Following up from yesterday, some more thoughts and links about the notion of thinking, and how that’s what science is all about, while so many people seem to have no understanding of what thinking, let alone science, actually is.
First, this post at The Week: The curious case of the COVID-free conservatives, subtitled, “The conservative TV elite thrive while hinterland radio hosts are dying of COVID-19. That’s telling.”
This follows up my post of 13 days ago about “vaccine regrets” of the right-wing deniers of covid who, oddly, have now died of covid.
The Week:
Another anti-vaccine conservative radio host has died of COVID-19: Bob Enyart, the Denver personality infamous for once reading the obituaries of people who had died of AIDS on the air while playing Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” By my count, that makes five such deaths in the past couple months: Enyart, Florida’s Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel, and Tennessee’s Phil Valentine and Jimmy DeYoung. Each one refused to get vaccinated and paid with his life.
Elderly unvaccinated men dying of COVID-19 is sadly unremarkable in America today. What’s noteworthy is who has been spared: the most elite ranks of conservative media. While B-list regional radio guys are being felled on a near-weekly basis, the Fox News primetime lineup is all healthy and safe. It reflects the psychotic disregard the conservative movement has for the lives of its own members.
The article ends:
At bottom, a huge chunk of movement conservatives would rather die than admit they live in a society with other human beings who also deserve consideration and respect, and these radio hosts did just that. They weren’t the first and they won’t be the last.
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The same news about Bob Enyart was also covered by one of the Center for Inquiry bloggers, Jim Underdown: One Less Fool To Refute: Another Pastor Bites The Dust.
The title refers to Bob Enyart’s habit, quoted in the above piece from The Week, of mocking gays who’d died from AIDS. Of course he considered himself a Christian.
To the point in Jim Underdown’s essay is this, which follows on from my previous post here.
I wish there was a way to get unscientific people to stop using the word science to try to convince people they know what they’re talking about. Real Science Radio, Christian Scientists, and Scientologists are practically the OPPOSITE of science! I’ve got shocking news for you: Believing COVID-19 is fake, that God heals disease when you become spiritually pure, or that space aliens invaded earth 75,000,000 years ago are not accepted ideas among the world’s science academies. Those ideas have all the scientific credibility of a carnival barker after his 11th Malort. L. Ron Hubbard and Mary Baker Eddy aren’t exactly icons of peer review, replicability, transparency, and other science standards. So back off pretenders, you’re not on our team.
It’s always been obvious to many, but perhaps not to everyone, that “Christian Science” and “Scientology” have nothing to do with actual science; in fact they subvert its philosophy, substituting dogma for replicable knowledge. They use the word “science” as a kind of imprimatur to suggest to inattentive folks that they deserve the same respect and obeisance traditionally — based on our modern civilization, built by science and technology and not by thoughts and prayers — reserved for actual science.
(Actually, “science fiction” has occasionally been charged with subverting science and/or fiction. Back in the 1980s, or even the ’70s, there was a notorious article in one of the literary magazines, perhaps Harper’s, with the title (IIRC) “Science fiction is to fiction as Christian Science is to science.” The author’s underlying (unexamined) premise was that literature is about people, and like they tell you in school, about people whose experiences change their life, and that’s all, period. A very narcissistic view. Such articles have stopped appearing. And of course science fiction is fiction, in a broad sense, and shares with science a premise that the world, even outside human experience, is comprehensible.)
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One more for today, just the headline, from Washington Post: Opinion: Remaining unvaccinated in public should be considered as bad as drunken driving.
