Facts and Analysis for Social Issues

Why is there not a central location for finding authoritative opinion and (especially!) facts about social issues and environmental problems like methampehtamine abuse, gun violence, vlobal climate change, and immigration? Wouldn't activists, educators, students, and writers love something like this? (Yeah, I've heard of Google, but I was thinking of creating something more focused and user friendly.)

But my idea is to make things even easier on people, especially people who are not very Web savvy. This objective could be served by creating a directory like DMOZ or Yahoo. The social issues directory would be organized into topics and subtopics. So, if you were interested in global climate change you might follow a path like this: Environment > Issues > Climate Change.

I see this directory as part of a larger project aimed at increasing the quality of information and thinking that underlies our approach to expalining and dealing with social problems of all types. The project would have two other components. The first would be a project to define and measure the impact on society of "social pollution" -- ideas that are unscientific, illogical, and/or undermine widely-held values. This project could publish a toungue-in-cheek Social Pollution Index modeled on the famous Harper's Index.

The other component of my "social pollution prevention project" would be an effort to identify and promote better ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. By "better" -- and yes there is a way to judge others' beliefs and lifestyles --I mean that the ideas would support values like health, family, and material sufficiency while also being scientifically valid and logically sound. Of course values have to have priority over scientific "truth" and cold logic.

I can't remember who wrote "Auschwitz was a rational place but it was not a reasonable one." We don't want to go down that path in our thinking about how things ought to be.