,
Senator Ted Cruz, as reported by Bloomberg:
In fact, 150 years before Galileo (1564-1642), Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand knew the Earth wasn't flat too, along with every literate person of the time. The story of the flat-Earthers at the Spanish court was apparently concocted by the American writer Washington Irving as a tall tale, which has had astonishing durability but no basis in fact.
The flat-Earth concept has never been "accepted scientific wisdom" since the time you could start talking about such a thing; the Earth's roundness had been pretty well established by Greek philosophers in the 3rd and 2nd century B.C.E., and one of them, Eratosthenes, made a pretty good estimate of its circumference, of 250,000 stadia (somewhere between 25,000 and 28,000 miles or so, depending on how long his stadia were, which is not totally clear, the low figure being very close to the right answer).
The problem Ferdinand and Isabella and their panel of scientific experts had with Christopher Columbus was that he thought the circumference of the earth was just 15,000 miles, or almost 40% shorter, which was why he expected to find India a few weeks' sail away from the Canary Islands. He was totally wrong, and the scientists who warned that he and his sailors would die of thirst before they ever got close to India were right, or would have been if there hadn't been this continent in the middle between the Atlantic and the Pacific (which the Central Asian scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni hypothesized ought to be there, in the 11th century, but what Columbus got from him was the wrong information, ruined by his own miscalculations).
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, and they were right. (I don't want to push this too hard, but is the persistence of this myth at all connected with conservative anxiety to gloss over Columbus's connections with slavery and genocide? A little plank of American exceptionalism affirmed by the idea that the proto-American Genoese was the only man on the planet who knew it was three-dimensional?)
Galileo's quarrel, meanwhile, was not with the scientific establishment of the time, such as it was, as BooMan was pointing out earlier. The heliocentrism deniers were churchmen (including some Jesuit scientists) who insisted on biblical literalism. They knew very well that their math didn't work, by the way, and used the numbers of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe even though they only made sense on the heliocentric view, but they didn't care. If I Chronicles 16:30 said the world cannot be moved then the theory that the earth revolves around the sun had to be rejected, even though all the available evidence showed it was true. Not simply because the Bible said so but because challenging the Bible threatened their hold on power. They were in the position of the oil companies rejecting science because science was going to cost them.
That Cruz believes in the tale of Columbus and the flat-Earthers, and mistakenly applies it to the science-church struggle of a century and a half later, shows that he may be as smart as everybody keeps saying he is, but he's not very well informed, and too arrogant to check his facts. And Cruz saying that his own position is somehow analogous to Galileo's is like—is like—
I don't know, it's like Cruz suggesting he's been influenced by the great liberal philosopher John Rawls, whose theory of justice argued that to be a moral person one cannot accept social and economic inequality unless it can be shown to benefit the least among us.
Well, I just happen to have Senator Cruz right here, and—not really, I've got Steve M, referencing our favorite carrot-up-the-ass bad-writing National Reviewster Kevin D. Williamson praising Cruz for bringing Rawls up in his stump speech and showing his brilliant conservative smarts. Really? Bringing him up for what purpose? WTF, I wondered, did Cruz actually have to say about Rawls?
Apparently that conservatives ought to be dropping his name more often in defense of regressive taxation and deregulation. He's been saying it for a while, at least since a Wapo op-ed of January 2013, in which he suggested that conservatives "should assess policy with a Rawlsian lens, asking how it affects those least well-off among us. We should champion the 47 percent."
But then, as blogger Ari Kohen wrote at the time, he never does ask how anything he proposes would help the less well off: "he simply says that they will and that policies preferred by Democrats will not." In fact every item on Cruz's policy list would horrify Rawls, precisely because Cruz does not object to inequality at all.
The consequences of Rawls's theory of justice for political economy, as Rawls saw them, have been summarized with beautiful concision by the philosopher Daniel Little at his blog, Understanding Society (my bolding):
Cruz name-checks Rawls in every speech to display how intellectual he is, and uses the words to defeat Rawls's ideas, the way he might use the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to defend the Republican program of resegregation known as "school choice".
But he's not merely insincere. He has literally no understanding of what King, or Rawls, or for that matter Galileo actually stood for. He knows nothing about moral philosophy or civil rights or political economy or the history of astronomy either. Princeton and Harvard and all, the man is a cultural illiterate.
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| Via Flat Earth Society. |
"Today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers," Cruz said. "You know it used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier."Galileo never denied that the Earth was flat, matter of fact, because he never in his life met anybody who thought the Earth was flat. It would have been impossible to even bring it up in conversation. He denied that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and got jailed for it by the Vatican, but the more-or-less sphericality of the Earth was entirely well-known to every educated person including his jailers. Ted Cruz is an ill-educated idiot.
In fact, 150 years before Galileo (1564-1642), Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand knew the Earth wasn't flat too, along with every literate person of the time. The story of the flat-Earthers at the Spanish court was apparently concocted by the American writer Washington Irving as a tall tale, which has had astonishing durability but no basis in fact.
The flat-Earth concept has never been "accepted scientific wisdom" since the time you could start talking about such a thing; the Earth's roundness had been pretty well established by Greek philosophers in the 3rd and 2nd century B.C.E., and one of them, Eratosthenes, made a pretty good estimate of its circumference, of 250,000 stadia (somewhere between 25,000 and 28,000 miles or so, depending on how long his stadia were, which is not totally clear, the low figure being very close to the right answer).
The problem Ferdinand and Isabella and their panel of scientific experts had with Christopher Columbus was that he thought the circumference of the earth was just 15,000 miles, or almost 40% shorter, which was why he expected to find India a few weeks' sail away from the Canary Islands. He was totally wrong, and the scientists who warned that he and his sailors would die of thirst before they ever got close to India were right, or would have been if there hadn't been this continent in the middle between the Atlantic and the Pacific (which the Central Asian scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni hypothesized ought to be there, in the 11th century, but what Columbus got from him was the wrong information, ruined by his own miscalculations).
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, and they were right. (I don't want to push this too hard, but is the persistence of this myth at all connected with conservative anxiety to gloss over Columbus's connections with slavery and genocide? A little plank of American exceptionalism affirmed by the idea that the proto-American Genoese was the only man on the planet who knew it was three-dimensional?)
Galileo's quarrel, meanwhile, was not with the scientific establishment of the time, such as it was, as BooMan was pointing out earlier. The heliocentrism deniers were churchmen (including some Jesuit scientists) who insisted on biblical literalism. They knew very well that their math didn't work, by the way, and used the numbers of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe even though they only made sense on the heliocentric view, but they didn't care. If I Chronicles 16:30 said the world cannot be moved then the theory that the earth revolves around the sun had to be rejected, even though all the available evidence showed it was true. Not simply because the Bible said so but because challenging the Bible threatened their hold on power. They were in the position of the oil companies rejecting science because science was going to cost them.
That Cruz believes in the tale of Columbus and the flat-Earthers, and mistakenly applies it to the science-church struggle of a century and a half later, shows that he may be as smart as everybody keeps saying he is, but he's not very well informed, and too arrogant to check his facts. And Cruz saying that his own position is somehow analogous to Galileo's is like—is like—
I don't know, it's like Cruz suggesting he's been influenced by the great liberal philosopher John Rawls, whose theory of justice argued that to be a moral person one cannot accept social and economic inequality unless it can be shown to benefit the least among us.
Well, I just happen to have Senator Cruz right here, and—not really, I've got Steve M, referencing our favorite carrot-up-the-ass bad-writing National Reviewster Kevin D. Williamson praising Cruz for bringing Rawls up in his stump speech and showing his brilliant conservative smarts. Really? Bringing him up for what purpose? WTF, I wondered, did Cruz actually have to say about Rawls?
Apparently that conservatives ought to be dropping his name more often in defense of regressive taxation and deregulation. He's been saying it for a while, at least since a Wapo op-ed of January 2013, in which he suggested that conservatives "should assess policy with a Rawlsian lens, asking how it affects those least well-off among us. We should champion the 47 percent."
But then, as blogger Ari Kohen wrote at the time, he never does ask how anything he proposes would help the less well off: "he simply says that they will and that policies preferred by Democrats will not." In fact every item on Cruz's policy list would horrify Rawls, precisely because Cruz does not object to inequality at all.
The consequences of Rawls's theory of justice for political economy, as Rawls saw them, have been summarized with beautiful concision by the philosopher Daniel Little at his blog, Understanding Society (my bolding):
When discussing the role of government in economic activity Rawls refers to four "branches" of fiscal and resource management activity (TJ 275 ff.). The allocation branch keeps the price system competitive and "prevents the formation of unreasonable market power" (276), and actively monitors market imperfections and externalities. The stabilization branch "strives to bring about reasonably full employment". The transfer branch is responsible for managing the transfer of incomes necessary to establish the social minimum. And the distribution branch "is to preserve an approximate justice in distributive shares by means of taxation and the necessary adjustments in the rights of property" (277)....
It is a theory of political economy that holds that government has substantial obligations based on distributive justice. It has the obligation of maintaining and correcting the system of economic institutions so as to prevent "unacceptable" levels of inequalities of income and wealth. It has the obligation of providing the resources for securing public goods at an appropriate level, and it has an obligation of collecting taxes sufficient to fund the social minimum for all citizens. It is an account that is well informed about then-current thinking about institutions and public choice. It rests on realistic assumptions about motivation and incentives. And it appears to set the stage for a set of institutions that appear to be economically feasible, along the lines of Scandinavian forms of social democracy.A redistributionist active-government position, in short, that is the exact opposite of what Republican policy stands for. And Cruz (who thinks the IRS should be abolished, his regressive flat income tax apparently to be collected, as Paul Waldman writes, by the Tooth Fairy) in particular. The Republican list under a "Rawlsian lens" would be pretty much invisible.
Cruz name-checks Rawls in every speech to display how intellectual he is, and uses the words to defeat Rawls's ideas, the way he might use the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to defend the Republican program of resegregation known as "school choice".
But he's not merely insincere. He has literally no understanding of what King, or Rawls, or for that matter Galileo actually stood for. He knows nothing about moral philosophy or civil rights or political economy or the history of astronomy either. Princeton and Harvard and all, the man is a cultural illiterate.
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