Lots of email coming in. Alas, I’m crashing on several deadlines so I can’t deal with this that much right now. However, in response to some snippy email let me say for the record, if you actually watch the discussion, my point wasn’t that some on the right doesn’t have their objections to science or scientism. Rather, my point was that many on the left and liberalism have their own problems with science but pretends they don’t as they lecture conservatives.

Still, off the top of my head, the examples of anti-science bias on the left are easy to come up with. The MIT biology professor who got the vapors like a 17th century wallflower in response to academic speculation about cognitive differences between the sexes seems a good place to start. Harvard devoured Larry Summers because of that. The abortion-breast cancer link might be another. There were thoughtful criticisms to the Bell Curve from the left, but they were few and far between. Most came to a conclusion that any such science had to be bad and then went looking for evidence to support their case. For years, the data on Head Start was fudged because what mattered was keeping the funding spigot open. Similarly, the harms of out-of-wedlock birth seem to still be discounted irrationally on the left. On the environmental left there all sorts of examples of intimidation, scare mongering and de facto censorship of inconvenient facts. Just get Bjorn Lomburg on the phone if you don’t believe me. And if you want to see how political correctness is harming medicine, you might want to pick up a copy of Sally Satel’s P.C. MD.

Since Marxists are little more than a category on “Jeopardy!” now it doesn’t seem worth spending a lot of time talking about all of the violence they did to rational inquiry. But that doesn’t mean it should be forgotten either.

Anyway, back to work.