www.ChrisCMoooney.com (Mooney's blog)
The Republican War on Science (Amazon.com)
(loved reading the reviews. There isn't any middle ground here!)
A few selected reviews:
Scientific abuse: Subverting scientific knowledge for short-term gain
Fighting the Republican War on Science: A Question of Balance
Research and the Right (Washington Post) Since I can't post the full review and since it requires registration, here's the important excerpt:
"Evidence abounds of the Bush administration's ham-handed approach to making science policy. The topic is thus ripe for a quasi-scholarly, quasi-journalistic study -- perhaps one akin to Daniel S. Greenberg's 1967 classic, The Politics of Pure Science , or its excellent 2001 successor, Science, Money, and Politics . Unfortunately, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science is not that study.
That's a shame, for he is a talented and energetic young Washington correspondent for Seed, an excellent and relatively new popular-science magazine. In writing a book about science-policy-making in America today, Mooney has bravely tackled a gigantic and complex topic. Unfortunately, the journalist in him won out over the scholar, for he ends up trying to reduce the subject's complexities to the "good guy/bad guy" categories of TV polemicists. The resulting book is ill-formulated, overwrought and surprisingly unconvincing."
'War' thesis fails the science test
Excerpt: "Mooney is relentless, but he isn't especially convincing. To be sure, some of the criticisms he levels at the Bush administration are justified, on matters such as litmus tests for appointees to science-related positions, distorted information to consumers about health and safety issues and antagonism toward embryonic stem-cell research. But Mooney's insistent denials that there have been equivalent misdemeanors by the political left are wholly unconvincing."
I'm not going to say that the Bush administration hasn't made major mistakes regarding science policy, because it has, but Mooney's book is representative of the left's most lethal assault against conservatism yet. We see it whenever the left refers to itself as the "reality-based community" when it is anything but; when Frank Wilczek, on his news conference after it is announced he has won the Nobel prize, slaps on a Kerry-Edwards button and grandstands that the physics award stands against everything the current administration is for; and when Paul Krugman says the reason that there are so few conservatives in academia is not because of discrimination or hostility towards people or ideas, but because conservatives prefer "revelation" over reason. In short, the left, after years of denying the existence of objectivity, is now declaring itself the sole arbitrater of truth and reason, and is trying to position conservatives in general and the Republican party in specific.
What's worse is that there are so many self-declared conservatives who are falling into the left's trap, and allowing themselves to be played for pasties. Going by a "anything my enemy is for, I'm against" philosophy, they will reflexively defend silliness such as creationism, even co-opting the left's language regarding "diversity" and "dissent" in their defense of irrationality. As a result, the left can hold them up as proof that everyone on the right is a fool thorougly detached from reality, and the media gobbles up and perpetuates this meme.
I came across FR when I was worried about whether or not I could still call myself a conservative, giving the seeming identification, if not equivocation, of the word with "creationist" in the MSM, but fortunately, it helped to restore in my hope in the movement. But since the voice of the Rationalist Right has been mute in the mainstream discourse-either due to deliberate exclusion by those controlling the dialog, or by the unwillingess of conservative scientists and rationalists to take political discussions beyond closed doors, conservatism faces a crisis of identity similar to what liberalism faced in the forties and fifties, when the support of communism by some within the movement threatened to delegitimatize it. The anti-communist liberals briefly won out, but the ideological fellow travellers resurged with a veangence in the sixties, and utterly decimated the type of liberalism identified with Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Similarly, the irrationalists within our movement will marginalize conservatism, if not completely wreck it, if the rationalist conservatives don't start speaking out more.
A couple of worthy links related to my rant:
First, an article from The Scientist which should have recieved greater circulation, but was ignored by the major press syndicates, and didn't even get posted on FR. It digs deeps and exposes as fradulent the image that the scientific community was overwhelmingly anti-Bush, and includes interviews from three conservative scientists, all very prominent in their fields: physicists William Happer and David Casper, and biomedical researcher Charles Arntzen. Not mentioned in the article was that Happer was a victim of genuine political abuse of science, dismissed from his DOE position in 1993 after he criticized some of Al Gore's statements regarding ozone depletion before a House Appropriations committee.
Lubos Motl, the Rush Limbaugh of string theory, takes on Krugman's aforementioned moronic statements in a long but very informed and astute post on his blog.
Finally, if you can stand me posting another John Derbyshire article, here's The Derb's ode to the wonders of science, and the understanding it brings to us. He also very wisely cautions against confusing scientific authority with political authority, something which both the left and right do too often.
And oh yes, for all you bloggers-that "reality based community" link is a Google-bomb suggestion. Go off and run with it :-)
Reading the Amazon reviews, I note that the ubiquitous and obnoxious PZ Myers (he of the scientifically sound but politically boneheaded Pharyngula blog) has not only posted his thoughts, but has decided to steal Physicist's motto, "The world is what it is, and not what we wish it to be". Too bad that PC Myers (as Gene Expression likes to call him) is so selective in applying it.