Fake Science

Austin Ruse
Fake Science (2017)

Fake Science, com o subtítulo Exposing the Left's skewed statistics, fuzzy facts, and dodgy data, é um livro que demonstra como a ciência se tem colocado ao serviço de causas, através de processos como a manipulação estatística ou a ocultação de dados, quando não a apresentação de números absolutamente errados. Em consequência, qualquer tentativa de verificar ou contradizer estes novos dogmas é imediatamente descredibilizada e anatemizada em termos políticos ou invocando pretensos valores humanistas. Esta "ciência" falsa, que apresenta consensos em vez de procurar a verdade, constrói uma narrativa ao serviço da ideologia e, desta forma, corrói as bases da verdadeira ciência, por um descrédito generalizado.
Focando-se na realidade norte-americana, cada um dos capítulos desmonta os argumentos "científicos" que estão na base do enviesamento progressista sobre temas como a manipulação das sondagens, o transgénero, a homossexualidade, o aborto, a revolução sexual, a parentalidade gay, o divórcio, a agro-indústria, a indústria caritativa, o "fracking", o aquecimento global (entretanto reformulado como "alterações climáticas"), a sobrepopulação, o cientificismo, e desmascara a falta de rigor e os erros científicos de numerosos "estudos" que estão na base da argumentação teórica, alguns dos quais realizados há várias décadas e completamente ultrapassados.

Transgenderism is just one area where science has been brought into the service of ideology. It always works the same way: Dozens of dubious “scientific” studies are fed into the public, academic, media, and political debates. The studies’ methodology is highly questionable, and then even wilder claims are extrapolated from them. The authors of any studies that challenge the propaganda are attacked by the Left. Their jobs are threatened and sometimes—as in the case of Kenneth Zucker in Canada—lost. The same script, as we shall see throughout this book, plays out in all the issues related to human sexuality, marriage, and family—but also in other issues: the environment, energy, and practically every controversial area of political discourse.
On all these issues of real importance to the health, safety, and happiness of the human race, we have a choice: swallow the unscientific ideology masked in the garb of fake “science,” or put up a fight.
[...]
In any case, Regnerus reported startling results about same-sex parenting. While there is not a great deal of difference between children raised by lesbians and gays and those raised in single-parent, divorced, and stepparented families, he found significant differences when he compared them to children raised in homes with their own biological mothers and fathers.
Children raised by lesbians were almost four times more likely to be on public assistance and 3.5 times more likely to be unemployed. Children raised by lesbians had a higher propensity for criminal behavior, and the average criminality of children raised by gay men was even higher.
Children raised by gays were three times more likely to have been touched sexually by a parent or other adults—and those raised by lesbians were eleven times more likely to have experienced this kind of sexual abuse. Children raised by gay men reported being forced into sex against their will at three times the rate of children raised by their biological parents, and children raised by lesbians were four times as likely to have been forced into sex.
Children raised by gays were three times more likely to have a sexually transmitted disease; children raised by lesbians were 2.5 times more likely. Children raised by lesbians reported the lowest level of safety in the home, followed by children raised by gays.
The news was so bad for gay parenting that the only thing to do was to attack the messenger, and that is just what the gay-positive academic world proceeded to do. They pushed for the University of Texas to fire Regnerus, but the university declined to do so. They demanded the revocation of the paper, also to no avail. They pulled out all the stops to sully Regnerus’s reputation, which sadly they achieved. On the Left, in the pro-gay media, and to many in the academy, he is now “the discredited Mark Regnerus.”
And yet his work is the best actual science we have on the question of gay parenting. What’s more, Regnerus’s results have been replicated by Paul Sullins.
[...]
What about the dozens of other alarmist claims made by Al Gore and “climate scientists”? How are those polar bears doing? Well, fine, just fine. In fact, pretty much all the claims made by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth were false when he made them, and they have certainly not been borne out since, though the same claims keep getting made.
As I write this, the Huffington Post reports that Greenland’s ice shelf is even in worse shape than we thought. As Christopher Monckton explains, “Greenland... is one of the alarmists’ favorite poster-children for climate panic. Headlines talking of unprecedented warming and sudden collapse of the vast Greenland ice sheet are commonplace. Yet the burial-ground in the principal medieval Viking settlement, at Hvalsey in south-western Greenland, is under permafrost to this day. It was certainly not under permafrost when the Vikings buried their dead there during the Middle Ages.”
One of the enduring images from Al Gore’s movie is the image of polar bears clinging desperately to what appear to be the last ice floes they can find. Once they’re gone, those poor bears are dead. The image is deeply dishonest. One of the most dishonest images in a deeply dishonest movie. But highly effective. Google “polar bear decline,” and you get hundreds of thousands of hits. It’s widely believed that the polar bears are in decline, and they are all going to die. In fact, the global polar bear population stood at twenty to twentyfive thousand in 2013—unchanged from 2001. This according to the Polar Bear Specialist Group. In fact, go practically anywhere in the world where polar bears live and they are doing just fine.