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According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:
His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.
"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."
Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?
He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.
As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @11:59PM
in the first place was because the founders of our country didn't trust the citizenry to rise above demagoguery and tribalism. And the drafting of the US Constitution actually predated the fall of the Bastille and all the rest of the French Revolution, so they were fairly prescient.
The electors were supposed to be the elder statesmen who could balance the wishes of their state's citizens with a more educated and deeper understanding of history, economics, geopolitics, science, and philosophy. Over time, though, practice degraded the role of electors into a glorified clerical role who nearly always follow the program assigned by their respective parties. It may be too late to try to reverse that. Now the Electoral College is basically a device for weighting the popular vote by state, and for reducing the scope of a recount in a close election.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday December 09 2016, @03:40AM
Today's Illinois Times had a very pertinent Tom Tomorrow cartoon I fear is not on the internet, so no link. But in the cartoon, as President Trump learns that the government has a time machine (top secret, of course) he goes back in time to meet the founding fathers, who write the electoral college into the constitution to make sure Trump could never be elected.
Ironic that he lost the popular vote by over two million votes.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Informative) by cmdrklarg on Friday December 09 2016, @07:07PM
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.