It’s something I’m sure we’ve all seen: someone produces articles or videos or documentaries or whatever on either science or politics that you look at and conclude “well, done, these people know what they’re talking about.” And then they make another piece, covering the *other* topic, and your response is “What the hell happened? You used to be cool.”
Carl Sagan was like that. He’d talk about science, and I was right there with him. Then he’d launch into politics, especially the “let’s disarm in the face of Soviet imperialism” and I had to back off, shaking my head sadly.
On the other side, there are organizations like Prager U that produce some interesting and reasoned videos on the subject of politics. but when they delve into science, *especially* science that dares to cover issues that the Middle Eastern religions claim to have a monopoly on the answers to… well, they get downright embarrassing. Witness:
The short form here: the trained chimp narrating the Prager U video claims that scientists are all a pack of hypocrites because they have replaced a faith in God with a faith in the Multiverse. But as the fella debunking that nonsense points out, scientists do not overwhelmingly believe in the multiverse hypothesis, so much as consider it an intriguing conjecture. It is not used to explain cosmogenesis or biogenesis. The two Famous Big Name Scientists that the narrator name-drops to show that scientists are Faithful Multiverse Believers are easily shown by the debunker to *not* be believers.
If you have to outright lie about the other side in order to make your case, your case isn’t very strong… and you apparently don’t have much faith in it.
It’s something I see way too much of, and it bugs the hell out of me. Michael Medved, for instance, has an interesting politics-based talk show. But I gotta change the channel when he brings on one of those professional BS artists from the “Discovery Institute” to talk about the latest claims about how they have successfully misinterpreted some snippet of data to back up their claim that evolution is a hoax. I *used* to like Glenn Beck politically, but dropped him like a hot rock when he started to turn into Reverend Glenn. Especially grating were the commercials that ran on his show in the local (Salt Lake City) market some years ago touting some conferences or other that claimed – based on religious claims – that 2500 or so years ago there was a massive iron-age culture in North America derived from a lost tribe of Israel. It was basically Ancient Aliens but with “I bet the Jews did this” instead of “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.”
Sadly, this weird-ass mix of good politics and crackpot science is all too common, not only in reality but also in perception. And it need not be so:
And of course, there’s The Other Side. The side that gets all the politics wrong, and claims to be the side of Good Science. And yet they are generally opposed to not only nuclear power, but are often enough coming out against actual space exploration/colonization/exploitation. So screw them too.