Thursday, June 19, 2014

The Left Gets A Pass....Again

So we hear a lot about the "anti-science" views of the conservative Right.  The folks who deny evolution to the point of claiming that Neanderthals and dinosaurs roamed the same earth, at the same time.

Fair enough.  That's pretty bad.

But why don't we hear about the anti-science views of the Left?  I don't mean just the market-deniers who believe in magic and think that a benevolent Lord called "DeState" will take care of them, either.

What about the Truthers?

The GMO-nuts?

The vaccine-deniers?

On the last of these, there is quite a funny video.  Dr. House (of Cards):

6 comments:

Brad said...

Probably because people like Jenny McCarthy aren't elected officials from the Democratic party?

I don't think people would mind too much were it simply fringe elements on the right that are anti-science. It's that said elements are now a major part of the major right-wing party in this country, and have used elected office (from school boards to the Senate) to push these anti-science beliefs.

tl;dr: false equivalence

Anonymous said...

I'll keep telling myself its only Team Coke that has this problem when Team Pepsi stops replacing my kid's science education with recycling education and doesn't fill social studies with a study of power relationships, and when my Team Pepsi local city councelman stops telling a grocery store they can't serve his poor district if they offer GMO food for sale.

http://maxspeak.net said...

Anti-vaxers and 9-11 truthers are not particularly left, or right. As noted above, you never hear a Dem politician spouting that stuff, in contrast to GOPers talking all manner of insanity about the gay Islamic Kenyan Obama.

Anti-GMO is a thing, but more because of objections to the privatization angle. You may disagree, but it is not nutty.

cheers.

Unknown said...

Surely Anti-GMO has just as much right in it as it does left? You might see the hippy/nature loving component as being left leaning; but what about the claim to basic access to information about whether a food contains GMO-foods in it? This would appear to be much more right leaning. Moreover, skepticism of the current state of knowledge on GMO foods is surely neither left nor right; we don't know enough about these foods to make an accurate assessment of their harm/lack of harm. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, ra ra ra, and the emerging evidence on the effect of glyphosate (round up) on bacterial organisms is raising much concern, so maybe we've been looking in the wrong place...i.e. it isn't the GMO corn that harms human cells/tissue, but the glyphosate contamination that harms the bacteria in out guts...and in the soil...and research into gut health is showing just how much we rely on these little critters...so the causality chain might not be so clear cut... Anyway, point is, perceptions of the left-right divide on GMO can be deceiving.

marque2 said...

After watching the video - the only bad thing about MMR that some conservatives might be upset about is the "R"component. The "R" is made from a cell strain that came from an aborted female foetus. Thousands of aborted foetuses were used in the 1960's to find good strains. In the case of MMR, many who are apposed to using aborted foetuses were using a MM vaccine but Merck no longer makes it, tying their hands.

http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/human-cell-strains-vaccine-development

"The vaccines below were developed using either the WI-38 or the MRC-5 cell strains.

Hepatitis A vaccines [VAQTA/Merck, Havrix/GlaxoSmithKline, and part of Twinrix/GlaxoSmithKline]
Rubella vaccine [MERUVAX II/Merck, part of MMR II/Merck, and ProQuad/Merck]
Varicella (chickenpox) vaccine [Varivax/Merck, and part of ProQuad/Merck]
Zoster (shingles) vaccine [Zostavax/Merck]
Adenovirus Type 4 and Type 7 oral vaccine [Barr Labs] *
Rabies vaccine [IMOVAX/Sanofi Pasteur] *"

triclops41 said...

Jack, there is actually a lot of info that GMO foods are safe, is just never enough for the "skeptics". Real biologists and chemists don't fear GMOs, just like real physicists and engineers don't fear nuclear energy.
And I'm sure there are some on the right spouting off about GMOs, but literally every single article I've read with such a position is leftist, often with inane anti corporation babbling mixed in.
All of the study of round up I've seen shows no legitimate issues. I Are there some studies you could point us to?