Here is David Brin in fine form talking about climate change, cell phone technology and how the two meet.
He also gets on his hobbyhorse about Goldwater and Buckley being "intellects" of conservatism, when the latter remains hugely overrated (apart from "God and Man at Yale," just begin by asking yourself which essay or writings of Buckley's stand the test of time to be read even now?*) and the former was not considered much of an intellect in most of his time in public life.** Still, Brin is correct that conservatives used to stand much more for scientific endeavor and science-based evidence up through the 1970s at least. And Brin's project here is not to talking to folks like me. He is trying to talk your old, racist uncle off the shelf of anti-Americanism clothed in patriotism. That is a very worthy endeavor.
Brin ends plaintively to modern conservatives that they won't turn into flaky leftists or even moderate liberals if they embrace science again. Then he adds, "we'll negotiate, I promise."
If "we" do negotiate, can we have David Graeber and Naomi Klein at the liberal-left side of the negotiating table so that information and analysis can truly be engaged? Pretty please? And it is not because those two are perfect, but they require a response that helps us recognize societal constructs in what people think are natural and immutable.
* But see here and here for, respectively, Buckley's inadvertent feminism on his television show, which will be far more remembered for the liberals he invited on, and a political retrospective, where it shows Buckley was far more influential in terms of leading a conservative movement of the wealthy and coalition with racists (though the author is far too kind to say the latter, and far too ignorant to realize how much of a favorable structural role that seed money played in a monied culture and a corporate media opposed to socialist ideas except for the rich) that has come to fruition with the anti-intellectual snarl that characterizes "conservatism" today. I wish Brin would simply say that and stop idealizing Buckley and Goldwater, but oh well...
**This is another article creating hagiography about Goldwater. It makes Goldwater sound like a saint for not wanting to inject "race" into the 1964 presidential election. But a careful read reveals something else: Goldwater needed to hide his Jewish roots from his own supporters and offered LBJ a deal: No race and no Jew baiting. LBJ agreed as he knew by that point he was beating Goldwater anyway. It is remarkable to me that I could find nothing on the Internet showing what was common knowledge about Goldwater's lack of intellectual acumen at the time he was in office and running for president in 1964. One cannot, for example, find the interview Gore Vidal did in Look magazine in 1962 where he easily exposed Goldwater's ignorance, but fundamental decency. Or where Eisenhower told Nixon that he thought Goldwater, while decent as a human being, was "just plain dumb." Mary C. Brennan, "Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP" (U. of North Carolina Press, 1995), page 97. This represents to me another example of the continuing rule that not everything is on the Internet. It most certainly is not. Still, the amazing thing is how much there still is...
