Gee where have we seen this before? Chris Mooney issues a press release on his upcoming publication, then he wonders why people aren’t accepting it because the real publication isn’t done yet and all we have is a cover and some fluff.
It’s BEST practice.
Apparently, given his defense, it was not the reaction he was looking for.
Here’s his defense over at the paid PR shill website DeSmog blog.
On Monday I announced my new book The Republican Brain, which will be due out next spring. And I provided a brief description, as well as layering on plenty of nuance, like a good liberal, to make sure it wouldn’t be misinterpreted.
So much for that!
Beginning with Roger Pielke, Jr. (not technically a conservative, but, well…), and then spreading to climate “skeptic” blogs like Watts Up With That and Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, conservatives are claiming that the book is a form of “new eugenics” and that it describes them as “genetically/mentally/psychologically inferior,” and so on.
All of this is completely without foundation, and in fact, contradicted by my own book announcement, which discusses the many strengths (as well as weaknesses) of the conservative psychology, and describes the left-right difference as a kind of necessary yin and yang.
And none of the people saying these things (including over 100 commenters at Watts’ site) have read the book because it isn’t out yet, and won’t be for 6 months. In fact, it is still being edited.
So, pre-release, “with nuance “…to make sure it wouldn’t be misinterpreted.“? Heh. Even worse than Muller’s PR mess.
I loved the comment from Hank there:
Hank_ – Thu, 2011-11-10 11:20Maybe you should consider delaying the release even longer, or maybe change the title? Doesn’t look like the reception is what you expected.
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Sorry, not going to read this until it is cleared on Amazon in a $0.25c sale.
Mooney is so smug I can barely stand it. But maybe he’s on to something–he’s trying to be a leftist Ann Coulter. The Coulter/Mooney formulation is simple, direct, and lucrative. You can sell a lot of books by providing a reasoned but deliciously hyperbolic rant about why the other half are idiots and/or crooks.
He is hoping the debate will go viral so when and if his book comes out, he well sell more books. The pages could be filled with random numbers and there will still be those that will buy to see what the debate is about.
As previously noted, Mooney uses the words “Republican” and “conservative” interchangeably. It appears he has written/is writing a “science” book that does not have precise definitions for key terms. I also note that the title is singular while the subtitle is plural, although to be fair to Mooney, he says he hasn’t actually finished writing the title yet. He’s just not waiting to finish his work before announcing it.
The book subtitle “The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science,” assuming he doesn’t now change the title, should be the first clue that the book is based on bogus scientific speculation. There is no science that quantifies belief – neuroimaging science or any other science for that matter.
Like so many other misguided champions of liberal ideology, Mooney attempts to use the authority of science to prop up and lend credibility to an otherwise worthless, unfounded, and unsupportable conjecture.
So if he were to consider changing the title, may I recommend “The Republican Brain – The Pseudoscience on Why They don’t Believe in Pseudoscience.”
Damage control already? Mr Mooney, don’t quit your day job.
Why pick the middle of the road? Go full genius or full retard. That’s where the money is.
Your current tact won’t cover the publication costs, career over.
The problem with liberals is they are incapable of thinking they might be wrong. So they have to portray all those who disagree with them as some how brain damaged. The truth is their inability to see all possibilities shows who the real brain damaged people are.
To a certain extent, Republican and Conservative are as synonymous as Democrat and Liberal.
Perhaps Chris Mooney just finished reading Michael Savage’s book “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder” and decided that a rebuttal book was needed
So much is revealed about Mooney, you have to wonder if he even realizes what he has done. How does one believe in science Mr. Mooney? What constitutes faith in science – belief in the consensus? This is why English majors shouldn’t try to write about science. To him, science is just another cultural phenomenon. I don’t have anything personal against English majors; my mother is one and I love her very much. But she admits that she doesn’t think scientifically (the look on her face when I explained to her that all 3D movies were actually 4D still makes me chuckle). Mooney needs to come to the same realization.
“layering on plenty of nuance, like a good liberal”? Well in all his research he obviously didn’t LEARN anything about conservatives. If he had, he’d know that liberal nuance is exactly what sets off the alarm bells in conservatives’ heads. Why not try just telling the truth?
[yawn]
This old “conservatives are mentally ill” stuff again?
John J. Ray at Dissecting Leftism has been debunking this crap for a long, long time.
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/
This has to reflect on the AGU. Any feedback from that organization on one of its board members?
greg holmes says:
November 10, 2011 at 11:49 am
I seriously doubt it will ever get that high. You might find it in some library’s garbage can someday.
As we get older and become more conscious of the limited time we have on this planet. we find it increasingly annoying to start reading a lengthy piece, only to discover sometime later that it was a complete waste of time.
My thanks to Mooney for making it clear up front that I can skip this book.
I would look at the left/right divide in a slightly different way – most humans have a need for faith. In your typical right-wing christian conservative circles, that’s the standard bible thumping you hear, replete with denial of evolution, and other rather unscientific beliefs. Having satisfied their faith need, they’re actually more capable of applying skepticism to areas outside of their faith (say, climate change).
In your typical left-wing secular liberal circles, while they deny having any sort of faith, the whole Church of Global Warming and radical environmentalism has actually served as a substitute for ancient books and people hung up on crosses to die. While they cannot *conceive* that they’ve fallen victim to faith based reasoning, from any objective outside view, it’s obvious that they have.
So in truth, there are blind spots on both sides, but the root cause is the same – a need for faith. Now, there are certainly some folk who escape that need for faith, and are able to navigate this world without believing in the Goracle or Jeebus, but I’d argue that’s your tiny minority.
Since there are two kinds of brains , left and right, accorning to Mooney, and 80% of the population is AGW skeptical, is it not the left brain that is likely genetically defective?
Here’s a vaguely relevant quote:
Tamara says 4 dimensions? My first thought height, width, depth and time, then a brain fart trying to figure out which other? Dah… 1, Dah…. 2, Dah…. 3, Oh now I get it. And I thought I would be OK today if I drank a multi hour energy drink. Darn debates, I hate things that keep me awake thinking!
Maybe I should mute Rick Parry next time, His problem might be catching.
Another small-time Gore money grubber
Are they selling those extra-wide brushes at Walmart again?
Fabulous stuff from the same person who thinks that General Pinochet was a hero of freedom and that Hitler was left-wing. No really.
“pat says:
November 10, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Since there are two kinds of brains , left and right, accorning to Mooney, and 80% of the population is AGW skeptical, is it not the left brain that is likely genetically defective?”
Nope, the Elite are few and the diseased masses need to be weeded.
I know a lovely old woman whom lives ascoss the street from me. I love her to death and she is very smart. We were discussing recycling, as a new mandatory recycling program is being implemented in California. I argued to her that some people don’t want to recycle. Her face went cold and she said “They should be made to”. Her whole demeanor had changed and she was suddenly angry.
There you have it, she is ready to start up the reeducation camps and impose her will over everyone else over a few aluminum cans. She has a heart of gold and she is a great neighbor but there is steel inside the liberal mind and it doesn’t bend. The jump from democracy to totalitarianism is a small one, all it requires is one side of the arguement getting their way for a little bit too long.
Sierra Club at the Metropolitan Club, pointer from James Delingpole.
The article, written by a retired physicist, shows the conscious propagation of pseudo-science by environmental advocates, notably the zero threshold principle. The NGO of record is the Sierra Club, but it may as well be the WWF, Green Peace, or the NRDC. Different actors, same script.
The point for this thread, of course, is that these NGOs with Mr. Mooney’s active collusion, are waging a left-wing war against science that has been far more corrosive, far more pernicious, much more widespread, and enormously more successful, than anything ever achieved by organized right-wing know-nothings.
But Mr. Mooney doesn’t see that, because from his heights it is apparently obvious that science consists exactly of what is said by the authorities with whom he agrees; nothing more. How can it be otherwise? After all, he’s sincere and certain, all the right-thinking scientists agree with him and that proves that.* So, everything is readily ordered in his world. The demons and the angels are easily identified, and the divine light shines on his works.
*This mind-loop might be called ‘a posteriori a prioriism,’ in which one latterly grants authority to those expressing the opinions that reinforce one’s prior prejudice; permitting the lovely self-delusion of migrating the earlier conviction into the later authority. This is the sine qua non of religious radicalism, in which extreme preachers attract the extremely prejudiced; each reinforcing the other. The process is necessarily mindless.
Let’s look at the other side.
Sometimes the left seems incomprehensible. Why are they like that?
Eventually I figured out that socialism is an evolved form of parasitism. Why is the human species so smart? We didn’t need to be able to understand Quantum Theory and Relativity to be able to hunt antelope on the plains of Africa. So why did we evolve as we did?
When we first evolved the ability to speak, some members of the species would have soon evolved the ability to use speech to manipulate others to gain advantage. For example, manipulation would get them the safest place in the hunt and the biggest share of the meat. Then others would have to get smarter to understand the manipulation. Then some would have got smarter to manipulate better, and round and round till you get where we are now.
The left say they know what’s best for us, but in truth they are the manipulators using their clever words to gain advantage as parasites. It’s not a co-incidence that after all the fine words and social changes the left get more free money and the contributors have to work harder. The welder is good at welding, and the public servant in is good at talking and manipulating. The welder produces, the public servant consumes.
The parasite class doesn’t produce, and yet they made our species as smart as it is.
True, I have not read his book. I have also not read the last few hundred “ you have already won” announcements received in the mail.
Does Mr. Mooney really think he’s more credible than Ed Mahon?
I’d say it was more to do with disbelief that there’s going to be an apocalypse without Jesus returning.
Is it 2-for-1 on wide brushes at Walmart? There are plenty of religious liberals and plenty of secular conservatives as well.
Skepticism is neither left nor right wing. But it is inconvenient in the context of group dynamics and groupthink. Partisans are not skeptics – they are the opposite of skeptics in many ways.
It depends on what you mean by faith. If faith is the rational expectation that past experiences can be a reasonably accurate guide to current phenomena and those phenomena can be tested then I have plenty of faith.
But faith in the religious sense demands prior belief before tenets of dogma can be accepted and that past experience is no guide to the present and there is no way to test whether the dogma is true or false.
That makes me a heretic. Its never pleasant to be so.
Pat Frank:
Quite so. Mooney has severe Anncoulteritis with its most clear symptom a complete lack of self-awareness that one could ever be wrong.
Unfortunately such people make large amounts of money and headlines even in our economies.
The biggest reason that I am not rich is probably that I cannot extend myself to unqualified statements of pure speculation without feeling a complete ass. For some people, its really not a problem.