My latest piece for Science Progress--where I am now a contributing editor--has just gone up. It's entitled "Enablers," and it's how people like us, who care about science, are often guilty of actually empowering those who who are attacking it. A great example occurred recently with the Heartland Institute's climate skeptic conference in New York. Climate skepticism is totally passe--this event should have been completely ignored. Instead, many of my intellectual allies were screaming their heads off denouncing it, and thereby drawing greater attention to it. In the piece I give other examples, including one that comes from the latest version of the Nisbet-Mooney talk (about Ben Stein), and that I owe Matt Nisbet for originally pointing out:
There's certainly a longstanding mentality among progressive groups that nonsense must be refuted, often in rapid-fire mode if possible. But that mindset runs up against something else that ought to be obvious: ...
