Category Archives: Philosophy

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Politicians’ “War On Science”

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Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses were nonsensical — both parties have ideologies that are opposed to scientific reality.

But I disagree with this:

So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.

Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.

Business, Economics, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Lies Of The Left

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Romney was, and most Republicans are, amateurs when it came to explaining them:

Reagan was like a veteran quarterback who comes up to the line of scrimmage, takes a glance at how the other team is deployed against him, and knows automatically what he needs to do. There is not enough time to figure it out from scratch, while waiting for the ball to be snapped. You have to have figured out such things long before the game began, and now just need to execute.

Very few Republican candidates for any office today show any sign of such in-depth preparation on issues. Mitt Romney, for example, inadvertently showed his lack of preparation when he indicated that he was in favor of indexing the minimum-wage rate, so that it would rise automatically with inflation.

Yes, I face palmed when I heard that. Romney was no Reagan, because it was clear that he had spent too much time learning business, and far too little understanding policy and its effects (otherwise, he’d have never done RomneyCare). He had no core political philosophy, and it showed. He is smart, and a quick learner (he actually did start to speak conservatism like it wasn’t a second language in the waning days of the campaign), but he didn’t learn fast enough.

I wonder if he may try again? He’s a very determined man.

Then there’s this as well:

One of the secrets of Barack Obama’s success is his ability to say things that will sound both plausible and inspiring to uninformed people, even when they sound ridiculous to people who know the facts. Apparently he believes the former outnumber the latter, and the election results suggest that he may be right.

Since most of the media will never expose Obama’s fallacies and falsehoods, it is all the more important for Republicans to do so themselves. Nor is it necessary for every Republican candidate for every office to become an expert on every controversial issue.

Just as particular issues are farmed out to different committees in Congress, so Republicans can set up committees of outside experts to inform them on particular issues.

For example, a committee on income and poverty could be headed by an expert like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This is a subject on which demonstrable falsehoods have become the norm, and one on which devastating refutations in plain English are readily available from a number of sources.

Another example would be space policy. I know someone who’d be happy to do it, if I could raise funds for it. But it’s not important enough, apparently.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Michael Walsh:

Principles, not programs, should be the battle cry. Romney’s foolish complaint that Obama won by giving away free stuff plays right back into the hands of the konsultant korps that lost him the election in the first place. If Mitt had a vision for America wider than the cramped, pinched and perpetually gray New England horizon, he sure didn’t show it. He didn’t show it because he was incapable of conceiving it, and there clearly was no one on his insular Boston team capable of supplying one. Instead, we got the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor, which in the end proved to be the candidate’s epitaph.

Yes. He was a principled man in his personal life, perhaps more so than most politicians, but he had no political principles.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Space

An Odd Obama Success

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Not just odd, but rare:

Since Barack Obama took office in 2008, U.S. space policy has shifted in a surprisingly free-market direction. Despite the Obama crowd’s general enthusiasm for big government, where space policy is concerned they’ve taken a decidedly different approach: Instead of building its own rockets as a replacement for the now-retired space shuttle, the federal government is now buying launch services from private companies that are largely free to build their own rockets and choose their own approaches.

There’s nothing new about this idea. The federal government did the same kind of thing in the 1920s with air mail contracts, and that program — along with wind tunnels and other R&D assistance provided by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — did a lot to establish U.S. dominance in civil and military aviation in the 20th Century. I wrote articles and position papers advocating such an approach more than two decades ago.

But now that it’s happening under the Obama administration, some conservatives are criticizing them. This led space expert (and former congressional staffer) Jim Muncy to comment “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.”

But, in fact, capitalism works everywhere.

Indeed. And one of the reasons that we need to get into space as soon as possible is not (as I naively thought over thirty years ago, when I first got interested in this) because we are running out of earthly resources, but because we need a new frontier into which to expand human freedom, lest that, the most vital resource, be lost on humanity’s birth world.