“CDC gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity”
along with the gutting of other departments like the EPA, this is going to cause long-term damage. Holy fucking shit.
Showing the Nazi-lite UCP and Stephen Harper’s muzzling of Canadian scientists how it’s REALLY done in an American Taliban theocracy. Fucking losers are quick to call the lefties “snowflakes” but they themselves can’t handle words.
So, the Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus game isn’t fictional but more of a documentary.
On top of the specific words banned, they want them instead to use this phrase to talk about science policy:
CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.
So they’re no longer “evidence-based”, they’re based on the whims of political appointees and their interpretations of society’s wishes. That never turns out poorly.
Welcome to Nazi America.
Well, because, diseases respond to cultural pressure, you know. Ask a bacterium nicely and it won’t infect you, honest. If you’re a rich white male hetero Christian Republican, that is.
This is what 60 million of your countrymen voted for. Never forgive them for that.
Way ahead of you, my man.
Empowering anti-vaxxers everywhere.
2020 can’t come fast enough, man. And hopefully the 2018 elections will shake things up too.
When I was a kid, I think that part of what formed by conservative view of the world was reading books like 1984 by Orwell. One of the greatest crimes of Communists, to me, was the rejection of science and reality itself manifested in things like Lysenkoism in the USSR, and presented by Orwell as things like newspeak, or the internalized antirationality of doublethink.
And yet now we see the conversation movement has actually become exactly that.
This idea of banning scientific terms is a literal manifestation of newspeak principles. The idea that the government wants to limit the use of certain terms, in order to restrict the thought processes which would use them.
We see doublethink manifesting itself more and more every day, with Trump’s supporters continually ignoring overt logical inconsistencies. The fact that statements don’t make sense literally does not matter to them.
There’s a big, big difference between Lysenkoism and modern anti-intellectualism; Lysenkoism was imposed from the top down, where this stuff is burbling up from the bottom.
Sadly, this may prove to be dangerous too. E.g. Paris Peace Conference did not “forgive” Germany after WWI, and look what happened. Allies did in fact forgive Germany and Japan after WWII, and things turned out significantly better. (Though possibly mainly because G & J were too terrified of the Soviet Union, and behaved themselves better as a consequence. Which I think is was true about Right-wingers in the US too.)
Also, Confederates were “forgiven” (pardoned) after Civil War, or things might have turned bloody again soon after.
There is a dichotomy today. Trump seems to be deeply up Putin’s ass. His followers may have been Russophobes, but what do they feel now? Confused I’d guess.
Confused, and elated that they’re getting away with it, too!
It’s totally coming from the top down.
Modern anti intellectualism in the GOP is being driven by leadership as a means to about having to acknowledge why things they say simply don’t work.
Their entire stance on climate change is an example of this, where attacking science itself helps about having to deal with the results of scientific research.
Trump supporters have few credentials to earn their positions, so I don’t (can’t) think of them as top-down, anything. Remember that Trump is rich because of the image he cultivated, as well as a loan given to him by his dad, not any particular skills or qualifications in running a business. (He failed several times, and his creditors only gave him a break because of the value the “TRUMP” name had accrued.)
In terms of power, though, it is top down, as Timex says; it’s the product of deliberate policy decisions by elites to shore up their position and it takes advantage of the cultural proclivities of non-elites, massaged by very carefully shaped media offensives.
That being said, certainly there is a strain of this sort of anti-intellectualism that does burble up from below, sort of naturally, but that too I think is a product of, if not active encouragement, at least passive neglect, in that natural tendencies towards cultural reaction and suspicion of science have been allowed to fester with very little pushback.
I think it started out as top-down but then there was an unexpected synergistic effect with the audience and their poor critical thinking skills, plus their resentment to social change.
In the big picture I blame the right wing media as the primary cause of the “reality dysfunction” of the GOP base, but the audience also played a role, and the two factors are IMO inextricably intertwined.
There was a lot of this coming out from the bottom during the “evangelical transition” of the 70-90s by addressing declining religiosity in religiously inclined by doubling down on literalism and rejecting science outright.