Christopher F. Rufo:: Counsel Of The Woke: Public-Health Experts Have Subordinated Science To Progressive Politics

This basically couldn't be righter. Absolutely, positively worth reading. (Short, too! I don't read a lot of things that make me think Wow, I wish this were longer...)

   Rufo is on about some stuff relevant to stuff I've been raging about ever since grad school. One thing is: the catastrophically bad relativistic philosophy (or pseudo-philosophy) that is central to the worldview of the intellectual left. Another thing (well, this is a more recent realization): the frequency with which they appeal to this philosophy/pseudo-philosophy to justify their lower-order conclusions / beliefs / preferences. Say what you will about the right, they don't deny the objectivity of truth every time they start losing an argument. The religious right may lean too heavily on word-of-God arguments. Well...they do. No may about it. But at least that's fairly isolated to one sector of the right. Relativism, non-realism, nihilism, social constructivism, subjectivism, and the rest of that radioactive stew of bullshit on the intellectual left more-or-less infects the whole left-of-liberal shebang. Oh, don't forget Marxism and related brands of meataxe naturalistic efficient-causalism… 

   Anyway, Rufo:

   Bergstrom’s subsequent conversion to “woke science,” however, was swift and absolute. On May 27, before the death of George Floyd dominated the news, the professor insisted he would wear a mask while walking alone in a public park, even if there is “only a 1-in-100,000 chance [to] save a life.” Three days later, after the outbreak of protests in Minneapolis and other cities, he tweeted that he was “heartbroken by the endemic state violence against people of color in America” and was reading Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist. A few days later, Bergstrom conceded that “science is an inherently political activity” and endorsed the protests, making the dubious claim that millions of protesters rallying, chanting, and gathering in close quarters wouldn’t necessarily spread Covid-19—and even if they did, he “wholeheartedly support[ed] the protests nonetheless.”
   Here’s the problem: Bergstrom and other public-health experts persuaded Americans that their advice on the pandemic response was driven exclusively by science and underwritten by cold fact. They argued that politics should be subordinated to scientific knowledge—but when the political grounds shifted, they immediately reversed that formulation. Bergson’s case is especially damning. In less than a week, he made the moral leap from recommending behavioral modification for a “1-in-100,000 chance” of death to supporting protests that, according to his colleague Trevor Bedford, could cause up to 4,000 Covid-19 deaths.

Not all progressives are like this, obviously--but it is an extremely common phenomenon, and at least many progressives at least tolerate it. Progressivism, as I've argued, basically colonizes any area of science (any area of study or expertise, actually) that impinges on progressive interests, and turns that science (or study or expertise) to its purposes. And so we basically get this sort of thing all the time:

Science proves progressive proclamation P! You must accept P! P is science! Why are conservatives so anti-science--and anti-expertise? We are super-scientific experts! You will respect our authorotahy! F*cking peasants. 

Anybody who reflects on such claims honestly can see--or smell--that there's bullshit afoot, even in the absence of the hyperbolic stuff above. And even when you can't see specifically where the bullshit happens, you eventually see the overall pattern. You learn to detect the characteristic excretory presence from just the faintest whiff of the stuff. Sure, there'll be some false positives. But every area of thought requires such tradeoffs. Get it right, and the false positives will be outweighed by the nonfalse ones (what's the opposite of a false positive/negative?). 

   Remember the stampede of "scientists" trampling each other to proclaim transgenderism a totally scientific fact? Note: they didn't merely assert that some women want to be--or feel like--men. Nor even just that some believe themselves to be men. Nor even that some have more male-like brains. They insinuated--and sometimes outright asserted--that science proved them to be men. Which, of course, it does not do. They pretended to elevate transgender ideology to the level of science, but what they actually did was denigrate science, dragging it--in its practical application, anyway--down to the level of transgender ideology. And politics. A set of arguments that were cooked up by activists in the women's studies department--decidedly not an area of science, and, in fact, an avowedly political (pseudo-)discipline widely recognized as among the intellectually weakest at any university--was represented as being, somehow, scientific. 

   And why is it, do you think, that conservatives are skeptical about anthropogenic global warming? I mean, it has all the hallmarks of progressive pseudoscience. Right down to the insistence that it must be accepted immediately, and that any questioning of it is morally wrong. 

   But it's conservatism that's unscientific! 

   As I've argued before: conservatism's worst sin is that it sometimes fails to accept scientific conclusions it doesn't like. The progressive left is radically unscientific in that it undermines the very core of science, both at practical and theoretical levels. Practically, it corrupts science and uses it as a stalking-horse to advance progressive political causes. Theoretically, it argues that that's fine, because science is political anyway, and objectivity is a myth...and similarly for truth, rationality, and the rest of that awful Western / Enlightenment racist nonsense. 

   Problems compound when you mix this bullshit up with the medicalization of everything. Medicine--which only about half science and half something practical--is another area progressives have colonized, and the medicalization of everything is how they push their program there. For example, they insist that firearms are a medical issue, and then proceed to push progressive policies under cover of medical "science." Eventually non-progressives got mad about that one and said: no more NIH funding for such stuff. The progressive response, of course, was: conservatives politicize science! At that point, anyone honest and paying attention feels like his head's going to explode. 

   Most recently, the left has tried to make free speech a medical issue. And, of course, it's easy to predict that they're not going to say that medicine proves that we need more free speech... LOL of course not! What medical "science" proves, you bigoted peasant, is that we need less free speech. More free speech! What kid of antiscientific nonsense is that???

   Then there's the push to rule some kind of scientific inquiry--e.g. on race and IQ--verboten.

   Not to mention the calls to sue or jail scientists who argue for the wrong side--e.g. against anthropogenic global warming...

   Prope-Lysenkoism is right smack dab at the center of the contemporary progressive left. Which should be no surprise. It's a central tenet of that left that politics--its politics--are fundamental and should pervade everything. It's not as if they've exactly kept this view under wraps. The personal is political not because there's something special about the personal--but rather because everything is political...

   It's the Gleichschaltung, baby. It's coming for statues, it's coming for history, it's coming for science, it's coming for the Bill of Rights, it's coming for me...and it's coming for you. That's something you ought to reflect on if you're still sitting around saying things like Oh, well, Trump's still worse... He's not. He's basically just a jackass. He's not the totalitarian reordering of Western civilization. And he'll be gone in 4.5 years, anyway. If we're lucky. Less, if we're not. At which time, the Gleichschaltung will probably still be rampaging across the land, devouring every good thing we've ever created. And mainstream progressives will still be making excuses, will still be saying Well, those anti-scientific conservatives are still worse...