We might not even have a global warming problem if we had continuied with the rapid nuclearization in the 60’s and 70’s that was stopped by bullshit from the left. We could all be like France, which gets 70% of its electricity from clean, zero GHG power.
It’s bullsit science from the left that has fought against GMO crops like golden rice, condemning millions of African children to blindness and other serious illnesses.
It was bullshit Mathusianism from the left that encouraged China’s one child policy, which was not only a gross violation of human rights but now leaves China with serious social problems due to gender imbalances and a low growth population. Lots of people on the left still talk about how we have to reduce Earth’s population to 1 or 2 billion people.
It’s bullshit science from the left which has been pushing unworkable renewable energy that is driving energy prices through the roof everywhere it’s been tried, and it’s activists on the left who are STILL trying to shut down working nuclear plants around the world.
It was bullshit science from the left from people like Margaret Sanger that led to the left’s enthusiasm for eugenics in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
I could go on. The right has its share of bullshit science as well, but let’s not pretend the left is immune, and some of their quackery has had extremely damaging consequences.
And since you added economics, there is nothing on the right that will ever come close to the scale of human misery caused by the left’s love for socialism and central planning of economies.
A faculty member’s salary is negotiated with and paid through the institution. Grants are not slush funds for the grantee. A faculty member cannot decide to take additional money from a grant for a raise, and the number of grants allocated to a lab is nothing more than a performance metric used to negotiate promotions and higher salary, exactly the same way good work performance can help you get a raise.
It is no more meaningful or interesting to say “getting published DOES lead to money.” than it is to say “having successful projects at work leads to money”. You would insist it’s some kind of corrupt direct feedback loop while having no idea of the internal complexities of academic funding across ALL fields.
If your job is to do research, and you don’t get anything published, there could be a couple of reasons:
you didn’t actually do any research, and so have nothing to publish.
you do research, but you are too lazy to write any papers
you do research, write papers, and they all get rejected because they’re crap.
The number one reason for young professors to write papers is to get tenure. Grants give one money for assistants, for labs, and for travel. And much of the grant money goes back to the university in overhead, another reason most departments like people getting grants.
I’ll caveat the above. Professors can often draw salary from a research grant during the summer if the university is only paying them for 9 months out of the year. But it’s at the same effective hourly rate.
On… repeating items that are not accurate to follow the Stossel narrative to disparage science and the left.
Again, unless you can explain away why is that opposition to a new power plant or dump can reach 65% or more, it is a problem for the right also because it is impossible that all in that 65% are leftists. NIMBY is the issue, and the country with more Nuclear power (France) did it with more education, respect for science and leftist government policies that allowed them to get more energy from nuclear power plants.
Again, while a good number of leftists are against GMOs the opposition to it (that is also more NIMBY ignorant than partisan) is not really to blame for the Golden Rice delays.
And speaking of the Nazis… no, that bit about “there is nothing on the right that will ever come close to the scale of human misery caused by the left’s love for socialism and central planning of economies.” is wrong for two reasons: the right wing Nazis, and the fact that a lot of the left are liberals, they also do not like central planning economies ran by authoritarians.
I have no idea what John Stossel has been saying, and pointing out people who used bad science is not ‘disparaging science’. You have got to stop using thee obnoxious guilt-by-association tactics, or every time you open your mouth I’ll just respond, “Oh, more glurge from Media Matters and the Progressive Policy Institute. Everyone should ignore this.”
I can easily explain it. People are opposed to nuclear power now because they have been subjected to decades of hysterical anti-nuke propaganda, almost all of which came from the left. Congratulations - your side won. Now we get to live with the results.
I’ve been fighting this fight since the 1980’s, and I know exactly who was on the respective sides.
There are many reasons for the time it’s taken golden rice to get to market, but among them was widespread opposition and lobbying from left-wing activists using fear mongering and garbage science. And you know it.
No kidding. And who advocated for, supported, and defended the one child policy? The left in the west, who were still certain that we were headed for mass starvation due to overpopulation and that the answer is to make sure there are as few humans born on the planet as possible.
Oh? What DO proponents of controlling emissions say about population control?
Ah yes, the National Socialists. The ones who believed in central planning, and who were often admired by major figures on the left. Fascism and Communism are close relatives. FDR was a fan of Mussolini’s until the violence started, having said that he was 'deeply impressed by what Mussolini has accomplished." Mussolini returned the favor, saying of the New Deal, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices … Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”
If we are going to place Hitler on the right and use him to blame western right wing movements for something, then we get to do the same with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, Maduro…
The thing is though, there’s nothing in Nazism that has anything to do with conservatism or neoliberalism, which come out of a history which includes John Locke, Russel Kirk, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and others. Western right-wing thought owes its lineage to Classical Liberalism, which has at its core the right of the individual to lead his own life for his own reasons.
Left-wing thought, on the other hand, is still rooted in the ideas of Marx and Rousseau. They share with Naziism the love of the collective, central planning, and the notion that people are better off when their activities are dictated by powerful people running society for ‘the greater good’, and that people are better off when the individual is subsumed by the collective. In the case of communism and socialism this organization is supposedly best for the worker, and in Naziism the glory of the State takes precedence over the indivual. But both share the belief that central planning and collective action for a ‘greater good’ is preferable to individual autonomy and that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few - or the one.
And yes there are liberals on the left, although the new illiberal intersectional left seems determined to drum them out of the movement. I will exempt them from this criticism. I should have said ‘leftist’ instead of ‘left’, which cuts too broad a swath.
Which brings me back to the subject of science on the left. Perhaps the biggest failure to understand science on the left has been their utter inability to understand complexity and the necessity for complex systems to organize themselves from the bottom up. This is fundamentally incompatible with central planning of an economy, and yet we know that societies and economies are in fact complex systems, and that complex systems simply cannot be controlled efficiently from a central authority.
No, what you did only showed that you willfully ignore what researchers looking at the issue found out about your claim there. It also showed that you just did not read the cite about what the proponents of controlling emissions like Al Gore say nowadays about family planning.
And so it is with a lot for the rest of your reply, the point I made early also stands, in the context of the tread it is really underwhelming to bring up the alleged misunderstanding of the left for the whole of science, that is what Stossel tries to do.
You seem to be somewhat confused about the subject of the article. The whole point is that the article is about gender and race.
Namely, it’s about how human beings are interpreting the behaviors of a newly invasive squirrel species in their region in terms of their own prejudices against other humans.
That is, some people see the unfamiliar brown squirrels eating refuse, and react to that by referencing the squirrels’ color or their “immigrant” status. It’s a mystery to me why you seem to think that studying this phenomenon is so weird or ridiculous, because it’s not at all unusual: haven’t you heard of, for instance, people referring to the Asian emerald ash borer beetles damaging US forests as “chink beetles”?
In other words, people frequently express negative reactions to animal species by repurposing slurs applied to disfavored groups of people. I don’t know why you seem to think it’s so outrageous for a social-geography scholar to write an article about an instance of this.
I have no idea whether the paper in question is a good paper, but the subject it investigates seems to me like a perfectly reasonable topic of inquiry. My guess is that all the tut-tutting about it is just some viral meme from rightwing media about “OMG now the libs are worried about squirrels being victims of racism!”, and people have seized on how absurd that sounds without bothering to really think about what the abstract actually says.
This is a pretty nonsensical assessment in all its parts. In the first place, most of the obstacles for the nuclear power generation industry in late-20th-century America were either self-created via cost overruns and other management issues, or due to lack of competitiveness in current fuel markets, rather than any “bullshit from the left”. It is very unlikely that nuclear power would have replaced most fossil-fuel power generation in the last 50 years even if environmentalists hadn’t opposed it.
In the second place, nuclear power generation by itself wouldn’t have done a thing to prevent the massive greenhouse-gase emissions from the transportation sector, which is responsible for about a third of all such emissions. It might in fact have indirectly made transport emissions greater by reducing competition and hence price for fossil fuels.
You can make reasonable statements like “Nuclear power generation is environmentally preferable to fossil fuel use” without descending into flagrant hyperbole like claiming that nuclear power could plausibly have saved us from ever having any climate-change problem at all. :rolleyes:
Also nonsense. As [Snopes remarks](As an ultra-nationalist, socially conservative, anti-egalitarian and fascist ideology, Nazism naturally falls on the extreme far-right end of the political spectrum),
That’s not to say that modern conservatives are necessarily equivalent to Nazis in any way, of course. But trying to pretend that Nazi ideology was somehow intrinsically more “left-wing” than “right-wing” is a modern right-winger’s political fiction.
Another silly libertarian slogan that has nothing to do with actual science or complexity theory, or liberal political philosophy.
I can confirm this. My daughter is very good at getting grants, but doesn’t get to keep any of the money except for summer.
Now when she does consulting on the other hand …
Well, that stuff about complex systems and the failure of lefties to cope with them is definitely spot on! You have only to look at the massive global flop of socialized medicine, how every attempt to utilize it has met with utter failure!
The list of countries that have tried it out is the same list of countries whose people have soundly rejected it at their first opportunity! Now, I’m just an ignorant country boy, so I don’t actually have the full list, but Sam is here, and I’m sure he will provide.
OK, maybe not all of them, maybe just the most important twenty or thirty.
For the right-wing sites that assiduously promote and publicize the soundbite versions of these pranks and smears, I’m pretty sure the takeaway is supposed to be “Any field concerned with social injustice, economic inequality, environmental sustainability, etc., or that criticizes dominant political or social structures, must be discredited and marginalized within the academy and denounced as completely unreliable and intellectually worthless, even if we have to resort to fraud and misrepresentation to achieve it.”
Check that everything is in order, not that it’s correct. You can’t expect a journal to challenge every submissions premise and replicate every experiment. You can’t expect them to make common sense calls based on gut feeling or current knowledge since many studies refute just that. If they did…oops there went relativity.
That’s half the point in publication…so others can challenge it, or replicate it, choose to accept it or deny it.
You seem to be somewhat confused about the subject of the article. The whole point is that the article is about gender and race.