This post on the Republican war on science was chilling enough, but did you really have to draw the logical conclusion of it all at the end? I'm trying hard to preserve the tattered shreds of my optimistic state of denial, you know.
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Curious - the War on Terror requires that the electorate be made as frightened as possible of things that actually pose them little risk. At the same time, politicians need people not to be afraid of the things that actually threaten them, because appropriate fear will produce a desire for appropriate change.
Scientists, whose primary purpose is to distinguish reality from unreality, are serious obstacles for those two goals.
It's not a good time to be a scientist in America.
"Scientists, whose primary purpose is to distinguish reality from unreality, are serious obstacles for those two goals.
It's not a good time to be a scientist in America."
Waiting for V to happen, where scientists are marched off to camps.
These days too often if I don't make with the bitter mock, I got nothing.
Also, it helps limit the number of holes found in the walls of my apartment at the end of the day.
Sorry.
I found it slightly interesting, incidentally, that on the Times website, last night when I found it, it was a small item, low down, albeit on the front page. This morning they moved it up to the top headline. (Frankly, I might not have blogged it if it had been that way last night, as I tend to think it's superfluous for me to blog an item given that level of prominence, though no regrets, of course.)
I suppose that I'll add this as an addendum, now that I've written it down.
Huh. Just saw via Meet The Press that Bob Woodruff, one of the three recently-named anchors of ABC News has gotten blown up in Baghdad, and is in surgery. That's going to get a lot of attention.
People adapt to changing technologies and awareness of methods of influence. Senator McCarthy was taken down because his methods weren't suited for television broadcast. Now that it's common for politicians to be televised, their strategies incorporate or even rely upon it.
Marching scientists off to camps would alarm even the least-aware and most-apathetic individuals. Leaving document trails is incriminating. I don't expect to see obvious evidence that scientists are being "leaned on" to produce only the desired results.
Do we know if anyone has tried to claw at Bush's or Cheney's face to see if there's a lizard underneath?
Gary... huh?
"I found it slightly interesting, incidentally, that on the Times website, last night when I found it, it was a small item, low down, albeit on the front page. This morning they moved it up to the top headline."
That's because it was published in today's paper. Check it out. The Times, like many other papers, will post stories before they appear in print on their Web site -- usually late the day before or early in the morning -- then move them up to correspond what's in the printed edition. Look elsewhere for conspiracies, my friend.
"Marching scientists off to camps would alarm even the least-aware and most-apathetic individuals." I'm not so sure about that anymore. The "What are scientists afraid of/what are they trying to hide?" mentality is pretty pervasive, I'm afraid.
The Fox News audience has particularly had years of indoctrination in how to act like Mao's rogue gangs--that is exactly how Bill O'Reilly's minions are acting with their brownshirt e-mails/phone calls/blogs/protests. Look at what they did to the professor Sami Al-Arian. This is not just a phenomenon of the "crazies" anymore. They think they're fighting for truth and justice, and it also distracts them from their own personal problems.
Perhaps scientists and intellectuals won't literally be marched into camps--they'll just be designated as belonging to various "camps," as being "sympathetic" to terrorists, as being anti-American, "taking extremist liberal views," in the words of O'Reilly, etc. People are swallowing this crap.
"Look elsewhere for conspiracies, my friend."
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Who said anything about "conspiracies"?
I'm also quite familiar with how the newspaper business works, and news websites, and the Times site, thanks.
I made a factual statement. Any implications you seem to have drawn are, I'm afraid, purely hallucinatory, and not derivable from the text.
Obviously the piece was going to be in today's paper. Duh. Where they were going to place it, prior to the daily change, was, of course, not predicatable in advance to anyone outside of Times Online.
"predicatable"
Predictable.
Shouldn't surprise anyone who understands the truth and importance of Brad DeLong's Rule: the Bush Administration is worse than you can possibly imagine, even after you have taken into account the fact that the Bush Administration is worse than you can possibly imagine.
Just saw an ABC News report on Hansen, by the way.
Check out this post on the subject over at realclimate by one of Hansen's colleagues.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=243#more-243
And some commenter called Bob Parks's assertions about Triana paranoid?
Oh goodie, summer camp! Should I pack my swim trunks?
Will no one rid me of this troublesome scientist?!
Follow-up here, by the way. It's a good thing, though only a small good thing.