What has distracted me most of late is the posters creeping out of the woodwork at various science blogs I follow. They are reaching for every available argument and form, from walls of text to "your side did it too" to questioning the meaning of Every Single Word like some sort of extreme gas-lighting sport, all to avoid even the slightest momentary admission that what is going on now is extraordinary. To deny, with plodding academicism spiced with point-blank rejection, that there is such a thing as a refulgent white supremacist movement or that it has any traction with the current administration.
And to not just deny -- this on science-based blogs -- that we are facing an onslaught of unreason that would send Carl Sagan screaming for the hills, a denial of reality I didn't expect to see represented outside of certain historic posters here; to in some sort of implausible ju-jitsu of the dialectic insist that the blog in question get back to doing serious science and leave phantom enemies given life only by partisan politics alone.
A denial of denialism, if that isn't too circular. All the more frightening as it is spoken by what appear to be educated people otherwise capable of putting a logical argument together.
(I am much heartened I haven't seen that kind of poster here.)
(On reflection, there is a kind of sense here. And it is exactly the thing Sagan warned about -- and Randi, and Feynman, and others. Which is that it is easy to use science as a source of blunt facts with which to bludgeon one's opponents. What is harder is to actually do science. To ever question, oneself more than anything.)
