Posted on 12/26/2016 9:15:00 AM PST by Oldpuppymax
The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress.
My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I dont devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. Its fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why arent you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives threat to science?
My friends dont like my answer: because there isnt much to write about. Conservatives just dont have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the party of science. But Ive done my homework. Ive read the Lefts indictments, including Chris Mooneys bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they dont affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if youre looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.
All three are in his first chapter, during Mooneys brief acknowledgment that leftists here and there have been guilty of science abuse. First, theres the Lefts opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, theres the campaign by animal-rights activists against...
(Excerpt) Read more at thecoachsteam.com ...
To the left everything is a political weapon to he hurled at their declared enemies.
Dang. So much the Christmas spirit, eh?
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