Never surrender

There's an argument that the Right should hold our fire against antiscientific fraud-peddlers like Fred Reed. Some claim, he's on Our Side - elsewhere. Or even if he's not, such a one is less annoying and less damaging than the transnational Left with its own antiscientific frauds to peddle. Most of the people banned from LGF argued the former. John Derbyshire has lately been arguing the latter.

To that, I just want to point over to what the scientists are saying, caught up in The Replication Crisis. The way Science! (which we f£cking love!!) is supposed to work is that you come up with testable hypotheses and then test them.

Recently there's this guy Devang Mehta, who devoted four years of his life evaluating CRISPR. CRISPR was supposed to get us genetics that resist disease. Mehta found that those diseases evolve, to work around the newly added defences. Mehta moots a worry that he's given ammunition to damage the reputation of gene engineering. But Mehta didn't disprove the underlying theory. In fact he'd supported it. Evolution won again. Its just that this battle was won against humanity's efforts.

In Current Year, nobody wants to hear about negative tests. They don't even want to hear about positive tests that raise additional, if predictable, results. The corruption is mainly Left-driven, yes; the descent into "epigenetic" Lysenkoism (for one) proceeds apace. The Right should be less eager to join in on it.

I comment about scientific debates because - well, this blog is my space (one of them) and I've (clearly) never much cared about whom I've pleased or displeased on my own turf. Also I personally don't like to read dishonesty, for its own sake, and dishonesty needs to be called out. Even if I did think the Right is right, which I mostly do, I also think the Right should be able to prove its own case based on first principles. Which the Right can, much better than the Left can, which prefers being politically-correct over being demonstrably correct.

The Right doesn't, because it doesn't believe in itself. It follows the Left's playbook, thinking that playbook will work. It bites its tongue, to build that elusive coalition. It cucks out.