Trump's EPA quietly proposes plan to embrace tobacco industry's anti-science strategies

[applegrove]

Trump's EPA quietly proposes plan to embrace tobacco industry's anti-science strategies

by Dartagnan, Community at Daily Kos

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/11/21/1900998/-Trump-s-EPA-now-following-tobacco-industry-s-anti-science-playbook-in-making-public-health-policy

"SNIP.....

While the nation is consumed by the impeachment inquiry, the Trump administration quietly unveiled a plan to base all of its public health decision-making on the same anti-science policies that tobacco companies used for decades to hide the dangers associated with their product.

When the pursuit of science is subjected to a political litmus test, the results are usually disastrous. One of the major reasons that the Soviet Union remained such a backward, third-world nation in its economic development during the 20th century was due to the adoption, by Josef Stalin, of pseudo-scientific agricultural theories. Trofim Lysenko was a crank scientist whose theories rejected established scientific principles and instead promoted unproven biological, environmental, and hereditary concepts that meshed well with the Soviet “collectivization” philosophy of agriculture. Lysenko was promoted high into the Communist Party’s ranks, and rejection of his crackpot theories eventually became a criminal offense in the USSR. The result was scientific paralysis and the perpetuation of mass famine in the Soviet Union.

In the United States, meanwhile, the elevation of political ideology over science has been a feature of both ends of the political spectrum. For example, science denialism by Democrats and liberals has usually taken the form of inventing dangers where none actually exist, such as the belief that vaccines can cause autism. Such denialism by Republicans is typically motivated by pro-business impulses (the theory that global warming is a “hoax,” for example) as well as religion-based objections by that party’s voting base.

One party’s science denial, Scientific American notes, is far more harmful to the public at large.

Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.

.....SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. They want corporations to have all the right info and an unhealthy

relationship between government and the public.

[Duppers]

2. What?

Democrats and liberals has usually taken the form of inventing dangers where none actually exist, such as the belief that vaccines can cause autism.

Excuse me? Wtf? The only people I know who to do this, who personally believe this, are right-wingers.