Science as Nuisance
From the beginning, the Bush White House has treated science as a nuisance and scientists as an interest group—one that, because it lies outside the governing conservative coalition, need not be indulged. That's why the White House-sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to baser interests like the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries-has altered, suppressed, or overriden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V./ AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed unqualified ideologues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts.
[Hendrik Hertzberg, "Mired", The New Yorker, 22 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
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on Saturday, 17 September 2005 at 02.48
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The Soviets persisted with an untenable economic system for a very long time in defiance of reality. Various unwelcome aspects of reality regularly intruded, threatening trouble. So they developed a system for dismissing or otherwise dealing with that which was unwanted — anything that didn't jibe with their economic and political system.
They called it the communist dialectic. It was a way of changing the meaning of words, terms and concepts. They converted evidence of inconvenient realities into things that fit with their ideology.
It never ceases to amaze me how Bush, his lockstep-marching Republican faithful and so many gullible Americans are as busy as they can be doing the very same thing.