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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."
Well, if I had any artistic talent...
A cartoon of Darwin with a turban except the turban is actually a bomb with a lit fuse.
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.
Abuses of science.... poorly worded?
Wow, did anyone else read that headline and think that they were inviting people to make their political attacks on science in a cartoon?
I expected a cartoon attacking stem cell research, of maybe a mushroom cloud over hiroshima with the caption "scientific progress".
Of course, it's completely the other way, as I would hope... but yeah, title misleading!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
dupe this story when the results & cartoons are ready, please :)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We need a cartoon that depicts an email recipient reading about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide with a send this to everybody you know footer.
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.
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.
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").
Nazis were SOCIALISTS
Actually, no they were not, although there seem to be many poorly educated people in the US who think they were.
Hitler took over a small party which started his rise to power, and this party had socialist elements in it. But nothing Nazis did after getting into power had anything to do with socialism.
Slave labour has nothing to do with socialism.
Michael Crichton once again shows how focusing on local differences and exceptions and extrapolating them as a trend is an intellectual folly. If you want to seriously argue that the EPA budget-cutting, pro-mercury in the air, pro-arsenic in the water, pro-relaxation of pesticide rules Republicans that adamantly refuse to entertain the idea of ratifying Kyoto treaty are no different from the Democrats, then you're deliberately cherry-picking your facts to bolster your dellusional worldview -- you know, like Michael Crichton does.
Nixon was moderate to liberal on a number of domestic issues from wage controls to gun control to affirmative action to establishing the EPA, OSHA, and NOAA. He supported a lot of market regulation in a time period that pundits were saying that conservatism was dead. He was very different from many conservatives today, and many of his policies were great successes that were overshadowed by his personal corruption.
As for Johnson, he did open up a pristine area to drilling. However, he also said the following when signing the Clean Water Act:
Johnson's record on the environment was overall quite good. His wife Lady Bird Johnson was a tireless environmental advocate. It was Johnson's administration that first started looking into the environment as a matter of air and water pollution instead of just protected land conservation. Nixon just kept the ball rolling that Johnson kicked off. From the Wikipedia, here is a list of environmental regulations kicked off in the Johnson era:
To suggest that Johnson (and thus Democrats) are and were not environmentalists based on one single action against shows Crichton's lack of intellectual integrity.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Are you serious? There is no question that the U.S. Ban on DDT has resulted in supply shortages such that millions of Africans and South Americans are dying each year from malaria. This site and this reference at the the CDC are good places to start.
Even the New York Times has begun to accept the truth on this.
What is worse is that the philisophical routes of this ban were explicitly anti-human. Rachel Carson barely mentioned any negative impact on humans in 'Silent Spring'. Certainly, there were no such studies at the time (and studies since then have shown 0 ill effects to humans). Carson's main complaint was that DDT weakened the shells of bird eggs, thereby disrupting their cycle. This too has been disproven.
So, we have essentially sacrificed the lives of millions of humans in the name of speculation regarding the potential damage to birds! If that's not religion, I don't know what is.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Man, it took me a bit to understand that, but that's about exactly right. I believe in God -and- evolution, and don't understand how people can flat refuse to believe God is powerful enough to use evolution as his tool.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
For all this discussion has focused on the "debate" about global warming, if you think that political interference is limited to environmental science, you're missing a very, very big picture.
Let me start off by saying that scientific advancement is not a left-right issue, and should never be viewed through the narrow prism of party politics. However, the United States has fallen into a (man-made) rut of EVERYTHING being split down partisan lines (even national security, even voting integrity, even scientific research) so that is the playing field we are on, whether we like it or not. Wedge politics infect every issue now.
Under this administration, the religious right has exerted undue influence over decisions ranging from:
(source article for that list, a must-read)
And without going on a daylong linkhunt, they are passing bad information about condom effectiveness, intimidating non-profit organizations which do not toe the party line on reproductive issues, and denying USAID funds to overseas orgs which even mention abortion, or distribute condoms as part of family planning efforts. (Imagine sending $15B to Africa to fight AIDS without distributing or even even mentioning condoms! Talk about throwing good money away...It's like fighting fires without water, it's that foolish.)
And don't even let's discuss the bi-partisan support for embryonic stem cell research which has been effectively neutered under this administration. Or the medical expertise of Dr. Bill Frist in the case of a braindead woman he never examined, or his patently absurd claim that AIDS may be transmitted via tears and sweat.
Sadly, I could document this sort of war on objective science all day, but I think I've made my point. It infests the policy debate over far more than global warming, and if you think there's no difference between the parties on this, you're sadly, tragically mistaken.
Vonnegut: "What is the purpose of life? To be the eyes, ears, and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
Ah yes, more to the specific point, which God is more powerful:
A) The god that creates everything in on feel swoop 6000, filles with incosistancies and plotholes and has to step in every so often to adjust settings here and there.
B) The one who can plan out events billions of years in advance, making everything fit so perfectly together, using simple rules that are capable of fractal growth into marvelously complex systems that continue to run flawlessly for millions of years without intervention?
In a head to head battle, I have a feeling that God B will have figured out how to win before the fight even begins.
This posting continues to repeat common distortions and false dichotomies about DDT, malaria, and the environment.
The use of DDT to prevent malaria is not an environmental issue. The amounts used are tiny when compared to what was used in agriculture.
Millions of tons of DDT were applied agriculturally, resulting in the wide-spreed environmental contamination and non-consented exposure of humans. This also resulted in the evolution of strains of DDT-resistant mosquitoes, making DDT less effective in malaria control.
A large about of the agricultural use in developed countries was to produce cheaper cotton. Yet this misuse that lead to the ban on the agricultural never seems to be criticized by the so-called DDT defenders.
The weakening of egg shells of birds by the DDT metabolite DDE has not been disproved.
The implication that individuals who are concerned about the environment and other species are not concerned about people in third world countries. There are extremists in every corner, but as a rule, no evidence ever presented to back this up.
Personally, I have had malaria while in a developing country, with out access to western medical facilities. I have a greater appreciation than most of the direct affects of malaria.