There is a degree to which I would want to congratulate him for realizing the obvious, but I get that is too harsh- how few of us do. Me as well. Razib is a serious man and dedicated to science through the lens of his own disciplines, reason I assume are associated with his ability to so easily discern the flight from science, fact, and objective reality across the usual political/ideological/philosophical lines. Rare to find someone who can spot the parallels between some of the more outre versions of rejecting climate change and the equivalent notion that “gender” is a real thing the way “sex” is. As opposed to, say, the modern equivalent of Freudian jargon, itself once consensus “science”.

I could bang on at length, mostly in praise of Razib. Let that suffice.

One tangent, though. I assume Razib alludes to the Bush-GOP neocon tendency to pooh-pooh opponents who called themselves the reality-based community. I don’t quite recall that as being the same kind of thing as this. It was certainly poor optics to pour slag on opponents for embracing “reality”, but it was equally bad substance [if excellent optics] for war opponents to adopt the moniker ‘reality-based’ community and start repeating it as though the dispute were about mathematical or physical laws.

IIRC, somebody raised the spectre of reality ‘on the ground’ in the Middle East and somebody [I want to say Rummy but can't be bothered to look it up] retorted that the Bushies intended to reshape reality.

Now, as far as all that goes, I sympathize with both sides. It was wise for critics to cite political etc conditions on the ground as limiting factors, and the neocons entertained foolish aspirations based on false assumptions about human nature [a universal failing of our civilization]. OTOH, the goal of policy, especially when that policy is something as enormous as war, is to reshape reality. If one does not have that goal, what is the point of the war? The question should rather be one of ends and means. Either way, the Bushies’ idea of reshaping reality in that context was neither ontologically nor epistemologically the same thing as the sort of reality management we are engaged in now.