Agreed.
We’ve had government run healthcare, in the form of Medicare, for almost 50 years. Show me instances of that level of meddling. The alternative, of course, is to have people whose primary job is to make money make the decisions, which doesn’t necessarily turn out better. Not to mention that part of ACA is evidence based medicine, where there will be an attempt to get rid of treatments that don’t work. Or is that anti-scientific also?
BTW, I’m sure there are some Dems from mouth-breather districts who are creationists. But please give some evidence that this is a majority opinion (it seems the instance is less than the national average,) that Dems as policy try to push it in schools, or that it is held by most potential presidential candidates.
Chiropractors successfully lobbied Congress to allow Medicare to cover certain chiropractic treatments, which they have since 1972. They’ve been trying to expand it ever since, mostly thanks to Grassley, a Republican, with the help of many Democrats as well.
So yes, the meddling does happen. Besides, if it didn’t or couldn’t, the OP wouldn’t care about the scientific illiteracy of Congressmen.
Or it was a tangential comment brought up just because it happened to be on the page of the citation I used. If we use the Scientific Method, we can deduce that the evidence shows you are incorrect. Or you can just ask me. No, the “argument” is not “slipping away,” especially since I anticipated that point - and dismissed it - in the very first post I made.
You don’t deduce results in the scientific method, but if you say it was tangential, I guess I’ll take your word for it.
He made it pretty popular to remain happily ignorant. Personally, I can’t blame him for enough bad stuff.
And we’re back to the people behind Reagan.
Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. The true Axis of Evil.
So does the World Health Organization:
Cite?
First of all, your assertion that "Most Catholics are Democrats is false. If you look at the chart here, you will see that 39% of white Catholics are independents and 30% are Republicans.
The Catholic News doesn’t specify the race of the Catholics, and the story is from 2004, however even then, “It has been awhile since Catholic voters were reliably Democrats… The fourth National Survey of Religion and Politics found that in the last dozen years Catholics have come close to being evenly divided between the Republican and Democratic parties, at 41 and 44 percent, respectively, up from 38 percent who were Republicans and 43 percent who were Democrats in 1992. The remainder of those surveyed said they were independents.”
So it’s safe to say that your assertion is false.
Also, I must say that I am not a militant Atheist who thinks all beliefs that are not based in verifiable scientific fact should not be. I don’t care if people believe stuff that is personal to them even if it’s not based in verifiable facts, whether it’s Jesus, that ghosts exist, they read the Horoscope with keen interest or that Republicans actually care about anyone other than the wealthy.
However, a line is drawn when someone decides that their unscientific views are no longer personal dogma but actual truth on par with science and that it should become policy in education and budget. There is a difference between being a Catholic who believes in transubstantiation and one trying to make laws that the waffers all be treated like children with the rights that children have.
To expand upon that thought, it bothers me a little that anyone votes for ignorance, but I expect more from people on this board and they are not living up to the standard of eradicating ignorance.
(Nor are they coming in to defend themselves, unless you are one of them, in which case, where is everyone else? You obviously need some help…)
Your cite - which is headlined “Republicans, Democrats Differ on Creationism,” thereby undermining your own false equivalency, says nothing about “prominent politicians.”
Cite?
Last Friday evening, September 5, 2008, I had the opportunity to ask Senator Barack Obama about childhood vaccine safety/choice. His response, “I am not for selective vaccination, I believe that it will bring back deadly diseases, like polio.”
He went onto say in so many words that he is for more science and the funding of more science if it’s needed. (His science response is fuzzy, as his first response stunned me for a second). I previously gave his staffer a folder of information on vaccines. The Senator promised me that he would take a look at it.
[/quote]
This is from Age Of Autism, and either the website or the author of the quoted story espouse the supposed link between vaccines and autism. They dislike that he didn’t agree with them.
What happened was everybody else lost WWII, and we won. Winning WWII destroyed Great Britain, and made it into England. Russia lost millions upon millions of people. It wasn’t because our capitalist philosophy was so great, or our policies so sane and reasonable, its because all the other guys were playing with a broken leg. Sometimes two.
Te general idea is that when Democrats do it, they are not doing it with the frequency, nor the scope of it as Republicans do it. It’s called false equivalency for a reason.
Why? To quote someone else in this thread, “That has nothing to do with science. Most likely you brought it up because you feel the argument slipping away.”
Lobbyists happen. Do you have a cite so we can see if the treatments covered are those for back pain and other things that they might do some good about, or for the quack claims that chiropractic can cure diseases?
Both the Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates were recently asked a question about how they’d deal with declining vaccination rates, specifically addressing “enforcement” of vaccination in the public interest and exemptions. Both candidates essentially ducked the question. Obama only wanted to talk about how Obamacare would encourage vaccination through funding of preventative medicine. Romney sounded more forthrightly pro-vaccination, but focused on creating a more favorable business climate for vaccine manufacturers. Neither wanted to touch the subject of vaccine exemptions with a ten-foot pole.
While there are certainly Democrats who support pseudoscience and quackery (Sen. Tom Harkin comes to mind), Republicans are far and away the leaders in promoting such nonsense. When I heard about that Republican congressman who chairs a science committee talking about embryology being a tool of the devil (and is a medical doctor, no less), I wanted to wear a bag over my head. How does the GOP attract all these loony doctors?*
*including the ones named Paul.
Nope, you are having reading comprehension problems, The point was that currently it is the Republicans who are doing the most harm by actively and constantly voting against what the science is telling us. The examples given are indeed dealing with the fabric of our nation, demonizing teachers and inciting people to go against what the science says.
Funny that you say that.
In essence, we have to thank Abraham Lincoln for the National Academy of Science, but today what we see is virtually all Republicans even denying or ignoring what the National Academy of Science says. The point he is not your straw man that I’m demanding a supreme court to force anyone to follow the science, the point is that willful ignorance of the science by any politician should be condemned and/or we have to demand better from our leaders.
If you think healthcare has nothing to do with science, my condolences to your survivors.
Please don’t blame the party for the actions of a few religious fanatics.
I swear, the worst mistake the Republicans have made in my lifetime was getting in bed with the religious whackjobs. We need to kick them to the curb NOW!
Not unless protecting the environment is ipso facto neopagan. Based on his book The Assault on Reason, Gore is more a rationalist than anything else.
I can see that the Republicans are much more to blame than the Democrats, but I cannot see how singling them out helps. I don’t admire a party for being less brazenly ignorant. A fundamental understanding of the scientific method should be as fundamental to the nation’s education system as basic literacy and math. Further, it can be taught in an hour. After that first hour, all they need to do is deepen that understanding with reference to how it has been and is applied in the various branches of science.
I also think that a good education in comparative religion would help, rather than having schools afraid to broach the topic at all, which only encourages confrontation between religious and secular education. Humanity’s sacred texts are interesting and worthy of study without regard to belief, and being forced to look at multiple traditions would be a good thing. I always think people who dismiss either science or religion misunderstand reality or else misunderstand the humanities. (Note: I’m not advocating religion, just acknowledging that it’s a thing humans tend to do and therefore worthy of attention.)
But, then they take their votes with them. And your kind of conservatives are not numerous enough to win alone.
The problems with interracial marriage are their warped beliefs, but how is it that so many people can believe Obama is a Muslim when all the facts say he isn’t as well as his actions these past four years (and I assume prior)? Do all these folks not have internet connections, or do they just say they believe he’s “evil” simply because he’s black?
It would be nice.
I can’t agree that the real problem is a lack of education. These guys have all been to college; they’ve all had a professor go over the scientific method. The problem is that the scientific outlook is just completely orthogonal to the political outlook. The scientific method is a systematic way of excluding opinions, feelings, personal experiences, fear, prejudice, desires and hopes, all of which are mother’s milk to politicians and the people who vote for them. If you explained a scientific principle to a congressman, his only thought would be “Now I’ll express polite interest and respect for this person’s opinions, so maybe he’ll vote for me.” The only science politicians have any use for is polling.
So I’m going to continue to argue that the only way to stop scientific illiterates from screwing up the country is to limit their power. I wouldn’t give a frog’s fat ass whether some congressman from some other state believed in creationism if I didn’t have to worry about him messing with my kid’s science textbook.
But that leaves my original question: Why doesn’t the public trust scientists? When it’s put to them generically, they say they do, but when the science goes against their desires, they never do. Have bad things been done in the past, in the name of science? I suspect they have. Or has science just gotten a bad rap?