Zac Goldsmith’s Senseless Spiked Attack On Sense About Science
IN “So much for ‘Sense’ About Science”, Zac Goldsmith looks at the SAS. Says he:
Every few months, an organisation called Sense About Science (SAS) issues a pamphlet that makes fun of celebrities getting their science wrong.
So what are the facts, Zac?
Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched Living Marxism magazine in the late eighties. LM, as it was latterly known, campaigned against, among other things, banning child pornography.
And this would affect its ability to be a fact-checking service for vacuous green celebrities who say one thing and do another how?
During the 90s, Living Marxism campaigned aggressively in favour of GM food. In 2000, it was sued for falsely claiming that ITN journalists had falsified evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims, and was forced to close. It soon reinvented itself as the Institute of ideas, and the online magazine Spiked.
Anorak’s old dog-racing and drinking partners at Spiked are unable to make fun of jobbing celebs because a few of Spikes staffers (you know who you are) worked on Living Marxism? Goldsmith is warming up to make a point, so don’t interrupt:
The chairman of this movement’s latest incarnation, Sense About Science, is the Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Taverne. While he routinely fires off about non-scientists debating scientific issues, calling at one point for Prince Charles to be forced to relinquish the throne if he made any further statements critical of GM food, he doesn’t have a background in science himself.
As one commenter says:
If I were called Zac Goldsmith, I would be a little bit cautious about insinuating guilt by association with historical connections, however tenuous, as they most clearly are in this rotten wolf of an brain dump.
Says Zac of the Fact:
Not everything the new pamphlet says is nonsense. It can’t be, or the newspapers would be embarrassed to run with it.
Good God. Zac, want to stop now? Sadly, no:
Some examples of celebrities getting it wrong are spot on. They provide readers with the odd laugh, and more importantly, they give credence to the SAS critique of other, perfectly sensible celebrity observations.
And your point it?
Gwyneth Paltrow for instance is ridiculed for saying: “When I read about what pesticides can do to small animals, I thought, ‘Why would I want to expose my child to that?'”
Her children are small animals? Go on:
It’s a comment that resonates with many people.
It’s also a comment that causes others who see Paltrow jetting off to promote the electronic arts and living in the alp of luxury to snort and snigger.
Another commenter says:
This smacks of libel to me, and I can smell a conspiracy to confound Sense about Science’s laudable attempt to change our appalling libel laws.
Back to Zac:
SAS, however, counters that “if studies produce doubt about the safety of a pesticide, it is not approved for use”.
Perhaps SAS is unaware of the story of Atrazine, a pesticide that causes male frogs to grow ovaries in their testes living in water containing levels 30 times lower than those set by the US Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water. Like countless other dangerous chemicals, it slipped through the safety net and was only banned in 2004 by the EU – after years of campaigning by environmentalists.
So the damaging pesticide was banned. After lots of asides and slights and sort of truths in a pointless ramble, how does Zac end his piece? Why with:
A little fact-checking, indeed.
Celebs and science – funny stuff…
Posted: 6th, January 2010 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
