Month: May 2010

How To Be a Denialist in Ten Easy Steps

In the latest New Scientist they cover the ever blooming fields of denialism that popped up everywhere or that bloomed anew in the first decade of the new millennium. One of their references is an important paper from Martin Mckee, and it’s at the European Journal of Public Health.
Here are his main points on how to be a denialist, I’ve expanded some bullets where I believe Martin conflated two separate tactics in the Denialist Arsenal.

  1. Allege that there’s a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
  2. Use fake experts to support your story. “Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility,” says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut.
  3. Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest.
  4. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
  5. Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more.
  6. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
  7. Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi.
  8. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
  9. Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature.
  10. Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected.

Simple but Eloquent Proofs of our Common Ancestry

Science uses some of the SINEs and LINEs of our times to track our common ancestry, and determine some of what had to be true of your evolution and mine.

Our great national shame is that only Turkey has lower belief in the science of evolution than we do. We can not hope to maintain our lead in science, technology and to keep our pre-eminence as a world power if this ignorance continues  far into this century.

Two Moons

The moon’s been rising in the wee hours of the morning so instead of staying up overnight to catch it I am snapping it in the am before it sets. These two were taken with a Canon Rebel XTI, and a Canon Rebel T2I equipped with a 70-300mm EF-S lens. They’ve been cropped down and optimized a bit for the web, but you can still detect the difference between the 10.1 Mpxl and 18.0 Mpxl cameras.

Arizona Illegal Immigration Law Fixed

…and how I stopped being a tool.

In  a last minute move after seeing a huge media and blog outcry Arizona has altered the vague sections of their Immigrant law that were crafted by a hate group lawyer, and now it’s more reasonable. Indeed, it’s something similar to what I suggested in 2006.

Lawmakers on Thursday night changed the language to require scrutiny only of people who police stop, detain or arrest. They also changed a section of the bill that barred officers from “solely” using race as grounds for suspecting someone is in the country illegally; opponents had argued that that would allow race to be a factor. The legislators removed the word “solely” to bar race from being used by officers enforcing the law.

Note that since that 2006 post and others like it, I’ve moved more to the center on immigration. I’ve seen it become the wedge that split the Republicans apart as I predicted, and I saw moderates leave and extremist groups like the Birchers swarm in to fill that vacuum. Here’s something else I wrote along that path – the more I researched the less I could support the Xenophobic fears driving the debate.

If treatment of the illegals is too harsh this will backfire as well. Many who feel firm now will quail before the hordes of MSM and liberal deportation horror stories to come. For make no mistake, in many cases enforcing this will drive a wedge into one of conservativism’s key values: Family Unity. Some families will be torn apart. The father or mother will be deported — so whatever the outcome of the conference committee two major conservative values will clash. With that said I refer you back to the quote at the start, and remind you that in the end all problems are solvable if one factor is patience, and the other persistence.

It was after this — when I saw large segments of the party really turn on Bush, McCain, Graham and others that I realized this this was the issue that would split us. I saw partisans full of bile attacking Republicans harder than any Demagogue from the Democrats would and began to research. My queasiness about recognizing the need for immigration just due to the sheer demographics of the aging baby boomers (who is going to care for and nurse all of the gray hairs in a few short years? ) turned to outright alarm when I saw that many of the cheerleaders, like Michelle Malkin, were aligned with Peter Brimelow and the Pat Buchanan tea cup racist crowd at the odious VDARE site. I began to realize that “Culture” and “Identity” weren’t just code words for the Eurofascists, they were code words for the racists here as well.

Do you suspect some of the legislators in Arizona started looking into things like Kris Kobach’s background and actually realized what tools they had been, like I did? I can only hope so.