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Conservatives' Trust In Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s
An anonymous reader writes "While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to a study by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 'Over the last several decades, there's been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,' said the study's lead author. 'For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities and what is perceived as the "liberal culture." So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes "us" conservatives is that we don't agree with "them."'"
They DO declare their belief in science by asking to be treated by a modern medical facility. If they really didn't believe it would work, they wouldn't bother.
They're not stupid, they're hypocritical, and lying to themselves about what they believe as much as to anyone else.
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
Right, because all those guys who pointed out that burning coal releases mercury that shows up in your can of tuna, or the Day the River Burned Down was due to water pollution, were heavily invested in windpower companies and alternative methods of manufacture. Actually, turns out they were like the 'agenda-driven climate alarmists' of today: mostly university professors.
Believing that science has an agenda is to believe that thousands of independently-working and independently-paid researchers are all part of a vast conspiracy. That's practically the DEFINITION of 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics', which is actually not inherently right-wing at all (think most Kennedy theories), and goes back for centuries (the original essay traced it back to Illuminati fears in the 1700s).
But the paranoid style has steadily taken over the right wing in recent decades, until fact-based, or at least fact-conceding, old conservatives can hardly be heard (or found) any more. It's the paranoids among them that are anti-science, not the whole group.
Between 1974 and 2010 the demand for immediate practicality in order to obtain funds for scientific research has dramatically increased in all government and private sector funding agencies.
It's not just AGW where conservatives are unwilling to face reality. It's economics, where faith compells them to continue cutting taxes on the rich in the face of ever growing inequality. Or health care, where conservatives cannot face the reality that we have the highest health care costs in the West and some of the poorest outcomes. Or contraception, where conservatives continue to push for abstinence only education, ignoring countless studies which prove it ineffective. I could go on...
Essentially you can turn on the news and find any conservative pushing any typical conservative wedge issue. Their position will be completely based in fantasy. This is why there's no liberal equivalent to Rush Limbaugh. We don't need to listen to blow hards make shit up for us to believe. We just listen to the news and decide for ourselves.
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The idea behind the joke was that there were well-known conservative positions at the time Colbert said it which specifically countered by reality. For instance, conservatives were proudly proclaiming that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue.
I am officially gone from
The meaning of "reality has a liberal bias" is only that conservatives like to call very solid facts and well-established science biased, rejecting reality. Agree or not, that's the meaning. See: Conservapedia.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"fiscally conservative social liberals" is an oxymoron.
Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton ALL come to mind. Every one of them decreased our debt relative to GDP. And all but Carter decreased the total debt .
It was under ALL 8 years of reagan, 3 years of Poppa Bush, and 7.5 years of W that massive increases in deficits/debt came about.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You missed the biggest liberal idea. Prohibition of alcohol.
That was certainly NOT a liberal idea. It was pushed by the evangelical Protestant churches. It was accomplished with help of the "drys" - The Prohibition Party. You should educate yourself on what "liberal" means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
It seems clear that this article was a title first, and then they crafted the article around the title. No research or poll was done.
And you reached that conclusions without going to look at the actual study by Gauchat in "American Sociological Review". Admittedly it is a forthcoming publication, but here is the author's bio. I am sure that you can read the article in April if you like, and then take up any issues with the author.
I study the anti-science movement in both conservatives and liberals, and the although they are both equally anti-science in their own way, the conservatives have a powerful anti-science champions in fox, the evangelical movement, Beck, Limbaugh, and pretty much every conservative think-tank that I can think of.
All that propaganda has an effect.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I am confused as to what you are trying to say. I thought one of the main reasons that MTBE was added to gasoline was that it raised the oxygen level of the gasoline. This would then make the gasoline burn cleaner. What is BS? Was that not the reason that MTBE (and now ethanol) was added to gasoline?
The conservative Christopher Buckley, son of William Buckley, traces the problem to a misplaced war on intellectualism by the right. His thoughts on this is that for the last half decade or so, conservative intellectuals had a tendency to go to Wall Street after college while liberal intellectuals had a tendency to go into higher education. Over time, colleges and universities had a more liberal personnel influencing future generations of students. Many conservative intellectuals like his father warned about this liberal intellectualism influence. The problem was the less intelligent members of the right would ignore the "liberal" part of the warning and the right grew to distrust all intellectuals regardless of their ideological views. People like Sarah Palin almost revel in their lack of knowledge portraying intellectuals as "elitists.". This is a very dangerous stance according to Buckley as it hinders progress and science.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's called push polling. They didn't give a shit what you thought, they just wanted you to hear their framing of the question and believe it was true.
Push poll
I really am not saying this to be a dick, but both you and a previous poster got this wrong. It's "cast aspersions on" not "cast dispersions on". http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cast+aspersions+on
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
That's pretty much exactly what IQ measures, by design, and often weighted to account for cultural differences.
That's exactly what some IQ researchers wish to claim that IQ measures, but that's not the same as IQ actually measuring that. What IQ actually measures is a long standing topic of debate in the field. Less than a year ago this study was published showing that motivation plays a big role in the outcome of IQ tests. Or look at the work or Richard Nisbett, whose research shows the exact opposite of your claim that IQ differences persist after controlling for societal factors.
This is an excellent example of how conservatives misunderstand science. They take a statement like "IQ measures intelligence" as fact, and don't question the evidence behind it.
Stupid fucking conservative.
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