Matthew Chapman’s suggestion that the presidential candidates have a debate on science is naive, idealistic, and a step in the right direction. It will never happen, because the issues of science we could talk about are not up for debate, and I don’t think any of the candidates in any party are competent to discuss them, and they know it. They won’t step into a venue where their grade-school level understanding of science will face serious challenge, or where their embarrassing misunderstandings will be publicly aired.

Now what would be feasible, I think, would be a debate on science policy. What are they going to do about getting objective science information to congress? What do they propose to do to improve science, engineering and technology education in the schools, and specifically, what are they going to do to address major failures of the school to instruct their graduates in basic concepts like evolution? What are they going to do about an alternative energy policy, and global climate change? A lot of these questions would get down to the candidate’s understanding, but I’m more concerned that my candidate has a plan to improve the public understanding of science, rather than that they know it themselves.

At the very least, Chapman suggests that the debate be led by a panel of qualified experts. This is the best idea of all. We would improve the discourse and the depth of content of these presidential sessions immeasurably by the simple step of firing the incompetent jerks who are always tapped to run these circuses: give Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer, and Random News Head #63 the axe (metaphorically would be good enough, but literally has some virtues, too). Why aren’t the candidates standing up before panels of economists, foreign policy experts, scientists, etc., and getting good questions asked of them by competent people? It would be far more informative, and it would give us a better picture of how a prospective president would handle his own shortcomings.

We have to rely on comedians to tell us the obvious.

And that’s because over the last seven years, because of the incompetence that goes by the name George Bush, we’ve become the most insecure, paranoid superpower ever. We don’t think we can get anything right anymore. We can’t take care of our own citizens after a hurricane, or plan for our wars, or maintain our infrastructure, and our celebrity rehab facilities obviously aren’t working at all.

My least favorite political/economic group is the Libertarians, so it is a wonderfully pleasant experience to watch as China Miéville takes a sharp and dismissive rhetorical blade to a Libertarian pipe-dream. He’s specifically criticizing something called the Freedom Ship, a gigantic free-floating escapist fantasy for Libertarians, in which they cruise the seas with their own closed colony of warriors for greed.

Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches–minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.–just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.

Above all, they recast their most banal avarice–the disinclination to pay tax–as a principled blow for political freedom. Not content with existing offshore tax shelters, multimillionaires and property developers have aspired to build their own. For each such rare project that sees (usually brief) life, there are many unfettered by actual existence, such as Laissez-Faire City, a proposed offshore tax haven inspired by a particularly crass and gung-ho libertarianism, that generated press interest in the mid-’90s only to collapse in infighting and bad blood; or New Utopia, an intended sea-based libertarian micro-nation in the Caribbean that degenerated with breathtaking predictability into nonexistence and scandal.

The summary is particularly sweet.

It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child’s autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance.

Well said — I think the institutionalized selfishness, petty small-mindedness, and bourgeois values run amuck of the libertarians represent the worst of America — and that finding common cause, supporting both social and economic equality, and striving for a real community of liberty (not that penny-pinching masquerading as freedom that libertarians espouse) represent the best.

(via Amardeep Singh)

(via Green Tea MN)

Here’s the true, heroic history of America:

You know this is “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”, right? Now you must check out the true, heroic recounting of the horrors faced by one of Horowitz’s neo-con speakers at the deepest pit of hell Wellesley. The girls made mean faces at her. This is cause for great fear and concern on the right: it suggests that Hamas is offering eye-rolling classes to their terrorist curriculum, and the Horowitzians cannot survive that kind of mockery.

We really are living in Roy Zimmerman’s America. I don’t think I like it much, even if it is funny.

The chemists among the readers here have probably already all heard this, but there is a bit of a flap in the American Chemical Society over Open Access publishing. It seems some within the ACS have been protesting Open Access; unsurprisingly, it seems that many of them have connections to the scientific publishing industry. I was deeply amused by the fellow who scorned open access because is it is “socialized science,” as if government support of science were bad, and as if we weren’t all dependent on the largesse of state and federal government support. Oh, if only we could return to the days when all scientists were either wealthy men of leisure who could afford to be gentlemen scholars, or they were captains of industry using the fruits of their laboratories to immediately produce commerce-generating applications!

I’ve put the full text of letters I’ve received about this below the fold. Have fun plumbing the practical sociology of science!

[Read more…]

Perhaps Barack Obama really wants to make sure I won’t vote for him. At least, that’s how I’m interpreting his attempts to couple environmentalism and religion.

Meeting the threat of global climate change will take hard work and faith, Obama said.

“Not a blind faith, not a faith of mere words, not a faith that ignores science, but an active searching faith,” said Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ. “It’s a faith that does not look at the hardship and pain and suffering in the world and use it all as an excuse for inaction or cynicism, but one that accepts the fact that although we are not going to solve every problem here on earth, we can make a difference.”

I don’t even know what the hell he means. Meeting the threat of global climate change will take hard work, but faith? What does faith contribute to it? And then the rest is just noise. You don’t need a searching faith, since there’s nothing to search, and no criterion for deciding when you’ve found something — just make it all up. Tossing in irrelevant nonsense about using faith in an endeavor that requires real-world solutions is just an annoyance, and makes me suspect he’s going to waste a lot of effort if he gets into office. We do not need faith-based science.

Then there’s another issue: linking himself with evangelical Christianity means he’s automatically going to be allying himself with anti-gay bigotry. He has since rejected the position, but face it — he’s going to be hauling a lot of baggage along with him on this issue.

Here’s the only stance I’d like to see from any of the candidates: they can say they’re devout, that they believe in god and all that stuff, but that it’s a personal issue that they keep in the home and in their church, and off the campaign trail, and in particular, out of their political office. Can we please get at least one candidate stating that they are running for a secular political office and all that matters is their natural, material qualifications and plans? I can’t vote for a candidate who’s running on the platform that ghosts are on his side.