6 Comments

Leaving aside the climate stuff, which needs so much more than a comment...

“Big tent” in practice usually means capitulating to the left. Proponents think it’ll make it easier to work constructively on real issues, and/or broaden their electoral appeal. They’re badly mistaken. The left sees it as a sign of weakness and exploits it.

Expand full comment

I'm not a climate change denier either...I just specify different phases of climate as Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

Expand full comment
Apr 29, 2023·edited Apr 29, 2023

climate* change:

Climate (n) the prevailing attitudes, standards, or environmental conditions of a group, period, or place: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/climate

The "climate" they want to change is people's attitudes, behaviors, and living standards (and NOT for the better). It has NOTHING to do with the weather, but weather implied to emotionally manipulate people into giving up money and freedoms in order to sAvE tHe PlAnEt. Its about a VERY few select group of people wielding power over the world's population and controlling how all will live, whether they agree to those STANDARDS or not. Green enegry = money & power

The whole "climate crisis" is a money laundering scheme.

Expand full comment

Professors Jerry Coyne and Anna Krylov write in the WSJ, science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster.

A prime example is Lysenkoism—the incursion of Marxist ideology into Soviet and Chinese agriculture in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1930s, the USSR started to enforce the untenable theories of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan Russian agronomist who rejected, among other things, the existence of standard genetic inheritance.

As scientists dissented—rejecting Lysenko’s claims for lack of evidence—they were fired or sent to the gulag. Implementation of his theories in Soviet and, later, Chinese agriculture led to famines and the starvation of millions. Russian biology still hasn’t recovered.

Yet a wholesale and unhealthy incursion of ideology into science is occurring again—this time in the West. We see it in progressives’ claim that scientific truths are malleable and subjective, similar to Lysenko’s insistence that genetics was Western “pseudoscience” with no place in progressive Soviet agriculture.

We see it when scientific truths are either denied or distorted because they’re politically repugnant. We see it as well in activists’ calls to “decolonize” scientific fields, to reduce the influence of what’s called “Western science” and adopt indigenous “ways of knowing.”

No doubt different cultures have different ways of interpreting natural processes—sometimes invoking myth and legend—and this variation should be valued as an important aspect of sociology and anthropology. But these “ways of knowing” aren’t coequal to modern science, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture.

Expand full comment