Reaction to John Holdren's appointment as presidential science advisor continues. Al Fin asks: "we knew Obama was a fascist. But why did he have to go and be a Luddite fascist?"
Too extreme? A more reasoned discussion comes to the same conclusion:
- Holdren's appointment is supposed to be some kind of victory for 'science' after the Bush administration. This highlights the vacuity of Bush's critics (that's no defense of Bush, by the way). As we can see, this 'science', isn't science. It is catastrophism (via environmental determinism and the precautionary principle), with almost no scientific basis.
- If the only weapon that exists in the anti-Bush arsenal is a fiction, which is defended by contempt for scientific debate, what free debate - let alone scientific research - can we expect? Climate science has been thoroughly colonised by political interests.
Sadly, the as the reactions to John Tierney's follow up post indicate, a lot of people appear to have drunk, and drunk heavily, from the catastrophism Kool-Aid that is peddled as the predominant mantra of environmentalist dogma by the likes of Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich and Jared Diamond.
- Obama’s headhunting amounts to a reinforcement of what spiked has called the New Scientism – the perversion of scientific data to reactionary political ends.
Worse, even when corrected, the Luddites still persist to assert their absolute adherence to catastrophism and their disregard for humanity, innovation, ingenuity and the capability of technology to fundamentally alter the dynamics of sustainability.
This is why ideology is so important. As the banner for this site states: facts don't change your perspective -- your perspective changes your facts. Is the greater peril to humanity the uncertain dynamics of technological progress and prosperity, or the controlling stasism of authoritarian dogma and elitist moralism? Those that are free, economically and politically, will always choose the dynamics of progress. Those who are oppressed by fear, and the elite who exert that control, will always push the "necessity" for stasist measures to preserve that hegemony.
Dynamism has faith in the human condition: stasism does not.
