Victor Davis Hanson on the Potemkin University

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson writes of how the university has become an expensive false-front of learning (that’s the “Potemkin” part) that is really devoted to fostering PC thought and behavior and monitoring itself and its denizens for any violations thereof. Well worth reading.

But it was this throwaway paragraph that caught my eye:

At the California State University system ”” the nation’s largest ”” nearly 40 percent of incoming students need remediation in math and English after failing basic competency tests. Universities are now scrambling to offer university credit for what are in truth remedial high-school courses, apparently to prevent eager (but entirely unprepared) students from hurt feelings when they butt up against the reality of college classes.

Now, that’s not really a surprise, but seeing that stark number—40%—is still depressing. Two things:

(1) It’s not just universities that are Potemkin facades, monuments to PC thought and helping students feel good about themselves no matter what, it’s high schools and grade schools, the institutions that should be preparing students for college.

(2) How will colleges react? They will continue to dumb themselves down more and more so that the “reality” against which students “butt up” when they get there perfectly meets their needs to continue to feel good about themselves.

The movie “Idiocracy” posited that this dumbing down would occur through the gene pool and reproductive habits. Unnecessary. We’ll accomplish the dumbing down purposely as a sacrifice on the altar of PC thought, with self-esteem and social justice for all.

Could we bring back the passenger pigeon? Should we?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer is “maybe.”

But not easily. And the results would be unpredictable. But it was the second paragraph here that especially caught my interest:

Assuming that a living passenger pigeon embryo can be “resurrected” (or perhaps, some would prefer to say, created) using such technologies, many hurdles remain. Will the passenger pigeon nuclear genes be able to work with the mitochondria and other cellular structures? And even if a few birds survive to adulthood, could they ever survive in the wild? Researchers worry that thousands””and maybe millions””of passenger pigeons would be needed. After all, the gigantic flocks observed by the American colonists famously darkened the sky for days and nested in colonies of millions.

Intriguingly, archaeological research indicates that the passenger pigeon’s story might not be that simple. The bones of passenger pigeons are rare in pre-Columbian archaeological deposits, suggesting that the birds were scarce until colonial times. Ecologists now think that the vast flocks may have emerged only after a declining Indian population left enough acorns and other seeds and nuts for the pigeon population to build up. Because passenger pigeons are so distantly related to other species, and because pigeon reproduction and genetics are not well understood, attempts at resurrecting it are likely to be difficult.

That turns the usual “colonists bad, Indians (or rather, native Americans) good” message on its head, although the final demise of the passenger pigeon was indeed due to hunting by non-native Americans (Westerners, “the white man,” whatever).

Here’s another discussion of whether the pigeons can be successfully resurrected:

Revive & Restore plans to breed the birds in captivity before returning them to the wild in the 2030s. Novak says the initial research indicates that North American forests could support a reintroduced population. He hopes animals brought back from extinction””not just birds but eventually also big creatures like woolly mammoths””will draw the public to zoos in droves, generating revenues that can be used to protect wildlife. “De-extinction [can] get the public interested in conservation in a way that the last 40 years of doom and gloom has beaten out of them,” he says.

Other experts aren’t so sanguine. They question whether the hybrid animal could really be called a passenger pigeon. They doubt the birds could survive without the enormous flocks of the 19th century. And they question Novak’s belief that the forests could safely absorb the reintroduction. “The ecosystem has moved on,” says Temple. “If you put the organism back in, it could be disruptive to a new dynamic equilibrium. It’s not altogether clear that putting one of these extinct species from the distant past back into an ecosystem today would be much more than introducing an exotic species. It would have repercussions that we’re probably not fully capable of predicting.”

That last statement absolutely seems like common sense. What’s more, the article’s description of the way it used to be when the pigeons were numerous makes them sound like—well, like hazardous pests:

In forest and city alike, an arriving flock was a spectacle””“a feathered tempest,” in the words of conservationist Aldo Leopold. One 1855 account from Columbus, Ohio, described a “growing cloud” that blotted out the sun as it advanced toward the city. “Children screamed and ran for home,” it said. “Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed.” When the flock had passed over, two hours later, “the town looked ghostly in the now-bright sunlight that illuminated a world plated with pigeon ejecta.”

Nesting birds took over whole forests, forming what John James Audubon in 1831 called “solid masses as large as hogs-heads.” Observers reported trees crammed with dozens of nests apiece, collectively weighing so much that branches would snap off and trunks would topple. In 1871 some hunters coming upon the morning exodus of adult males were so overwhelmed by the sound and spectacle that some of them dropped their guns. “Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats groaning off steam, with an equal quota of R.R. trains passing through covered bridges””imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar,” the Commonwealth, a newspaper in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, reported of that encounter.

The pigeon flocks were awesome in every sense of the word. But is it any surprise they were hunted to extinction? Not only were they as intrusive as described, but they were tasty, and were thought to be inexhaustible in number.

Decisions, decisions: what’s a blogger to write about?

The New Neo Posted on by

Being a blogger is a funny thing.

Every day a blogger like me has to decide what to write about. Will it be some long-winded technical and/or reflective piece that attempts to tackle big and complex issues? Do I want to spend that time? How many people will read it? Wouldn’t I do better in terms of traffic if I specialized in short nasty jabs (it’s not really my style or my interest, but it apparently draws the crowds)?

Each day there’s a meme that seems to be the one that everyone’s dealing with, and many of those memes have become more and more tedious and repetitive over time even though each incident within the meme is slightly different. For example, for a while all you heard about was some tip a big spender left for a waitperson, or some insult (mostly fake) towards a waitperson. Now we are hearing about fights on airplanes, some of which have been videotaped.

It’s all become a big yawn, as far as I’m concerned.

Then there’s the celebrity who said some shocking thing, usually an insult towards someone (often Trump these days). The latest in the grouping is from Stephen Colbert, who said (and I quote): “the only thing [Trump’s] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.”

And the only thing interesting about that statement is that Colbert is still on TV. There’s a “fire Colbert” campaign from the right, but I doubt it will go anywhere.

What has happened to public discourse? I know the answer: it’s sunk to an abysmally low level. It happened slowly but surely, beginning in the 60s, and during the last decade it’s gone so deep into the gutter that someone like Colbert, fired up by his own self-righteous Trump-hatred, can say something like that on national TV and think it’s going to be perfectly okay. And maybe it will be perfectly okay.

And someone like me has to decide whether or not to write about it.

Understanding “health insurance” and pre-existing conditions

The New Neo Posted on by

The present health care bill is caught up in Congress in an argument over insuring pre-existing conditions. That’s a requirement Americans seem to desire, but that few understand, as Josh Blackman wrote in 2009:

. A September 2009 Kaiser survey found that 80% of respondents supported this ban [on failing to cover pre-existing conditions] ”“ that included 88% of Democrats and 67% of Republicans. Among those supporters, however, only 56% still favored the provision if it resulted in higher premiums; 36% would oppose it. Supporters almost certainly did not realize that requiring insurers to cover sick people would necessarily shift the cost onto everyone else.

Recent surveys are similar in that they uncover, not just the opinions of respondents on the question of coverage of pre-existing conditions, but ignorance about how the entire health insurance system works. Way too many people seem to think that insurance companies set prices and rules arbitrarily and that their reluctance to cover pre-existing conditions has no economic cause (except greed) and no economic results (except joy).

Now, granted, part of the reason for this ignorance is that “health insurance” isn’t really insurance in the usual sense of the word. But because it can be, and sometimes is, a matter of life and death to have it or not to have it, and because in most of the Western world it has become thought of as a right to be guaranteed by the government, a great many people not only no longer understand the way the insurance model would work for health care coverage, but they no longer accept that model even if they do understand.

Health care has become remarkably expensive, and specialized care is now priced out of the reach of most people. That’s not a coincidence; it’s partly a result of insurance reimbursement rather than out-of-pocket payments, and partly a result of laws requiring hospitals to treat even the indigent. But it’s also a reflection of the fact that health care equipment and treatment has become far more elaborate. Think just about a disease such as leukemia, which when I was a child was an invariable death sentence with no treatment at all, and then reflect on what can be done for it now.

The current debate on pre-existing conditions lumps together a host of different but related things. For example, we have the fiction that before Obamacare, health insurance companies regularly used to “drop” people who had been properly insured and then got sick. This was propaganda in the sense that it didn’t happen in the way that people were led to believe it did. There were laws to forbid it, and when you heard anecdotal instances of its happening anyway it was virtually always because the insurance company alleged that the patient had committed insurance fraud by not disclosing the pre-existing condition at the outset. In other word, the patient lied.

Now, sometimes the insurance company would use this as a ploy when it wasn’t true. In those cases people could sue, because the law was supposed to protect them from this. I am pretty sure that, as with most things, sometimes there was a miscarriage of justice. But there were laws that prevented this supposedly-widespread dropping of sick people just because they got sick.

Then there were the high-risk pools that used to cover people with pre-existing conditions prior to Obamacare. I’ve written about the subject several times before, for example here:

If you look at the chart in the middle of this page you’ll see that 35 states ran high-risk pools prior to Obamacare, and most had been in operation for many many years (Kansas had started its high-risk pool in 1993). The 15 states that didn’t have them didn’t necessarily leave their high-risk individual health insurance customers in the lurch, either. Some were guaranteed issue states, which meant pre-existing conditions could not be excluded at all: New Jersey, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont had straight guaranteed issue, with Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Idaho having guaranteed issue with some restrictions involving previous continuous coverage…

How do I know this sort of thing? I was in a high-risk pool for quite a few years. It was far from perfect””I paid about the same as I would have if I hadn’t had a pre-existing condition, and my deductibles were significantly higher””but I could certainly get insurance.

It was a problematic situation, to be sure. But the idea that there was no recourse for people with pre-existing conditions who were not insured through their jobs is simply wrong.

There’s a lot more that is poorly understood about the way pre-existing condition coverage used to work, but I’ll stop there. I’ll just add that the confusion about what went on then—and the purposeful propaganda to make it sound even worse than it was (see this, for example)—continues in today’s confusion about what’s happening now:

[An amendment to the bill offered by Rep. Fred Upton, Republican holdout from Michigan] would provide $8 billion over five years to reduce premiums and other costs for those with pre-existing conditions who have a gap in coverage and reside in states that received waivers from some of Obamacare’s requirements under another provision in the bill…

Upton on Tuesday cited the bill’s provision on pre-existing conditions as a reason for his defection. Under the bill — prior to the amendment he is now working on — states could allow insurers to charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions who have had a gap in coverage of at least 63 days in the prior year. States could also let insurers charge older customers more than the original bill allowed — at least five times more than younger ones, beginning in 2018.

“I told the leadership I cannot support the bill with this provision in it,” Upton said Tuesday. “It’s not going to get my ”˜yes’ vote the way it is.”

The previous GOP bill reflected something like the situation that existed prior to Obamacare: states making decisions, and some variability in the price of health coverage depending on whether a person has a pre-existing condition or not. That’s standard insurance practice, and it lowers the costs for others. But Americans have come to be dissatistifed with both that practice and with the high costs of health care and health care insurance, without acknowledging that they are asking for contradictory things.

The Bloomberg article I just linked also gives a statistic commonly offered:

About 27 percent of adults have a pre-existing condition like cancer or heart disease that insurers refused to cover before Obamacare, said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“There are millions with pre-existing conditions,” he said.

That makes it sound like this would affect 27 percent of people. Of course it would not. Many many of these people are on Medicare, which does not exclude them. Many others are covered at work. This problem only affects the rather small individual insurance market. And of course, under the more Draconian Republican bill, they would be covered, just not as easily or as cheaply as those without pre-existing conditions.

Revisiting those high-risk pools—briefly

The New Neo Posted on by

First let me say that this post will be much, much quicker and briefer than my usual. I have a very busy day today and I’m behind in my schedule. So I’ll just say that I’ve noticed, with the debates over how (and if) the GOP should (or will) repeal/replace Obamacare, the subject of high-risk pools has come up again.

Of course. That’s because it’s a knotty problem that’s built into the whole concept of health insurance for all: how to insure the sick, who will incur higher costs?

I’ve discussed it several times in the past, and plan another looong post or two on the subject. This is not that long post, but now I’ll just say that I’ve seen an enormous amount of misrepresentation about how the pre-existing condition coverage used to operate before Obamacare. This was especially true when Obamacare was first being discussed and passed, and it’s still true today.

A very quick summary version is that, prior to Obamacare, most states either had mandatory coverage (including those at high risk) or, much more commonly, a high risk pool for those with pre-existing conditions, and that the high-risk pools were usually partially subsidized by the state to help defray the cost to the consumer who was strapped for funds.

That doesn’t mean high-risk pools were cheap to most people. They were not. But they were a lot cheaper than individual underwriting (which was the other option commonly open to people with pre-existing conditions). I know, because I was in a high risk pool for many years, and I did research on how it worked on a state-by-state basis.

Why not Le Pen?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting take on the furor surrounding Le Pen’s candidacy, from someone who refuses to think she’s evil incarnate.

I’ve read a lot about her, mostly con. But I don’t think I know enough to opine yet, except to say that her appeal is understandable, given the state of France and Europe (and the EU) today.

Why the Democrats lost

The New Neo Posted on by

As a little introduction, I’d like to offer this passage from Through the Looking-Glass:

“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

* * * * *

I’m a bit puzzled by this report—mostly by what’s left out of it:

…[The] Democratic Party [is] at a historic low point…trying to figure out how it can win back power. Much of the debate over how to move forward has centered on whether the party should try to win back working-class white voters ”“ who make up the bulk of Obama-Trump voters ”“ or focus instead on mobilizing its base.

Turning out the base, the data suggests, is simply not good enough.

“This idea that Democrats can somehow ignore this constituency and just turn out more of our voters, the math doesn’t work,” Canter said. “We have to do both.”

…Priorities USA released a poll last week, conducted in part by Canter’s firm, that found the Democratic base ”“ including voters who usually sit out midterm elections ”“ was unusually motivated to participate in the next election. Officials with the group have preached in recent months that Democrats can both reach out to white working-class voters and their base with a strong message rooted in economic populism.

This ignores one of the elephants (donkeys?) in the room, something I touched on in a previous post today: the fact that Hillary Clinton was an unusually poor candidate. But a more important—and less personality-driven—problem for the Democrats is that “reaching out to white working-class voters and the Democratic base” posits an approach that is contradictory and/or extraordinarily difficult. Although Clinton didn’t even try—and that’s part of why she lost—how would Democrats go about doing that?

What would such an approach actually look like, while still maintaining a recognizably Democratic identity? The needs of those two groups used to be united—or at least appeared to be united—back in New Deal days. President Bill Clinton was able to do it, too, but he did it by tacking to the middle. These days the bulk of the Democratic Party, and its base, has traveled much further to the left than that. Yes, there were leftists in the 1930s (including some of my own relatives) and in the 1990s, but there are a lot more of them now in the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

What’s more, at some point the party made white men the enemy, in both its rhetoric and its policies. That rhetoric and those policies were a conscious effort, not an accident—the result of a calculation to go for the base and ignore that other demographic, a bet that such an approach would lead the way not just to victory but to permanent victory. The Democrats’ base hates Trump for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is that he has thrown a wrench into that theory and those efforts. By appealing to the “forgotten” group—a group that had not so much been forgotten as taken for granted or, more probably, purposely written off as irrelevant—he siphoned off just enough of that group, in the right geographic areas, to win.

If Democrats believe they can appeal to both their base and that group without changing something very fundamental about their message and more importantly their policies, then I think they’re up there with the Red Queen in believing impossible things.

Of course, they might not actually have to appeal to this group in order to win. Maybe all they have to do is to nominate a more appealing candidate than Hillary Clinton. Obama certainly was. But where shall they find another?

Which for some reason reminds me of this (note particularly 1:13 to 1:25):

“He’s not Hillary” as a pro-Trump argument

The New Neo Posted on by

In an interesting discussion on this thread, commenter “Big Maq” responded to commenter “Cornhead” this way:

“He’s not Hillary.” ”“ Cornhead

Seems like an excuse now for anything wrt trump.

Just found this ”“ seems appropriate to that tired refrain:

“Then there are the folks who are mostly-in for Trump. Every day I hear people say on Twitter, “Yeah, he’s flawed but at least he’s not Hillary.” But what kind of standard is that? I’m glad Hillary’s not president. Truly. But if your yardstick for a Republican president ”” not candidate, but president ”” is now “He’s better than Hillary,” then you’ve filed down the yardstick to a couple inches. “Better than Hillary” strikes me as the minimum requirement for a conservative president, not an omnibus justification for anything he does.“ ”“ Jonah Goldberg

“He’s not Hillary” serves a lot of purposes as a rejoinder. If it’s a kneejerk all-purpose response to any criticism of Trump, meant to end the argument, then it’s a meaningless closed door to discussion. And I suppose sometimes it’s offered in that spirit.

But I think that it can also be (as I think it may have been for Cornhead) a reminder of the realities we faced. Once it became clear that Trump had clinched the nomination, it was a binary choice. Although some people held out hope for a while for a third choice that would gather steam (I held out some small hope for a bit), it became clear before Election Day that that was not to be.

One of those two people was going to be president, and every voter had to decide which one. It was an easy choice if the voter thought highly of one of them, but a far more difficult one if the voter thought they both were execrable, although in very different ways.

So “he’s not Hillary” can simply be a reminder of that stark fact. People often consider a present situation and complain about it without regard to the alternatives. So sometimes it’s good to point out what the real alternatives were. And so far, there’s little question that for a conservative voter, Trump has been better than Hillary would have been.

That doesn’t mean that the speaker gives blanket approval to everything Trump does. For example, “he’s not Hillary” could be the statement of someone who thinks the only good thing Trump has done is to nominate Gorsuch to the Court.

A more interesting question to me—although an extremely hypothetical and speculative one—is what some of the other leading GOP candidates such as Rubio or Cruz would have been doing as president, and how they would have fared in the office. We can argue about that—and we have—and we can argue about whether any of them could have won (and we have). But we’ll never know.

My opinion of Trump so far? (a) He’s not Hillary. (b) He’s been considerably better than I thought he would be, but my expectations were low. (c) It’s early, and he’s already shown growth and change compared to what we saw during the campaign. (d) I’m happy with some of his actions and unhappy with some of them, but I’ve written on this blog about the specifics and so I’m not going to list them here. (e) Trump is Trump, and his essential nature is mercurial and combative; he likes to surprise people, so it’s never possible to completely relax; and (f) He’s not Hillary.

Ballet and technique: the unbearable lightness of style

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’ve followed ballet as long as I have, you can’t help but notice vast changes in technique (I’ve written about some of them here and elsewhere). In general, the number and scope of physical feats has increased tremendously, perhaps exponentially. But there are tradeoffs, too.

I was going to write “there are tradeoffs in the non-physical part of ballet—the artistry.” But I wonder; is any part of ballet non-physical? Ballet is a strange amalgam, an art that is expressed almost totally in the physical/visual, because the instrument of art is the human body in motion. Singing and playing musical instruments are at least partly physical, but their main modality is sound. Painting and sculpture require physical control, and their main modality is visual as well, but a product is created that is separate from the artist and ultimately can stand on its own.

But as Yeats memorably wrote (in one of my favorite poems):

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

We can’t.

Which brings me to the subject of this post: changes in style in ballet over the years. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a few changes that I would characterize as good. For example, some of the truly schmaltzy over-the-top kitschy histrionics are gone. But one person’s schmaltz is another person’s souffle. And as a general rule, I think we’ve lost far more than we’ve gained in the sense of style, just in my lifetime.

Style—and artistry—have been sacrificed to technique, for the most part. I like to see physical feats, but if I want to see them for their own sake I’ll go to gymnastics. Ballet only becomes transcendent when style is wedded to technique, and although a certain level of technique must be present, it is meaningless without style.

So now, without too much further ado or comment, I’ll bring you some examples of a certain style that was found far more often in the past, that of ethereal lightness and quickness and joy. The clips I’ve cued up in this video are from the 60s, I believe (perhaps 1967?), and they’re not even of performances; they seem to be a sort of staged, in-costume rehearsal by some soloists with the Bolshoi:

Those two soloists were fairly typical of what I recall of the dancers of the time in their emphasis on the dance aspects of what they were doing. Interestingly enough, although ballet technique has become more advanced in the intervening years, one area in which it has declined is quickness. The tempi at which Russian dancers used to move could not be matched by most dancers today, and their speed was accomplished with an illusion of great lightness and ease.

The next clip illustrates those qualities, but unfortunately it cannot be embedded. I’m planning to analyze it in greater depth in another post, although the lack of embedding ability is unfortunate. The entire clip is part of “Walpurgis Nacht” from the opera “Faust,” and shows the revels of bacchantes and satyrs (probably recorded in the 1950s or perhaps the early 60s).

If you want to see it (and I hope you do), go here at YouTube and take a look at minutes 3:44 to 5:24, and then the pas de deux from 6:19 to the end. It is almost unbearably schmaltzy, old-fashioned, and easy to mock. But I think it’s also very wonderful, particularly the performance of the lead bacchante, the lady in red Raissa Struchkova, whose lightness and quickness cannot be rivaled by a single dancer today who comes to mind.

I think we’ve lost a great deal, although most people are unaware of what we’ve lost.

Adam Gopnik “tries” to resist Trump Derangement Syndrome

The New Neo Posted on by

He tries—but he fails.

Or is he just pretending to talk himself out of Trump Derangement Syndrome, while consolidating it for himself and his readers? He gives up the anti-TDS fight awfully easily, doesn’t he?

I understand, Adam. Believe me, I do. It takes no imagination at all for me to imagine being a liberal in your position, confronted with the shock of a Trump presidency. But you can try a little harder than this to resist:

We owe it to our country and to our sanity to go on a case-by-case basis, empirically evaluating each action as it takes place, and refusing to succumb to the urge to turn politics into a series of set responses””exactly the habit, after all, that we so often deplore in Trump and the people around him.

This is a perfectly reasonable assertion, and one that would count for a lot in pretty much any semi-normal circumstance. The problem is that it refuses to see, or to entirely register, the actual nature of Trump and his actions. Our problem is not Trump Derangement Syndrome; our problem is Deranged Trump Self-Delusion. This is the habit of willfully substituting, as a motive for Trump’s latest action, a conventional political or geostrategic ambition, rather than recognizing the action as the daily spasm of narcissistic gratification and episodic vanity that it truly is.

See how it goes? Something like it would be reasonable to be reasonable about Trump if we didn’t know that we shouldn’t be reasonable because everything Trump does has evil motivation even if it looks like it might not. Talk about circular reasoning!

Gopnik goes on to describe various actions by Trump that might be considered to have benign motives but which he rejects out of hand. What’s more, he warns his readers that it is dangerous to think otherwise—in other words, that any defection from Trump Derangement System is the beginning of a slide down the slippery slope of compromise with evil:

Doubtless there will soon be revisionist trends in the assessment of Trump, with journalists insisting that beneath the flailing and lying there is something resembling a plan””that one can connect the dot, and see a real picture. Don’t buy it.

Don’t open your mind and even consider the alternative to Trump-as-evil. If this sounds a mite familiar, it should. Not only is it a variant of the same thing I wrote about earlier today regarding the reception of Bret Stephens’ NY Times column on AGW, but it’s the same thing I’ve written about for over a decade: the left’s closed minds and intolerance of any thought that challenges its belief system and agenda.

Thinking for oneself and opening up one’s mind—who knows to where it might lead? After all, someone like me who happened upon certain alternate (conservative) views that made more sense to me than the liberal/left ones I’d always known, and who changed her political affiliation as a result—someone like that is dangerous to the solidarity of the left.

When I was a liberal Democrat (I was never on the left, although “liberal Democrat” and “leftist” have become more synonymous these days than they were when I was young), I actually believed that “liberal” meant “open-minded and willing to listen to the opinions of others.” Therefore it was one of the shocks of my life to be the recipient of so much rage when I tried to discuss my differing and changing views with people I knew. Some were okay with it, by the way. But many were not, and I could not have predicted in advance who those people were going to be.

But I don’t think that even in my liberal Democrat days I would have nodded along with what Gopnik is writing in his column. But there are an awful lot of people who will.

AGW: when a scientific theory becomes a religion…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then those with an opposing view become apostates.

That’s especially true if the topic is one with very high stakes, such as AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Think about it this way: if a person is—(a) convinced that AGW has been proven beyond any doubt (b) threatens life as we know it all over the globe; and (c) can be halted and/or decreased by measures we understand and can control if only we had the will to implement them—then if follow that anyone who disagrees is a person who is endangering life on earth.

Science, of course, is not a religion, and the history of science is littered with theories that have been considered proven and then are disproven. So scientists must remain skeptical and open to any evidence that would challenge their theories and their findings. That’s difficult enough to do when the topic is an abstract one with few practical applications. But when a topic is highly highly politicized (as with AGW), the difficulty increases exponentially and the public also becomes very much involved.

Which brings us to an article Bret Stephens wrote in his new venue, the NY Times. It was really a rather modest suggestion that people listen to both sides of the issue—not so much on AGW (which he himself seems to believe is true) as on whether we know enough to accurately predict the future of AGW and/or to fix the problems it may cause.

The Twitter storm this caused has been virulent. But if AGW (and intervention to halt or slow its effects) is your religion, then someone like Stephens becomes the AGW devil. Then this sort of response seems perfectly reasonable (if crass):

“You’re a s”“thead. a crybaby lil f”“kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.

“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.

“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.

Not only has Stephens been excoriated, but that last sentiment—that he shouldn’t be at the Times—has drawn enough support to be expressed in a petition, that now has about 27,000 supporters, asking that he be fired. It’s especially ironic, not only because Stephens just arrived there but also because the main thrust of his column was to ask people to listen to opposing voices. And although Stephens is voicing only the mildest of opposition to current AGW thought, his voice is intolerable to many people who like their echo chambers particularly echo-y:

“Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” [Stephens wrote]. “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know ”” as all environmentalists should ”” that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”

But social media users didn’t care, with some ”” including several scientists ”” going so far as to order a subscription boycott of the Times on Friday.

“Each and every one of us should fully boycott the NY Times ”” don’t link to them, don’t click on their links. Their actions are inexcusable,” wrote one Twitter user. “You cannot be an ostensible paper-of-record and allow a science denier to spread propaganda.”

Adriana Heguy, a genomics scientist and professor of pathology at NYU, urged her colleagues to scrap their subscriptions, as well.

“Composing my letter to the editor today and canceling @nytimes,” she tweeted. “”˜Balance’ means a VALID alternative opinion, not pseudoscience. I’m so sad.”

There’s room for plenty of sadness to go around. I certainly feel it, although I’m used to it, and I’m used to the sentiments expressed there.

The left has always had aspects of a religion, although many on the left don’t believe in religion. Or maybe because they don’t. Human beings apparently have a need to believe, whether they believe it or not.