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Senate Confirms Climate Denier With No Scientific Credentials To Head NASA (nytimes.com)
On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Trump's NASA nominee Jim Bridenstine, seven and a half months after being nominated to lead the agency. "The Senate confirmed Mr. Bridenstine, an Oklahoma congressman, as the new NASA administrator in a stark partisan vote: 50 Republicans voting for him and 47 Democrats plus two independents against," reports The New York Times. "The vote lasted more than 45 minutes as Republicans waited for Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona to cast his lot." Slashdot reader PeopleAquarium writes about some of Bridenstine's anti-LGBT and non-scientific views: Bridenstine ran a planetarium once, and peddled a debunked argument made by climate change skeptics, claiming that global temperatures "stopped rising 10 years ago." He said "the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept" an apology from then-President Barack Obama for what Bridenstine called a "gross misallocation" of funds for climate change research instead of weather forecasting. In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space.
Why do positions and beliefs like that have any bearing on his fitness to run NASA? Are we going to have 'morality police' roaming around, like in Iran, arresting people who don't prescribe to a specific set of beliefs? Should people who are not pro-gay be sent for re-education?
WTF are we still in 1600? What is immoral about it? Does it harm someone? If your morality is based on maximizing the number of little Christians that are produced, like it was defined for a long time, to increase the power of this particular religion, I will argue that you are the moral disaster. There are already enough humans on Earth, we don't need you to have 15 children that will fight over the remaining resources of the Earth. Unprotected heterosexual sex is much less moral than gay sex or masturbation, if your moral compass is not fucked up by some ancien illogical customs.
It's not because he believes in physical genders, it's because he thinks gay people are " sexually immoral,"
Are you saying none of them are? Are you saying there's less "sexual immorality" among gays that straights? Do you have a factual basis for complaining about his opinion?
It's not a great attitude
What does "attitude" have to do with NASA's mission? Science isn't "attitude". Gravity doesn't care about your feelings.
Publicly admitting that he hates
Citation needed.
some of those 14,000 employees for religious reasons is going to wreck his ability to lead, and get the agency mired in distracting lawsuits.
Fuck them if they're going to put their personal egos above NASA's mission. If NASA cares about self-involved assholes more than it's core mission, it should be shut down immediately.
Yes, we realize she lost.
It's time for YOU to accept the idiot you elected is going to cause "only" serious problems for the lucky people and devastation for the unlucky people. If 19 out of 20 doctors said you had cancer that was treatable, would you listen? Or would you listen to the one doctor who says "This is natural," even though you've been feeling like crap for the last year and getting worse?
Are we going to have 'morality police' roaming around, like in Iran, arresting people who don't prescribe to a specific set of beliefs?
Yes. If you don't stand up to them, then yes. That's exactly what you will have.
Conservative Christians don't consider "being gay" immoral, they consider gay sex, and in particular promiscuous gay sex, immoral. You aren't born having gay sex. Furthermore, they nature of their objection to gay sex has little to do with sexual orientation, and more with the fact that they believe that people ought to have sex only inside a heterosexual marriage; so they object to pre- and extramarital sex as much as they do to gay sex.
And the beliefs of conservative Christians contradict rationality... how? What rational argument can you make that extramarital sex is not immoral? I happen to disagree with the views of conservative Christians (I think some extramarital sex is moral), but that's a moral judgment, not a rational belief.
Furthermore, I think you are projecting your own behavioral patterns onto others. While it is certainly true that a progressive managers will frequently act with intolerance and hatred towards employees holding what they consider "immoral beliefs" (e.g., conservative, libertarian, Christian beliefs), the reverse isn't true. Christians generally believe that people can be saved and redeemed from their immoral actions through reasoned argument and teaching.
As a classically liberal gay man, I'd rather work for a Christian manager than for a progressive manager; progressive managers make your life a living hell if you don't agree with their party line.
"Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal;"
That seems to be a logical assertion, but I'm not sure it's proved to be true.
Putting former astronauts and scientists in charge HASN'T seemed to have caused NASA to flourish, has it? Maybe because these individuals *didn't* understand the *politics* necessary to succeed in the intensely political atmosphere of Washington DC?
I mean, the NASA admin isn't designing space craft and piloting rockets: he or she is a BUREAUCRAT, begging other bureaucrats for money and other resources. Seems like a position where a politician might be more successful.
-Styopa
Explain to me why the U.S. is the ONLY country in the civilized world where religion and science are seen as contradictory and incompatible ?
They are? Pretty much the entire Ivy league is universities founded on religious principles, and those also were the model for places like Stanford. Most religious people have no problem with science; in fact, it can be argued that strict atheism is, in fact anti-science. For you cannot prove the existence of a higher power one way or another, so thus the scientific method would require you acknowledge the possibility for existence of a higher power is equal to the probability there is not a higher power. A real scientist could be a believer (who will claim it on faith, and thus not scientifically provable) or an agnostic; never an atheist.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Basically - no. We can test for a Santa Claus, since pretty much everything about the man says he physically manifests himself, slides down chimneys, and places presents under Christmas trees around the world.
Not my Santa. He's metaphysical. The presents get delivered but parents often take credit for them. Some other believers claim that Santa actually acts through the parents, guiding their actions; I do not agree with those heathens, though.
Now, how about a metaphysical higher power, that influences our emotions and impulses, who will only be seen after you are already dead?
If nobody sees him until after they're dead, then basically anyone who claims to know that he exists (let alone know anything about what he is like, or what he wants) is just making shit up.
No tangible interference in the physical domain to document, strictly an emotive, internal "nudge" - the source of conscience, for example? How do you test for that?
That's up to those claiming that it exists; in science we go with the null hypothesis. Why would you believe something which you not only have no evidence of, but also cannot ever find evidence of?
There are a near infinity of things which people can invent out of whole cloth and which you cannot test for. If your position is that we should believe everything until it is proven false then you are at best gullible. How exactly you've managed to convince yourself that "real scientists" have to believe things which they have no evidence of ... that's truly mindboggling.
They are?
In much of the country yes, the fact that it' not everywhere does not make that so.
in fact, it can be argued that strict atheism is, in fact anti-science.
No it can't.
For you cannot prove the existence of a higher power one way or another,
You cannot prove the existence of magical unicorns one way or another either.
But believing in them would be so silly that we have no words to describe the obverse like aunicornist and no one attempts to twists themselves in logical knots if you claim that they do not in fact exist.
So yes, scientists can not belive in god just as well as they can not believe in magical unicorns, faries, crystal magic and sentient homeopathy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.