Dear Skeptic Mag: Kindly Fuck Right Off

 So, over at Skeptic, we find an article criticizing "experts" (read academics, researchers, etc) for being "too political".  

Put kindly, this is complete stupidity - from people who should be much more adept at delving into the psychosocial history involved. Instead, they descend into the usual tropes of accusing academics and researchers of "being condescending", and "not listening to the concerns", blah blah blah.  Of course, this is all the fault of those meanies who call themselves "progressive", right?  Wrong.

Let's be clear about something here, there has been a decades-long attack on science, rationalism, and ultimately enlightenment era understandings about the world around us.  It starts with big tobacco spending billions of dollars to misrepresent the science around tobacco and lung cancer, metastasized into climate denialism (another area where big industry have poured huge money into convincing us that the science "isn't settled", when it is).  Then with the rise of social media in the Web 2.0, so-called skepticism about science snowballed with disinformation sites like InfoWars and Brietbart actively 'flooding the zone' with lies. 

Then what starts happening is when a "progressive" (really someone who bothers to point out what the evidence and science shows) points out the lies, they are shouted down for being "condescending".  Researchers are now questioned for "political bias" in their studies - especially in areas where the discourse has become contentious. 

The writers over at Skeptic then turn around and tell us that somehow it's the "progressives" who are "politicizing" things.  No, it isn't.

I've spent enough years on this earth to have watched the process as it unfolds, and see the absolute stupidity of such claims.  The people engaging in politicizing things are not the researchers, it's the people who have decided that being "skeptical" is somehow "cool".  It's the people who engage in denialism for its own sake instead of looking at the evidence and incorporating it into their thinking. 

I have seen plenty of examples - especially in discourse around transgender people - where anti-trans activists deliberately ignore anything that contradicts their presuppositions about trans people. You can point it out to them and they'll just act like it was never said, or they'll find some pithy reason to dismiss it such as "oh, that's clearly biased ...".  Of course, when you challenge them to demonstrate that it is IN FACT biased, you get deafening silence.  

Is there a problem with the credibility of science today?  Absolutely.  Is that the fault of "progressives"?  No - hardly.  There is a clear faction that has spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to convince us all that "their feelings are equally valid to your evidence based analysis".  It is not valid skepticism to sit there and say that this is the fault of "progressives" while ignoring the disinformation ecosystem that has been developing over the last 25 years.