In my Spectator column this week, I’ve taken issue with the editorial in the latest issue of Scientific American urging its readers to vote for Kamala Harris. This is how it begins:
The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as “the climate crisis”, “public health” and “reproductive rights” are “lit by rationality” and based on “reality”, “science” and “solid evidence”, while her opponent “rejects evidence” in favour of “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies”.
On the face of it, there’s something a bit odd about a storied science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics. Indeed, the editorial acknowledges how unusual this is, suggesting that’s all the more reason we should take the recommendation seriously. The editors have descended from Mount Olympus because the fate of America – nay, the world – is at stake: “That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.” True, the previous occasion was only four years ago when it endorsed Joe Biden, but the editors have a point. It is rather unorthodox.
So how can science tell us how to vote? My admittedly primitive understanding of the history of science is that it only really began to transform our understanding of the world when a firm distinction emerged between fact and value – between descriptive propositions, which depict the world as it is, and prescriptive ones, which tell us how it ought to be. That is, the Scientific Revolution occurred when students of nature eschewed politics and religion and embraced reason and empiricism. In that context, the editors of Scientific American, in seeking to muddy those waters again, seem to want to return to an era in which the evidence of our senses – “reality”, as they put it – tells us how to behave. In defiance of the naturalistic fallacy, they are smashing the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ back together.
Worth reading in full.
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Good for him. Reform’s problem is Tice. The electorate suspects he’s a globalist in sheep’s clothing, and that manifested in the local elections.
Tice’s night time “olympian” partner Isabel Oakshott seriously dented any pretence of Reform’s anti-establishment stance when she wrote Handicock’s diaries.
Standing down 317 candidates in 2019 also added deeply to this suspicion.
Tice does indeed to pee or get off the pot.
With respect that seems to me like wishful thinking.
People who are naturally on the political right keep voting Tory in huge numbers. They have to stop for another political force to emerge on the right. They have had many chances and if the penny hasn’t dropped by now, I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.
“We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.”
Oh, I think such a collapse is absolutely inevitable tof.
Looks that way
This has been going on for so long that there’s even a German word for it: Politikverdrossenheit (Fed-up-with-politics-ness). People are generally convinced that they keep getting shafted by corrupt/ otherwise non-desirable career politicians and have mentally disengaged themselves from political public life, yet, enough of them keep making the same crosses on the same boxes of ballot papers and then hope that this will somehow magically fix things (which it never does).
This is mirrored on the side of the actual political actors: By the time some group of people with a positive vision regarding what they want society to become and how to achieve that has percolated through the parliamentary system to positions of actual power, it’ll have turned into yet another group of short-termist establishment politicians playing to the tune of the machinery they believe to have conquered while it has really conquered them.
The system is f***ed and making more crosses on pieces of paper so that someone else will hopefully do something about it is not going to help.
Yep the system is indeed f…ed. ————-But as Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government…apart from all the rest”. ———We have to somehow operate within that f…ked system or become anarchists instead.
I’m not sure the electorate at large know what a globalist is.
Our area didn’t even have a candidate from Reform – I might have held my nose and voted for them, despite revising my opinion of them fundamentally.
I was born in London.
At age 1 I moved to Australia with my parents as a “10 pound Pom”.
I had a holiday there when I was 8, and another when I was 52, 9 years ago.
How times change!
As with San Francisco, Melbourne, New York and Seattle, Lefties certainly know how to destroy a decent city.
The fact that Khan looks set for another term says it all.
No desire to live there again.
if only those of the small government centre Right had one third of the commitment, energy and activism of those on the Left we may be in a better place.
We’re too busy working
I fully acknowledge that small c conservatives are busy but they are effective, practical hardworking people and that is why I considered that one third of the commitment, time and energy spent by the Left would be enough to turn the ship around.
Good point!
We also don’t like telling other people what to do or how to think.
Well done Howard Cox!
Just waiting for the Fake News to call him Hitler, anti-semitic, far right and an anti-vaxx science denier who wants to kill Gaia. They can dust off their 10 year old copies and regurgitate.
Too many people, too many cars, too many trains, too many planes, too many beggars, too many criminals, too many drugs, too many knives, too many guns, too many of almost everything you can think of…………..How can a total clutter like that be sorted out? Especially when boat loads of more clutter arrive in their thousands each week.
Time for a change. Sadiq has shown his incompetence and is destroying a once great city. Vote for the new guy or forever be ruled by the WEF.