Memes

This Newsbusters story, via HotAir, is entirely typical of the confirmation-bias-as-news that pervades the MSM.  

“The Obama team is so talented and smart and wonderful!  Especially compared to Republicans!”

It is so completely transparent now, it has become literally sickening to me.  From Ford to Reagan to Bush, we’re told Republican Presidents are dumb.  How is that Carol “you know” Kennedy, who has accomplished nothing and whose only qualification is her last name, gets treated more like a princess than a politician when the notion is raised that she might be appointed (not, let’s note, elected, which would at least arguably be some kind of achievement in and of itself) to a Senate seat, but Sarah Palin, a governor with an 80% approval rating and a genuine record of reform, is widely held to be unqualified for the largely ceremonial (and elected) position of VP?  Ipso facto, she’s a Republican, she must be dumb and unqualified.  And she has a funny accent.  Not one of us, you see.

If the press wants to lean more toward Karl Marx than Ayn Rand, fine.  They’re wrong, but sure, fine, they’re entitled to their opinion.  But let’s call it opinion.  Let’s put a (D) and an (R) next to everyone’s name so when we hear how a Democrat thinks a Republican is dumb we can sort that into “political opinion” rather than “factual news from an objective source.”

The only thing sin more egregious than the pretense of political objectivity while equating “political opponent = dumb” is the environmentalist-crusade-masquerading-as-science called global warming under the pretense of scientific objectivity.  Even assuming global warming is a real problem, it doesn’t need to migrate its way into every science story as “scientists are concerned about the effects of climate change on X.”  When we see global warming mentioned in stories about antibodies, you know it’s being forced in there not because it has significance to the issue but rather to moralize – this is no longer practicing science but chanting one’s faith.

The problem with global warming is perhaps best illustrated by the well-known fact James Hansen first discovered the opposite of anthropogenic global warming in the 1970s – anthropogenic global cooling.  The solution was the same then as now: cut pollution.  OK, great, he doesn’t like pollution, very noble, good that he’s looking for reasons to cut it, but let’s not pretend this is objective science.  It’s a lot more like when you’re a kid and you find an article that says video games can be educational; you don’t care how educational it is or isn’t, you want to play video games, except your video games didn’t cost other people trillions of dollars.

What’s really irritating is the certain knowledge that tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the next decade I’ll be reading these same unexamined memes, regardless of what happens.