Snarky Behavior

Ezra Klein notes:

“Republican politicians have to evince, at the least, a deep sympathy for [creationism in schools and the willful effort to ignore the evidence on man-made climate change], and many soak in applause from forthrightly echoing them. I can think of some unpopular, and maybe even unwise, beliefs that afflict the left, but I can’t really think of anything in the same category of proud, even aggressive, know-nothingism.”

We had a discussion in my Quantitative Methods class today about the framing of scientific issues; particularly, we discussed how the right had managed to mobilize against the consenus of science which supports anthropogenic causility in observable climate change.

You see, the right is very good at taking a scientific issue and turning it into a policy issue.  A policy debate can be filtered through the news media, which is constrained by objectivity, and moreover has a vested interest in seeing a debate rather than a consensus. 

So you end up getting a Hardball style format on an issue where 100% of people (who actually know something about the topic and aren’t being paid off by the coal lobby for dissenting science) happen to agree.  And so the public thinks there’s a fifty-fifty split, and climate change gets thrown into the realm of “debatable public policy.”

Well sure… the policy is debatable.  But the science isn’t. 

Look: the left gets a bad rap for being “elitist” and looking down their noses at Christian Conservatives who cloak their willful ignorance in faith.  What the left SHOULD be getting a bad rap for is refusing to get into the mud with the Republicans.  For smugly being content with the self-assurance that they are justified in their knowledge of rational science, and refusing to engage the simpletons in a more emotive (read: effective) way.

The existential threat of our time IS NOT ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM.  IT IS GETTING BAKED THE FUCK OFF THE EARTH. 

Moreover, I don’t see how the Republican Party can sustain itself on lies in an information age.  That was the original point of this post.