In Praise of Science Skeptics

Ron Clutz's avatarScience Matters

Peter St. Onge writes at Mises Wire The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink. And yet the explosion of “cancel culture” intolerance of any opinion that doesn’t fit a shrinking “3 x 5 card” of right-think risks destroying the very tolerance and science that sustains our civilization.

Since World War II, America has suffered two respiratory pandemics comparable to COVID-19: the 1958 “Asian flu,” then the 1969 “Hong Kong flu.” In neither case did we shut down the economy—people were simply more careful. Not all that careful, of course—Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock in the middle of the 1969 pandemic, and social distancing wasn’t really a thing in the “Summer of Love.”

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1st rule of central banking. It is never our fault.

Image

Barbarossa, Hitler’s and Stalin’s Hell on Earth – War Against Humanity 014 – July 1941, Part 01

Douthat on Cancel Culture

whyevolutionistrue's avatarWhy Evolution Is True

Yes, Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist, but does that mean he can be totally ignored? I don’t think so, at least not this week, when he devotes his New York Times space to a discussion of “cancel culture” (CC), and provides as good a definition of the phenomenon as I’ve seen. He also admits, in his list of “ten theses” about CC, that the Right does it too, but also that “a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.” I agree with most of what he says but strongly disagree with his thesis that the Right barely engages in creating CC at all.

Read it by clicking on the screenshot:

I’ve put Douthat’s “theses” in bold, and indented a few excerpts from his article. My own take on his points is flush left:

  1. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by…

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4 pinocchios because #DefundThePolice totally different to redirecting funds! A cut in police budgets is a cut

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1283473191172739073

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A hard case to make a good law: the ideological impurity of David Starkey

whyevolutionistrue's avatarWhy Evolution Is True

The original saying I paraphrase above, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, is “hard cases make bad law”, meaning you shouldn’t erect general principles based on extreme cases. But in this instance, regarding the defenestration of scholars who say things unpalatable to their peers, or odious things in general, these are the hard cases that should be the basis of a general rule: academic institutions should not punish scholars who exercise their right to free speech.

Sadly, as Benjamin Schwarz—former literary and national editor of The Atlantic—shows in the new Spiked, this rule, which used to hold in the UK, no longer holds, at least with respect to historian and television presenter David Starkey. Starkey, it has to be said, uttered a statement that is reprehensible, unworthy of a thinking person. But it’s still free speech. Read what happened to him by clicking on the screenshot below:

First, Schwarz…

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Bari Weiss resigns from the New York Times, citing hostile workplace climate

whyevolutionistrue's avatarWhy Evolution Is True

This now seems to have been inevitable, but it’s very sad, especially for the NYT, which has lost a powerful voice and a counterweight to the paper’s fulminating wokeness—an ideological groupthink that has so degraded its quality. Click on the screenshot to read the CNN report:

Weiss did not go gentle, either. From CNN:

But in the resignation letter Weiss posted online, the self-described “politically homeless” writer blasted The Times for fostering what she called an “illiberal environment” that she said was “especially heartbreaking.”

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times,” Weiss wrote. “But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

“Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions,” Weiss added.

News of Weiss’ departure was first reported by Vice.

Weiss generated…

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The socialist’s dilemma @AOC @BernieSanders

Vaccines are the greatest public health intervention ever

It’s a pity you’re not the first

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