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United States41991 Posts
It varies. You get weird spiritualist neo paganists on the left who think their own research is a substitute for actual experts. Meanwhile you get conspiracy theorists and religious nuts on the right who think that vaccines are a front for Sharia Law and that expert just means ivory tower west coast elite. It's a massive overgeneralization but basically in my opinion the ones on the right are insecure about their lack of education and overcompensate by rejecting education as a liberal elitist ivory tower thing while the ones on the left are very secure in the value of an education that they never bothered to get.
The right is far more organized about it though, as they are with everything else. Leftist nuts are too busy counting the microaggressions in the world to really organize.
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On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"?
Anti-vax ideology is more popular among more affluent, college-educated whites, particularly in certain communities (e.g. the West Coast).
Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural".
Both of those populations are far more left-leaning than climate change deniers or evolution deniers. The former opposes the Green movement (a very progressive movement) and the latter is deeply rooted in religious politics (something the Left has very little of).
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Basically hippie ideology meshes with "natural" remedies and homeopaths for the same reasons medicine can clash with evangelical and fundamentalist ideology. For both ideologies "ancestral wisdom as interpreted by my community is better than science" has a deep resonance.
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On March 03 2019 05:29 Nouar wrote:Damn, I don't even know why I'm caring when I see this kind of reaction (Trump latino supporters at the El Paso rally). The con is so obvious, it's even worse than a casino, but it still works, like moths to a flame... Show nested quote +“Right now I don’t even have healthcare,” Thompson said.
“I go to the emergency room,” Gaudet said, laughing.
“I just go to the emergency room,” Thompson agreed.
I asked if they would support higher taxes for millionaires if it meant that people like them would get free healthcare. Gaudet didn’t hesitate. “No, because one day we might be the millionaires.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/02/why-donald-trump-could-win-again-by-dave-eggers Opinions like these are worth no more consideration than your child complaining about the bitter taste of medicine. Give them free access to doctors for things that aren't just physically debilitating or life threatening, then take it away and tell them they can go back to paying crazy fees at the emergency room and see how they like it. Like the ACA, people vote against their own interests all the time. It's up to the progressives to force this issue down their throat for their own good.
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On March 03 2019 09:01 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"? Anti-vax ideology is more popular among more affluent, college-educated whites, particularly in certain communities (e.g. the West Coast). Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural". Both of those populations are far more left-leaning than climate change deniers or evolution deniers. The former opposes the Green movement (a very progressive movement) and the latter is deeply rooted in religious politics (something the Left has very little of).
Yes, but it is worth it to clarify that that does not mean that left-wing people are generally anti-vaxx. Anti-vaxx people however are usually leftwing. Most leftwing people also think that anti-vaxxers are weird and crazy.
With regards to GMO, that is kind of strange because there are multiple facets to this. Firstly, there are the people who are indeed against it because it feels "unnatural" or something like that. Which is indeed pretty weak as an argument. And a lot of unreasonable fears that gene modified stuff will in turn modify your genes.
But there are also more reasonable reasons to dislike the way that GMOs are currently utilized. Not because the manipulating of genes is generally wrong, but because the way the GMO industry works, with large corporations patenting seeds, is scary. And the problems that arise due to large-scale monocultures which also often follow the GMOs.
It is often hard to distinguish legitimate concerns from weird hippie talk that also often crops up, and i find this to be a problem that people who care about the enviroment have. There is this blending of legitimate reasons and important concerns about the environment on the one hand and weird talk about "naturalness" etc on the other hand. I think that the rational enviromentalists (to which i count myself) need to distance themselves from the, for a lack of a better word, hippies.
I generally think that we should be able to do a lot of good with GMOs. We just need to be a bit careful to not break something important as a sideeffect. We are at the technological level where we are able to make better crops in a far more efficient way then by just crossbreeding stuff. It would be foolish to completely ignore this. It would be equally foolish to ignore any potential problems just because it sounds sciency. Implementation is at least as important as general ideas.
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On March 03 2019 10:27 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 09:01 Stratos_speAr wrote:On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"? Anti-vax ideology is more popular among more affluent, college-educated whites, particularly in certain communities (e.g. the West Coast). Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural". Both of those populations are far more left-leaning than climate change deniers or evolution deniers. The former opposes the Green movement (a very progressive movement) and the latter is deeply rooted in religious politics (something the Left has very little of). Yes, but it is worth it to clarify that that does not mean that left-wing people are generally anti-vaxx. Anti-vaxx people however are usually leftwing. Most leftwing people also think that anti-vaxxers are weird and crazy.With regards to GMO, that is kind of strange because there are multiple facets to this. Firstly, there are the people who are indeed against it because it feels "unnatural" or something like that. Which is indeed pretty weak as an argument. And a lot of unreasonable fears that gene modified stuff will in turn modify your genes. But there are also more reasonable reasons to dislike the way that GMOs are currently utilized. Not because the manipulating of genes is generally wrong, but because the way the GMO industry works, with large corporations patenting seeds, is scary. And the problems that arise due to large-scale monocultures which also often follow the GMOs. It is often hard to distinguish legitimate concerns from weird hippie talk that also often crops up, and i find this to be a problem that people who care about the enviroment have. There is this blending of legitimate reasons and important concerns about the environment on the one hand and weird talk about "naturalness" etc on the other hand. I think that the rational enviromentalists (to which i count myself) need to distance themselves from the, for a lack of a better word, hippies. I generally think that we should be able to do a lot of good with GMOs. We just need to be a bit careful to not break something important as a sideeffect. We are at the technological level where we are able to make better crops in a far more efficient way then by just crossbreeding stuff. It would be foolish to completely ignore this. It would be equally foolish to ignore any potential problems just because it sounds sciency. Implementation is at least as important as general ideas. Yes, whole heartedly agree. Sorry if there was any ambiguity on that front.
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5930 Posts
Pew actually did some polling (in 2015 iirc) with regards to anti-vax beliefs and political affiliation. The conclusion they ended up with was that the more partisan and political the person was, the more likely they were to take anti-vax bullshit seriously. It wasn’t specifically a left wing thing. There’s some suggestion that anti-vax beliefs are tied to the person’s belief in the government handling preventative health, which makes complete sense as the most partisan groups are also the same ones with an intense distrust of government authority.
Since Pew poll was conducted during the Obama Administration, there was an obvious divergence where the right wing were more willing to believe that vacations should be optional. Which isn’t surprising, we got the whole bullshit about death panels, death camps, Obamacare putting people down and so forth.
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On March 03 2019 07:00 Nouar wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 06:55 KwarK wrote:On March 03 2019 05:18 Nouar wrote:To laughter, Trump continued, mockingly: “No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Let’s hurry up. Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’”
The crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Trump's critique of the Green New Deal and wind energy. There are clear downsides to Wind Energy, but when part of a proper energy mix, it's fine. It's really appaling to see "the leader of the free world" having an IQ of 2, being proud of it, and his idiots cheering him on. I guess, I should be happy that he is often too dumb to even advance his dangerous agenda. So maybe there is a chance there is still a country at the end of the tunnel. edit : woops, the source https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/02/donald-trump-cpac-speech-democrats-green-new-deal-bullshit If he thinks that’s bad wait until he hears about solar power and this new thing called night. No, that IS a very fair criticism to make about solar power, and why we cannot really make solar panels our main source of power, since the consumption peak is usually when the sun sets. Even being able to store energy would be nigh impossible in a country grid, due to the sheer amount of batteries that would be needed. (Think Total Annihilation and saving up for shooting huge energy cannons, if some of you remember xD) So I would have been ok if he complained about that. But this television/wind bullshit, man...
Oof.
I have no doubt that this would be the answer that Trump would give, probably massively simplified, it'd be nonetheless wrong.
First, you don't use "solar panels" to create energy for a grid. Photovoltaic is what you put on your roof, but not in a power plant. There's multiple systems, but they all share one thing: the end result is steam. The most common way is, afaik, solar troughs. That's a big curved mirror with a pipe in the middle, through which runs water. The mirrors concentrate light onto that pipe, turn the water into steam, and use said steam to power turbines, which feed the grid. The second, more modern/radical approach is even better, because it also solves the "problem" of "huh, sun is off, muh phone empty". In that one, you have a big tower in the center (you've probably seen it in documentaries or something sciency already), mirrors around it. Those mirrors focus on a hole in the tower, with enough heat and focus to melt steel instantly. That beam is used to melt salt (around what, 600 degrees celsius roughly) - which runs then through a heat exchanger, creating superheated steam - and that runs, again, steam turbines.
Now, in regards to storage: you can absolutely store that molten salt, it'd lose roughly 0.5 degrees per day. So any salt molten at daylight, you can use to power the steam turbines at night as well. They are a bit clunkier than your average coal plant, admittedly - but you can build them in places where coalstuff etc doesn't make sense - in the desert. Preferably, even. So space really isn't that much of an issue.
Or, if pure storage is the goal, the US already has quite a lot of it too (i think 25 gigawatt or something just in water reservoirs). In something that's similar to a battery, just not in the sense that you're describing. In fact, every country that has nuclear reactors has to have big storage. Nuclear reactors (especially older ones) are not designed to be ramped up and down, or throttled. At night, when considerably less energy is consumed, there's a very real danger that nuclear powerplants would overload the grid, basically blowing it up. That's why at night, a lot of the generated energy is used to pump water into reservoirs (or turn thermal energy into potential energy, if you want), which then over the day create power through hydroelectric generators, used to smooth out the grid. Admittedly, pretty expensive, but absolutely doable.
Here's what i'm trying to say. There are many ways to store energy. Flywheels, capacitors, reservoirs, hydrogen etc etc all of course with different efficiencies, but no one said it'd be easy to figure it out. What i'm saying is, that it's absolutely possible to do, and not impossible like Trump would claim.
The conclusion they ended up with was that the more partisan and political the person was, the more likely they were to take anti-vax bullshit seriously. It wasn’t specifically a left wing thing.
That would add up with my "observations". I've seen many anti-vaxxers in forums, and most of them were also buying into other conspiracy theories (righties) or other idiocies like homeopathy to fight cancer, living "on air" etc (leftists).
It's not the side, it's how deep you buy into it. Right wing "deep enders" usually believe in chemtrails, flat earth, nasa hiding aliens, faked moonlanding etc etc - left wing "deep enders" as stated, homeopathy to fight severe illnesses, stones with healing powers, "haven't eaten for 9 years" and that kind of bull.
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On March 03 2019 09:01 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"? Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural". How being anti-GMO can be misguided when it comes to the enviroment?
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On March 03 2019 19:06 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 09:01 Stratos_speAr wrote:On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"? Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural". How being anti-GMO can be misguided when it comes to the enviroment? People who have no idea about the consensus in agricultural science would think so.
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Anti-vaxx people are being painfully distrustful of the government more than anything, which is a certain segment of the out-there crowd in either party. (Though generally speaking, less so socialist/big-government types.)
You basically have a bunch of politically left celebrities promoting it, but many of them also belong to Scientology and have been peddling mistruths about everything from smoking to psychology. At the same time, Trump once tweeted in 2014 (beginning with "if I were President" no less) about a link between vaccines and autism.
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Then again, one of, if not the biggest "celebrity" pushers of anti-vax garbage is Jenny McCarthy and she's not really left leaning, so the anti-vax folks are something of a diverse group.
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On March 03 2019 19:06 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 09:01 Stratos_speAr wrote:On March 03 2019 08:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I wasn't aware that either "anti-science" was a left phenemenon. Could you tell me how you came to that conclusion? Perhaps it somehow is in USA, but for the life of me I really can't see it.
Something like evolution denial and climate change denial is something that is actively supported and propagated by the "right" political parties and people in USA, whether by evangelicals, or by big petrochemical companies, but how would anti-GMO and anti-vax be actively supported and propagated by the "left"? Anti-GMO sentiment is very strong with people who are more environmentally conscious but have a misguided and unfounded hatred for GMO's/anything "unnatural". How being anti-GMO can be misguided when it comes to the enviroment?
Because most anti-GMO arguments consistently demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the science behind GMO's, similar to anti-vax sentiment.
These are the kind of people that don't understand what a "chemical" is and automatically dislike anything that has one in it.
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It also stems from a distrust of the corporate food industry and a distrust of anything that is reluctant to have a label saying what it is.
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On March 03 2019 23:14 Plansix wrote: It also stems from a distrust of the corporate food industry and a distrust of anything that is reluctant to have a label saying what it is.
Anti GMO is mainstream in Europe. The main issue is that people are afraid of unforseen ecological consequenzes by modifying genes in a lab rather than through breeding. I do not know enough about the subject to say who is right and wrong, but GMO is frowned upon by a large majority of consumers and regulators alike.
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On March 03 2019 23:46 Slydie wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 23:14 Plansix wrote: It also stems from a distrust of the corporate food industry and a distrust of anything that is reluctant to have a label saying what it is. Anti GMO is mainstream in Europe. The main issue is that people are afraid of unforseen ecological consequenzes by modifying genes in a lab rather than through breeding. I do not know enough about the subject to say who is right and wrong, but GMO is frowned upon by a large majority of consumers and regulators alike. Given the damage we have done simply by bringing total benine plants like blue berry bushes to other parts of the world, I think it is a reasonable concern.
In another note, the Republicans are going to continue to struggle with their problem concerning race and xenophobia through 2020 and beyond.
For those who don’t know, 9/11 truthers have taken their conspiracy theory to the logical next level with our first Muslim women serving in Congress. And I wouldn’t be shocked if they are being elevated by repressive Muslim nations that are having a real struggle with the reality of Muslim women in congress.
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On March 04 2019 00:48 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 03 2019 23:46 Slydie wrote:On March 03 2019 23:14 Plansix wrote: It also stems from a distrust of the corporate food industry and a distrust of anything that is reluctant to have a label saying what it is. Anti GMO is mainstream in Europe. The main issue is that people are afraid of unforseen ecological consequenzes by modifying genes in a lab rather than through breeding. I do not know enough about the subject to say who is right and wrong, but GMO is frowned upon by a large majority of consumers and regulators alike. Given the damage we have done simply by bringing total benine plants like blue berry bushes to other parts of the world, I think it is a reasonable concern. In another note, the Republicans are going to continue to struggle with their problem concerning race and xenophobia through 2020 and beyond. For those who don’t know, 9/11 truthers have taken their conspiracy theory to the logical next level with our first Muslim women serving in Congress. And I wouldn’t be shocked if they are being elevated by repressive Muslim nations that are having a real struggle with the reality of Muslim women in congress. The right lost their collective shit when a brown man was elected as President. Makes sense that a Muslim in Congress has a similar effect.
Heaven forbid you elect a Muslim President. Going to be civil war 2.0
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On March 04 2019 01:00 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On March 04 2019 00:48 Plansix wrote:On March 03 2019 23:46 Slydie wrote:On March 03 2019 23:14 Plansix wrote: It also stems from a distrust of the corporate food industry and a distrust of anything that is reluctant to have a label saying what it is. Anti GMO is mainstream in Europe. The main issue is that people are afraid of unforseen ecological consequenzes by modifying genes in a lab rather than through breeding. I do not know enough about the subject to say who is right and wrong, but GMO is frowned upon by a large majority of consumers and regulators alike. Given the damage we have done simply by bringing total benine plants like blue berry bushes to other parts of the world, I think it is a reasonable concern. In another note, the Republicans are going to continue to struggle with their problem concerning race and xenophobia through 2020 and beyond. For those who don’t know, 9/11 truthers have taken their conspiracy theory to the logical next level with our first Muslim women serving in Congress. And I wouldn’t be shocked if they are being elevated by repressive Muslim nations that are having a real struggle with the reality of Muslim women in congress. https://twitter.com/jeremymclellan/status/1102071766967410688 Too bad she also appears to have some iffy beliefs about jews. I think her whole term is going to be filled with issues.
She really doesn't though. It's concern trolling.
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