pOmo rAVagES: going pomo as a carreer choice

Big Government: "SOWELL: BELL WENT ‘INCOHERENT’ TO AVOID OBSCURITY"

Thomas Sowell’s syndicated column this week took on Derrick Bell, whom Sowell knew at Stanford. Sowell writes that Bell was not a leading scholar, and that he found himself between a rock and a hard place in career terms:

Derrick Bell's options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond. His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. (...) >>>

Mar 14, 2012
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Science as a Narrative: pomo post normal science

Closely related to pomo science to post normal science. Watch also here on YouTube - Hat tip: @justintempler - There is of course something very wrong in mixing science and political agendas -

De Staat van het Klimaat: "Paltridge: postmodern science is a dangerous beast", by MARCEL CROK

There is an excellent op-ed by Garth Paltridge on the Australian Financial Review. I agree with almost everything he writes. I also much enjoyed his short book The Climate Caper. Paltridge explains why climate science is far from settled (...)

(...) From the social and economic side of things, one might take much more notice of the global warming scare campaign if it were not so obvious that many of its most vociferous supporters have other agendas. There are those, for instance, who are concerned with preservation of the world’s resources of coal and oil for the benefit of future generations. There are those who, like the former president of France, Jacques Chirac, speaking at a conference on the Kyoto protocol in 2000, look with favour on the possibility of an international decarbonisation regime because it would be a first step to global governance (the president’s actual words were “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance”.) There are those who, like the socialists of the 20th century, see international action as a means to force a redistribution of wealth both within and between the individual nations. There are those who regard the whole business mainly as a path to the sort of influence which, until now, has been wielded only by the major religions. More generally, there are those who, like the politically correct everywhere, are driven by a need for public expression of their own virtue.

Of course there is nothing wrong, or at least not much that is wrong, with the ideals behind any of the above agendas except perhaps the last couple on the list. But the battles over them should be fought in the open and on their own merits rather than on the basis of a global warming crusade whose legitimacy is founded on still-doubtful science and on massive slabs of politically correct propaganda. (...) >>>

June 24, 2012
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