Conservatives Hate Science

You mean I'm not God?

So I read with much interest a recent article in EurekaAlert!, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Entitled “Conservative Americans consistently distrust science,” the piece noted that recent surveys indicated that American conservatives distrust and dislike science – and not just science that contradicts their beliefs (i.e., evolution and climate change) but science in general. They just don’t like it. Period.

In particular, they don’t like science because it says everything can and should be questioned. Nothing is immune to examination. Which is another way of saying that their own beliefs could be disproven.

And, in their vast narcissism, that is unthinkable. Conservatives of the MAGA variety must be utterly correct. They are infallible. When they speak it is ex cathedra.

And so science, for them, is blasphemy. It interferes, you see, with the everlasting worship…

Of themselves.

And RFK Jr. Flops Again

 The problem with doing this blog is that I write the entries in advance. I did the piece on RFK Confounding His Friends on March 4. But, now I learn that he has again flip flopped and is saying that maybe we should trust in vitamins and crunchy cures rather than vaccinations.

Argh.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s his nature. Of course he’d eventually abandon common sense for “medical care” that is based instead on herbs, weeds, and wishful thinking.

And the tragedy is that we all, and particularly children, will pay the price for his madness. 

They Can Change

Here’s one encouraging piece on antivaxxers. It seems that they can, after all, change their minds if given the right information in the right way. Check out this piece in the Guardian, “Formerly anti-vax parents on how they changed their minds: ‘I really made a mistake’.” The authors cite the case of several anti-vaccine parents who woke up one morning and realized they were being lied to…and that those lies were putting their own children at risk.

Give the piece a read. It offers some useful techniques for the ways that communities and families can confront the (incredibly dangerous) antivaxxer movement.