Unfollow the Science

John Kerry is a man of science. It took a lot of science, and probably also a lot of cosmetic surgery, to produce that look.

So, our high prince of pomposity recently announced that science had given us nine years before the world would suffer a climate catastrophe that would make hurricane Katrina feel like a drizzle. 

OK, he didn’t quite say that, but Kerry did say that we must follow the science that is predicting the end of the world, and enact the Green New Deal.

Of course, Kerry did not know and will never know that predictions about the future are not scientific facts. At best, they are hypotheses. At worst, they are prophecies. But, they are in no way science. As Wittgenstein so aptly noted, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow.

And then there is Dr. Anthony Fauci, elevated to sainthood for his management of the coronavirus pandemic. We recall, yet again, that Dr. Fauci was personally responsible for sending the virus to Wuhan, China. He assessed that the lab over there was well equipped to keep it under control. Evidently, he bore no responsibility whatever for what happened. Huh?

We also recognize that Fauci was leading the charge against the virus. Yet, strangely enough, the media has done a full court press to ensure that Fauci had not the least scintilla of responsibility for the pandemic, but to make it appear that he single handedly stopped it. Surely, responsibility must be shared, but in truth the man in charge was the man in charge. And that was Dr. Fauci. To some large extent the deaths are on his record.

Yet, given the propaganda media that now seeks total mind control, Dr. Fauci is a great hero while Donald Trump is a mass murderer. Fauci is even more of a hero than Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who sent recovering patients to nursing homes, where they infected the residents and caused around 15,000 unnecessary deaths. Remember when Cuomo was a national hero, the ultimate anti-Trump?

Remember especially that the news about Cuomo’s dereliction was common knowledge before the election. Yet, the media refused to report on the story until after the election.

So, the Democratic Party has crowned itself the party of science. And yet, it believes, as an article of secular dogma, that a man who thinks he is a woman and who poisons himself with cross-sex hormones, is really a woman.

It’s a scientific fact, the Democrats say, and it is even a job qualification. Yesterday, the Senate confirmed one Dr. Rachel Levine to be a top official at the Dept. of Health and Human services. Not only did she fail miserably in her job in Pennsylvania, but she was appointed to make history. And yet, no one with eyes to see will believe that she is really a she.

So much for science. We are not dealing with rational thought, the basis for scientific enquiry, but with dogma and superstition. When doing science, or when thinking empirically, you are willing to allow the evidence to refute your theories. You allow experience or experiment to affirm or deny your hypotheses. This means, as Richard Feynman argued, that science is based on skepticism, on an open mind and on a mind that is willing to allow the evidence to cast judgment on theories.

Naturally, if you say that Dr. Levine does not look like a human female, your opinion, to say nothing of the composition of her trillions of chromosomes, will be dismissed as bigotry-- because it might make her feel bad. 

When you enforce opinions you are dealing with dogma. When you do not allow people to express any opinions that would run counter to your most cherished beliefs, you are promoting dogma.

Those who believe in science are merely using the term to impose their beliefs on a gullible populace. They are not interested in discovering scientific knowledge, but in changing the world to make it conform to their beliefs. There is a massive difference between negotiating with reality and changing it. Wherever did we get the idea that we must change reality when it does not affirm our dogmatic beliefs.

Clearly, to be very specific, the Democrats believe that if they can force everyone to think that the transgendered are really the gender they believe they are, well then, they will be the gender that they believe they are. Fact yields to groupthink.

Victor Davis Hanson argued the larger point in a recent article on American Greatness.

In truth, leftists and Democrats have become the purveyors of superstition. Their creation of a fantasy world is not because they do not believe in science per se, but because they believe more in the primacy of ideology that should shape and warp science in the proper fashion for the greater good. What prompted Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, or Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hysterically and wrongly to forecast widespread demographic or climatological catastrophe in just a few years was not ignorance of science per se, but a desire to massage science for our own good.

Not only that, but it was prophecy masquerading as science.

And then there is Dr. Fauci. He is a master at public relations, at messaging, but, from the time he declared that the virus was not going to be a problem-- remember that-- to the time that he said that masking was unnecessary, he has been consistently wrong. And yet, he has become an object of veneration, so we are not allowed to say so. There is nothing scientific about the worship of Dr. Fauci.

Hanson continues:

Dr. Fauci has not just been flat-out wrong on the science of COVID - in his assessments of the origins and possible dangers of COVID-19, of when we can get back to normal, of when the vaccinations would appear, and of which particular governors have been doing the most or least effective management of the disease. He has also, by his own admission, deliberately lied. 

Currently, the nation is engaging a long overdue debate about the efficacy of lockdowns. By most accounts, locking down a state like California did not produce any better results in terms of the disease than did opening a state like Florida. But, lockdowns cause significant damage to businesses, to families and to children. About that the party of science does not really care-- it can throw money at the problems.

Fauci does not care, because he is obviously a true-believing leftist:

Unspoken, is that Fauci usually errs on the side of what is deemed progressive orthodoxy. In contrast, Dr. Scott Atlas warned us that extended and complete lockdowns in any cost-benefit analyses might well inflict more human and economic damage than the virus. And he added that an opened-up Florida and Texas might do no worse virally than a locked-down California or New York, while avoiding the severe recessionary collateral damage.

And let us not forget, Hanson explains, that in the midst of the pandemic throngs of people took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. And that the Democrats, for all their professed confidence in the science, had not a word to say. The protests made Donald Trump look bad. The protests ginned up Democratic voter turnout. What are a plethora of new coronavirus cases when the politics can be turned to your favor?

Hanson writes:

Consider another scientific debacle. In the midst of the quarantine, when governors and mayors were threatening to jail any who violated social distancing, mask wearing, or assembling en mass outdoors, hundreds of thousands hit the nation’s streets in crowded phalanxes of screaming and saliva-projecting protestors—all supposedly in violation of “the science” of epidemiology and public health.