By Eh?Nonymous
As someone who largely identifies with at least a few libertarian values, I can’t think of many better examples of free market thinking than the process of observing, collecting, and analysing scientific data and allowing it to speak for itself without being manipulated, corrupted, or framed in a way that will further a particular political or theological (or atheist) agenda.
I just read a really interesting article on the arrival of the Juno probe at Jupiter by XYZ editor David Hiscox. David approaches this well written piece in a very scientific manner. At no point does he bemoan that NASA is hamstrung by a lack of funding, or indeed that it is flourishing under the Obama administration. Nor does it contain a postscript that ‘this is clearly proof that Christians are mistaken in their belief that heaven lies just above the clouds’ or indeed that ‘the miracle of Juno is clearly proof of intelligent design’. It is factual, unbiased, and doesn’t push any kind of political or theological agenda.
David has written numerous thought provoking pieces of social and political commentary, so it’s not as if he doesn’t think about such things. It’s just that he realises the importance of a scientific article remaining strictly scientific and unadulterated by politics or theology. An article about about the Juno space probe has no place making tenuous links to commentary about refugees, Pauline Hanson, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, or anything else that the author might be interested in examining. Sadly not all commentators take as much of a purely scientific approach to science stories as our XYZ editor.
This article, on the other hand will not be taking a purely scientific approach, because the website that it concerns is not taking a purely scientific approach.
My wife is really into science, and is also what I’d describe as an Anglican on hiatus. She has beliefs, but doesn’t attend church. She isn’t political in the slightest, and doesn’t really follow such things too closely. One evening, I noticed her scowling at her tablet and asked her what was wrong.
“Why does this site keep picking fights with Christians?”
The site in question was I F—ing Love Science. It has one of the most popular pages on Facebook. When you have that kind of power, it’s a lot of responsibility. It’s easy to compromise impartiality to push beliefs that it isn’t the time or the place for. And that’s exactly what they do. I can’t remember exactly what the article at the time was. Something about a discovery from an ancient civilisation that apparently debunked the Bible because it was older than the Bible claims that the world is.
The Bible was written by scholars who didn’t have the luxury of having access to things like carbon dating or the fossil record. Even still, these people were hardly idiots. Just being literate in Biblical times was akin to being a chemical engineer like Australian scientist San Thang (more on him later), so it hardly seems fair to judge them by 21st century semantics.
The vast majority of Christians realise this and don’t take everything written in there as gospel, if you’ll pardon the pun. The regressive left don’t understand this of course. As has been noted before, they don’t understand religion full stop. These are the same kind of people who watch a movie from the fifties and chuckle ironically when they see someone in it using a phone book.
“Who would be stupid enough to use a phone book when you can just Google it?” they remark with millennial superiority over the quaintness of a generation who were way better recyclers and infinitely more environmentally friendly than their grandchildren, who demand a new and improved smartphone every five minutes.
The article that irked my wife was not a one off apparently. She told me that the site used to be cool, but every few articles lately they seemed to be throwing in conspicuous commentary about all of the hot button Cultural Marxist topics (my words, not hers. I believe she said ‘annoying hipster topics’ but I got her drift). A quick perusal confirmed this, and reading the comments below the suspect articles, it became clear that at least half of those who had liked the page had noticed a similar aggressive left-wing bent.
I haven’t looked at the page for some time, but in the interest of fairness I had a quick look today. The second article I saw was entitled ‘Six Incredible Scientists Who Had To Flee Their Homeland as Refugees‘.
There was clearly nothing scientific about this article other than the fact that it involved six scientists. It almost read as if it were commissioned by a refugee activist group. And even then the link they made was dubious at best. They spoke of scientists like Gustav Nossal, Johannes Kepler, and Einstein in the same breathe as some North African guy who claims to be Syrian. Here are a few excerpts from the article that pertain to the Australian side of things:
“San Thang’s voyage across the South China Sea at the end of the Vietnam
War looked a lot like what we are seeing in the Mediterranean today. He fled Vietnam among 409 people crammed aboard a tiny boat seeking to avoid repression from the communist forces who had recently taken Saigon.
“Thang’s work providing tools to allow chemical engineers to alter plastics to suit their needs has proven so useful it was at short odds to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014. Funding cutbacks have forced him from the position in which he spent most of his career, but he has continued to work on in an unpaid capacity.
“Today, the boats crossing the Mediterranean include scientists whose expertise make them targets for extremists groups.”
It couldn’t have looked any different to the XYZ Juno article. It shamelessly pushed a pro-refugee agenda, alluded to Liberal cutbacks at the CSIRO, and of course indicated that those who make up the Refugee Regatta we see crossing the Mediterranean today are not of the ilk that helped increase the rate of rape in Sweden by 500% and the violent crime rate rise by 300% in just a few short years, but are in all likelihood highly functional scientists who will be bringing scientific breakthroughs into Europe with them.
The best evidence IFLS can come up with to support their thesis is purely anecdotal (the left loves presenting anecdotal evidence as the norm), and revolves around half a dozen scientists who settled in random places between the early 17th century, and just after the Vietnam War. That’s one scientist seeking asylum every 67 years, a benefit that apparently justifies mass destabilisation of Europe and elsewhere.
Now to quote Donald Trump, I assume that many if not most of these refugees are good people. Just don’t query them too closely on their opinions about feminism, gays, or Jews, and I’m sure you’ll have a lovely conversation over a cuppa without being put off your Tim Tams. But statistically, it’s ridiculous to allude that a refugee is statistically more likely to be a scientist than say, a criminal or a radical jihadist.
Judging from the comments below their Facebook share of the article, at least a good percentage of IFLS page followers seemed to realise they’d been fed an elaborate Cultural Marxist puff piece under the guise of an impartial scientific paper. Here are just a few comments to be found below the article:
Walter Wong: Don’t go there IFLS
Phil Kwiatowski: Einstein compared to terrorists? Dude this site went straight to hell.
Janet Alaska: Potentially six out of 2 million? Well worth it.
Mario Slovansky: This is bad propoganda.
Darren Hocking: I’m sick of IFLS political bulls—. Stick to science. Unsubscribed.
Ryan Kyger: Stop with the political BS already. Science and politics need to stay separate.
Amanda Sime: Give it a rest would you?
Interesting stuff indeed. Seemingly, the fans of the IFLS page are a very analytical bunch and can quickly detect bulls— when they see it.
Clearly, IFLS seems more obsessed with social engineering than structural engineering. More enamoured with Cultural Marxism than Bacterial Culture. More preoccupied with social justice than social science.
For a site that is allegedly scientifically inclined, they seem awfully beholden to relying on anomalous anecdotal evidence. Using Einstein as an example that refugees can be scientists is a little like using a 58 year old woman who has accidentally fallen pregnant as indisputable evidence that women can comfortably wait until their late fifties before having children. Sure, it’s possible. But not probable.
The conspicuous recurring theme of Cultural Marxist doctrine at IFLS is symptomatic of the main problematic issue with regressive left ideology. Like alcoholics, these people don’t seem to realise that they have a problem.
The regressive left don’t even regard their beliefs as political or biased. They think that left-wing is just something you’ll find attached to the side of a plane.
They see their ideology as indisputable fact. They’ll readily question very unscientific claims by creationists that the shape of a banana is proof of intelligent design, but blindly and wholeheartedly accept the junk science on their side of the political spectrum with no questions asked.
Regardless of your political leanings, it’s important to remain vigilant, cynical, and skeptical of sources that present heavily biased opinion as science. Thankfully as you can see from the comments below this and other IFLS articles, most centrist and conservative people who visit the site seem curious by nature and only too willing to question obvious theological and socio-political doctrine that is presented as being scientific. Now, if we can only find a way to convince IFLS to be a little more scientific and a little more politically and theologically impartial.
Eh?nonymous was a thoroughly repellent unemployed social justice warrior until a one in a million glitch in his Facebook account affected the algorithms in his news feed, omitting posts from his much loved left leaning Huffington Post and I F**king Love Science, and inexplicably replacing them with centrist and conservative newsfeed items that slowly dragged him kicking and screaming into the light beyond the safe space that Mr. Zuckerberg had so carefully constructed for him. It’s a long road to recovery, but every Mark Steyn share he sees in his newsfeed is like another day clean from social justice addiction.
Photo by tonynetone