Science Left Behind is out tomorrow and there is no question it will be fighting an uphill battle in the science community. Obviously a book that makes fun of anti-science progressives isn't going to be for progressives and it isn't for Republicans during election season, since Democrats get scant mention.
Instead, it is for scientists and fans of science who have slowly watched science in America become hijacked by social authoritarian progressives who want to frame everything through a social justice issue of some kind or another. Coal stinks but we can't build solar plants because of environmental lawsuits brought on by union lawyers. Everyone knows what I am talking about, yet there is a lot of wagon circling around the Big Tent of the left, whereas the right tend to be pretty good sports when it is noted that their sticking of heads in the sand about emissions is pointless, since physics believes in them regardless of whether or not they believe in physics.
The book is really more for people in and around science, who are going to be left wing in 2012, but who are sick of no one calling out the blatant partisan goofiness. Yes, it is for liberals who actually believe in fairness and skepticism and have not yet gone extinct.
Bernie Mooney at Contrary to popular belief ~ Tilting at Nonsense has a pre-release review up and basically nails the spirit of the book. There is no 'red meat' for one party, we are not Team Blue or Team Red, we are Team Science. We just recognize, as too many deny or rationalize, that the encroachment by progressive social authoritarians is far more dangerous than anything done on the right.
He writes "I have to admit, I hate low flow shower heads; so much so that I am a green outlaw. When I bought my new shower head I popped the gasket out that makes it a low flow. I now have a full flow shower head and man is it sweet."
Indeed, that is why the subtitle is "Feel-Good Fallacies" - like spoons made from corn that melt or break when used, a large number of progressive initiatives are just intellectual placebos to assuage guilt at having too much stuff. It's making no difference in the world at all if you use a low-flow toilet, for example.
Like any liberal skeptic, he isn't buying every argument. We think fracking has been victim of a 'blame it first and then find a reason to do so' mentality at the EPA (who we then defend in another part of the book) but that's the beauty of having a discourse. Either we are right, and we just need to show it better, or we are going to be shown wrong. It isn't like we are in the bag for every study that comes out on a weekly basis, we are not Oprah viewers - but if something is the victim of anti-science PR, we call it out. If it turns out fracking does actually cause cancer and Earth deflation, as some anti-science types claim, we are happy to be wrong and accept the science. When there is science and not hysteria.
He calls it
an honest, non-partisan look at the anti-science mind of many progressives, which despite its strident tone, exposes the fallacies of the left, just as the title says.
but then writes
Ah, who am I kidding? It’s a Sherman’s March against the misguided, idiotic, anti-science thinking that plagues too many progressives.
Are we burning our way through legacy enemy plantations of the Old World Order so that a new, modern science culture can take its place? Not sure, but I like the imagery. I bet if he were working in publishing his titles could sell a whole lot of books.
Progressive thinking and the rise of the anti-science left by Bernie Mooney, Contrary to popular belief ~ Tilting at Nonsense
