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(41,694 posts)saltpoint
(50,986 posts)represents people who are angry, who are bigoted, who clearly lack critical thinking skills, who distrust public service and anyone in it, and who are contemptuous of Science.
There are substrata in the GOP base whose distrust of Science is in some or significant part related to their belief in a fundamentalist Christianity, of the Franklin Graham / Kim Davis flavor.
Whether they're as strong this cycle as in the recent past, they're at least as loud.
Dustlawyer
(10,497 posts)airwaves! One of the first things of a Sanders administration will be to bust up the media oligarchy and require truth in the news, no more "entertainment" exceptions for a program called Fox "NEWS"!!! Right after enacting Publicly Funded Elections and busting up the banking oligarchy!
My town has all three network stations owned by the same media company. Do you think we hear the whole truth? Two of the stations share the same on air talent!
saltpoint
(50,986 posts)answer for.
For the most part, the airwaves are full of eye candy and ear candy -- puff pieces.
If a serious story requires an in-depth treatment, it means investigative journalism, and the media are resolved that they ain't gonna do investigative journalism no more.
A pretty pathetic state of affairs.
Dustlawyer
(10,497 posts)complicit in screwing us. It's not coincidental that they all decided that exit polling is too expensive!
MisterP
(23,730 posts)everyone hit the roof over the telescopist with the naughty shirt, but the Science Wars saw "race realists" running around; even the Kochs tie their chemical training to their Powellite fascism (what are they, Herbert Spencer?)
in fact it was these conservative scientists, with their boundary-policing against "interpretivist" scientists and "holist" disciplines and their long tradition of being whitecoats-for-hire, that are the main driver behind warming denial--they're all Tobacco Institute alums
the Kehoes of this world don't need to hide their reports or cherrypick their data: they just need to say "We need to see the evidence first": what they massage is science itself, its processes: if the fish are downstream from the reactor, you emphasize acute doses; if you're selling Americans on plutonium you note that even just your skin stops the alpha and beta particles; if someone dies at the plant you wait a little before Geigering them at autopsy, after replacing the "faulty" equipment
but several factors reshuffled this situation by 1996: the Tobacco Institute was dissolved and its alums dispersed (to our everlasting grief); Gingrich had permanently reshaped the GOP, absorbing the Dixiecrats; the fundies expanded into the burbs to recoup from the massive televangelist scandals; the Cold War was definitively over and the "rightsizing massacre" put hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers out of work as military doctrines shifted from 10,000-mile bombers and 310,000-lb payloads to brushfires like Bosnia and Haiti
it's more complicated than "America doesn't like science no more"
Duppers
(28,127 posts)Yet I'm appreciative of the fact that they're a minority in the scientific community.
What havoc greedy whites wreak everywhere.
eppur_se_muova
(36,299 posts)OK, maybe it is.
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)SheilaT
(23,156 posts)these days.
Similarly, anyone who looks to the Bible as the only source of wisdom has never learned to read or understand a sustained narrative. That's why things like evolution and climate change are so difficult for them to understand. They never read anything longer than about twenty-five words, and think that such short phrases are suitable for every possible thing in life.
CanSocDem
(3,286 posts)...
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hunter
(38,328 posts)That's why the oligarchs don't support free, liberal, public education.
Even our brain surgeons and computer scientists can be uninformed idiots; in fact the political machine prefers them that way.
Duppers
(28,127 posts)to be destroyed by truth."
- Sagan
M$M avoid truth.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)The dumbing down of America has only accelerated since the days of Carl Sagan.
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