Correcting some misapprehensions…

Some people have taken blogroll amnesty day the wrong way—or perhaps it has been used in the wrong way. Jon Swift registers the impression that this was an undemocratic purge that simply re-enthroned the same old elites and tossed the little guys on the scrapheap.

But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself [Atrios]. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. “Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they’re hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list,” he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus’ General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling. Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. “It sucks and it feels bad,” he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios’ Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

Uh-oh. This is precisely the antithesis of why I thought the amnesty was a good idea: we shouldn’t take the A-listers for granted and just put them on the list because everyone else does, but should instead critically evaluate all of them. I like Atrios’s site, for instance, and browse it regularly because he seems to be an excellent and responsive weathervane for issues that might be of interest to me…but it’s all those smaller sites that put a little more care into more substantive or quirkier posts that I appreciate more.

For instance, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo thought I’d dropped him in the revamp. No way, man—that’s a much more fun site to read on lefty political issues than what Atrios does. Besides, I’ve got the t-shirt. I think that means we’re in a committed relationship at this point. Oh, and Skippy, I’ve never been on Atrios’s or Kos’s blogrolls myself—we’re just going to have to settle for each other.

I should also explain that Jon Swift has the wrong impression of my blogroll policy. It isn’t quite as brutal as he supposes; I’m extremely liberal about adding new blogs to it, and although I do drop blogs that are abandoned by their owners for a month or more, I’m also quick to add brand new ones that I find, and do so on at least a weekly basis. That’s how my complete blogroll has grown to 405 blogs at last count (and which I could never handle without my NetNewsWire to manage everything).

I have and always will consider linking to be a way to break out of stale hierarchies, and I hope no one gets the idea that I would want to use them to lock out fresh ideas.

Evolution is bad, so stars can’t possibly evolve

It isn’t just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of “stellar evolution”. She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics and astronomy.

It just goes to show that there’s something about the word “evolution” that unhinges these kooks. Everyone does know that biological evolution and stellar evolution are completely unrelated processes that don’t share any mechanisms, right?

Is WingNutDaily actually a parody site?

I have to ask the question because by all my usual measures of whether something is satire (criteria like excess, and advancement of stupidity that no one in their right mind would espouse), it ought to be regarded as a humor site. Having Pat Boone writing on science, for instance, ought to be a dead giveaway, and now we’ve got Chuck Norris weighing in on the appropriate qualifications for the presidency. Now if he’d said, “the ability to kick someone in the face while they’re standing in front of you,” I’d have this pegged as a humor piece. But noooo. His requirements that our president be “wise” and a “good Christian”, pedestrian and merely brainless ideas.

Where he makes me wonder, though, is that in weighing those two values, he comes up with one good candidate: one individual who personifies wisdom and Christian values.

Newt Gingrich.

I think he was trying to match The Onion.

Reality is a constituency

Alan Sokal—who has a history of criticizing the irrational Left—and Chris Mooney—who has come down hard on the anti-science Right—have teamed up to write an op-ed that makes suggestions to keep both sides from falling into the same trap again.

I think the root cause of the problem is that we have a democracy in which education is an insufficiently high priority, and either party can succumb to the temptation of going for votes by appealing to the most uneducated segment of the electorate. The Republican party has thrived in the past by going the other way, and building its base in the wealthy elite (which, unfortunately, has no certainty of being coupled to reason and education); they’ve long since learned that religion is a handy bridge to get votes from the most irrational side of the population, and have ridden the crazy train to power.

Democrats have long been populists, but I suspect that the focus on labor has at least grounded the party in practical concerns. That focus is fading away fast, and I worry that in an attempt to rebuild a solid majority they are also going to cast a covetous eye on the religious masses (hence my reluctance to support Barack Obama) and get there in the wrong way.

Sokal and Mooney propose some top-down safeguards against the further encroachment of anti-science bias into government. These are good ideas.

To address this new crisis over the relationship between science and politics, we propose a combination of political activism and institutional reform. Congress needs to establish safeguards to protect the integrity of scientific information in Washington — strong whistle-blower protections for scientists who work in government agencies would be a good start.

We also need a strengthening of the government scientific advisory apparatus, starting with the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment. And we need congressional committees to continue with their investigations of cases of science abuse within the Bush administration, in order to learn what other reforms are necessary.

At the same time, journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence. For, in the end, all of us — conservative or liberal, believer or atheist — must share the same real world. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us. As physicist Richard Feynman wrote in connection with the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “nature cannot be fooled.”

To avoid nature’s punishment, we must take steps now to restore reality-based government.

I’d just add that we also need more bottom-up preventive measures: more education. I want a reality-based government, and the best way to get there is to increase the pool of reality-based voters.

(Crossposted to The American Street)