Speedkill

Jonah Goldberg’s own readers think he’s an idiot. Awesome.

(I’m referring to his update, not the sarcastic email)

The Corner is counting down the top 25 “conservative” movies. Number twenty two is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Labeling a movie conservative for depicting a totalitarian society seems like a pretty broad use of the term. Which is fine, but it give me an excuse to note that Terry Gilliam renounced his American citizenship because of no-longer-President Bush. So the director of one of the top conservative movies is apparently anti-American. Silly people.

The Corner had so many awesome posts today I starred four in Google Reader today, two of which are worth mocking:

Mark Krikorian declares that a FCC complaint filed by a Hispanic group and him being criticized by the SPLC is an assault on American liberty. Free Mark Krikorian! Death to tyranny!

K-Lo quotes another blogger noting that by saying Obama would have “home field advantage” in his interview with Matt Lauer, “NBC News has finally admitting to being nothing more than Obama cheerleaders.” I am apparently not able to comprehend the logic of that statement (I don’t speak wingnut). I believe us sane people took that as NBC News using a football term to convey that the interview was occurring at the White House.

Shorter K-Lo:

Blagojevich pursued pro-choice policies, so it’s no surprise he’s corrupt.

Yes, it all makes sense now.

I don’t really have much interest in figuring out why the Republican Party seems to have gone to hell, but the debates are kind of interesting. Especially the one about religious conservatives. Spurred by a Kathleen Parker column, here’s Daniel Larison saying the religious right isn’t the problem and here’s Kevin Drum making a case that it’s at least a significant factor.

For my part, both seem right. Speaking for myself, one of those young people who came of political age during the Bush administration, the fact that Bush’s presidency has been such a disaster really does seem like the catalyst for my views. My parents are conservative, it’s hard to claim I was indoctrinated in college given that I was a CS major and took almost no relevant humanities classes, and I had no particularly political friends. If 9/11 and the Iraq war hadn’t occurred, it’s not a stretch to say I’d be pretty apolitical.

On the other hand, I’m not religious. To the extent that I thought about it, I’ve always held liberal-ish social views. So even were I inclined to GOP positions on the economy and foreign policy, the GOP still looks to me like the party of conservative Christians who really don’t like, well, people like me.

So I think Republicans are getting hit from two sides. Their recent performance is disastrous and just for good measure they’ve alienated a lot of young people to whom they could appeal for another chance. The former they can fix by finding candidates to competently advance their basic agenda (a hawkish foreign policy and a smaller government, business-focused domestic policy are always going to be capable of winning elections). Easier said than done. The latter they can fix by dumping the crazy people. But dumping those people will alienate the religious right and if they haven’t restored their brand otherwise (and maybe even if they have), the cure will be worse than the disease.

So it looks to me like they have to solve the first problem and improve their standing a bit regarding the second. Moderate enough on social issues to make people like me less hostile (obviously I’m probably too far gone for them to placate me completely and not entirely lose the religious right) and people in charge who aren’t corrupt fuck-ups. It’s not really an existential problem, but it’s still a difficult path to walk without screwing it all up.

I wonder, if I could patent posts of the form “Barack Obama is doing X, that’s not Y,” where X is a policy or action by Obama that conservatives dislike/misinterpret and Y is some variant of a Barack Obama campaign slogan involving change or hope, and charge royalties, how much money would I make in the next four years? I think I’d own the planet. It’d at least be enough to hire Michael Goldfarb to rant about how everyone who doesn’t like me is stupid and plays D&D.

Another idea: a subscription-based web service that conservatives can send a given policy or action and get a post with a snide remark about it not being change back. I’d free up a lot of conservative energy with that. They’d have even more time to devote themselves to figuring out who in the Republican Party doesn’t like Sarah Palin and complaining about them. That’s a goal we can all support.

I vote that the GOP use this strategy from now on. Stop campaigning and just think happy thoughts.

Incidentally, this would be a novel interpretation of election fraud. Oh my, that touchscreen voting machine just switched my vote from Obama to McCain! It’s a miracle! God has revealed his choice.

This is great. McCain put out an economic plan (in the loosest sense of the word) that was purportedly signed by 300 economists. The catch being that some of them don’t even agree with that plan, but signed a short, vague statement about McCain’s broader economic perspective.

It seems the McCain camp is getting tips from creationists and global warming denialists. Fake surveys are their stock and trade. The party of the backwards and ignorant marches on.

How precious. And the Right was always worried about the ideological kinship of communists and liberals. Apparently, we need to be worried about the inhumanity shared between communists and Republicans.

I’m proposing this as an explanation for why conservatives are supposedly happier than liberals. Clearly, if you’re the kind of person who supports torture, despiting knowing its purpose is to punish and elicit false confessions, you’re obviously deriving pleasure from others’ pain and suffering. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of pain and suffering in the world for conservatives to get off on.

As I said a couple posts ago, I’m nothing if not current. I find it curious how often global warming deniers equate belief in human caused climate change with faith. This post from one of Montana’s newer conservative blogs (and so far, what appears to be one of our better ones) is a good example. Cody’s list of “truths” is a bit muddled.

The first point (which seems to conflict with point 8 ) claims man made global warming is a scientific theory. Well, sort of. The mechanisms causing it are the province of scientific theory, but whether the Earth is warming or not is a factual question (a difficult one, of course). This is similar to evolution, where we have the fact that evolution that has occurred and the theory detailing the mechanisms driving it. I’ll return to this in a moment.

Points 3 and 4 seem to address the claims of those who accept global warming who bring up the fact that science is based on consensus. Cody is right that science isn’t democratic. If you’re a scientist studying global warming and someone counters your research by claiming the consensus says otherwise, that person is an idiot. However, we aren’t scientists studying global warming, so this is largely irrelevant. We’re people who don’t have adequate expertise to fully judge these issues. We have to rely on and respect the consensus to some degree. We base public policy on scientific consensus. Scientists who explain the consensus are educators and those who advocate policy solutions are practicing politics. Seems pretty clear to me.

The next two points are the big ones, I think:

# Man-made catastrophic global warming is not a hypothesis, it cannot be tested or falsified via experiment. Similarly, it cannot be proved true. Only time will tell.

# The acceptance of things unproven by scientific method relies on faith; faith is not restricted to matters of religion. Nor is faith a bad thing – it allows us to function in a world about which we do not know everything.

Let’s take the first one. It’s strikingly similar to what creationists say about evolution. Climate scientists create models based around our current understanding of the physical processes that contribute to our climate. These models make predictions about what we should see in certain situations, past or present. We then test the models by comparing their predictions to data from those past situations or on data that comes from those future scenarios as they move into the past. If they don’t match, the models are changed. Real Climate explains this quite well (and they’re actually climate scientists, so that helps).

Of course, Cody is right that these models can’t be proved true. That Cody thinks this is a relevant point reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of science. The scientific method doesn’t prove things. It provides evidence (it can disprove hypotheses, of course). There’s always uncertainty. We’ve done lots of experiments, but can you really prove you aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and the acceleration due to gravity is 4.3 m/s2 instead of 9.8 m/s2? Nope. However, we can use the inductive reasoning central to science to say that’s vanishingly unlikely. We use similar reasoning when we accept a climate model’s predictions of future temperature. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more uncertainty here, but it’s the same basic principle. And the process is science. It’s just not 7th grade biology science.

The second point above (and those following) seems to fall away after that. Faith is a loaded term. It doesn’t mean belief in things that we don’t know for certain but which we have good evidence for, as we do with global warming. In means belief regardless of evidence. Now, some who accept global warming do describe their belief as faith; Mark T has done so. This is slightly different than Cody’s claim. Mark has chosen to rely on scientific consensus because he doesn’t have the competency to judge the science (which is much more honest and humble than a lot of us who like to talk about his issue are). It’s not blind trust, though. Science has a pretty decent track record and much of this seems superficially true anyway. Mark has chosen a position based on a line of reasoning that’s pretty valid. I don’t think that’s really faith, but it’s not necessarily rational inquiry, either.

Cody doesn’t seem to be a fan of environmentalists, either. Much of global warming denialism seems to be sustained by that same antipathy. I’m right there with them, for the most part. Lots of environmentalists are shallow and have only a superficial understanding of these issues. They’re stuck in a mindset that causing them again and again to prescribe the same policy solution. It’s more theological than rational. They deify nature and view any human intrusion as wrong, rather than something to be debated on a case by case basis. If we cross nature, if we try to control it, we’ll be destroyed. They’re so narrow-minded they refuse to look outside their belief that we just have to limit humanity’s impact; instead of trying to push society to a position where we can preserve nature without hurting people’s livelihoods, they play prophets of doom, warning us to repent. They’re suckered by any crisis that fits their theology.

That said, they’re not always wrong. We did burn a hole in the ozone layer (and we were able to fix because we had viable alternatives to CFCs). Pollution and mining have had negative impacts on our environment. It’s not enough to define yourself in opposition to them. Global warming is certainly the in style crisis right now. There’s over the top alarmism. But it is real and we do need to do something about it.

Another thing denialists seem to be afraid of is liberals pushing their politics as solutions to this issue. Yes, that’s going to happen. Guess who’s fault it is? It’s the people who have better ideas who cling to denial because we’re not absolutely sure and because the annoying environmentalists believe in it. As long as we liberals are committed to this problem, our solutions are going to become policy. Don’t like that? Stop debating what’s already been debated and start talking about policy. Start promoting solutions.