An Unscientific Method

On November 4th voters across the country and the nation rejected liberalism. That memo never made it to the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun, based on two wildly out-of-touch editorials they published today.The first piece, published by our old friend Tom Schaller, denies that Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, said that things he his shown on video saying about Obamacare. There is of course video that proves Schaller wrong, so his denial is nothing more than his usual defense of ideological leftism. But at least with Schaller everybody knows what they are going to get, and he is at least involved in the political process.

The truly insidious piece was a piece published by a Professor declaring that “Acknowledging Climate change is in the GOP’s Best Interest.” The piece is full of the usual canards lobbied at right-minded people who don’t want to wreck the global economy (“Yet our electoral system continues to grant climate-change deniers considerable power” he writes) in support of global warming hysteria and leftist political action masquerading as science. But the Professor tries to pretend that his radical environmental agenda is somehow conservative in nature. For example:

The climate movement could use conservative cranks like Mr. Sammler. Ultimately, both political parties must embrace the challenge before us. It’s no easy thing for a people to change its ways for the fate of a distant century’s children. Science isn’t equipped to enhance our capacity to do so; neither, for the moment, is our political culture. We seem to require a new rhetoric, one characterized by moral sensibility.Recall the religious and cultural fervor that animated the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements. Recall Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Baldwin, the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. These writers addressed political conflict by appealing to our moral imagination.

What’s lost in translation, of course, is the fact the conservationism is at the heart of conservatism and Republicanism. Remember, it was Ulysses S. Grant who gave us the first National Park, and Teddy Roosevelt was the first national figure who was a conservationist.. And, as I mentioned last week, there’s plenty of Biblical and religious basis for protecting God’s creation.

But the question here seems not to be the environment, and more along the lines of embracing radical leftist environmentalism:

Environmental conservatism needn’t be an oxymoron. In a very real sense, the human future depends upon society’s willingness to chasten its material desires and live within limits.

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The typical code word for the middle class to give up basic consumer goods in order to protect the environment. Something that the majority of Americans realize is nonsense.

I haven’t noted the Professor’s name yet. Because that’s what is truly insidious about The Sun publishing this piece. Because check out the byline:

Paul Jaskunas, a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is the author of the novel “Hidden” and “The Market for Virgins,” a Kindle story from Amazon.

 

That’s right, the Baltimore Sun printed an op-ed in support of radical environmentalism from a professor at MICA.

Clearly Mr. Jaskunas has some sort of environmental background right? Well, no. He’s a literature professor. The MICA website describes him as part of the faculty of “Humanistic Studies.” He has a Master’s in Fiction. He teaches classes on Contemporary Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Dawn of Modernity, Intermediate Fiction,Postwar Fiction and The Wire.

Of course, MICA doesn’t offer classes in the physical sciences at all.

So, why I am throwing this professor under the bus for writing a column in support of radical environmentalism? I’m not. But it does expose certain hypocrisies of the left. Both environmentalists and editorial boards of the mainstream media decry opposition to leftist approaches to deal with climate change as being “anti-science.” Yet, often times the leading proponents of global warming hysteria in the media are often not scientists themselves, but actors, politicians, and political agitators.

It isn’t those who are opposed to Big Environment that are saying things like “The Science is Settled.”

The debate over “Climate Change” itself is settled, because the climate is changing all around us. It has for five billion years. It will for another five billion. But it is hard to take seriously the desire for supporters of radical environmental policy to shut conservatives out of the debate on ecological issues and by branding conservatives as “anti-science” when the left sends out a humanist literature professor to make their case…



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