Thursday, April 19, 2007

Al Gore does Chris Mooney

Al Gore has a new book coming out in May "The Assault on Reason" which takes the argument begun on the blogs and moving into public conciousness about framing one step further

A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason

(Ethon has been teaching me Roger's tricks, but you can work your way back through the links) Eli would change that to "purposely combined" in there. The blurb continues

We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions. . .

Gore's larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason's enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds, and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

On the framing subject, Pielke is making sure that people know that he used the word framing (albeit in a pretty traditional sense: "framing a problem") once back in 1997.

And I figure that over my lifetime, I have probably used the word that way a handful of times -- including at least once before 1997.

So where's my Nobel Prize?