Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/07/how-americans-got-so-weird-abo.html
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I’d say part of the problem is that Americans value science only so much as it produces desired results, like profit for example. It’s OK for little boys to be interested in science, IF they turn that into a new invention they make money off of, not so much if they go into academia.
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I think the fact that science left little room for a god had something to do with it as well.
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That’s right, and since we’re not pinkos, we don’t want state funded research.
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I quite disagree. There may be the “mad scientist” but there’s also the Apollo program and the “rocket scientist.”
We didn’t distrust science until corporations started spending hundreds of millions to make us distrust science. It’s working.
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“40 things your doctor doesn’t want to tell you about homeopathic remedies.”
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That’s right. At least Cthulhu was an honest elder god. He promised madness and chaos and delivers every time.
Meanwhile I am still waiting for my “scientifically proven formula” to add its 1-3" and increased girth.
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Science is not Technology.
And when Technology is bad it’s because of the actions of a businessman or politician.
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The other angle is convenience. When science gives an answer or thing that makes life easier (or at least appears to) then it is good. But when it says we need to put forth an effort… Well, then those braniacs don’t have any clue about the real world, do they?
I won’t say it’s causation, but there is a very large correlation between willingness to accept the answer and amount of personal inconvenience it will cause.
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That you’re a fucking moron for trusting doctor oz and telling the guy who spent a small fortune and a decade of his life in higher education that he’s full of shit you’re going to drink speshully filtered water while wearing magnets to purge ‘toxins’ from your budy?
Doctors tend to be polite. What we need is Greig House. MD…
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There’s also stuff like the Texas Board of Education. Which is made up of mostly climate change denying young earth creationists.
Members have literally said shit like “someone has to stand up to science”. As if what is true or not depends on what they believe.
They’re literally magical thinkers.
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Never understood that. I believe in God and Christ’s Sacrifice but I also believe in what i have clear data for and the datap oints t humanity turbofucking the climate.
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If your faith relies entirely on a dogmatic belief that the bible is absolutely and literally true, and then never actually read the bible, then you can be tricked into believing it says anything. Like, that there’s no possible way the climate’s in the shitter. God said dominate nature, right? Why would there be oil underground if we weren’t supposed to use it?
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I just wish energy companies would think long term and realize they need to stop clinging to petroleum and start gearing to other energy models.
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Dinosaurs all the way down. They dig up dinosaurs, they think like dinosaurs, and eventually they’ll be extinct like dinosaurs.
They could have evolved if they wanted to.
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I don’t think we should discount the meaning of science to the nerd culture. Just on the BB forums, time and time again, I’ve seen examples of posters going justifiably ga-ga over some obscure bit of science. Nothing about $$$ to be made.
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I think you can trace it to the 5 stages if grief, the first of which is denial.
It’s so much easier to believe that catastrophic climate change is an overblown problem than it is to take the necessary steps to address it.
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We are America too.
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Science reveals the truth of the universe one fact at a time regardless of whether those facts are convenient for making money or stoking believability in God.
Let’s be clear here, it’s the GOP and it’s wild-west capitalist, Christian base that are assuming the only answer to their existential crisis is to remove science and science based education from the hands of its US citizenry. Meanwhile in places like Dubai, religion and science seem to be working just fine together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LoTtDS3kp4&feature=youtu.be&t=16m
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“The burgeoning Cold War with the U.S.S.R. raised fears that workaholic Soviet scientists, laboring relentlessly under Communism, were making progress faster than American scientists, a competition that played out in the Space Race.”
Rubbish.
Our German scientists were always better than their German scientists.
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