The Republican War on Science: Amazon.co.uk: Chris Mooney: Books

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Times Higher Education Supplement, December 22nd 2005
"...(This book) has to be praised in its original analysis ... We should be grateful to Chris Mooney for his diligence."

Johann Hari, The Independent , December 20th 2005
"Mooney...has bravely decided to thwack his way into this jungle of propoganda and lies on our behalf ... definitive ... disturbing."

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, long before his reelection and even before he became a "wartime president," George W. Bush found himself in a political tight spot. Read the first page

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Junk science, 7 Oct 2005

By	"tommacf66" - See all my reviews

"The science says you must do what you want to do anyway", seems to be what the Bush administration wants to hear from the scientific community. Only that's not what happens.

Like every other field of human endeavour, science is a fallible, but it does set up a methodology to try and eliminate error and refine truth: the scientific method.

What science does not, and cannot offer, is complete certainty.

So when the world's only hyper power falls into the grip of a group of people who regard the Bible as an alternative to science, you know we have returned to the sort of bigotry which was so widespread before the Enlightenment, and which never fully left us. (Northern Ireland offers a home-grown paradigm.)

Were it happening in any other country, we could ignore it. But it's not. American policy, as we know, has world-wide ramifications. Climate change being a major example.

Chris Mooney offers a history of, and an explanation for, the rise of the religious Right in the USA, and describes its link to corporations, and their resentment of government regulation.

Within this coalition there is both a resentment of education, and a resentment of the findings of scientific research which threaten both the core ideology and policies springing from them.

Whilst the author sounds a valid warning against misuses of science coming from the Left, he believes it to be a much larger problem from the Right.

The AIDS epidemic was an early victim. Ronald Reagan's domestic policy adviser did not want children educated in the use of condoms, so AIDS was not mentioned during Reagan's first term.

The tobacco barons did not like the results of research on passive smoking, so they funded their own "research" group which challenged the findings of the Environmental Protection Agency, and worked to undermine its credibility.

Global warming is not man-made. Exxon funded policy groups to say so. George Bush likes to talk about the "incomplete state of scientific knowledge" on this subject. (In this context The Daily Telegraph frequently publishes "findings" purporting to show that climate change is a fiction.)

Evolution contradicts Genesis. Intelligent design is built-up as an alternative that sounds more scientific than Creationism, but is merely another way of saying God created Man. Ergo, evolution is only a theory, and - thank God! - our ancestors were not apes.

(Creationism tried to stick to the creation-in-4004-BC-theory, which even the American Right now realise does not stand up!)

Abortion is sinful, but it also causes breast cancer, and triggers mental illness. Ergo: abortion is also bad for you, "science" says so.

I hope you get the flavour.

This book is carefully balanced, and it offers detailed explanatory background which is especially welcome on the difficult subject of stem cell research.

Above all it's a good read.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Orwellian "Sound Science" replaces science, 8 Aug 2006

By	F. Sweet (Midwestern USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Chris Mooney's passionate, thoroughly researched book concludes: the Bush administration ignores or denies mainstream research to please its conservative base. Business groups and certain religious lobbies helped while Bush-era treatment of scientists did a 180-degree reversal from that of Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan. The Republican Congress passed laws - endorsed by the Bush White House -- designed to disable clean air and water efforts, and has dismantled safeguards, such as the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, originally intended to give legislators unbiased advice.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mooney, the Republicans' war on science had its beginnings in the Reagan/Bush I and Newt Gingrich many years before the U.S. presidency was a twinkle in George W. Bush's eye. Their assault on rational scientific debate originated in the monolithic, multibillion dollar tobacco industry.

Traditional science and rational policies arrived at with scientific impartiality began to be manipulated - politicized -- decades ago on the heels of medical researchers discovering links between smoking, heart disease and cancer. Big Tobacco heavily financed disinformation campaigns to confuse the smoking public. Exploiting the orthodoxy of approaching all new scientific discoveries with a healthy skepticism, Tobacco's hired guns painted as unreliable all conclusions those smoking produces medically harmful effects. The disinformation campaign worked very well for Tobacco during two decades. That is until the U.S. Surgeon General could no longer conceal the growing, irrefutable medical evidence. He was obliged to conclude that smoking cigarettes had been killing Americans in rapidly increasing numbers over a long time.

Mooney uses interviews and old-fashioned digging out of documents to explain how, during two decades, right-wing politicians created institutions for discrediting working scientists. Energy companies allied themselves with powerful Republicans (such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma) to block or reverse U.S. efforts to curb global warming.

Mooney covers the Bush administration's defiance and dismissal of the worldwide, expert scientific consensus on climate change, on mercury pollution, and even on how to read statistics. Mooney's book tracks Bush White House efforts to spread misinformation and dysinformation about stem cells; the work of religious right regulators like Dr. David Hager (formerly on the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs advisory committee) in restricting access to birth control; and the attempts of the Discovery Institute (and other think tanks linked to the Bush base) to fight the teaching of evolution in public schools. In the past five years, Mooney documents, many formerly apolitical physicists, biologists and doctors have concluded there is a "pattern" of science abuse under Bush, a push back against the methods of science itself. Conservatives may react with indignation; liberals, moderates and working scientists will find few surprises, but Mooney's very readable, and understandably partisan book is the first to thoroughly document the whole story in one place.

Mooney writes, "in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses. But they are almost never as guilty as the Right." By "the Right," Mooney means the powerful alliance of conservative Christians -- seeking to influence policies on abortion, stem cells, sexual conduct and the teaching of evolution -- and advocates of free enterprise who attempt to minimize regulations that cut into corporate profits. The savior of both groups -- and the chief villain of Mooney's book -- is President Bush, accused by Mooney of having "politicized science to an unprecedented degree."

Mooney's impartial -- indeed scientific -- approach in making his case produces conclusions that are compelling and essentially impossible to deny. In the present Republican war, pitting ideology against reason, Mooney takes the side of reason.

By insidiously dismissing real science as "junk science" merely to further their Alice in Wonderland ideology, the Republican assault on reason is a cosmically greater danger to western society than any group of terrorists.

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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creationism, stem cell research + other right-wing subjects, 11 Oct 2005

By	FrizzText "frizz" (Wuppertal) - See all my reviews

The Bush administration (enslaved to on the one hand religious lobbies, on the other hand commercial interests) improves their insolent fight against a scientific conception of the world spectacularly. Darwin's evolution theory as a component of the biology lesson in schools is fought by creationism or the slogan of an "intelligent designer" (God?), obedient, at this point unruly teachers are threatened with dismissal. The scientific fight for a reduction of the global warming is represented crazily as an allegedly jealous attack on the energy consumption standard of the American population. Like the tobacco industry suffocated the warning cries against smoking, so the oil industry lets slip the warning on resource wasting. The industry interested in armed forces orders undermines pacifist efforts, embryonic stem cell research is blocked for religious reasons. The attack on the scientific critical conception of the world of renowned research institutes by the present right-wing conservative Republicans around the Pseudo evangelist George W. Bush is perhaps worse than sporadic threats by Islamistic terrorists: because a systematic attack on the human reason stabilizes himself in Washington, continuously more and more effectively. Scientific progress, won within the last 400 years, seems to dissolve into air in view of the right-wing conservative Christian fundamentalist banding together. An air though, in which Air Force bombers are still be able to fly fantastically. The author of the book, Chris Mooney, who writes for the respected science magazine SEED, has summarized in a really good way, what, at present, unfortunately in Europe increasingly is contaminating politics production processes, too...

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