Please, please, please…I want to cast my vote for Al Franken in 2008, and I want him to be my representative in the Senate.
Why don’t our official news media ever dig into the truth as plainly as our comedians?
Pianka speaks out. Nick Matzke has a good post on Pianka at the Thumb, addressing the smear campaign against him*. He links to an interview with the good Dr—what he’s saying is simple sense, common in the biological community, and he’s not endorsing mass murder…he’s talking about conservation and planning ahead. Mims is a “crazy kook” who distorted the story and turned it into screaming match.
Get used to it. This is part of the right-wing strategy to attack the academy: when scientists honestly state bad news (and there is much bad news, and it’s growing), they are going to be rabidly accused of all kinds of outrageous crimes. It’s the new McCarthyism. The majority of us do not support short-sighted policy, we don’t endorse jingoism, we are going to urge people to think before acting, we are going to predict the consequences of bad policy, and we are generally going to be critical of demagogues and fools…and that is being treated as a crime.
*Quite unlike the situation with Paul Mirecki; I can’t help but interpret this to mean you’re going to be left twisting in the wind if the right-wing mobs try to lynch you, and you admit you’re godless.
The Pianka situation is getting very, very ugly. I’ve been chatting with a member of the Texas Academy of Science, and people there are getting death threats over it. Here’s one example of the kind of email they’re getting:
I’m getting some email requests to state my opinion on some claims by Forrest M. Mims. Mims attended a talk by Eric Pianka, in which he claims Pianka advocated the “slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings.” I wasn’t there, and I don’t know exactly what was said, but I will venture a few opinions and suggestions.
Everyone is going to be there now—Duncan Black is going, so are the Firedoglakers, and oh, yeah, me. Not yet in the press releases is the fact that the lovely Dr. Mrs. Gjerness Myers will also be attending. It’s going to be quite a crowd at the Yearly Kos. Anyone else joining the gang?
There will be so many of us, I don’t think we’ll need to worry too much about the blustering wingnuts showing up with ax handles (by the way, don’t these right wing kooks ever consider the meaning of their words? Or is it intentional?)
Now if only it were being held in an interesting place. At least there is one spectacle I’m going to have to try to make time to see.
Gosh, and skippy, too.
What the Wege says.
There’s a new Carnival of the Liberals online, in which I am reminded that yours truly is hosting this one on 12 April. So, like, ummm, go read it, get some ideas, and start sending me links.
There is a most excellent online seminar on Mooney’s Republican War on Science going on over at Crooked Timber. The usual gang is reviewing it, with the addition of the inestimable Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. Wait a minute…Steve Fuller? That Steve Fuller? Steve Fuller. Steve Fuller!
Jebus.
I saw some glimmers of some interesting ideas at the start of Fuller’s ultimately long-winded essay, but they expired even before he started defending the “positive programme behind intelligent design theory” and collapsed into tired pro-creationism mode. When he called George Gilder and Bruce Chapman “technoscience sophisticates”, two people who know no biology and are proud of it, yet rail against basic evolutionary biology, I gave up. I don’t know what a contemptible pseudoscientific poseur like Fuller is doing in there, actually—maybe they should have invited Tom Bethell or some similar anti-science crank in, to give even better balance.
Oh, well. You can skip over that one. The rest of the online seminar is much more sensible.
I’ve been at my local DFL convention all morning, and I think I need some caffeine to scour my brain out a little bit. I don’t think I’m temperamentally suited to politics—too much nitpicking and finagling. But I’m very glad to see we’ve got people here who are willing to do the hard work.
Ben Domenech has imploded.
That didn’t take long.
Domenech has posted his excuses. Basically, he’s claiming that the plagiarism didn’t count because it happened when he was younger, that the WaPo editors “are convinced by my arguments on many of these issues”, and that he’s only resigning because of the “firestorm”. As is typical, he’s making rationalizations to avoid simply taking responsibility. And then there’s this nonsense:
But all these specifics are beside the point. Considering that all of this happened almost eight years ago, and that there are no files or notes that I’ve kept from that brief stint, it is simply my word against the liberal blogosphere on these examples. It becomes a matter of who you believe.
But for a really gagworthy comment, try this:
To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.
Oh, yeah. He took a bullet…for America!
Scumbag.
Hey, now he’s got something else (besides exhibiting excessive hubris that gets him fired from a job he acquired through Rethuglican connections) in common with George Deutsch: he never graduated from his college. Isn’t it symptomatic of a movement in trouble that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel, grabbing young, unseasoned incompetents and stuffing them into positions for which they are unsuited and unprepared, except perhaps by their ideological leanings?
I worry that these are just the ones who are getting caught. How many young wingnut incompetents are settling into positions of power right now?
