Thanks neverdem.
Feel-Good Fallacies and the
Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left
by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell
Kindle edition
Posted on 09/10/2012 2:29:35 PM PDT by neverdem
A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true?
No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines.
Consider California’s Proposition 37, which would require genetically modified food to carry a warning label. The American Medical Association is opposed because “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.” Every major scientific and regulatory agency -- including the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, EPA, FDA, and USDA -- recognizes the importance of genetic modification.
Yet, the California Democratic Party has officially endorsed Proposition 37 -- in direct opposition to the recommendation of America’s finest doctors and in contradiction to the scientific consensus. The Republicans endorsed the pro-science position. Did this fact make the news? No.
Digging deeper into the issue, one finds that California Democrats have de facto allied themselves with some of the biggest anti-science quacks in America. Among Prop 37’s most fervent supporters are peddlers of alternative medicine, anti-vaccine groups, and even one crank who claims that genetically modified food causes autism.
This anti-science mentality is not a recent development. The Democratic Party has long made common cause with prominent people who thought vaccines caused autism, two in particular who stand out among the rest.
The first person is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who published an influential article in Rolling Stone and the progressive website Salon back in 2005 tying vaccines to...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Well yes, if you define “Science” as being manufacturing a study to validate pre-determined political dogmas.
they appear to be very confused about the whole -life beginning at conception- thing.
Science: A fetus is a distinct, unique human being
they have a vast apparatus in place to support their lies and misinformation to include scientific studies, economic data, social research, government budgeting and fiscal policy matters, public opinion/ polling and news.
In short, the operate a gigantic lie machine.
They are most certainly the pro-phylactic party.
No, they are the “scientific”-whores-for-more-bogus-regulations party.
got that right.
I was in a debate with another freeper which was quite heated , so I looked at his profile and saw he did not even know when life began.
That on a conservative website, it really is stunning how messed up our side is at times.
Depends on what you call science. If you mean Deepak Chopra style New Age techno-babble the answer is yes.
They do want to seem to keep us grounded and prevent us from exploring space...God didn’t exactly put us here to live in caves, we were given the tools we have for a reason.
They are demoncrats... they serve satan... their party is founded on lies and their master is the lord of the lie.
LLS
You can go on and on with leftist science deniers:
Denying that a new life begins at conception being the most blatant and egregious.
But most of believers in the following anti-science nonsense are leftist:
Crystals
Energy vortexes (like all the loopy lefties in Sedona,AZ such as Sean Young believe in)
Homeopathy
chiropractors (the wacky version with “tuning forks” and other nonsense).
Acupuncture and the vast majority of the eastern medicine and herbal remedy crap.
fortune tellers
ad infinitum...
“Science” is regarded as a sort of religion by the supposed thinkers in the liberal establishment. And as such, it is not to be questioned, once it is “settled”.
But REAL scientific inquiry is never settled. The very basis of most research is to pose only a working hypothesis, until additional facts, which may not have been known before, become apparent in light of changed conditions and are integrated into the hypothesis, which may modify it in unexpected ways.
Everything you learned in school? Be assured, that before you die, fully half or more, will be demonstrated to be totally, absolutely WRONG in both its premise and application. But you won’t know which half it is until after you have already tried to use it as a basis for further argument.
That a dam built by a beaver for beaver purposes is a beautiful part of nature - but a dam built by humans for human purposes is an affront and attack upon nature.
That anything that is natural is good and pure, and anything that is manmade is evil and a toxin.
That cycles of climate including ice ages are an unexplainable feature of the natural world, but that recent land based readings of increases in temperature are caused by human activity (capitalism especially) and will lead to the destruction of the Earth by fire.
Previously that cycles of climate including ice ages are an unexplainable feature of the natural world, but that less recent readings of decreases in temperatures are caused by human activity (capitalism especially) and will lead to the destruction of the Earth by ice.
That scientists are evil and untrustworthy if they work for private industry trying to provide a good and helpful product in order to make a profit by selling to willing customers - but that scientists are good and paragons of trust if they work for the government and are trying to dictate private behavior (even if they have to use a “trick” to “hide the decline”).
That capitalism produces nothing of any good and should be done away with, as soon as they download the latest hits onto their iPad.
etc, etc.
> Are Democrats Really the “Pro-Science” Party?
NO, they are the “Faux-Science” Party !!!
bump
bttt
NASA’s budget is at it’s lowest in fifty years as percentage of the budget on Obama’s watch.
Less then half a penny now of the federal budget.
The bailouts would have powered NASA for decades to come.
Pitiful.
The nations that lead on the frontiers, dictate the course of human history.
Obama the global citrizen doesn’t believe of course that America should be dominate in that.
This is a case in which entrenched ideology is self-destructive. Academics always think that voting democrat will help with science funding etc., but in the end, it usually results in budget shortfalls and big cuts in funding. Further, when you hit the private sector with taxes and big regulatory costs, they won’t fund research either. In the end the pipeline of innovation that can drive future economic growth dries up. Science funding is horrible in the US right now. i would not encourage a young person to pursue science at this time.
Feel-Good Fallacies and the
Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left
by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell
Kindle edition
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Thanks neverdem.
Yes. Democrats are the pro-science party because they are brilliant, really-really smart, intelligent, bright, superior, and genetically advanced.
On the other hand, Republicans are stupid Christians who believe in superstition and who hate science because they are dumb, stupid, moronic, knuckle-dragging, gun-loving, bible-thumping idiots, ya know?
/SARCASM/
I hate to say it, but I've seen too many examples right here on FR of people pushing anti-vaccine, pro-"organic", literal creationism, cold-fusion, alternative medicine, etc., to believe that there is really much difference between left and right when it comes to scientific literacy.
The writer has a lot of Faith in the "scientific consensus" of corrupt government bureaucracies, political groups and industry groups. He is not pro-real-science, he is just gullible.
By his thinking, Libertarians are anti-science, since many of them are against stuff like the following:
Science is a religion for a lot of people, and they cannot handle skeptics who question their dogma.
I know what you mean. I've been posting health and science stories for almost 9 years. But not all the anti-vaccine rants are bunk.
Tetanus vaccine may be laced with anti-fertility drug. International / developing countries.
Playing Now: Hail to Us Chiefs (obama blames American people for his failures)
Why California’s Three-Parent Law Was Inevitable
The New Republic: Obama “Close to Carter Territory” (Walter Russell Mead)
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
Since I was a kid, I heard about “activist science” out of the Left. I had a teacher talked about it. As I recall it was in social(ist) studies - the soft sciences.
But I think it has spread now with the introduction of humanism (moral realitivity) into medical schools/hard science/research. The truth is not relative in Western science...but it is humanist “science.”
We learn all the time that theories are facts and only knuckle dragers dare to question liberalism’s/humanism’s “science.” They all went along with algore’s man made climate science...even though it left out the Sun and ignored ancient climate chage.
Once socialists tamed their independence and analytical ability to speak and think independently in a “bush hates science” head nodding frenzy, socialism ensnared them into socialized medicine. Federal grant and contract funding control was bad enough, but they had their own somewhat independent institutions and businesses in the name of medicine. They are totally owned now.
.
..The DEMOCRAT Party = The Anti-GOD Party..
Why, we all saw it for ourselves on National TV..!!!
.
That abstract you linked was not an indictment of vaccines, but a description of people committing deliberate evil. Unfortunately, using the practice of vaccination to hide/commit nefarious acts has the effect of making people distrust a valid public health effort, with the long-term effect that fewer people receive vaccine protection, and more people die of preventable diseases. All of that actually does fit the radical left agenda (those who would decrease human population by any means possible).
As for scientific illiteracy on the right, we have, right here in this thread, posts #27 and #30 demonstrating the kind of scientific illiteracy that I have been trying to counteract for years.
These are the modern Priests of the Temple. Their god is secularism and their trade craft populism. Government schooling keeps them in business. No thinking person would be a liberal.
I think a strong argument can be made against the “life begins at conception” belief, one that meets both a scientific and a religious standard fully in keeping with Christian values. Leave a fertilized egg alone and it will not turn into a baby. It will not live. Instead it will wither and die due to a lack of vital nutrients and hormones all necessary for growth.
Given that eggs, both fertilized and unfertilized can be passed out of a woman’s body without producing life what are the circumstances that lead to life? Only when that fertilized egg attaches to the uterine wall whereby those nutrients and hormones can be supplied does life begin. This occurs about 7 days after conception. When would God send a spirit to this little baby - at conception when it cannot sustain life or at this point when life can be sustained?
The argument that “life begins at conception” is unscientific. It also fails to meet the basic understanding of God and the nature of this world. If one moves away from “conception” and toward implantation you have a sustainable argument.
This is why language is so important and why control of language is a major goal of progressivism. They love to undefine or redefine words.
Look what happened last century change - liberalism which had always meant the classical liberal: freedom and liberty loving e.g. The Founders, and conservatism which had always meant monarchists, the Old Guard, etc. were switched. Progressives redefined and controlled the language making us conservatives - yet it is a rare FReeper who fights for entrenched interests like more government or more cronyism.
Today we gleefully call ourselves Red. Reds have always been communists. It is their symbol, yet one election year because some news media colored their political map red for the GOP and blue for the Democrats we’re now Red and the bad guys are now Blue, as in True Blue. How did that occur and so rapidly?
I suspect because it is the Devil’s world. He needs confusion to reign because error needs a crisis.
——This is a case in which entrenched ideology is self-destructive. ——
Meanwhile on Free Republic, myth trumps science every day
Not that we should bailout anybody as a government, but NASA isn’t Constitutional nor necessary for American progress. NASA stifled progress in space.
What is the cause of all this ignorance? Answer: Government schooling. You could dissolve every teacher’s union, close every district and turn education over to “charter schools” or vouchers for private schools and you’d still have the same problem. Why should I trust a government bureaucrat to define what is and isn’t an education?
Government doesn’t belong in education. Get government out of our minds and out of the minds of our children. The same group that blew the Food Pyramid, missed the 9/11 attack intelligence and is making a bad recession into a depression give us our educational standards and mandates.
The government is the gang that cannot shoot straight. They make the Lavender Hill Mob look like stone killers. The government is the problem. It is political by its nature. Why should a free people submit to government mind control?
Teachers believe in government. What then will they teach our children? There is no balance in education and look what it has gotten us - infantilism. People who never grow up and think that money, masturbation and recreational escapism is a real life.
Any real change in America has to come from educating people. Hard knocks produces a lot of conservatives, but it does nothing to eliminate the myths laid down like sediment over the first dozen years of an education.
Even going by your standard - that still excludes most abortive methods.
Let me put it this way - every life has a beginning, and an end.
Your existence on this planet will expire at a pretty obvious point in time.
At what point in time did your existence on this planet begin?
AMEN!!!!!
One more thing:
Government schools are godless. Children must think and reason godlessly just to cooperate in the classroom.
Lesson taught:
Simply by attending children learn to check their religious beliefs at the door. In other words, this teaches children to separate their personal faith from their public life.
Question:
So?....When a tyrant then orders government bureaucrats and businesses to abuse fellow citizens will those religious scruples be there, or will the worker be then thoroughly trained to separate personal belief from his public life?
My decision:
I no longer have government teachers for friends. They are too evil, too stupid, to too much of a Useful Idiot to be a friend.
And where does this *belief* come from? Phony fudged data, altered to fit some bullsheet 'Hockey Stick' computer model that nobody else can duplicate when the correct data is used. That ain't 'Science', it's making snake-oil.
But they need evolution so they can take God out of any equation of life. That's required so they don't have to feel 'guilt' for being perverted degenerates and not having to pay any price -- aka: Final Judgment -- for their mentally deranged, sick, 'choice of lifestyle'.
A God in that picture just ruins everything.
Note: I omit the Big-Bang as belief in that is not mutually exclusive from belief in the existence of God, i.e: If there was a Big-Bnag, there had to be a Big-Banger.
Then there’s the science of forensic analysis of data, like PDF files.........
True. Years ago a prof I had for a lecture stated that data remains the same but the explanation and interpretation of that data is never fixed and is always open to be challenged and changed.
I understand your comment, but have to say that myth trumps truth every day in society, and often science trumps truth. There was recently a publication in Nature in which a guy who was the head of Amgen’s cancer drug development program for many years selected 53 landmark studies in cancer research, from high impact factor journals and high profile labs and had a team of about 100 researchers try to replicate the results of these studies. They could only replicate 6.
When they told one of the researchers they did his experiment 50 times and never got the result he got, that researcher said ‘we did the experiment 6 times, got that result once, and published it’.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R12P20120328
Bayer did a similar study and found that >2/3rds of the published studies they investigated could not be replicated.
The bottom line, to me, is that no one has a lock on truth, or a right to be arrogant based on self-perceived ‘superior knowledge’. I've had many conversations over the years with scientists who scoff at the idea of God and at religion. I personally find it intellectually shallow to believe that everything exists for no reason, and to summarily dismiss spirituality and faith. This world view is, in fact, its own type of ‘leap of faith’ - faith in the secular. Dogma, including secular dogma, is often the enemy of truth, IMHO.
It is “science, falsely so called”. (1 Tim 6:20)
I have a libinlaw who, for every challenge to her belief system, refers to “science”. I ask her to explain what she means by the term and she never can, and doesn’t care to. That’s the end of it as far as she’s concerned.
Heck, they don’t even realize that two men can’t make a baby.
Blame Tim Russert for the terms "red state" and "blue state", in the 2000 election.
Until then, blue was more often Conservative Republican, red for Democrat / Socialist / Soviet Communist.
In other words, it was strictly a debate amongst the leftist media, so naturally they chose "true blue" for themselves, and designated the opposition as "radical red Republicans" -- an exact reversal of the historical symbolism.
Of course, they claimed it was because "r" = Republican = red.
But year 2000 just as strongly reflects the approximate time when Liberal-Democrat-Socialism became dominant political orthodoxy -- which the (blue) leftist media felt necessary to defend against those bad (red) aggressive Conservatives trying to cut back on their big-government.
For consolation, Conservatives clearly own "red-blooded American" and even "redneck".
Further, in military symbols, red represents courage and sacrifice, which certainly are appropriate for Conservatives.
And yes, in military terms, "red" is the aggressor force, but in training exercises, it often refers to the highly-skilled select group of permanent cadre, whose mission is to play aggressor force in order to train regular (blue) units in realistic war games.
So in military training, "red" aggressor forces are the teachers, by analogy to politics, teachers of traditional Conservative constitutional values to people who might otherwise have no clue.
So bottom line: yes, "red" conservatives are a role-reversal imposed on us by the leftist media, but on the other hand, I'm not certain if we shouldn't wear our new color with pride.
After all, youuuuuuuuu just might be a red-neck!
;-)
Don’t misunderstand me, please. I’m not arguing for abortion, but for a better definition of conception. One that will clearly define our position both scientifically and spiritually. We need to win on this one.
And I argue that “conception” occurs exactly when we all learned it did in science class.
When the sperm fertilized the egg - they both lose the DNA identity of their hosts, and a new DNA code is formed. That is because a new life has formed. Left alone - in the body - where conception has occurred for millenia (up until recently), this new life will either implant and continue to grow or it will not.
That some of these embryos will not survive that process does not mean that our lives did not begin at the moment of “conception”
Not sure what you mean by “lose the DNA identity of their hosts”.
A sperm or egg cell is produced by meiosis. The original cell has the DNA of the person, one of each chromosome from mom and one of each from dad. This is mixed up so the NEW resulting DNA pattern in the reproductive cell is unique to that cell, and that cell will only have HALF the DNA of the parent cell.
When the sperm and the egg combine each half forms a new whole - but nothing happens with the DNA other than that it is combined with the ‘missing’ half.
The sperm cell is alive, the egg is alive - both have the DNA of the parent - but in a new configuration.
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