A country called "Rationalia"

[PaulSacramento]

Just read this article:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/01/nei ... e-country/

An excerpt:

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has apparently gotten everyone thinking about declaring independence or starting new countries. #Texit was trending on Twitter after the Supreme Court overturned the Lone Star State’s regulations on abortion clinics. Some on the other side of the aisle—like astrophysicist and “Cosmos” host Neil deGrasse Tyson—appear to be thinking about their own kind of exit.

On Wednesday, Tyson tweeted: “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.”


Kevin Williamson at National Review calls this “schoolboy nonsense.” He was being generous. But Tyson’s antics aren’t that surprising. Like fellow television personality Bill Nye “the science guy,” Tyson has built a career out of inserting himself into political debates. Also like Nye, grandstanding on hot-button issues like climate change and creationism is one of his favorite pastimes (although, to be fair, Tyson, unlike Nye, is actually a credentialed scientist).

Still, a remark this puerile borders on satire, and actually reminds me of my favorite article at Neckbeard News. Naturally, progressive propaganda outfit BigThink.com celebrated Tyson’s tweet as a diamond of wisdom from on high, linking to a video where he further unpacks his proposal for utopia.

[PaulSacramento]

Here are a few interesting passages:

The idea that religious people approach the world with dogmatic blinders while secular scientists approach it with a stiff upper lip and brave objectivity is laughable, but it isn’t new. The republic of reason Tyson thinks will logic away the world’s problems has been tried before. It was called the French Revolution, and it caused a lot of people to lose their heads—literally and figuratively. (Tyson should get a pass on this, since he’s already shown his grasp on history is tenuous, at best).

Weaponizing Science Destroys It
Don’t let Tyson fool you: Science is in trouble—precisely because of the way it’s been politicized. A mortifying correction recently published in the American Journal of Political Science completely reverses a much-touted 2012 study that purported to show higher levels of “psychoticism” and authoritarianism among conservatives. Turns out the results were “exactly reversed,” and that liberals, not conservatives, show higher rates of psychoticism and authoritarianism.

But it runs deeper than one study. In a must-read piece from earlier this year at First Things, William A. Wilson chronicles the profound challenges facing peer-reviewed science. The entire process has become riddled with procedural flaws, human error, selection bias, seniority politics, sensationalism, fraud, and an ever-swelling torrent of published nonsense that outpaces the discipline’s “sclerotic” mechanisms for self-correction.

The very idea that makes science possible—that the universe is predictable enough for inference from limited experience to be a meaningful way of knowing—is pure philosophy. Philosophy, I might add, that was derived from a Christian view of the world.

Tyson, too, has a philosophy, whether he realizes it or not. It’s called “scientism,” the belief that science is the only valid source of knowledge. The rule-by-self-identified-experts he envisions for the happy land of Rationalia is scientism’s logical outcome. But when you insist that facts and evidence speak for themselves, it has a funny way of silencing everyone else. As one intrepid Twitter user replied to Tyson’s initial tweet, “Convenient how the ‘evidence’ always seems to line up with Tyson’s personal beliefs.”

The real problem, of course, is that Rationalia doesn’t take into account the fallenness of human nature, or the fact that we all approach reality with a certain set of assumptions. If we’re to build a new country based on rationality, the question is simply, “Whose rationality?”

[PaulSacramento]

I always get a bit of laugh when people state there is no right or wrong or that they are subjective.
It amazes me that they never grasp what kind of world if would truly be IF there was no right or wrong, no absolute moral, where everything was subjective ( subjective to the strong of course since there would be no reason to allow the weak to have a say at all).
See, I don't know many people that subscribe to the "no morals" or "morals by evidence" view, but I do know some and they would be the LAST people that would TRULY want that view to ever be taken to completion by others.
On the other hand, paradoxically perhaps, I do many a trained fighter ( trained killers even if you want to view that extreme) and every single one of them ( and the no morals group should be thankful) DO believe in right and wrong and do NOT view the weak ( pretty much everyone else) as inconsequential.