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Abuses of Science Political Cartoon Contest
AngryNick writes "The Union of Concerned Scientists has announced a cartoon contest for amateur and professional artists.
'The absurdity of political interference in science is fertile ground for satire,' said Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program. 'We hope these contests encourage amateur and professional cartoonists alike to express concern--through humor and art--about the impact of the abuse of science on our safety, health and environment.'
A celebrity judge panel will select twelve finalists and the public will then choose the Grand Prize winner. The winner will receive a host of prizes, including $500 and an all-expenses-paid trip to have lunch with the celebrity judge of his or her choice.
You can read Contest details, sample topics and the list of celebrity judges."
If we're talking political abuse-of-science, can I link to this essay by Michael Crichton about "environmentalism as religion" just to remind everyone that things like this cut both ways?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
When the Republicans (not necessarily the Right) try their hardest to subvert science, then I would expect scientists to lampoon them.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Please no flame wars about the old churches stance on celestial mechanics - we've all seen it before, no need to bring it up and get side tracked. We are talking about todays political climate.
And please let's not limit this discussion to evolution and creationists - there's been a great deal of interference on the topic of global warming. The old Republican party stance that it's not occurring has been disproven by the vast majority of atmospheric/climatologists scientists, and have shown it to be a fact. I hate that because Al Gore (A Democrat) is pro-environment, that many Republicans feel that they have to take an opposing viewpoint - what gives!? Yes, I'm sure the Dems do the same with other issues, but we are talking about science here, so let's keep our egos and passions aside and behave like rational thinkers.
..........FULL STOP.
Given the fact that you posted it I have to presume that you are unaware of the fact that your post is a reasonably good example of why this contest is a good idea and the sponsoring organization is necessary.
Yes, you are right. (That was sarcasm)
If you take the time to read the sponsoring organization they are clearly promoting a liberal socialist agenda. One side, anti Bush, Anti republican, etc etc. The kind of organization they are would not let out cartoons critiquing their side.
But ultimately this has no place on slashdots main page. Let people only listen to one side, I do not care. I take the time to read both sides, and I understand both sides are morons. Thank you for proving though that you have no clue about one sided propaganda.
Right.... the republicans are raping the environment because they want to stick it to the democrats. It has NOTHING to do with the millions of campaign dollars contributed by companies that profit from the destruction of the planet.
People of religion have been studying science for decades.
There is no disparity.
Those who seek conflict only search to reaffirm their own personal beliefs about the world.
The "debate" deserves parody.
When I read the New Testament, one thing that really stands out to me is the emphasis Jesus placed on always asking questions. He never told his followers to obey him obediently. He wanted them to question his actions and words. He wanted them to think for themselves, and analyze the world around them, for themselves. That's the very essence of science: understanding nature via observation and experimentation.
A common theme throughout the Gospels is somebody asking Jesus a question, and Jesus telling them to look. Sometimes they would have to look inside themselves, but other times they were told to look at the world around them. They could find the answers there. All they had to do was look.
Frankly, we don't need comics to prove wrong those Republicans, neoconservatives, evangelists, etc., who have perverted the teachings of Christ. As Christ taught us to do, all we need to do is look! We can look for ourselves at his very teachings just to see how perverted some people's interpretations of them are. And we can use his wisdom in our pursuit of science. As scientists, we always need to be continuously observing, experimenting, and otherwise understanding the world around us. That's exactly what Jesus encouraged his followers to do.
But bring up the Nazi eugenics experiments--and bear in mind the eugenics is scientifically established--and they just mumble and walk away.
Um, Nazi Germany was a self-avowed christian society; atheists were harassed and killed right along with other "undesirables". Does that make christianity bad?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Me, I do believe it's happening--but that human activity has absolutely nothing to do with it. Rather, it's part of the natural cycle that has been in effect since before there WERE human beings on earth.
The notion that it is caused by what puny humans can do is just laughable. One has only to look at the phenomenon of Mt. Pinatubo and Mt. St. Helens--both of which put more particulates into the atmosphere in DAYS than humans have throughout their history--to realize the earth is a self-regulating system.
Global warming, if it is really happening, is a natural occurence, and will bring as much benefit as it does harm.
However, socialist politicians, who lust for the power to establish their order in the lives of individuals, are using it as a pretext for a power grab. This must NEVER be allowed to happen.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
There is significant evidence for global warming, but less showing that it is caused by people. It seems to me that scientists are politically pressured to support global warming, just like evolution (Which I don't necessarily disagree with, but I doubt many scientific organizations would give support to a scientist with another theory, even if it wasn't in any way similar to intelligent design.).
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Heck, if we're talking abuse of science, I can't think of any better subject to discuss than the author of Andromeda Strain, Prey, and State of Fear. The man's been mangling science for years and then making his books look better by tossing a gratuitous biblography of all the papers he supposedly read to justify his plots. (Alien crystal viruses, grey goo, and local cooling disproving global warming, oh my!)
Michael Crichton doesn't know what he's talking about. State of Fear is filled with junk science. Read a more thorough debunking here.
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths, and claims that they're distorting facts without backing any of it up with "facts" of his own -- except for "facts" like the harmlessness of second-hand smoke. Crichton's a loon and an asshole for making that last argument in particular, but the bulk of the essay argument is that environmentalists are wrong in their assertions (without any justification of why) and thus religious nuts for asserting something that his holiness Crichton declares to be wrong. (Oh, he could cite mainstream articles, but you wouldn't believe him anyway, so why back up his bald-faced lies?)
He attacks environmentalists as being the same as people who romanticize primativism, use errors on predictions of a socially affected phenomena like population growth show that scientists who care about the environment can't be trusted. He claims that DDT is harmless because it's not a carcinogenic (when it's the liver, immune, and nervous toxicity that actually caused it to be banned). He states that we can't totally roll back carbon emissions without fusion technology, so it's a waste of time to bother reducing them in the meantime. He falls back on the old saw of the environment being a complex system that's hard to understand as justification for not erring on the side of safety.
His speech is nothing but a litany of half-truths, distortions, unbacked assertions, and ad hominem attacks. So, yes, let's start our discussion of abuse of science with a discussion of Crichton. It's only appropriate.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
So abuse of science, how far does that stretch?
Could I not argue that science invented weapons so the Iraq invasion is an abuse of science.
Could I argue that nuclear power was invented to save people, so using it as an excuse to pressure Iran is an abuse of science?
We could push this so far it's insane.
I like muppets.
But as the quote a few stories down, praising Michael Bloomberg for "It is impressive how he very directly demonizes those that would politicize stem cell research, global warming, Terry Schaivo, and evolution" demonstrates -- the lure of conflating them in order to reduce everything to A War On Science is irresistible to a lot of lazy thinkers.
(I love, by the way, the notion that "demonizing" ideas marks one as an advocate of science against religion.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
eg: NASA is currently cutting back or eliminating many science missions in order to pay for the next-gen shuttle, which assumes Congress won't cut NASA's budget over the next ten years -and- there are no cost overruns anywhere, according to the New Scientist.
eg: The US has spent a miniscule fraction of what it pledged and committed in the fight against bird flu, according to the World Bank. Whether an epidemic ever occurs is irrelevant in this. What matters is that even hard-nosed financial institutions are getting concerned. When the economists think Government is spending too little, it's time to be worried.
(I'm not singling out the US because it's particularly bad amongst nations - it actually does better than most - but because that's what the contest is about. Had this been an international contest, I'm sure I could find alarming attitudes in every civilized nation on the planet. It wasn't that long ago that the South African Health Minister promoted garlic as a cure for AIDS. Although I suppose there might be a lot of vampires in South African politics.)
I just don't know how this project can possibly reach its true potential with such limited backing. Most who could enter a truly biting cartoon won't be bothered, because there won't be any perceived value. If getting into the final rounds constituted a publication in a peer-reviewed forum, then perhaps there would be more interest. Money from pro-science organizations towards prizes would have been good, too.
For those on Slashdot with no artistic talents - enter anyway. Most scientists can't draw worth a damn, so it'll be purely down to the ideas in the cartoon anyway. Besides, there are valid reasons for believing the readers here have a broader understanding of the state of science and the attitudes around it - those focused totally on their subject won't have time to read up on anything much outside of their speciality and so won't be able to so easily draw on attitudes and perceptions that are universal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From what I've seen, any area on the political playing field will try to attack science if it hurts their sacred cows.
Bring up the cost/benefits of Kyoto, and most of the objections won't be from Republicans.
He falls back on the old saw of the environment being a complex system that's hard to understand as justification for not erring on the side of safety.
You had me interested until that point. Come on, that's just a little too obviously biased to let slide - side of safety for whom? Future generations who might be affected? Or current generations whose economic interests *will* be significantly affected?
I'm not arguing against the theory of global warming, but merely stating that "playing it safe" is an arbitrary term. Some of the anti-global-warming-hype people do think they're playing it safe, but they're looking out for different interests than those you espouse.
Somone steal this and submit it:
Devil holding up a sign, "My gandpa ain't no monkey!" in a group of evolution protestors. One guys turns and says, "YOU'RE here too?" And the devil replys, "What? And let even MORE people see how brilliant he can be?"
Don't like it when Republicans are criticized on science? Fine. Then get your Republican leaders not to downplay all climate research that doesn't reflect corporate interests, and not talk about evolution and "intelligent design" as though they were competing ideas of roughly comparable credibility, or treat evolutionary theory as though it were some radical, unsubstantiated idea that wasn't accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists.
Yes, science has been politicized terribly by people and governments at both ends of the political scale, and I won't hesitate to acknowledge one of the worst examples I can think of came from Soviet-style "communism," in which Soviet geneticists were hobbled by a state mandate to adhere to a hopelessly outdated and long discredited model of inheritance because it was thought to provide a natural parallel and support for elements of Soviet doctrine.
However comma in the US, which is a major venue for scientific research and technological innovation (not to mention simply being an enormously powerful and influential nation), as well as the area in which the organization sponsoring this contest is based, political constraints upon or interference with science have typically come from the political right - sometimes because scientific findings are thought to pose a challenge to religious belief, sometimes because they have implications for social policy that don't reflect conservative ideals or that challenge corporate interests, and so on. The Bush administration has repeatedly shown it is one of the worst offenders in this regard.
Bias, Balance, & Bullshit: "Balanced" news is making you stupid by Allan Uthman
Last issue of The BEAST contained our annual "50 Most Loathsome People in America" list, by far our most popular feature. As always, once it hit the internet, it was unstoppable, and still pervades the "blogosphere" as I write this. E-mails are streaming in by the hundreds, and surprisingly enough, most are positive. But, of course, there are a lot of angry messages from conservatives, too, each giving us a piece of their mind, most of whom hardly seem able to spare it.
By far the biggest complaint is that old chestnut, liberal bias. Any list that doesn't include Michael Moore, or Ted Kennedy, or Howard Dean, or Cindy Sheehan, etc., is obviously the product of partisan bias, they say. Of course, it seems kind of stupid to expect some kind of dispassionate ideological "balance" from this tiny biweekly, which is called, after all, The BEAST. But beyond that, the very idea that the list cannot be considered legitimate unless it contains the same number of Democrats as Republicans is just silly, a symptom of what I think is a national neurosis, a logical virus that infests modern political discourse in America. That virus is "balance," or rather, the exaltation of balance, the glorification of balance, to the point that truth itself is subjugated or simply dismissed as unknowable, or nonexistent, or just plain irrelevant.
Syndicated columnist John Leo's most recent piece, which actually cites the Loathsome List (though he calls us a "left blogger"), is a good example. Titled "The Left Now Joins the Right in Attacking Mainstream Media," the column indicates, among other things, that Leo is incredibly out of touch with liberal thinking:
Liberals wage many battles, but have you heard which one is the major struggle now? Brace yourselves: It's the campaign "against the established media and its bizarre relationship with the right wing and the truth." That's from the Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog. No, it's not a satire. Just when conservatives thought they were getting somewhere against the entrenched liberalism of the newsroom culture, it turns out that the newsroom has been reactionary all along. The real lonely insurgents fighting for media balance and truth are liberals. The mind reels.
Droll stuff. Leo imagines that liberal complaints of conservative media bias are a brand new development. He also seems to think the charges are ludicrous. But what is truly ludicrous is the assertion that the mainstream media--of which The BEAST is clearly not a member--leans left. It's obvious, from the speed with which White House scandals drop from the radar, and the lack of outrage over clearly illegal executive policies, that the "MSM" has been much, much softer on this president than the last, considering their respective performances. Contrary to conventional wisdom, congressional corruption is much worse than ever before, but you would hardly know it from the kid-gloved coverage it receives.
It may not be that news sources suffer from a right-wing bias as much as a corporate bias. Relaxed FCC regulations have paved the way for the consolidation of huge media conglomerates--publicly traded juggernauts with a vested interest in the deregulation agenda of the GOP. But the real distinction in my eyes between the bias complaints from the right and from the left is in their very nature. Liberal complaints mainly focus on lies, distortions, and sins of omission, while conservatives complain about "balance." The left wants a press that insists on facts, while the right wants an even presentation of partisan versions of reality. But there aren't just two sides to each issue; sometimes there are many, and sometimes there is only one that rings true.
The balance fallacy is hurting the country. Presenting every issue as a he said/she said dispute, an unending, irresolvable argument, sounds fair, but what happens when one side really is wro
The caption for such a cartoon should be: "Not Mohammed"
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
That's like saying it was the staph that killed him, not the ban on penicilin. Stupid.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
As if the Union of Concerned Scientists isn't infamous for perverting science for its own political ends itself. Real science that contradicts the Union of Concerned Scientists highly normative ideologically-based junk science? No, can't have that, people might begin to question the agenda, and more importantly, the funding, of "scientific" special interest groups.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You need to re-evaluate your understanding of science. Science proves nothing. Science is the process of creating models of natural (or even unnatural) phenomena, and empirically testing these models via experimentation. But no amount of experimentation will prove that a model is right. Experimentation can only show that a model is flawed, at which point a new model is proposed.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I was thinking of something more along the lines of a cartoon showing a Politics & Science Cartoon Contest with a panel of celebrity judges determining the winner.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
I might be willing to buy the bit about recycling paper being bad for the environment with some evidence to back it up, but there are a couple of points you made that are invalid or misleading.
1. Gore was never "in power". Bill Clinton was President and he took more input from his wife than from Gore. You could criticize Gore for not asserting himself more, but very few VPs before Cheney have, that I am aware of (I'm young, Dan Quayle's my major point of reference here).
2. As far as the private jet goes, my understanding is that Gore calculates his entire carbon footprint (home, cars, jets, etc) and purchases offsets in renewable energy from sites like www.carbonfund.org to make his effective footprint zero. How much faith you have in carbon footprint calculations or the effectiveness of purchased offsets is another matter, but you can't call Gore a hypocrite if he believes in both of these things. Another way to look at it is that, if his efforts, wasteful as they may be, result in lots of people collectively reducing their CO2 output by more than Gore is expending, then it will be worthwhile. Either way, you can't seriously expect him to bike across the country or row across the sea to promote his movie.
or worse yet:
"Stuffing cattle into crowded pens can lead to disease outbreaks. Better put antibiotics in their feed."
Still, until you can show widespread DDT resistance, the analogy isn't entirely apt.
If you want to be denigrated and flamed hysterically just question even the tiniest aspect of Global Warming©®TM.
If you don't want political interference in science, don't use government funds in research.
Those who accept the king's gold must dance to his tune.
Liberal Party of Australia is the conservative Australian party. It seems odd that some people don't understand that names don't prove anything. I guess this guy is why the Clear Skies, Healthy Forests, and No Child Left Behind got the names they did. How can you argue against a name?
I suppose framing things as such helps. Renaming Creationism to Creation Science was probably a slick move. Hitler did just take over a small socialist party and had absolutly nothing to do with socialism (as anybody can tell by his post election activities). Nazi Germany != Sweden.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Global warming is not an extremist theory, it is a fact, unless you want to argue with decades of climate data. While it is still hotly debated whether this is because of CO2 emissions, natural cycles, volcanoes, sunspots, or whatever - it doesn't change the fact that the Earth's climate is changing.
The Earth's climate is always changing. We have been in a warming trend since the peek of the Little Ice Age.
That's not news, at least to those who pay attention to such things. Unfortunately, the rhetoric has been dominated by questions about whether the climate is warming (never seriously in question) and whether the majority of scientists agree that the climate is warming (Who cares? Science is about evidence. It is not a popularity contest.)
The part that you have downplayed, the cause of global warming, is actually the important part, arguably the only important part. And the answer to that question, as always, henges on evidence. Too bad there seems little interest among the public or the popular press in discussing that evidence.