BIG SCIENCE IS TRYING TO KILL ME WITH BIG SCIENCE!

Jamelle Bouie's essay on "conservative tribalism" -- the tendency of right-wingers to adopt (some) positions just to be on the other side of positions liberals have taken --  rings pretty true. I think the problem goes deeper than he knows, though. Dropping a position you used to hold just to get on the right or left of the opposition is an understandable political maneuver.  But when you see conservatives reacting to, for example, Michelle Obama's drink-more-water campaign by exposing the lie that water is good for you, you know things have gotten weird.

Here's a more recent example from the Rasputin of ressentiment, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: Reynolds quotes a New York Times story about how judgments on what foods are good for you have changed over time, as one would expect in a era of active research ("trying to tweeze feeble effects from a tangle of variables, many of them unknown, inevitably leads to a tug of war of contradictory reports"). Many of us would appreciate the reminder of the need for perspective and factor it into our dietary decisions. Here's Reynolds' reaction:

Yet all the nutritional commands — like the command to avoid sunlight — have been issued in the Voice Of Authority, with doubters and skeptics condemned as disrespecters of science. There’s even the suggestion that the war on tobacco caused people who quit smoking to gain weight, with more cancers resulting from obesity than from cigarettes. If that proves out, will the anti-smoking folks be targeted like the tobacco companies were?

Kind of tempts you to tell him liberals "command" everyone to avoid running their lawn mowers over live power lines, doesn't it? Actually there's no point: He's not going to live out the freedom-from-science dream. That's for his readers to do, poor bastards.