Monday, January 11, 2016

Sciency Is the Truthy of the Lefty Left

Well, I'd expected that most of the people who read what I write would realize that when I use the word "sciency" that I'm playing off Steve Colbert's brilliant and accurate neologism, "truthy".   Something that is truthy isn't the truth but you feel like it should be  Something that is sciency is something that feels like science but it isn't.  I'm not sure if I was the first person to use the word but when I use it, it's to refer to the moderny stuff that's truthy but in the guise of scientific thinking.  Or, since so much of the science which is in fact not science but merely sciency is just an assertion of materialism in the gaps of knowledge,  it's really that at a deeper level.  And it is the nearly ubiquitous pose of being modern and scientific and objective and logical and rational that permeates the intellectual lives of those with a college education today, few of whom are willing to practice the rigor to actually back up the pose with substance of any substance.

I suspect that as a politically active and native Mainer I'm more aware of the politics that resulted in Paul LePage than a bunch of guys from the middle-Atlantic states, the Pacific North West and Canadians who wannabe Staters.  I've only been following the politics of my state for the past sixty years. Believe me, I know what was behind such stupid ideas as easy ballot access, third party and independent candidacies and the guys and gals who proposed and adopted those idiotic measures that led to a series of the worst governors in our history were very sciency when they talked it up.  Much of it was couched in that most emblematic of all sciency sciences, sociology.  I've known some of them, I've met more of them.   Lots of them were careerists who would never let real economic justice and real equality get in the way of their own professional advancement.  And they have yet to show that they've learned from the disasters that their previous "reforms" have led to. There's a lot of that on the "left" which is lefty but not a real left.  The refusal to learn from real life instead of a line of logical bilge is one of the emblematic features of scienciness. 

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