4 ms·

Ignoring the fact that there are far more than left/right in the real world, I take issue with the equivalency you're making between Right and Left in the USA.

Ignoring the fact that there are far more than left/right in the real world, I take issue with the equivalency you're making between Right and Left in the USA. While both sides have many pet issues and wedge issues that are divisive and bad for democracy, the right is denying scientific truth and actively contradicting its extreme budget-hawkishness under the previous president. While the left is bought quite a bit, the right is even more bought by the Kochs, big business, and wealthy donors. Look at the only accomplishment of the right coalition: a major tax cut that expires quickly for everyone except the rich, who receive a massive win in perpetuity. If you look globally, we don't have a Right/Left in the USA, we have an EXTREME right in power and a moderate left in minority. The GOP is the only party in the world whose stance is that climate change is a hoax. We withdrew from the Paris accord while Syria and North Korea have joined it. That is despicably anti-scientific. If you compare Obama's middle of the road left-ism to Trump's extreme right stances, its quite shocking. There can be no false equivalence between the R and L in this country, one is evidently far more extreme.

throwaway7312 9y ago
It's extraordinarily worrying to me that the American Left uses 'science' as a shield for its ideological positions and the adherents of its ideology lap it up and repeat it. I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science. Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field. The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science. Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2] Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars. I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology. But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation. [1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-noaa-data-tampering/ https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n... [2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fraud/ https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...

throwaway7312 9y ago

It's extraordinarily worrying to me that the American Left uses 'science' as a shield for its ideological positions and the adherents of its ideology lap it up and repeat it. I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science. Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field. The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science. Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2] Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars. I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology. But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation. [1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-noaa-data-tampering/ https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n... [2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fraud/ https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...