Liberals love science - until it proves them wrong.

[Jedidiah]

I certainly have a great deal more value than a chicken. You may not, but I do.

[Jedidiah]

I am with you on these two issues.

[Jedidiah]

You're right, I'm so sorry.

I should have remembered that I'm supposed to just sit still, and take the constant generalizing of liberal philosophy on this site - but never generalize conservatives.

Ad homs are not generalizations. Ad homs are ad homs.

[Jedidiah]

The same folks who promote things like wind power are some of the first to cry NIMBY! Ted Kennedy was a great example. Moreover, both solar and wind power are only feasible in certain areas. Solar power, for instance, has serious limitations in places like the northwest coast of the U.S. where cloudy, rainy weather is the norm.

And not too useful in Alaska during the winter when we need power the most.

[Starlight]

So, um, I hate to break it to him, but geoengineering isn't really a thing. It's like flying cars... I'd love it if we all had one, but we don't. His sentence reads like "oh, you're so stupid wasting money on that $1000 plane ticket to fly to the other side of the world, you should just buy a $100 flying car instead." Okay, cool, I'll get right on that...

Sure, there's people working on the idea of geoengineering. As a scientist, I applaud that. We might well need it. But they haven't discovered a magic bullet solution to climate change, and it's ridiculous to put a cost estimate on this non-existent solution and imply that it will be 1000 times cheaper (billions rather than trillions) than simply avoiding the problem in the first place. It's conservatives making up imaginary science like this that leads to liberals rolling their eyes.

The costs of climate change are going to be horrendous. Sea level rise alone, one of the smallest problems caused by climate change*, is going to mean that huge amounts of coastal real estate disappear. Since coastal real estate is often the most valuable in big cities, we're talking unspeakably large amounts of money lost. In my own country alone, council plans forecasting which suburbs will disappear to sea level rise show significant portions of cities disappearing.

* Probably bigger problems are:
a) More common extreme weather events, with severe floods, hurricanes etc happening about a hundred times as often as they used to, thus doing trillions in damage.
b) Changes in climate making existing farmland unusable, thus devastating food supplies and causing famines, and food price spikes.
c) Displacement of people. When farmers have to leave their farms due to droughts, and city people have to leave their homes due to sea level rises, all those people need to go somewhere, and the resulting social turmoil can create wars. In Syria, about 80% of farmers had to leave their farms due to droughts, and what the country ended up with was a civil war that has led to one of the biggest refugee crises in history.

So in general, we're talking catastrophically huge financial losses from the effects of climate change. Whereas, to switch power production over to renewable energy, from coal etc, costs a certain one-off amount, but it's orders of magnitude lower in dollar amount than the costs involved with a quarter of our coastal cities going underwater. It seems like it's worth fronting up and paying that amount now to stave off devastating consequences in future. What frustrates liberals is that conservatives talking about climate change tend to either take an ostrich approach of sticking their head in the sand and pretending it's not a thing, or an approach that relies on prayer and wishing hard.

What's now got people really spooked is that the global temperatures are rising even faster than some of the worst estimates of the previous models. The temperatures this most recent year have been really really bad. Meanwhile scientists have revised down their upper-boundary for serious irreversible danger from +2 degrees of warming to +1.5 degrees of warming, and we are almost at +1.5 degrees. Basically, the more we learn, and the more it's studied, the worse it looks. Here's a depiction of the latest temperature data... the rate at which temperature increases have accelerated over the last year has scientists terrified:



The rate at which that line for this year has pulled away from the previous spiral is...

Liberals morality is not interested in the question of whether fetuses are human beings, so any answer science gives to that is irrelevant. Liberals are interested in questions like: Does the fetus feel pain, does it have a developed brain, etc? Medical science can answer those questions, and it answers them in such a way that makes liberals okay with abortion.

Genetically modified foods are safe, sayeth the scientists.

That's not a thing. It's like saying "drugs are safe". You've got to extensively test each genetically modified food to know whether it's safe, just like you've got to test each drug. Sensible people would want extensive scientific testing of newly developed genetically modified foods, just as they'd want extensive scientific testing of newly developed drugs.

IQ is partly heritable, the neuroscientists tell us.

Things like heritability are very complicated. Obviously IQ is at least partially genetic because humans are smarter than other animals and what primarily differentiates us from them is different genetics.

What liberals tend to object to is bigots who say "well my race is superior. Why? Because I said so. Something something, IQ. So there." In reality there's a huge variety of genetic advantages and disadvantages that different races are known to have. eg White people are open to getting cystic fibrosis, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, etc due to defective recessive genes within the European population. Africans have a common mutation to make them immune to malaria, but that same mutation can give some of them sickle-cell anemia. etc.


Overall, do I think liberals have a tendency to pay attention to science, and conservatives have a tendency to ignore it? Yes. Absolutely, 100% yes. Even within my own country, which is a lot more liberal than the US, the vast majority of scientists I talk to are left wing... generally scientists lean left and businessmen lean right politically.

[demi-conservative]

Liberals morality is not interested in the question of whether fetuses are human beings

Except those libs who go 'parasite', 'clump of cells', 'tumor' etc etc.

That's not a thing. It's like saying "drugs are safe". You've got to extensively test each genetically modified food to know whether it's safe, just like you've got to test each drug. Sensible people would want extensive scientific testing of newly developed genetically modified foods, just as they'd want extensive scientific testing of newly developed drugs.

That's not a thing. It's like saying "drugs are safe". You've got to extensively test each vaccine to know whether it's safe, just like you've got to test each drug. Sensible people would want extensive scientific testing of newly developed vaccine, just as they'd want extensive scientific testing of newly developed drugs!!!



But wait, most vac deniers are the libs. Libs also buy homeopathy and other Wholefoods nonsense.

[Starlight]

Liberals morality is not interested in the question of whether fetuses are human beings

Except those libs who go 'parasite', 'clump of cells', 'tumor' etc etc.

I feel like you're missing the point. The question of "is a fetus, scientific speaking, a member of the human species?" is not usually considered by liberals to be a relevant question in determining whether abortion is moral or not.

Usually the morality of most liberals revolves around the extent to which higher brain functions are present or not. So a liberal is likely to be more interested in the state of the brain development of the foetus - something science can help answer - than they are about whether it meets any particular criteria of 'human'.

You've got to extensively test each vaccine to know whether it's safe, just like you've got to test each drug.

You don't actually. Vaccines are made of dead viruses. Injecting them into the body gives the immune system a chance to learn what those viruses look like, and create antibodies for them. As a result, when the body encounters live versions of the viruses, the immune system immediately identifies them and has the antibodies for them ready to deploy immediately. Over the decades, we've learned that on the whole there's not really much that can go wrong with vaccines. As a result of that knowledge, gained over decades, that vaccines are not dangerous, organisations like the FDA just wave them through without requiring extensive testing. If, in 100 years time, we've learned that every GMO worked fine, we can stop bothering to test new ones as thoroughly at that point.

But wait, most vac deniers are the libs.

Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Michele Bachmann would beg to differ.

[Jaecp]

Vac deniers are kooks. And, yep, liberal kooks. How many are congresspeople?

I don't much care that crazy people exist. No way to prevent that. Liberals don't tend to elect those people into office.

[Leonhard]

Is there any real evidence to suggest that anti-vax stuff isn't a crossparty problem? I know at least one person subscribing to homeopathy on this forum (he's a Christian). Then there's truthseeker who's a libertarian.

Any polls and surveys I've been able to find put it roughly evenly.

[Tassman]

Do you feel the same way about unborn chickens? If not, why not?

It's a religious thing. Chickens don't have an eternal 'soul' implanted in them at the moment of conception that makes them special and gives them dominion over all other creatures. The bible tells us so.

[Starlight]

Is there any real evidence to suggest that anti-vax stuff isn't a crossparty problem?

The only anti-vaxxer I personally know (a wife of a close friend), is a moderate Christian who doesn't vote, and who's passion in life is how the paleo diet cures everything.

Any polls and surveys I've been able to find put it roughly evenly.

According to studies cited here, PPP found anti-vax views to be about twice as common among strong conservatives as they are among strong liberals. And Pew found that 50% more democrats than republicans said they'd take the swine flu vaccine. Another source informs me that that Pew study found zero difference between democrats and republicans as to whether vaccinations should be compulsory for children (71% of both parties said they should).

I guess an interesting question is why the anti-science conspiracy theories about vaccines extend to the liberal left equally, when usually the liberal left is pro-science and immune to the anti-science conspiracies that only right-wing conservatives tend to fall for. It seems to be something about health that does it - we see exactly the same trend for things like homeopathy. But for some reason the conservative right do seem to love their conspiracy theories... people here fell over laughing when the Christian fundamentalist leader of the new right-wing Conservative Party told the media that he believed in chem-trails and that the moon landings were faked.

[Starlight]

It's a religious thing. Chickens don't have an eternal 'soul' implanted in them at the moment of conception that makes them special and gives them dominion over all other creatures. The bible tells us so.

It's worth noting that the bible doesn't tell us that.

When I was a Christian my view was:
"God is omniscience, so he knows the future, and knows which fetuses are going to be aborted and which aren't. Therefore he presumably doesn't put eternal souls into the ones that are going to be aborted. Otherwise he'd waste an awful lot of souls, since something like ~70% of fetuses are naturally aborted....
Or, if they do get souls: Given that ~70% of fetuses are aborted naturally anyway, God presumably already has some sensible system set up to deal with their souls (eg maybe by recycling those souls into new fetuses, maybe not putting the souls into them until birth etc) and the ~6% of fetuses that are aborted by human action can thus be handled by him in whatever way he handles those that happen naturally. Either way, abortion is presumably not a big deal."

There's not really anything in the bible (without gratuitous stretching of verses and creative interpretation of poetic language) that says an eternal soul is planted at the moment of conception, or that abortion is bad. In fact, there's various commands to kill infants and perform abortions, and instances of God killing infants and performing abortions. For this reason, up until the late 70s, being anti-abortion was considered to be one of those weird catholic things. Historically it was a common view that the soul was infused into the fetus at the moment of "quickening" - when the woman could first feel the child kicking within her womb - this was based on some of the bible's poetic language and was often judged to be the legal cut-off for abortion.

[firstfloor]

God created man and woman to have dominion over all other creatures.

Such a bad idea. Now that we understand ecology so much better than the prophets did, we need to think more in terms of stewardship. There is no point in having dominion over a dustbowl.

[Jaecp]

Is there any real evidence to suggest that anti-vax stuff isn't a crossparty problem? I know at least one person subscribing to homeopathy on this forum (he's a Christian). Then there's truthseeker who's a libertarian.

Any polls and surveys I've been able to find put it roughly evenly.

I'm sure there are conservative ones, but it's strongly linked with other weird stuff that tends to be liberal, like non-religious homeschooling and American anti-vax is heavily concentrated in liberal bastions in Cali

Edit:

After reading Stars post, it might be that it seems to me as more of a liberal issue because conservatives in America are wrong on so much of other science that it seemed like a liberal problem to me because anti science liberals are almost always anti-vax (or vegans...)

[Sparko]

Thank you, peanut gallery. if you just want to make snide remarks, then leave my thread. I am tired of your constant sniping without any actual contribution to threads.