Via Media - Walter Russell Mead's Blog

Walter Russell Mead is an amazingly prolific writer and thinker with a less than knee-jerk conservative bent. He casts a wider intellectual net than any serious blogger I've read. And, perhaps aside from the great Steyn, I can't find anyone who can string multi-syllabic words together in a more pleasing rhythm.

Here he contrasts physicists' response to the recent, doubtful, discovery of a particle traveling faster than light with the worshipers of climate change:

What’s interesting, of course, is how much more mature physicists seem to be than climatologists. Dissent from a scientific paradigm much more firmly established than anything in climate science isn’t greeted with howls of rage, fury and charges of heresy. Many physicists are skeptical, as well they should be, of evidence that seems contrary to decades of experiment and analysis, but the overwhelming mood seems to be one of curiosity rather than rage.

and

If physicists can control themselves while the most fundamental elements of their worldview are challenged by a handful of researchers with some interesting but quite tricky and potentially flawed results, then the climate world should be able to handle controversy with a little less venom as well. My guess is that the best climate scientists are more interested by the questions critics are asking rather than infuriated by their temerity in doing so. The orthodoxy enforcers and the heresy police tend not to be the finest scientific minds; skepticism and curiosity make for good science, not herd thinking and righteous rage.

Here he bloodies the New York Times editors for allowing what is essentially a press release, and an over-fawning one at that, from a Ft. Collins, CO green urban development plan to be published as news. He quotes,

"Democratized by necessity, the process led to goals that went beyond the predictable safe streets and commerce that planners might have otherwise emerged. In a departure from the old command-down process — planners proposing, residents disposing in public planning meetings — ideas bubbled up in new ferment."

The entire (lengthy) piece reads like this, full of obsequious adulation and namby-pamby greenthink cliches unthinkingly parroted. The article makes no mention of even the smallest criticisms of the new plan, nor does it provide even a hint of caution to leaven the overbearing optimism of the piece. Virtually the entire piece consists of process-worship; there is zero, correct, zero in the way of objective measures (population, productivity, traffic to new stores, employment growth, tax base) that would allow readers to assess how all this beautiful process produced or did not produce real world change. The planners like their project and speak well of it; that is enough to get a lengthy, heavy breathing puff job (hardened newspaper people would use a phrase in place of that one that is unsuitable in a family friendly blog like Via Meadia) in the New York Times. Only an idiot or a propagandist would write such a piece; it is hard to see how any editor would put it in print.

As something of a blog-taster myself, reading the paragraph above makes me want to take my keyboard and go home. It's not fair.