Greg Laden is catching some heat from other SB’ers for his claim that Chris Mooney sounds like a creationist-symp. While everyone is getting hot and bothered, let’s remember that this latest chapter opened when Chris wrote a post claiming to “merely present the facts” on the success of Expelled, and where the slender selection of such “facts” could’ve been pulled straight from a Premise Media press release. One would think a post claiming to present “the facts” would work a little harder on contextualizing the numbers instead of immediately proceeding to congratulate creationists on their victory. Regardless, Chris isn’t a creationist symp. He only looks like one because he and fellow-traveler Nisbet have their credibility wrapped up in the idea that we’re doing everything wrong and making creationism successful because of it. Expelled being an abject failure, given the unprecedented kitchen sink that was thrown into making it a success, would kind of undercut that claim.
April 22, 2008 at 5:56 pm |
Way back when, lots of us were upset because we thought Mooney and Nisbet were infecting science with the worst aspects of politics, replacing honesty with spin and undercutting the value of the truth — which, damn it all, is the best thing science has to offer. After all their denials, after all the insistence that “framing is not spin” — Mooney went ahead and did it. He fucking did it.
All in all, Expelled has been a fascinating case study: it’s brought subtext out into text and made the half-hidden visible. We had ideas about communicating science, conjectures and suppositions which we formulated from intuition and whatever data was available, but now we have concrete examples to which we can point and say, “That’s what we were talking about!”