Politically liberal science is bad science.

What resulted is pages and pages of liberals and conservatives throwing insults and wildly inaccurate scientific claims at each other.

I have to say this thread has been remarkably successful. The topic of this thread is how political ideology leads to bad science (I singled out the liberal side, but the principle applies for both sides of the political divide).

What resulted is pages and pages of liberals and conservatives throwing insults and wildly inaccurate scientific claims at each other.

I can't think of a better way I could have proven my point. I have to admit I stepped away for a bit, but this thread has proven my point incredibly well.

You're right in that the mutations do not occur in response to changes in the environment, but the ones that successfully meet the change become the norm, but there is even less reason to suggest that they occur in response to a specifically predicted change.

Quote:

You can't directly attribute increased CO2 emissions with climate denial.

Actually you can. The disinformation was used (by petrochemical lobbyists and the right-wing media) to effectively block any carbon mitigation legislation in the USA and to water down any global climate accords.

Pretty much anything you write is ridiculous, Finn, including your post to me about the Foreign Legion, to which I was replying. Rest assured that if there's ever a war between our two nations, the legion will play a minor role.

I kind of thought the Foreign Legion comment was droll

You'll always hear this line because it is appropriate when faced with anti-Americans finding 100% of fault with the US.

Stop being such a pollyanna, It would not have made any difference and you know it.

Do you think China, Russia or India think the US is "the best nation on earth, the big guy on the block, the shining city on the hill that everyone gazes at with envy and admiration?"

I for one can and do think very, very highly of the US without imagining that we set the tone for the world, or that our geopolitical adversaries will sublimate their national interests because they are shamed by our "example."

They wouldn't even give us credit while they laughed behind their hands at our self-destructive folly.

Goodness, you sound like a neo-con.

The Taliban of San Francisco
by Serge Halimi, Monde Diplomatique - August 2019


The most controversial painting in Victor Arnautoff’s Life of Washington series

Does ‘resistance’ to racism in the US require destroying works by a communist artist, created under the sponsorship of the New Deal? Life of Washington, 13 murals by Victor Arnautoff covering 150 sq m on the walls of George Washington High School in San Francisco, has been condemned by ‘resistance’ fighters despite the fact that it is explicitly anti-racist, which was boldly revolutionary when it was painted in 1936. It exposes the hypocrisy of the virtuous proclamations made by the founding fathers (including Washington) in the US constitution.

Yet on 25 June the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBE) voted unanimously to paint over it. Arnautoff was expected to pay homage to the first president of the US, after whom the college was named; instead, he showed Washington as a slave owner and instigator of the first wars to exterminate Native Americans. However, it is not Donald Trump who is calling for the destruction of a work of art (created by a communist who ended his days in the Soviet Union) that debunks an American myth; his fiercest opponents are doing the work for him.

Their decision was informed by the report of a 13-member ‘reflection and action group’ (appointed by the SFBE), which boldly asserted that the murals ‘[glorify] slavery, genocide, colonisation, manifest destiny [the belief that protestant settlers had a divine mission to “civilise” North America], white supremacy [and] oppression.’

This interpretation does not withstand scrutiny: the socialist realist tradition that inspired Arnautoff left no room for such gross misinterpretation. So another justification was devised, considered more acceptable though it is just as worrying: the reflection and action group claimed that Life of Washington, which shows the dead body of a Native American being trampled by settlers, ‘traumatises students and community members’. We face a choice: should we remember slavery and genocide, or forget them? When can anyone be sure that an artist’s work about the history of his country will never upset ‘community members’, who surely have countless other opportunities to witness scenes of violence every day, in real life or in art? Should Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Tres de Mayo, which are just as violent and traumatising, be destroyed as well?

This controversy is at present of concern only to the small section of the US left most agitated about identity issues (see In America, identity replaces solidarity). But given that this vanguard of virtue has already successfully exported some of its most twisted obsessions, we ought to be less welcoming of this one.

Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco branch of the N.A.A.C.P., which is in favor of keeping the murals on display, told the board, “It pains me that we have become complicit in a move to do a redaction of history.”

Goodness, you sound like a neo-con.

You have turned begging the question into an art form