This article makes an all too common economic fallacy.
It argues against a proposed marginal cut in spending on science. In order to portray this as a bad idea, he then argues that in total, spending on science is a good thing.
Similarly, I oppose 10% cuts in military spending because if the military were cut 100% 50 years ago, I'd probably have suffered under communism.
This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".
I don't think he's making any policy suggestions so much as he's fighting the mindset a lot of people have: the anti-intellectual stance that scientists are a bunch of ivory tower elites that have no real impact on society. Certainly, there are places where we're unnecessarily spending money in science. But that doesn't justify some anti-science rhetoric you're seeing from some.
It's a 4 paragraph blog entry meant to be funny and make you think a little bit. It's not trying to be anything more than that. "Intellectually dishonest" is an unfair charge.
If the author had even pretended like he was making a rigorous, logical case for why some particular budget should not be cut then you would have a very good point. Yes, a specific instance of a science budget being cut is mentioned, barely. It's really obvious that the author had a bunch of general opinions he wanted to share and the news about the budget cut was merely an impetus to write.
Actually, 50 years ago is pretty much the time of the "missile gap" hysteria where the US military was wildly overestimating the threat from Soviet strategic systems to justify expenditure on new weapons systems. So a pretty enormous reduction could have been been made, the Soviets would still have been deterred and the consequences of any war would have been an awful lot less terrible.
"Either a proposition or its negation" is the logical principle of the excluded middle, which is not a fallacy.
The fallacy of the excluded middle is considering only a small subset of possibilities. It applies here, not with what was explicitly stated, but an underlying assumed view. It is assumed that arguing against spending current amount X of money on science, means arguing for not spending any at all. Obviously that would be bad, because we wouldn't have the current benefits. In fact, we can also spend somewhere in between 0 and X (e.g. X/2) or even more than X. We'll get some non-zero amount of benefits for these, and it's not as clear that it's worse off, unlike spending nothing.
Speaking of logical fallacies, science sure looks a whole lot better if you only look at the benefits it has brought to society, and not at any of the harms.
When the vast majority of the people who promote science are just as intellectually dishonest as any other variety of religious fundamentalists, I think it rightfully raises a lot of questions about the true value of the endeavor.
It argues against a proposed marginal cut in spending on science. In order to portray this as a bad idea, he then argues that in total, spending on science is a good thing.
Similarly, I oppose 10% cuts in military spending because if the military were cut 100% 50 years ago, I'd probably have suffered under communism.
This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".