Admittedly, I do remember some, a small minority, saying that. It was not, however, any mainstream officials or politicians.
Can you show us some examples of the “many” warnings that you remember? Can you show us, say, half a dozen?
Oh, yeah, I always get those two confused. And we shouldn’t, this cycle, because Reich is for Sanders and Krugman is for Clinton.
Don’t you get it? Our fringe lunatics are just as bad as their lunatic elected officials and lunatic mainstream media outlets!
Say what you will about transitivity, while I’m willing to accept that Fox News is the equivalent of a paranoid nut’s blog, I’m not willing to accept that some liberal paranoiac’s blog is the liberal equivalent of Fox News. Neither am I willing to engage in or excuse any kind of Broderian exercise in making city council officials or similar look the same as Vice Presidential or Presidential candidates when it comes to influence on their respective national-level parties. Ditto for equating previous and failed politicians with current politicians.
Both parties have problems. The Democratic Party is a rather unexciting organizaton that is, frankly, a bit too well-organized for my tastes, which is most apparent in the narrowness of the DNC primary field, and which is in bed with some mildly repulsive anti-science elements (anti-GMO, anti-nuclear). The Republican Party is a rotten husk of an organization which is currently so decadent it can’t fight off what should be minor infections, such as Trump and Santorum, because more serious infections, such as Cruz and Rubio, have gained a serious foothold and are suppressing the immune response. It is blatantly anti-science, especially climate and economic science, and uses party organs to broadcast outright lies.
Yes, this makes me blatantly partisan. Thinking Obama was born in Hawaii, that abstinence-only sex ed is a failure, that the global climate didn’t suddenly just decide to get massively warmer for no reason, that refusing to pay for essential services isn’t a valid political gambit, and that modern macroeconomics is relevant to the economy makes me blatantly partisan, too. That’s the problem.
The anti-GMO and anti-nuclear rhetoric has been far more dangerous and deadly. In fact, the biggest obstacle to implementing the best response to climate change is the left’s decades long propaganda campaign against nuclear energy. And the anti-GMO nonsense is responsible for the death and blindness of millions of children.
It takes some pretty obsessive partisanship for someone to try to use science denial as evidence of the Democrats’ superiority over Republicans.
Oh come on. You don’t think denying evolution, the foundation of modern biology, reveals a Republican anti-science inclination?
FTR, I am not a Democrat either. But the anti-science banners are overwhelmingly on the Republican side.
And Dems rarely run on anti-GMO platforms. Nuclear’s more complicated, but hasn’t been a big issue for decades.
It is a giant issue. The nuke plants that would have been built if not for anti-science nonsense would be chugging along right now, and much less CO2 and pollutants would be in the atmosphere. The very air that you are breathing would be cleaner.
And without the anti-GMO rhetoric there would be hundreds of thousands to millions of children now alive and well, who instead died or have undernourishment related disabilities, like blindness.
The left’s anti-science nonsense has done more damage.
I am more left leaning, but the left’s anti-science banners have done more harm.
Look, opposition to nuclear power may be overblown and sometimes veer into hard-green territory, but it is not in and of itself “anti-science nonsense.” There are pros and cons to nuclear power. And there have been real power-plant disasters. I believe my brother the (software, not nuclear) engineer when he says improvements in plant design have made such accidents unlikely or impossible in recently-built plants, but I can understand the opposition.
Mmmmmmmmm…groundwater contamination! Pour me a glass, please.
Let’s do this. (All searches case-insensitive.)
Official DNC Party Platform. Exact string “GMO” mentioned 0 times. Exact string “nuclear” mentioned 39 times, all of which are related to nuclear weapons.
Official GOP Party Platform. Exact string “Reining in the EPA” occurs once. Exact string “Abstinence” occurs three times. Exact string “a metallic basis for U.S. currency” occurs once and I am not shitting you.
The bolded part is enough to prove my case all on its own. Gold buggery is pseudoscience. It’s outright discredited junk bullshit which any actual economist would laugh at for the same reason any actual MD would laugh at homeopathy. This is not debatable, and hasn’t been since going off gold got us out of the Great Depression, if not earlier.
My point is, the Democrats don’t have lunacy written into their official party platform. The Republicans do.
I agree. I’m a little shocked the gold standard is in there, actually. But I should’ve known.
But it’s absolutely true that the Republicans have tended to have actual public officials sign on to the kind of thing that, among Democrats, tends to remain at a grass roots level. The Sanders phenomenon threatens to change this, though. It’s definitely not at anywhere near the same level, but Sanders claiming that the business model of Wall Street is fraud at a fundamental level is starting to drift into that paranoiac zone.
I’ll note that The Daily Kos is not Fox News, never has been Fox News, and won’t ever be Fox News. It’s a lot closer to the “paranoiac blog” territory I mentioned above.
Second, I agree about Sanders. He’s both anti-nuclear and anti-GMO, and Clinton, to the best of my knowledge, is neither; that’s a big reason I’m anti-Sanders and pro-Clinton.
I think calling it that undermines the point about elected Democrats not going into this territory. Nancy Pelosi and many other elected Democrats *post *on the site. And we don’t want to say that someone of that prominence is posting on a “paranoiac blog”, right?
What’s actually interesting about it–and I’ve been there since nearly the beginning–is that the actual editorial control of the site has always been in the hands of mainstream Democrats, a little on the left edge of the mainstream but still mainstream. So if you go to the main page, you won’t see anything that looks too “wacky left”.
But their *users *have, for many years, been able to post their own blog posts (they used to be called “diaries”, and are like starting threads here, in a way, except that we don’t have many threads started by the mods). And other users can “recommend” them, and the recommended diaries go on a special “rec list” on the main page. The PTB found these diaries to be alarmist and extremist, and (much to the chagrin of many users) made their own rec list (called “community spotlight”) that is higher up on the page. They did still keep the regular rec list, though, and you can see how stubbornly radical most hardcore users are, even against the grain of the management.
Nothing in the GOP platform about evolution or climate change. Advocating reigning in a government agency isn’t science denial, even if some of the people holding the position due so because of it.
And the fact that the Dem platform doesn’t address domestic nuclear energy production doesn’t bolster your argument, since the GOP platform does:
Plenty of their prominent figures have denied reality on these fronts, as you well know.
Thank you for the effort; none of those thread posts by random internet people says what you claimed. I noticed that ALL of your examples were from one discussion on one website, as well. Not really hitting the level of “many” “warnings”; at best you had 1 or two “pondering”.
I think it’s equally amusing that you would use the term “grass roots” to mean “random individuals”. You used the term incorrectly both in form (the term is “grassroots” not “grass roots”) and in meaning; it has nothing to do with individual actions.
You are nitpicking to cover for being wrong. I originally said I remembered “many liberals” talking this way. I never said they were media figures or politicians: if you inferred that, it was your error.
I provided six posts from the preeminent liberal website of that era. (Note too that they outnumbered the dissenters who complained about paranoia.) If you put enough money on it to make it worth the time to dig through, I will find you 100 different commenters who signed on to this kind of narrative, from at least ten different months. But yes: they will all be from DKos, which as I pointed out was in no way a fringe site.