Here are my running notes from Bruce Sterling's rant at SXSW:
This is a genius adminsitration for inspiring angry rhetoric.It's got a nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dighis poetry. Job one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they'rean info-war-centric outfit. If you get it spun, you don't need toget it done.
Controlling the message is more important to them thancontrolling the underlying reality. It's a blatant part of theirideology. Their global climate change policy is in defiance ofthe laws of physics, it's Lysenkoism. The Union of ConcernedScientists has a page documenting the Bushies' Lysenkoism fromclimate change to on.
The science stuff is starting to blow back. The UCS isnonpartisan. It's like Stalin and Lysenko's faith-basedagriculture: the reason Soviet wheat fields have weeds is becausewheat is evolving into weeds. You didn't have to get the peasantsto weed the fields, you could just allege this. Scientists wereamazed and horrified. Soviet scientists who went abroad to talkabout chemistry and physics were confronted with a credibilitygap arising from this — they had to admit that back home,politicians made up the laws of physics. So scientists defectedto Cornell.
