For the Sake of Science

At least that’s according to another Teabagger at AsMaineGoes who was responding to my posts about Libby Mitchell being great for education.

Notice the circular and vacuous arguments. He gratuitously pronounces the falsehoods that “LePage and the Republican party is [sic] hostile towards science” and that LePage has “precisely suggested” “to just give away degrees”, misrepresents “science” and its purpose to be “areas of conservation and new technology (especially for clean energy)”, and claims that “LePage and Republicans aren’t hostile towards science because they disagree with Libby Mitchell” but because “they’re hostile towards science”.

I think this is a case of a blindly angry Teabagger (apologies for the redundancy) hearing the word “conservation” and making a lot of assumptions from ignorance. Take, for example, this part of his post.

Not only does this a) have nothing whatsoever to do with “science”, b) misrepresent science as ideological environmentalism…

He goes on, but (b) is the important point. He heard “conservation” and assumed evil, anti-business environmentalism. I was actually referring to a wide array of concerns all Mainers share regardless of their party or ideological affiliation. For example, like every other state to my knowledge, Maine has a wide range of hunting restrictions that are important to maintaining the health of whatever the given population is. An insane conservative with insane ideology might object on immature libertarian grounds that this is mere “ideological environmentalism”, but it remains a fact that in order to be sure hunting is a worthwhile endeavor in Maine, we need to deploy the tools of science.

Take the common place event of someone killing two deer when a limit of one has been imposed (or however many constitutes more than the given limit). There’s no way to know something illegal has happened after the fact by looking into someone’s freezer filled with cut-up meat – unless we have the right people with the right background in science. Qualified biologists need to compare DNA sequences in order to determine if there are two individuals in a given freezer (or whatever the location may be).

Or take the issue of microsatellites and Atlantic cod. Research was conducted that was important in determining the spatial and temporal population structure over a range of several banks (or, if you’re anal retentive, two banks and one shoal). This matters because it isn’t in anyone’s interest to manage any stock in a way that doesn’t reflect the way genetic information is being passed around.

Call me crazy, but I think this is pretty important conservation – no matter the reason one wants to maintain a given animal population. But maybe I should avoid buzzwords like “conservation” so I don’t get the conservatives twitching. (On second thought, nah.)

But let’s go back to that first paragraph I quoted.

…and claims that “LePage and Republicans aren’t hostile towards science because they disagree with Libby Mitchell” but because “they’re hostile towards science”.

I want to give this guy credit for pointing out a typo on my part (where I said “is” instead of “are” – I originally had written the sentence with just LePage), but then he goes and displays some rather sloppy reading comprehension. I didn’t say anyone is hostile towards science because they’re hostile towards science. I actually said this:

They just disagree with Libby Mitchell because they’re hostile towards science.

I’m not even making a claim as to why LePage or the Republicans are hostile towards science. I’m claiming – rightly – that they are hostile and as a result they disagree with Mitchell.

This isn’t that hard.

Filed under: Misc | Tagged: AsMaineGoes, Libby Mitchell, Maine governor, Paul LePage, Science | Leave a comment »