‘Scientific American’, ‘WIRED’ Break Precedent To Come Out Against Trump

[DonViejo]

Two publications have broken with their respective histories to wade into the presidential election: WIRED, which released a ringing endorsement of Hillary Clinton Thursday, and Scientific American, which did not endorse a candidate, but came out strongly in an article for the September 1 issue condemning Donald Trump’s anti-science views.

Scientific American editors traced the history of Trumpism through decades of anti-science and anti-fact sentiment in American politics:

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who pays even superficial attention to politics that over the past few decades facts have become an undervalued commodity. Many politicians are hostile to science, on both sides of the political aisle. The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a routine practice of meddling in petty science-funding matters to score political points.

But Trump, they wrote, is not only the result of a consistent politicization of science as an instrument of control or influence, rather than an objective standard for testing hypotheses — he makes things significantly worse:

The current presidential race, however, is something special. It takes antiscience to previously unexplored terrain. When the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

-snip-

http://www.nationalmemo.com/scientific-american-wired-break-precedent-come-trump/?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sd&utm_medium=email