I am having an internal crisis. I consider my self a skeptic, but I do not support the current administration (note: I did not support the last one either). I considered the politics of an individual irrelevant as long as they were interested in research and finding evidence for ideas. However, in the past few months I find myself being attacked by my fellow skeptics in the blogs and the like for not supporting the agenda of Obama. Now, I do not want to have a political discussion, but I am just a little confused.
That doesn't sound very skeptical of your friends to be attacking you for not supporting a particular candidate. There's a lot of upheaval around the skeptical movement about how much skepticism should talk about politics, and I am of the opinion that unless it's really testable, than there is no point arguing ideologies. (That's what political groups, blogs, and forums are for.)
Ideologically, I've always been a libertarian (gasp, I said it!) but lately I've been questioning a lot of that because of my greater awareness of skepticism. I prefer to keep myself apolitical for a while until I figure it all out.
I have to agree with NoisyAstronomer about your friends. Just because I'm a bleeding heart liberal doesn't mean I have a right to say anything about which political movement you follow or don't follow. Politics get dragged to such a dogmatic level and that's where I lose interest all together. I support Obama, but I don't worship him - conversely, I didn't support Bush, but I didn't think he was the root of all evil. This isn't the case for many, many people, and that's where a whole lot of problems manifest. Problems like friends jumping down your throat for not being as into it as they are. Sorry they're being sheeple.
Politics is an arena rife with claims believed wholeheartedly merely for the sake of supporting a particular party. I am far happier with Obama at his worst than I ever was with George Bush, but I don't agree with everything his administration does, and I think we should be free to evaluate their initiatives rationally, rather than simply supporting him because he's "our guy."
Until the job description for public leaders and other positions of 'power' resembles that of a butler, or handmaid - before then, you are right to be a sceptic of ANYONE in power.
The power Obama and all of the cronies around him wields, is unquestioned, unstoppable and beyond the common man.
Bear in mind, that it is not Obama that is in charge of your country however. The international banking syndicates control everything - of course not directly (usually) - but control them they do. Obama is yet another stoolie for them.
Remember the Rothschild quote - "Give me control of a country's money supply, and I care not for it's laws."
Amschel, Rothschild, Bush etc etc.
The situations change, the power stays in the hands of a few bad men. Period.
Definitely skeptics, should be political, but mostly non-partisan. I agree, with Noisy.
I am a libertarian too, use to be a big "L" libertarian. If you're not familiar with that... it means a somewhat partisan Libertarian.
Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Greens all have their anti-science factions.
Obama is suppressing studies the same way Bush did. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10274412-38.html. I am not arguing that that guys study is correct, just that we should not suppress it.
More importantly, there are people being locked up for many years, life or put to death, based on shaky science and myths. Forget about telling us for the umpteenth time why ID is not science or UFOs and crop circles are bs. We know. Start thinking about real and immediate impacts of bad/pseudo science.
See... http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/arson-cases-texas-under-broader-review or Radley Balko's (he's a libertarian too) site, http://www.theagitator.com, on numerous cases concerning bad science in the criminal justice system, especially in Mississippi.
Note: It might seem that way but I am not trying push libertarianism on any skeptics. It just drives me nuts, as a SKEPTIC (and as a libertarian too), that people are having their liberty or life taken away based on bad science. Compared to that, I could not care less about ID, UFO sightings or crop circles.
Ron, you make an interesting point, and it's something I've thought about. There are definitely some subjects that seem to be more urgent than others. The misuse or misunderstanding of science in the justice system is something that I am particularly interested in, since I just graduated from law school, and I'm still hoping to be a lawyer one of these days.
While I'd like to see more attention paid to that subject, I think it's impractical to suggest that we drop everything else to focus on that. There are people involved in skepticism as many different levels, whether you're talking about science knowledge, advocacy ability, or time to devote. For people who aren't able to devote the time and energy necessary to try to change the way science interacts with the law, subjects like UFOs or crop circles offers a way to be involved and learn how to engage those debates on a less intense level.
And not for nothing, topics like "intelligent" design and alternative medicine and psychics, while they might not always have the same immediate, dire consequences, are topics that capture the popular imagination. Trying to help people understand how and why those claims fail is an opportunity that I don't think we can ignore.
I think it is arguable that the unfamiliarity that most people have with science and reason is reflected in issues like capital punishment. While there are many science teachers out there who try and inspire the youth of the nation to pursue science throughout their lives, their efforts are hamstrung by parental ignorance, bureaucratic inanity, and a for-profit college system.
Perhaps I'm a little naive, but I feel like if we invested more time and money into overhauling our school programs, then a lot of these issues that people have would work themselves out in a generation or two, by educated individuals having to interface less and less often with ignorant opposition.
I did not mean that we should ignore those other issues entirely. I often read the magazine Skeptic and the Skeptical Inquirer and it seems like every issue has several articles on those subjects and little else. Skeptic magazine seems to be a little worse with a focus on ID. To me it's beating a dead horse and preaching to the choir, at least for the magazines already skeptical audience.
Alternative medicine does have some dire and immediate impacts.
Because so much focus is put on the same subjects I worry that even skeptics are not fully aware of the bad science in the legal justice system.
platinumwolf
"I think it is arguable that the unfamiliarity that most people have with science and reason is reflected in issues like capital punishment."
The issue of capital punishment is about your values, not science. The forensics (while certainly not all bad, is uneven and it's validity is often exaggerated) and pseudoscience used to convict people is certainly an issue related to science. Whether they get a death sentence or just a year in jail is not my point, but that they were convicted in the first place.