Yeah, some things are just true whether you like them or not.
As the Republican Party spins deeper and deeper into an imaginary swamp, worth reviewing why science is the absolute anti-thesis of the Authoritarian idea that only what the “great leader” says is true.
The problem isn’t merely the normalization of Trump. It’s the normalization of reckless demagoguery, of angry paranoia, of conspiratorial thinking. And those now have a life of their own on the Hill and on the airwaves almost independent of Trump.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 25, 2018
Last November, Sargent and other flat Earth believers gathered at an Embassy Suites hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina, for the Flat Earth International Conference, an educational seminar where individuals and organizations discuss scientific questions about Earth.
Sargent said he thinks there are more people who believe the theory than just those outspoken on the subject.
“You know flat-Earthers,” he told ABC News’ Eva Pilgrim. “I guarantee it. But you don’t know who they are because they are afraid of talking about it.”
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Trump’s Proposed Budget: A Wrecking Ball to Science
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EDITORIAL 19 January 2018
Science after a year of President Trump
After 12 months in office, Trump’s effects on science have been as bad as feared.
I finally get to correct Neil deGrasse Tyson. He misspoke “1963” but meant to say “1863”. Yep, Lincoln did this during the middle of the civil war.
And this is what the Academies of Sciences are publishing these days:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIUN5ziSfNc?rel=0&w=560&h=315%5D
Sounds like a pitch for philosophy (and history) of science in schools. What’s so convincing about science- what leaves someone who understands the evidence without a choice about what to believe– involves an extension of the common sense practice of reporting everyday, observable phenomena (and predicting, in the everyday way, what comes next). The work that’s been done to build that extension (including mistakes of wrong turns as well as great insights and observations) is what we study in history of science; that the results of that work are more reliable and better established than most of what’s called common sense is part of the story we need to tell in philosophy of science. (As an aside, this leads me to resist more metaphysical turns in philosophy of science– abstract discussions about the nature of ‘truth’ and the relation between successful descriptive language and the world we apply that language to describe, predict and explain don’t illuminate the successes of science in delivering a powerful and reliable way of thinking about our world…)
The sheer number of people who would have to be in on this theory is fantastical. Every pilot. Every ships’ captain and their crew.
I recently watched a documentary on the battle of the river plate. Lives are on the line and officers and crew are falsifying records in the middle of a battle all to serve some centuries old conspiracy.
And NO-ONE spills the beans! Not one person of the thousands upon thousands who would be in on the conspiracy has ever confessed to it.
You can have a perfect conspiracy or you can have a vast conspiracy or you can have a long-lived conspiracy but you can’t have all three.
Hard for me to work out if these flat-earthers are for real or whether it’s all a pose. Can’t really think of them as a sign of the times, seems pretty much a fringe group with some perverse need for a claim to fame.