Pseudo-Science The Right Likes and Pseudo-Science The Left Likes Is Sometimes Just About The Same Science

One of the worst things about an ignorance of science while holding that science is the very embodiment of all that is good and great and wonderful, the ultimate source of knowledge and progress, is that it leads to uncritical acceptance of anything that gets the label SCIENCE attached to it.  "Science" as a category in the wider society, isn't a methodology invented to increase the chances that what is presented is of enhanced reliability,  it isn't a rigorous practice of controlled and rigorously reviewed research, it is a slogan, a sort of trade mark.

Even among science journalists as good as Chris Mooney can be, the emotional attachment to science can override what they know science requires.  In his case I suspect it isn't unrelated to the ideological involvement he has had with the atheist promotion unit, Center for Inquiry.  Though I do respect some of his work, especially his books, and he has shown he is able to exercise some critical judgement, in other cases that seems to give way as he looks at that word "science" on the label and critical judgement stops*.

But Chris Mooney is certainly far more knowledgeable than most of the sci-ranger scribblers for the online magazines, many of them, also, with a professional attachment to CFI and other Kurtz originated groups, and even some without that. Many of them are engaged primarily in the promotion of their latest celeb-sci-guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson or some other cable TV sci-shows.  Most of those don't share either Mooney's dedication to research or have anywhere near his appreciation of what science is supposed to be and what it is not.  Chris Mooney is, after all, a journalist of the kind who actually does some research, something I'd never accuse most of them of being. Though, as I said, he does have some of the same blind spots his journalistic colleagues do, some of them only have blind spots.

There is an article on Salon by Paul Rosenberg this week, pushing the same pseudo-scientific paper, produced by three political scientists, not even real scientists, that Chris Mooney was promoting a couple of weeks ago.  It insists that there are differences in the brains of "conservatives" that make them different from "liberals" and that those are to an extent, innate, genetic.  I noted some huge problems with that idea, not the least of which is that the definition of what a "conservative" or "liberal" is changes over time and that people change their political identity, quite often.  Attributing political differences to differences in the physical organ, the brain, is entirely in line with materialist ideology, it doesn't match the known reality of what political position is in real life, in the MINDS of real people.

If Mooney and Rosenberg had stated it unfashionably, that there were differences in THE MINDS of liberals and conservatives, they could have avoided the problems with pretending that was a physical difference with biological and even genetic causes brings but they'd have violated the code of materialism that you must always pretend to have reduced a problem to a physical cause.  Of course, the observation that the minds of conservatives and liberals aren't the same is hardly news, it's what constitutes an actual difference that the imaginary act of positioning them on an imaginary line notes. So, no publishable article stating that fact.   In the case of Rosenberg it also would save him from the potentially embarrassing explanation of how he squares what he promotes in this week's article with one he posted TWO DAYS EARLIER!,  Right wing’s worst nightmare: The master stroke that turns red states blue.  Apparently he thinks it's easier to change a state's collective "brain" than it would be to change an individual conservative's brain.  Or something like that.   I'm having a really hard time coming to an understanding of how his "brain" could have produced those two articles within two days.

The thinking of the science scribbling community on this stuff would seem to be rather muddled, though I don't think there is a physiological or genetic explanation for that.   I think their even more ignorant or indifferent editors and publishers don't much care what they write as long as people click on it.  So, it's a purely profit motivated phenomenon, in the end, not different in kind from the pseudo-science that the extraction industries push because the real science of climate change is unprofitable for them, just far less catastrophic in the short and long term.

And there is far worse on even the high end magazines of the alleged and even the real left that shows that it is no less gullible about what science is and what it isn't, what is and isn't science.  Both sides have science it rejects and science it adores, in the case of biological determinism, both sides seem to buy that, though for different reasons.**

*  I've noticed one area, GMO foods, where a suspicious number of people related to CFI and other Paul Kurtz originated groups are really big proponents of GMO and the clear online effort to suppress criticism of it.   It's pretty clear that there is paid trolling of comment threads on that issue and, since there is enormous money to be made by GMO corporations, I believe they are funding the suppression of the criticism.  I believe Chris Mooney has entirely more integrity than to push a position for his own profit but I suspect he has been influenced by the AstroTurf propaganda and coersion.  Though it might just be that he has a blind spot when it comes to genetics as popularly understood these days.

**  My comment on Rosenberg's "brain" article.

This article is an example of how as liable what is identified as "the left" is to buy into pseudo-science as "the right" is.  This is junk science at its worst, beginning by coming up with phony definitions of "things" that aren't really things, two alleged political positions and pretending to use that to create "different brains" and some kind of genetic basis for those.  Since the first "thing" produced by those "genes" isn't really a thing but an intentionally manufactured construct, the "genes" aren't really there.  Neither are the "different brains", even easier to debunk because 1. political positioning isn't fixed in any individuals life but is liable to real and effective change, 2. the definition of what is "conservative" and what is "liberal" changes over time.  Free speech absolutism used to be the reserve of liberals who wanted to overturn laws banning pornography, now it's used by the far right on the Supreme Court and by corporate funded lawyers to overturn the largely liberally adopted campaign finance laws.

This is as totally pseudo-scientific as scientific racism, sharing with it many of the same bad habits of thought, and even more so eugenics, two things that are generally believed today are "conservative" attributes, though plenty of those considered "liberal" and "modernistic" explicitly advocated both scientific racism and eugenics.  Such "liberal" icons as Karl Pearson (who certainly should have known better) George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence (both early advocates of gassing "biologically inferior people",  H. G. Wells (an enthusiast of racial genocide in the name of progress) and up to today with people like Watson and Crick, both of whom were flagrant eugenicists and scientific racists.

It is really troubling how attaching the label "science" to stuff like this that is such obvious pseudo-science, making reference to genetics and made up scenarios under natural selection, the very basis of eugenics that got millions killed in the last century, sells it to people on the alleged left with the same ease similar junk has been sold to the alleged right.  Only, people who have bought that junk aren't nearly as different as they like to believe they are.  As proven by those two alleged political adversaries, representing the imaginary "right" and "left" ends of the imaginary spectrum during their time, Hitler and Stalin both produced what were among the greatest mass murders in history.  Those bodies are what really determines their political positioning, those are real, the stories and alleged biological differences they depended on were entirely imaginary.