Over on Myrmecos Alex Wild just brought to my attention a rather personal attack from a pair of republican senators (Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and John McCain, R-Ariz). Once again I started to comment, but given how close to home this hits, I felt a longer winded diatribe approaching…
Apparently, my job is a giant waste of money. Funding that the California Academy of Sciences (my employer) has received, is coming under direct attack. OK, my position has nothing to do with Antweb and I am not supported by public funds – but some of my colleagues are. Colleagues that have the exact same job title as my own, work a few doors down, and happen to work on different projects funded from different sources. What this boils down to is not only a republican war on science (go find that book), but a republican war on intellectualism. Everyone whose scaly little hand has crafted this report is not only willfully ignorant but is being outright dishonest. What is their unstated major premise here? The logical fallacy runs somewhere along the line of…
A) Democrats are wasting money because we are not in power.
B) By pointing out where this money is being “wasted” we will help save it and in turn ingratiate ourselves to the voters.
B) Supporting science (e.g. wasteful spending) is the cause of our economic problems.
So to be explicitly clear the massive unstated major premise and logical fallacy is “science funding is causing our economic problems (among other things we deem unfit)”. Somehow they are telling the American people that they would do a better job of not spending money on such silly things like “science”. They would “create American jobs” by not giving jobs to American scientists. So if were let the republicans cut the funds what would happen? That money wouldn’t support a curator, a team of students, technical-staff (just like myself), general museum staff, the American businesses that build our equipment and the domestic airlines that fly us around the world. This isn’t even approaching the secondary benefits that come from the research itself that are much more valuable and slightly more intangible. Alex is right of course – Antweb is a massively powerful tool used world-wide to help identify a group of insects that impacts our lives on the scale of trillions of dollars annually (on a global scale). This is the same sort of logic that forced the cancellation of the superconducting super collider in Texas. Following the wake of that decision was a mild recession in Texas followed by a ‘brain drain’ that drew physicists out of American institutions and to Europe where the LHC was constructed and put online last year. Thousands of jobs were lost in construction and thousands of long-term science jobs were never created.
I’d like to know who sets these republican strategies and where he gets his giant black cape and the white cat that sits on his lap (Cheney-mart?). Somewhere far, far away exists a think-tank where they decide the best strategy is to willingly mislead the American public because they know they are fundamentally ignorant (extrapolating Alex’s idea). This is of course to their massive benefit because while on one hand they cater to the beck and call of big business yet on the other hand they tell the populous that it is them they are watching out for most of all. And in the end they get away with their appalling condescension without anyone being the wiser and they get to call it patriotism. Of course only John Stewart will aptly point this out to the mass-media, which is never really heard by the audience who really needs to hear it most.
Much of this comes from the strange logical fallacy of the “real” American (akin to the naturalistic fallacy where ‘natural’ things are good, like arsenic right?). A blue-collar, hard-working, deeply republican, gun-toting, fundamental christian who goes by the name “Joe”. They are at odds against us regular “Chris the scientists” who are out there sitting on piles of their tax dollars snorting giant mounds of cocaine and flying around the world catching bugs. Yet I believe in a free market (albeit regulated), pay taxes, rent an apartment, drive a car, own a gun, work hard and have the freedom to not believe in God. Yet somehow I’ve been rounded down to wasteful spending that doesn’t count as a job. To me, and likely to all of my readers, we slap ourselves in the forehead and wonder how we got here in the first place.
So whose fault is it? Somewhere along the line we massively stopped valuing science and science education. Our numbers are slipping in health care and education on a yearly basis. The average American sits at home on their couch growing roots out of their ass and fails to realize science is responsible for almost literally 100% of their daily life. Every month we are presented with infinitely more complex technology that widens the gap between the user and developer. And so here we are careening towards a future where scientists will exist as part of a mysterious class orphaned from society that not a single person understands. Perhaps not elevated on ivory towers as powerful magicians who control the world – but more like mole-people who are relegated to the underworld allowing our flying cars to operate. And as Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – we now hold devices in our pockets that do more than a $4,000 computer could do five years ago. How this happens seems like magic – and when this magic crosses the lines into science and health we lose track of reality.
And so with a closing thought from Sarah Palin (emphasis not my own):
It’s about stopping Obama, Pelosi and Reed from what they are doing TO our country.
