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posted by on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-like-a-massacre dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday December 09 2016, @03:05AM

    by curunir_wolf (4772) on Friday December 09 2016, @03:05AM (#438986)
    OMG
    --
    I am a crackpot
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by jmorris on Friday December 09 2016, @03:19AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday December 09 2016, @03:19AM (#438992)

    Yup, that is the "Science" Wired is desperate to save from the wicked, ignorant and evil Trump. The whole edifice need to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch. To allow that sort of thing to exist for decades damns them all. So look well upon it and know despair for we proclaim idiocy to be wisdom, wickedness to be good, and darkness to be light. Science has been profaned.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 09 2016, @06:36AM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:36AM (#439043) Journal

      The very scientific method and ethos itself, the idea of critical thinking and investigation and repeatability and objectivity, is what's being made war on.

      And you are playing a part in this war, however small, with every single one of these stupid self-destructive instances of cultural and intellectual vandalism you commit. You sit in the lap of science, surrounded by its fruits, and use them to argue against it. You saw off the very branch you stand on.

      I don't know what dark cloud of fear and rage and death-instinct has turned you into this. People like you arise in every era, always carrying the same eternal Wendigo psychosis. It feels exactly the same wherever and whenever it appears. I don't undestand it, and probably never will.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:59PM (#439205)

        I don't know what dark cloud of fear and rage and death-instinct has turned you into this. People like you arise in every era, always carrying the same eternal Wendigo psychosis. It feels exactly the same wherever and whenever it appears. I don't undestand it, and probably never will.

        As a committed islamofoe you aren't that different from jmorris. Understand why you are so eager to throw out rational evaluation when it comes to me and my family and you'll be on your way to figuring what animates jmorris's irrationality.

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 09 2016, @06:43PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:43PM (#439310) Journal

          My problem is with Islam the religion, not Muslims the people, in the same way doctors take issue with Ebola, not Ebola victims. And, in case you missed it, I feel exactly the same about Christianity (though not Christians) and Judaism (though not Jews). You and your family are humans, just like me, and so long as you're not going to try and impose your religion's laws on civil society we'll get along fine.

          Now quit the false equivalence. Calling out a toxic ideology is not the same thing as saying the people who hold it are untermenschen.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday December 09 2016, @06:40PM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:40PM (#439303) Journal

      I'm not sure I would call that science, but it does seem to have a disproportionate voice in academia. They're the feminist flavor of idiot who believes in social gender theory.