The Washington Post on Friday hired a new blogger for its Wonkblog: Chris Mooney, a bomb-thrower with two books attacking the idiocy/authoritarianism of Republicans. The Post somehow left out the titles in their joyous announcement. They are “The Republican War on Science” and “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality.”
Hiring Mooney away from the leftist magazine Mother Jones is also a clue of how the Post considers “provocative” ideology a qualification. From their statement:
Chris joins us from Mother Jones, where he has written about science and the environment and hosted a successful weekly podcast. Before joining Mother Jones last year, Chris spent a decade as a freelance writer, podcaster and speaker...Chris also has published four books about science and climate change.
Chris is one of the most distinctive, provocative voices writing about environmental issues today, arguing that people’s preconceptions — political, religious, cultural — color the way they view science. More fundamentally, Chris has built a loyal audience through solid reporting and vivid, authoritative writing.
The Post announced Mooney would start October 20 on the Wonkblog and then later create his own blog that will feature an "all-star roster of energy and environment writers" at the Post. NB’s Tom Johnson has recently chronicled some of Mooney’s more blatant attacks:
Math and liberalism are linked:
“Although Ellenberg doesn't make this case explicitly, there's an argument to be made that the brand of mathematical thinking that he's embracing overlaps heavily with a broadly liberal style of thinking about politics and the world. Published psychological research has shown, after all, that one important difference between the left and the right involves the toleration of nuance and uncertainty.”
Conservatism belongs in the prehistoric Pleistocene era:
[L]iberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics…The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments…
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology. The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed.
Republicans are Earth-hating authoritarians promoting the “environmental retrograde”:
One intriguing related hypothesis posits that the right wing has become more unwilling to compromise in general because it has become more psychologically authoritarian — closed-minded, prone to black-and-white thinking. That's not a pattern that would uniquely affect environmental issues, though. If anything, it would be felt most strongly on the topics that authoritarians most care about: crime, national defense, religion in public life, and matters of that ilk. Whatever the cause, the consequence is clear: We can't get anything done in a bipartisan way on the environment any longer…
Mooney's aggressive left-wing oeuvre easily identifies the slant of the "objective" media. Back on The Corner in 2005, I noticed:
On his blog, Chris Mooney noted he would be plugging his book “The Republican War Against Science” on Tuesday with host Ben Merens on the “Ideas Network” at Wisconsin Public Radio. “I’ll be talking about the book, which they’re using as a premium in their pledge drive.”
