How else can you explain why those adorable screaming moonbats at the Daily Kos have come up with a science book? I’m kind of dismayed that good science has become a partisan issue, but don’t blame us—our side puts out stuff like Kosmos: You Are Here, while the righties seem to have a surfeit of Lotts and Bethells.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Well, the book probably *is* better than the nonsense that Bethell, et al put out, and I’m a big fan of community produced projects like Wikipedia and (apparently) this Kosmos e-book. But $18 for an e-book? A *community* produced e-book?
And for $50, you get this complementary “Daily Kos” mug and daypack.
Yeah, maybe that is a better way of thinking of it — as a premium that you get for donating to Daily Kos rather than something you are actually buying.
As for the proposition in the title for this post: this hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when the left was typified by the disciples of Ramtha and other “channeled” entities, or entranced by astrology, herbalism, crystal power, or other affronts to the the corporate orthodoxy. (Of course, I’m probably biased by spending most of my time on the left coast.) But the divorce between the current party in power and empiricism wasn’t finalized until the late ’90s. Somewhat later, folks from la-la land were spooked by the War on Terror into fealty to that power (such that Ramtha has now transmuted into Rambo). Forget the fundies; it’s the aging new-agers that have gone wingnut.
Idlemind, that’s an amusing thought in some regards, perhaps because I land on the opposite side of that, somebody who swallowed a lot of the New Age stuff in High School, but jumped hard away from it. I think you’re probably right in what you say, but I think there’s also a secondary current of those you end up rejecting all the mysticism and end up leaving la-la land.
I’m not sure if it brings with it a pull to the left by definition, but with times being what they are it may include one.
In my experience the woo has been pretty evenly divided between “left” and “right”. And I’ve had decades of experience.
I don’t think the neocons are responsible to the rift between the Republican party and realism. Their foreign policy is certainly very idealistic, but they share too many characteristics with idealistic liberals for it to have been certain for them to go to the GOP.
Without having read Chris Mooney, I’ll conjecture that it’s the rise of Christian fundamentalism that is to blame. Christian fundamentalists essentially coopted the tactics of the radical left: consciousness raising groups, a single-villian ideology, direct action, collective political action, academic subversion, and so on. Only the religious right didn’t have to coordinate feminists, gay rightists, racial egalitarians, unionists, and pacifists, so it’s much more effective than the radical left ever was. Indifference to reality is a natural byproduct of that modus operandi; to the fanatic, realism is simply an elaborate conspiracy of The Enemy.