the research (let's not act like there currently is), I'm not ready to trust this set of experts. And, as said above, if they can't produce an even mildly valuable model, they clearly don't understand the complexities of the climate system well enough to be making the claims that have become intellectual pretense in American culture.
I tend to side with Fellows on this one. Climate science, while a worthwhile concern and endeavor, has quickly devolved into an incestuous, politically-maintained hokum.
ReplyDeleteI'm not (and I don't think Fellows is) claiming that man-made global warming ISN'T a thing. But, until there are truly open minds tackling the issue and a transparent, authentic peer-review system for the research (let's not act like there currently is), I'm not ready to trust this set of experts. And, as said above, if they can't produce an even mildly valuable model, they clearly don't understand the complexities of the climate system well enough to be making the claims that have become intellectual pretense in American culture.
That's pretty well exactly where I am on the issue.
ReplyDeleteThere are just too many holes that don't seem to have fillers. They put up model after model, each one as inadequate as the last, just more so.
Maybe global warming is 100% man made, maybe it is 100% natural, maybe it's a just a scientific equivalent of the 'boogieman', a story told to keep little scientists under the covers at night, frankly, I don't care. What I do care about is what is, and is not, science, and if someone is demanding action and making claims, they need to do more, they need to make predictions, and those predictions need to come true, until they can manage that they are the ones emulating the anti-vac crowd, not I.
At least if science, as a word, still has the meaning it is claimed to have.