06 Sep 11 | Uncategorized
The state-owned California Science Center has been embroiled for two years in a legal dispute over a documentary critiquing evolution. The American Freedom Alliance, which says it “promotes, defends and upholds Western values and ideals” — apparently, among them, the dubious scientific theory of Intelligent Design — originally sought to air the film in the rented science center’s IMAX theatre in 2009.
The museum eventually canceled the documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record, for fear of appearing to endorse its claims. The American Freedom Alliance then sued, arguing that the government-run science center had violated the First Amendment by showing preference for one viewpoint (evolution) over another (intelligent design, generally considered to be a more publicly palatable version of religious-based creationism).
Last week the two reached a settlement: The science center is paying the American Freedom Alliance $110,000 to end the dispute, although, as the Los Angeles Times has pointed out, neither party is admitting wrongdoing in the unusual agreement. As part of the settlement, the science center agreed to invite the film back for a screening, and the American Freedom Alliance agreed to turn the invitation down.
Intelligent Design advocates are properly claiming victory, although their logic is slightly flawed. Said William J. Becker, Jr., the alliance’s lawyer: “It’s a vindication for ID, and First Amendment guarantees of free speech.”
While the latter may be true, the settlement hardly confers on intelligent design some new respectability in the eyes of public institutions. The notion that government may not suppress or favor the expression of certain ideas has nothing to do with whether or not those ideas have any merit.
17 Aug 11 | Index Index, minipost
Local papers in Albemarle County, Virginia, have reported that Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been removed from sixth-grade reading lists after a parent complained that it was “our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion.” In the book, in which a father and daughter are rescued by Mormons on condition they adopt the Mormon faith, Conan Doyle wrote that Mormons were “persecutors of the most terrible description”.
26 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
In the days since Anders Behring Breivik — the accused perpetrator of Friday’s deadly attacks in Norway — has been identified as a Christian right-wing extremist, some liberals in the US have descended on the episode as another opportunity to draw a straight line between hard-right political causes and actual violence. The meme has been gaining steam since the early rise of the Tea Party, a group that occasionally celebrates its Second Amendment gun rights by toting weapons to public rallies.
“Norway, US, Worldwide — is Right-Wing Violence endemic?” asks a blog post on the popular liberal Internet enclave Fire Dog Lake. Explains the writer:
“Right-wing supporters, here in the US and around the world, have a long history of resorting to, or actually embracing, violence. People from politicians, to preachers to doctors have all been shot because of their perceived (and perhaps real) left leaning political views.”
The author then proceeds to compile a list of recent incidents involving right-wing violence, including mention of the January shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
ThinkProgress, a liberal blog affiliated with the progressive Center for American Progress, has published an oddly beside-the-point revelation that the “Norway Terrorist is a Global Warming Denier“, as if this contributes further damning evidence of the ideological similarity between mass murderers and run-of-the-mill conservatives. In another post, the blog cites “evidence that [Breivik] was a fan of far-right bloggers and political parties.”
It then uses the occasion to chastise Rep. Peter King, who has refused to include homegrown terrorism threats – read: threats from neo-Nazis and other domestic right-wing extremists — in his congressional hearings investigating the radicalisation of American Muslims. King, since the Norway attacks, has held to that position.
Of course, it would be preferable for King to abandon the hearings all together rather than to add domestic political partisans to his already dubious investigation of the Muslim community. But the hint of “endemic” right-wing violence poses a different challenge – and that’s that we head down a tricky path in trying to draw systemic conclusions about political ideology and specific incidents of bloodshed.
It’s possible — as has turned out to be the case with Giffords’ shooter — that the defining characteristic of Breivik and other such violent rogues isn’t their politics, but their mental instability. And conflating the two could be problematic for political speech in the long run.
Sarah Palin was widely indicted after the Giffords shooting, which left six dead in an Arizona strip-mall parking lot, for having produced a map of political opponents targeted in the 2010 election with gun-sight symbols over their districts. Pundits speculated that such a map could have motivated Jared Lee Loughner to take Palin’s suggestion literally. (Subsequently, there was no evidence Loughner ever even saw Palin’s campaign graphic.)
Since then, Americans have been struggling mightily with the consequences of political discourse, with what it means to be “civil” at a time of rising political acrimony, and with the murky causal connection between words, ideas and violent action. It’s an important discussion. But chalking up the Norway shooting as another example that “right-wing ideas = violence” doesn’t add much to it.
Joshua Foust, writing in The Atlantic, is equally firm on this point:
“In order to tar all of Europe’s right, even just the upsetting xenophobes clothing themselves in worry about jihad, you must demonstrate a causal mechanism by which concern over cultural outsiders becomes murderous rage against the very people you claim to protect (in this case, ethnic Norwegians). Without being too trite, it requires an especially deranged mind already far outside the mainstream to decide to slaughter children at summer camp just because it is run by a left-wing political party. Associating that sort of mentality with the mainstream is not just wrong and lazy, it is hypocritical.
Indeed, much of the Western’s left’s quasi-triumphalism over the Norwegian tragedy revolves around it’s complete non-relationship to Islamic terror. Here, so many seem to celebrate, is the proof they had finally sought that right-wing politics are not just annoying and wrong, but actively dangerous.”
That argument may be politically profitable in the short term. But in the long run, suggesting political beliefs — whether liberal or conservative — are synonymous with incitement to violence could wind up undermining the rights of even those making such an argument today.
01 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
As the rest of the world’s governing bodies and opinion polls have gradually come around to a consensus on climate change, the United States stands out as a particularly odd outlier: Supporters and deniers here have in fact grown further apart, with the issue more politically divisive today than it was just five years ago. Public concern about the climate has actually declined. Politicians who once acknowledged global warming have changed their minds. And in a particularly shocking vote earlier this spring, not one of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee would vote for an amendment simply acknowledging that climate change exists (which is the position of the government’s own scientific bodies).
In the midst of all this, an even stranger thing has happened — scientists themselves have become controversial figures, now routinely harassed, investigated and attacked for their research.
In a particularly high-profile case, Virginia’s elected attorney general has spent most of the past year trying to subpoena the state’s prestigious public university for the academic records of a climate scientist, Michael Mann, whom he accuses of defrauding the public for grant money to support his research. Mann has not worked at the University of Virginia since 2005.
The latest tactic, inspired by the Climategate email scandal, has been for non-governmental activist groups to file public records requests about individual researchers in the hunt for personal information to discredit them. One such group, the American Tradition Institute, last week sued NASA to obtain records on any ethics or disclosure violations by James Hansen, a top climatologist who blew the whistle on censorship of scientists during the Bush Administration.
The trend is distressing for each of the researchers who’ve become unwitting targets. But, more broadly, academic and scientific organisations increasingly worry that such tactics will have a much wider impact — intimidating the entire scientific community and deterring work on a crucial area of public inquiry.
Exasperated with this trend, one of the country’s most respected scientific organisations (and the world’s largest general scientific body), this week released a formal statement decrying all the harassment. The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science wrote:
“We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public. This both impedes the progress of science and interferes with the application of science to the solution of global problems. AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions.”
The scientific community has spent centuries perfecting the process of policing itself — peer review is designed to ferret out research fraud, and the revision and correction of earlier findings is a central element of the very idea of scientific progress.
All of this has been lost on aggressive climate deniers, who have been remarkably successful at creating the public impression of scientists as agenda-wielding partisans in a political war. For their part, cloistered researchers not used to communicating with the public have seemed baffled by attacks that can’t be repelled on data and evidence alone.
As the AAAS points out, the stakes go beyond even the implications for chilled speech. Because all of society will lose out when scientists are intimidated into staying away from climate research that’s needed to inform what we should do about the problem.
As the board put it:
“We are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.”
