Also, it is interesting that no one has mentioned the name which used to be synonymous with politically motivated bad science – T. Lysenko.

Having read the comments in this and the other sections of this project, I have enjoyed reading them, but I am not overly impressed with the arguments that the Republicans are waging war on science. It’s a nice sound bite, but not supportable by any research methodology that would pass muster in the natural sciences. It seems to me that a real problem is one of people who bring their politics into their science. This applies on both sides of the political spectrum, and it is why weprobably should be somewhat skeptical of reports issued by scientists paid by any organization with a stake in the outcome. That applies to scientists employed by natural resource extration companies as much as it does to those who are paid by Friends of the Earth or the Sierra Club.

All attempts to manipulate science to support political motives should be condemned.

“Levitt fiasco”???? Oh right, John Lott totally debunked his work. Give me a break.

I dont know or care much about Lott. Levitt’s work has been debunked by Steve Sailer and later Foote and Goetze.

The “fiasco” I refer to was the way in which mainstream intellectuals, including CT’s, were overawed by Levitt’s cocksure attitude and headline-making claims. Possibly because they were impressed by his celeberity status. Or perhaps because they secretly agreed with Levitt’s implicitly eugenic proposal that the best way to cut US crime was to indiscriminately mete out pre-natal capital punishment to a whole cohort of African-Americans.

Jack do you actually believe that Levitt is a “politicised anti-scientist”?

No. But the Left-of-Centre pro-abortion Crooked-Timbers were practising mildly “politicised science” by giving Levitt’s manifest errors a free pass.

Both the Right and the Left oppose parts of the Darwinian theory of evolution that are politically inconvenient. The Right’s spiritual creationists oppose Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the genesis and development of organic life. The Left’s social constructivists oppose Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the adaptive differentiation of human minds.

I think that the CT’s are in danger of making the same sort of error again with the RWOS seminar. By focusing solely on the Right’s War On Science they give a free pass to the Left’s War On Science.

The LWOS is mainly waged against Darwinian socio-biology. This is less politically damaging than the RWOS. But it is more intellectually damaging in the long-run since it is waged on campus, which affects the minds of all future opinion makers.

That’s blatantly racist pseudo-science Sailer is spouting there.

Jack do you actually believe that Levitt is a “politicised anti-scientist”?

One should also add to that list the Bush admins headline foreign policy adventure in Iraq. Within the US government most non-partisan foreign policy professional experts opposed the War, basicly on scientific-logistic grounds.

Although, to be fair, there was a special faction of Right Wingers dubbed “Republicans who know what they are talking about” who based their opposition to Iraq war on social scientific and realistic foreign policy grounds. Steve Sailer has been an insistent critic of the Bush Republican party’s opposition to the reality-based community. He likens the Bush Republicans to post-modern deconstructionists.

The Foucault-ification of Republican ideologues continues apace. In French postmodern thought, there’s no such thing as “truth,” just power. More and more, Bush is dependent upon “Fundamentalist Post-Modernism,” the belief that belief is all that matters and that reality is trivial compared to having a positive mental attitude.

…the mood of the country seems to be moving increasingly toward what I call Christian post-modernism: the feeling that reality is less important than thinking positive thoughts, that problems don’t so much exist in the real world as merely in the heads of those awful, negative-thinking cynics. They are the real problem!

Increasingly, that way of thinking is popular among the more frenzied defenders of the Iraq Attaq. Thus, the WSJ is outraged that the Niger Yellowcake hoax wasn’t “investigated” by a gung ho Republican fanatic who would have reported back exactly what the WSJ wanted to hear.

Look, guys, the President has already admitted that Wilson was telling the truth—we got pranked by forged documents. (Of course, I am as shocked as you are that all communications from Africans purporting to be high government officials with interesting deals to discuss might not be completely on the up and up.) It’s time to pull yourselves out of your deconstructionist death spiral.

Bush’s contempt for science is shown by his appointment of a Democrat as science policy adviser.

the official science advisor for the last three years has been John H. Marburger III, a Democrat. Since Bush is the most postmodern President ever, in that he doesn’t believe in truth, just political will, you can see from the science advisor’s party registration the high priority Bush places on the job.

All this led Sailer to call this period of US political history The Heroic Age of Epistemology:

Between CBS’s dogged defense of their apparently forged documents and the Republican Convention’s repeated conflation of the War on Terror with the actual War in Error in Iraq, American elites appear to have entered into a collaboration to prove Foucault right: that power and the will to impose one’s interpretation are all-important and that “truth” is obsolete in our post-modern era.

I suspect, however, that reality gets the last laugh.

The Bush admins opposition to politically inconvenient sci-tech is not of purely intellectual interest. The US government is by far and away, measured by assets and income, the most powerful and wealthy corporation in the world.

This has immense social consequences, particularly in the area of ecological and technological policy, where the Bushies are definitely running a political agenda.

But I would take the non-Right’s criticism of the Bush admins anti-science political agenda more seriously if the critics were prepared to direct the same criticism towards the anti-scientific Left. Over the past generation the academic Left has placed a heavy blanket of censorship on the application of Darwinian socio-biological analysis to human beings. This does not have immediate political consequences. But it does discredit the Left’s ostensible committement to rational science and free speech.

Chris Mooney, a moderate Leftist, is willing to concede this point.

Let’s be fair: those on the political left have undoubtedly abused science in the past….groups have occasionally allowed ideology to usurp fact…In fact, in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses. But they are almost never as guilty as the Right.topics such as the genetic underpinnings of human behavior have often gone unstudied out of a “general left-of-center sensibility that anything having to do with genes is bad.”

Remember, in the Levitt fiasco you guys got your fingers burned by overly gung-ho acceptance of a head-line thesis. So come on Crooked-Timbers, lets make a full confession and see some ideological even handedness in denunciations of politicised anti-scientists.

Thanks for the links, and I had heard about the effectiveness of the ‘insecticide treated netting’ for combating malaria, but have also heard from some missionaries in Africa that the frustration is that when given free netting (treated), the netting ends up being sold in the open marketplace. Some being so destitute that food for the next meal trumps the threat of a possible mosquito bite.

Bro. Bartleby

(which means I missed my chance to comment on the Nebulas—I wanted to weigh in in support of Spin!)

In any event, the likes of “Red Earth, White Lies” hardly make any impact outside of some parts of academia, as well as radical Greens, deep ecologists and the like. However, the right-wing anti-science types are mainstream and hold power in the US - unlike the deep ecologists. This is why the Republican war on science is a threat and Deloria is not.