Credit: Ringo Chiu/Reuters
If you want to know why the United States is in such big trouble, look at the findings of a new Gallup poll. The percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science has plummeted from 72 percent in 1975 to just 45 percent today. (By contrast, the number of Democrats with confidence in science has grown from 67 percent to 79 percent.)
This is not some fringe movement we are discussing. This is a party that until the last election controlled both the White House and the Senate and that could easily recapture Congress next year. Think about what it means that a majority of one of the two major parties has lost confidence in science — essentially the same as losing confidence in logical, fact-based decision-making. The alternative is to embrace superstition, misinformation and conspiracy-mongering — and that’s just what Republicans have done.
Roughly a quarter of […]
This is akin to blaming Facebook and Russia for interfering with elections. The issue is the stupidity of people and what they believe and make decisions from, not the political parties themselves.If you are stupid enough to base all of your decisions on what politicians say or on what Facebook says, then that’s you problem.The Democratic Party is no better than the Republican Party in this regard!
Since most Democrats are vaccinated, did and do wear masks, do listen to the scientists, and have significantly lower numbers of covid cases, I think the Democrats, at least in regard to this one issue, are better informed than Republicans at the moment, Mike. Yes, Albus, I agree with you, that there’s a lack of faith in our institutions at the moment. I think that comes in part anyway from misinformation / disinformation sources. Yes, probably the institutions themselves aren’t perfect either, but they’re the ones we have, and they, like the union, do strive to be “more perfect” but end up being just human. I don’t see why we cannot forgive them of that, instead of writing them off as worthless. The sources of misinformation / disinformation seem to want us to lose our faith in our institutions. We probably can’t eliminate them, but how do we tone them down?
This loss of confidence is a mirror for loss of trust in institutions as a whole. Why would the common person trust science when the corruption of the illness profit system is open for all to see?
Graphene oxide input makes it a bit more complex than resorting to “the science” rather than looking at complexity of the situation. We just used covid to get rid of #45 would be another piece of the complexity. Experiences pro and con with allopathic medicine another. Big pharma lobbying in the billions does play into it. And there is the liberal arts bubble.