Collide-a-scape

In the Do As I Say, Not As I Do category: in a recent comment thread at Real Climate, here’s Eric Steig admonishing one of the more churlish climate bloggers:

Eli, with all due respect (and I do have a lot of respect for you), and at the risk of your calling me naive again, please don’t stoppoing making this personal. If you have something to say about scientific work, say it. If you are merely going to use people’s names — e.g. Peter Cox — with no context, then you are a) assuming the readers here know what you’re talking about (I certainly don’t) and b) risking casting unwarranted aspersions on people. The point of this post was “what the science shows is totally different than what is being said about it”, NOT to speculate on the the underlying motivations of the authors or anyone else. Feel free to speculate about that on your own blog, but not here.

Let’s leave aside the Freudian typo and go now to Steig’s response to another commenter on the same thread:

I don’t doubt your sincerity. Many colleagues of mine that I know are sincere seem to think Pielke is “reasonable.” All I can say is that well meaning people thought that Joe McCarthy was ‘reasonable’ too. Those people weren’t paying attention (or they had rather un-American values). Now: read this post by Stefan (Sealevelgate) in which he is unambiguously saying that IPCC is conservative (not alarmist), and then read RP Jr’s post in which he misconstrues Stefan’s post to mean that “another leading scientists says that IPCC is flawed.” THERE is stealth advocacy for you. Look me in the eye and tell me you think Piekle is being “reasonable” here. (Note: I grant you that it is possible that Pielke may just be too stupid to have understood what Stefan wrote. But I doubt that.)

Speaking of Roger Pielke, Jr., (who was not the subject of that Real Climate post), he’s got a book review out in the current issue of Nature (it’s freely available) that is sure to elicit primal screams from his various antagonists, especially these passages:

Climate science has become deeply politicized and climate politics is in gridlock. Climate change is at risk of becoming an issue of cultural politics, similar to the evolution debate in the United States and elsewhere. If the climate-policy debate is to continue as it has, we should expect more of the same.

An alternative way forward would start by admitting the limitations of science in compelling political agreements, and by admitting that we do not know how to complete the challenge of decarbonizing the global economy. There may be greater prospects for political consensus if scientists acknowledge their humility rather than asserting their authority.

My beef with the review is that it’s way too short (1,775 words) to adequately distill four books. It’s not fair to the authors. Multi-book reviews warrant much more space for overview and discussion. Roger’s review reads like a well-written book report with his summary conclusion tacked on at the end. He should have been given at least another thousand words to air out the book’s arguments. I tell you what would be interesting: seeing Bill McKibben review the same four titles in the New York Review of Books.

Better late than never. Hit & Run, wading into the textbook wars, offers up this equivalent of a libertarian koan:

It is difficult to determine just what specific curriculum changes the Texas school board has in mind, though the ringleader of the revisionist faction, a creationist weirdo named Don McLeroy, strikes me as one who wants to impart ideology into the textbooks, not balance.

Ya think? It is difficult to determine what I should call the writer of this Hit & Run post: Sparky or Snarky. The thing about Reason is that it can’t simply call out McLeroy as a religous fanatic and leave it at that. The libertarian thing to do here is the Texas Two-Step: skip to the right, skip to the left. So in a post about theocrats rewriting American history, there has to be the obligatory discussion of ideological biases on both ends of the political spectrum. Sometimes I wonder if Reason does this just to pander to the liberal-hating conservatives who also consider themselves libertarians.

In the end, the writer, seemingly playing it straight, decides:

these people are not to be trusted to achieve some sort of “balancing” of the historical record.

Ya think, Sparky?

Last week, a superb NYT investigation pulled the curtain back on the shady details of a bad Everglades land deal. I guess the findings were so ugly that the Times editorial board (presumably, Robert Semple, Jr.) had to look away while writing this love letter in support of the deal.

I’d have grudging respect for the editorial if it at least acknowledged the investigative work of the two Times reporters who wrote last week’s blockbuster. Even more disappointing: Carl Hiaasen holds his nose and also can’t bring himself to mention the big Times scoop.

Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book:

Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of discontinuity and cultural extinction. Almost universally written from a European perspective, the mythologies of conquest have helped render Native Americans invisible.

Part of what’s bugging Wilcox is also the focus of a new volume of essays (by a number of scholars, including Wilcox), that challenges the research behind Jared Diamond’s popular and influential tome, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It so happens that just yesterday, Rex over at Savage Minds covered this renewed debate in a detailed post.

Not having read either of the newer books, it’s impossible for me to offer any informed comment on them. But the Stanford piece quotes some provocative Wilcox statements, such as this one at the end:

I may be critical of archaeology, but what I am saying is that it makes sense to do work that is responsive and includes the opinions of indigenous populations. The more that archeologists and Native communities work together, the better things get. I really want this field to do well, and I believe it can be much better. It has to because stories of the past matter.

On this, he’s likely to get little argument from southwestern archaeologists, as many have become increasingly receptive to Native American concerns and oral history. But there’s something about that last sentence–because stories of the past matter–that might set off alarm bells in some quarters. Because, in fact, there are points where science and tribal stories of the past collide.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wilcox and his colleagues reconcile the tension between science and oral tradition. As my recent piece on the contested Navajo history in the Southwest suggests, science can be trumped by the politics of this newfound, well-intentioned sensitivity.

Tobis fires a few wild shots, Lambert does recon, while Real Climate tries to keep the posse in check. It’s quite a spectacle, this latest variation of Shoot the Messenger.

Here’s a fact: university press releases that tout scientific studies are routinely vetted by the principal researcher(s). Assuming And that’s the case here, as I confirmed this morning in a phone call with Richard Taffe, who wrote the Boston Universtiy release. So why are Tobis et al playing this disingenuous game of gotcha with the messenger? It strikes me as yet another example of misdirected anger.

File this one in the Department of Unfortunate Headlines. The head in the Times story that the blog post references is obviously more apt. But it’s possible the blogger was simply trying to be clever.

Reason magazine is running a multimedia series, “Reason saves Cleveland.” One of the episodes is titled “Fix the Schools.”

After Reason is finished saving Cleveland from urban decline, I propose that staffers head out to the Lone Star state and save Texas from theocrats,  who have hijacked the public school curriculum.  Nor is that abomination an isolated event, as this anecdote from Daniel Czitrom, a college history professor, suggests. Interestingly, Czitrom seems to believe that the Texas Board of Education’s motivation to rewrite American history springs from something other than just ideology or religion:

Many conservatives are simply unwilling to accept how much the writing and teaching of American history have changed over the last 40 years. They want an American history that ignores or marginalizes African-Americans, women, Latinos, immigrants and popular culture. They prefer a pseudo-patriotic history that denies the fundamental conflicts that have shaped our past.

Surely Reason magazine, which examines all manner of pseudo-science and political correctness, would have something to say on the latest textbook wars in Texas, especially since the implicatons extend well beyond the state’s border. But there’s not even a mention of it on Hit & Run, the magazine’s popular blog. Maybe there’s a “Reason saves Texas” production already in the works…

Over at Savage Minds, there’s an interesting post on the merits of anthropologists hanging in the field with jihadists. It quotes Roxanne Varzi wondering how to contextualize jihadi videos:

These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing a critical anthropological methodology to reading these video texts?

Varzi then says, apparently, that she wouldn’t do it without an ethnographic component. Which makes Adam Fish wonder:

Let me get this right. I gotta hang out, like, deeply, with jihadi terrorists? As an anthropologist I cannot make a statement about jihadi video production practices without having first squeezed my way into their schedule and shared a few meetings over tea with my local jihadist? I’d love to, frankly, but I doubt I can network into their cliques.

Two relevant questions seem to be missing from this discussion.  Wouldn’t the Human Terrain program make this a wee bit more problematic and dangerous (methinks jihadists probably know about it). And secondly, even if no Human Terrain anthropologists were working in a war zone, there would still be a huge risk factor. It’s not insurmountable–journalists find a way to talk to jihadists–but it’s there, which Fish seems to ignore.

Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As the NYT reports,

It means that a mother can huddle on the floor of a closet with her daughter for what seems like eternity as fierce gunfire is exchanged outside their home, as occurred here recently, and then find not a word of it in the next day’s paper.

And it means that helicopters can swoop overhead, military vehicles can roar through the streets and the entire neighborhood can sound like a war movie, and television can lead off the next day’s broadcast talking about something else.

Welcome to life in the Mexican border towns, where, as the Times story reports, even the local American media has been intimidated by drug cartels.

As I noted several weeks ago, there’s some nice happy talk about cross-border cooperation on environmental issues. At least that’s one thing journalists on both sides of the border can feel safe to report on.

UPDATE: Over the weekend, three U.S. citizens with ties to a U.S. consulate office in a Mexican border town were killed in an ambush. The AP reports:

The slayings came amid a surge in bloodshed along Mexico’s border with Texas and drew condemnation from the White House. Mexico’s president expressed outrage and promised a fast investigation to find those responsible.

A fast investigation. In that lawless region, any investigation would do, but even that won’t change the facts on the ground. As the AP reports, the U.S. recognizes this:

The State Department authorized U.S. government employees at Ciudad Juarez and five other U.S. consulates in northern Mexico to send family members out of the area because of concerns about rising drug violence. The cities are Tijuana, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.

It’s been on public display this past week. As the NYT reports:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Why is this important?

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks.

In other words, to paraphrase another famous motto, What’s good for Texas is good for the rest of the country.

Fortunately,  though, we live in the digital age, so the Texas influence

has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

Still, it’s worth reading the entire article to grasp just how thoroughly Texas conservatives are rewriting history. As the Times notes, the new social studies curriculum will include

dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

For example, one of the conservative board members,

who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

Mavis Knight, a Democratic board member, introduced an amendment, the Times writes,

requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

The only thing more shocking is that the Texas Board of Education didn’t try to insert a phrase somewhere saying that global warming was a massive hoax, perpetrated by a cabal of commie climate scientists.