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Canadian Scientists Protest Political Sandbagging of Evidence-Based Policy
New submitter sandbagger writes "Stephen Harper and the Canadian government have made headlines several times for stifling opinions that dissent with their own. This also applies to respected, peer-reviewed science. Canadian scientists have chafed at being gagged and having evidence take a back seat when forming policy, so they're grabbing their slide rules and marching in protest. 'Hundreds of participants gathered in 17 cities for rallies on Monday. In Toronto some donned lab coats while in Vancouver protesters were seen wearing gags adorned with the Conservative Party logo – a reference to the alleged muzzling of federal scientists by political overseers. ... Dr. Gibbs and colleagues said they hoped the rallies would alert the public to scientists’ concerns that the federal government has shifted funding markedly toward commercially driven research at the expense of public-interest science. ... Dr. Gibbs said her group would consult with the Canadian research community and look to other countries in trying to craft recommended policies for science in government. In recent years explicit scientific integrity rules have been adopted by many U.S. federal departments and agencies, after accusations of censorship and politicization of science during the administration of former president George W. Bush. 'Canadian scientists are where American scientists were maybe a decade ago,' said Michael Halpern, a Washington, D.C.-based program manager with the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'They're trying to figure out how to protect themselves from a government that’s increasingly focused on message control over a more open discussion of the facts.'"
Don't they have corporations in Canadia to tell the scientists how the studies should turn out?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is Canada, they use a chicken cannon.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
what is this muzzled science? Why isn't that obvious let alone seemingly never mentioned.
getting the word out in this day and age isn't exactly the problem it was 20 years ago.
god knows I'm not sticking up for that cretin harper, but seriously, what's the deal?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Here in Australia the Minister for science role has been scraped, effectively removing scientific opinion from the decision making process.
Not really. What's happening is exactly what happened in Australia, the UK and the USA. That is the Murdoch empire has been blasting the populace with carefully orchestrated propaganda designed to shift the political spectrum "right" and get poor people to vote against their own interests.
It will never cease to amaze me how pathetically effective this type of targeted propaganda is at actively getting people to do things that are not in their own interest.
The Canadian shift has taken the longest to occur, part of that is because it took Murdoch longer to penetrate and take over enough of the Canadian media because Canada still has ownership rules (at least until the propaganda machine gets those revoked as an affront to capitalism like they did in the US). Inevitably the Canadian people will fall to the far right just like everyone else under the sway of the Murdoch propaganda machine.
It oughtn't be surprising: those least informed are most easily persuaded. If you went and told an englishman circa 1600 about science killing millions (a la hiroshima), but left out the part about it saving millions more (medicine, etc), they would be persuaded because they'd be presented with only part of the truth.
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Really?
The right wing ones tell us that spending money to fix underlying social problems isn't as effective as prisons so we have huge expenditures on prisons and huge social problems. Yet in countries which spend money on fixing the social problems they have fewer people in prison.
Right wing politicians tell us that as long as a company is making profit it must be good, even if the banks are taking us to the cleaners.
Right wing politicians try to tell us what we can do with our bodies (eg abortion) because God told them so, and so therefore they must be right.
Right wing politicians have classified pot as a narcotic and make all sorts of claims about how dangerous and addictive it is without any evidence whatsoever other than their fervent belief in that.
Right wing governments will tell you abandoning safety and environmental regulations will actually make us safer and have a cleaner environment as if some magic will happen.
Right wing politicians tell us that tax cuts for the rich will somehow magically improve the rest of our lives when in fact there's no evidence for that.
Right wing governments will tell you all sorts of crap, specifically because it's in line with what they believe, but seldom because it's something they can prove.
Sorry, but you're an idiot if you believe that right wing politicians don't ignore evidence. The lies a right wing government tells you are just a different set of lies than what a left wing government tells you.
Which is why policy based on actual evidence is a much better choice.
Show me the proof, not what your ideology (left or right) has told you must be Immutable Truth.
If there's no evidence to support your claims, and the things you said were supposed to fix things aren't working -- then clearly what they've been claiming isn't based in facts or reality. Merely ideology and what they want the world to behave like.
Which is exactly what we see these days.
Their research is there to support the Canadian people that pay their salaries. It should be used for the people, not against them.
Since fucking WHEN is Obama and Clinton left wing?????
You woldnt know a left leaning politcian if it bit you on the ass
If you are referring to Obama and the democrats as being on the left side of the political spectrum then you are grossly mistaken. The democrats are more like center-right...it's just that you don't see it like that in your duality "democracy". Being non-American and an outside observer, this is very evident.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
The scientists being muzzled are employees of various departments of the federal government. While several departments of the federal government give grants for scientific research, the scientists who receive those grants may be employed by other bodies. One example are universities. Universities are heavily funded by the government, but they are managed independently of the government. In that case, the scientists are not in the employment of the government so they are not under the same degree of control. (Of course the government can refuse to provide further grants to that scientist, but that is the limit of their control.)
At any rate, the whole point of my original post was that grant-funded research is not equivalent to outcome funded research.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
~Idarubicin
Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking.
It's true his power is not absolute.
Even in Australia (where his control of the print amounts to almost 77% of papers sold) he has, since he backed Whitlam in1972, lost the federal election on 3 occasions (1973, 1993 and 2010). He only missed 2010 by a hair's breath (his influence did not extend to those independents who decided which party to back in the hung parliament). That's a success rate of well below 100% (it's actually only a touch above 80%). And yes, in Australia, Murdoch backs either side of politics as the expediencies of current business imperatives demand. Though in the US (where his power is much diluted) his media seem welded on to the Republican side.
In Australia, of course, he has just notched up another win, in an election that (given the (re)emergence of a popular figure on the non-Murdoch just before the election) was being touted as almost a test of his power to determine the government of Australia. In the event Rudd ran a pretty lousy campaign so the precipitous fall in his popularity cannot entirely be attributed to Murdoch's admittedly shameless propaganda: among other things dressing the incumbent and his deputy in Nazi uniforms (actually Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schulz) on the front covers of Australia's highest circulation dailies.
OTOH, it would be foolish simply to ignore Murdoch's influence. And I would stress to that the use of 'Murdoch' here is somewhat of a synedoche, it being perhaps more accurate to speak of the influence of the upper management of News Ltd in general --including of course Col Allan, whom Murdoch sent in specifically to fight the 2013 federal election.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The only people shrugging are the worthless executives who take credit for Atlas's hard work.
I'm a leftist. I'm upper middle class, and I believe that my taxes ought to be higher so as to help people who need it. I also believe your taxes should be higher in order to help people who need it. The world isn't so simple that we can just lump all poor people into one label (that is, "lazy") and say that they, as a group, deserve to starve and die. That is immoral. It is far more immoral than raising the income tax on the wealthy by a few percent.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that corporate profits are up while wages are down. I don't believe that people should live off of the government; I just wonder where all those jobs are now that the "job creators" are doing so well.
I'm a leftist. I am aware of the fact that the reason abortion was made legal in the first place was because people did it anyway, and many many people died from it. I also think it's funny as hell that you're this big conservative yet you expect young people to take care of your selfish ass in your old age. Save up some money like a good fucking responsible self-sufficient capitalist and pay those immigrants to take care of you, dipshit.
I'm a leftist. I'm no expert on climate change, but I know that people who study the climate for a living are more reliable sources on climate change than people who really really want climate change not to be true. That said, like every other leftist, I hope we are wrong about climate change, because if we're right about it, we're all fucked. Also, unlike with climate change, there's a lot of actual scientific debate on the merits of pot.
I'm a leftist. My car gets 45 miles to the gallon, and I'm in favor of pushing for stronger efficiency and emissions standards rather than stopping them. Every leftist in the world could shiver in the dark, but that wouldn't solve our emissions problem. Change needs to happen on a global scale, or we're fucked.
I'm a leftist, and I don't even know where the fuck to go with this one. We gave the rich their money? Are you fucking high? We want to tax it all back? Are you really, really fucking high? Fuck, I'd settle for having the investor class taxed at the same rate I am rather than at 15 percent.
I'm a leftist, and I understand that science starts out wrong about a lot of things, but when their observations don't fit their hypotheses, they refine their conclusions to fit the data rather than dogmatically repeating the same claims over and over again in the face of overwhelming evidence the way conservative economists do. You don't like science?
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science." - Carl Sagan
Yeah it def happens in australia. When John Howard was in, my sister worked in climate research, and the government was regularly threatening researchers that if their research kept demonstrating potential hazards from climate change funding could be pulled or worse. She was pretty much told "The official government line is climate change is not real, and if you scientists dont start conforming we'll pull your funding". When the press started getting involved and her collegues started recieving death threats from crazed climate denialists (Apparently science is some sort of "communist plot") she left the country to go work in the UK.
Similar things happened to a friend of the family in the 1980s who was researching the effects of forestry on the water table, and after a report he wrote warning that the water table was getting salty due to logging in the Karri forests, his report was officially censured and he was ordered not to tell anyone. He also resigned.
Incidently this is why I sometimes want to slap assholes who claim climate scientists are doctoring reports for grants. Nothing could be further from the reality. Scientists in Australia, the US, and UK all report recieving threats from politicians that if they dont "tone down" the reports they could lose funding. As a result I believe the situation we are in, and this is a belief privately held by many researchers, is a lot worse than the official models show.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Exactly. Less eloquently worded: Calling Democrats left shows a serious lack of historical and international perspective.
First, economics is not a real science, it is social science, and, in its prediction craft, often similar to astrology.
Second, as you could see at the example of West Germany, social market economy was far better than fundamentalist capitalism to improve the lives of common people.
And above all, saying that there never was such thing as collective, is sheer idiocy because human society evolved in small collectives, not as a bunch of individuals. All this "special snowflake" individuality is a very recent invention and seems to breed arrogant arseholes first and foremost.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
What I find fascinating about conservatives is that a large portion of them does not only chooses to be ignorant, they revel in being ignorant and declaring war on science. Conservative pundits can say what they want, pull out all the old slogans and call dissenting voices 'communists' and 'socialists' but even the old Soviet Union did not revel in ignorance. The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Hate to break the bad news to you, but people who vote to have their own rights taken away in the name of "security" probably didn't deserve to be making their own choices in the first place.
Incidentally, if you actually, sincerely believe that the current ball of shit that is world politics is entirely due to Rupert Murdoch, you're either mentally ill or trolling. The man is a speck, a drop in the ocean compared to some of the money moving in defense contract circles. Murdoch is just a rich fuck who's making himself richer parroting what the people with REAL power are saying, ingratiating himself to the royalty. Rupert Murdoch isn't sitting in some little control room somewhere surrounded by intelligence agents plotting to take away your freedom, that's just paranoia talking. The politicians you elected are the ones doing that plotting. Even if he were, again, not important enough to make a difference. He's a media mogul, nothing more. I'm sure if the Democrats threw more money at him he'd dance just as well for the opposite side. The know nothings that Americans elect are the problem, not their media whores.
The one plotting to take away your freedom is your president, worry about that and forget Murdoch, you might actually accomplish something. Unless the extent of your activism involves schizophrenic rants about Rupert Murdoch being some sort of conservative Voodoo shaman?
While I agree that the state of world politics is not due solely to Rupert Murdoch, I disagree that he is merely a speck. He controls quite a bit of media around the world. I hope we can all understand by now that when you can control what news and viewpoints people hear you can control what and how they think. Of course there are other news outlets, but in the US those are owned and controlled by a handful of corporations (five, I think). The operators of these corporations share certain interests and so will not allow much talk about certain subjects or viewpoints.
Murdoch is more than a speck; he is a master propagandist that has a heavy hand in how many people see the world. It's hard to overstate that kind of power. He serves a valuable purpose as a member of the Elite.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)