Truth and even the idea that there is objective truth is a fundamentally political concept. Authoritarians are opposed to the idea of objective truth because objective truth gives a person a foundation on which to criticize and dissent from those in power. Truth is threatening to authoritarians. Truth is an alternative source of legitimacy.
We are experiencing an assault on objective truth in the US in order to get scientific institutions to submit to political authority rather than the authority of reason.
So I agree with you, it is policy that should not be handled by politicians but by experts, which none of us are. Unfortunately science is being politicized.
The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason.
Defending scientific consensus is seen as an equally political act as denying it.
"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."
There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.
The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.
It's pretty easy actually. Rejecting the mandate gives people political platform. If the issue at hand isnt directly affecting you in the meaningfull way, it works like a charm every single time.
Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad
The narrative around vaccines has been completely strong armed in different ways by both sides. Which has left legitimate cases of bad reactions to be largely ignored, underreported and/or not believed, and carries a negative stigma.
My wife has had a medically verified bad reaction to vaccine it was extremely severe. It took multiple doctors before it was recognized and by that point she progressed to having permanent disability
"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"
I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.
I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity. There is one way to help significantly once something bad does happen.
Awareness too, and more testing never hurts. One thing we learned about post incident is that a test of her immune system would have likely shown she shouldn’t be vaccinated at all, due to potential reactions. Why not work on making such tests cheaper and faster so we can prevent needless harm?
"I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity."
I agree absolutely. What really pisses me off is how governments seemingly everywhere become misers—miserable bastards—and either deny responsibility or when cornered screw compensation down as far as possible.
It's not only in matters such as vaccine failures, or Flint's lead-in-water crisis but you see this miserly attitude with war veterans, and so on.
Trouble is, we the citizenry are ultimately responsible. For some reason we see someone getting something from government that we are not getting and that brings out the worst in us—we seem to forget too easily that the injured or those disadvantaged through no fault of their own deserve fair and reasonable compensation.
In my opinion that all-too-common attitude is a blight on the human character.
Awareness, that goes back to proper schooling. That that's lacking is another tragedy.
Edit: both government and the companies responsible for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc. ought to take much greater responsibly to inform people of the risks even if they are minor. One way of achieving this would be to hold those employees (both in government and in those companies) directly responsible for providing the necessary information. This would go a long way in stopping pharmaceutical companies hiding the unsatisfactory results of drug trials etc.
Don't hold your breath though, I can't see that happening anytime soon.
Tolerating this slippery slope that “theres always the other side” is how we got to a place where I have to vaccinate again for measles at 40 because there are people out there saying the measles vaccine isn’t safe.
I don’t agree with the framing of “we are experiencing an assault on objective truth…”.
We are experiencing a challenge to some existing status quo practices, some of which have come out of science in the past.
But nowhere in any conversation has the dialog been “we must question status quo institutional knowledge, and objective truth, to dismantle the institution”. (That’s left speak, actually, and I am acutely aware of leftist circles where that is the conversation.)
Look at RFK Jr. This guy doesn't need power and control. He’s a whacko with some different beliefs about health—who fundamentally believes he’s making humans safer because of his negative lived experience with health policy in the US.
Occam's razor points to there being a credible benign reason for him to be motivated to challenge existing policy. (And if there is one area of science ripe for iteration, it’s nutritional health.) We don’t need to grab for more extreme alarmist narratives to explain what’s happening.
It simply doesn't take some autocratic utopian agenda to question whether fluoride is worth it and advocate for political change.
It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to dismantle the fabric of western liberal democracy and install fascism” line.
He is a dangerous crank, but fresh roadkill is a perfectly fine practice.
You have to cook it thoroughly, same as any other game meat. Do not eat the central nervous system, again same as game. But dead is dead, and a car is no worse than a bullet.
That does not alter that we have a dangerous idiot running out health care policy.
Dead is dead but for how long? If you hunt, you know when the animal died and presumably cleaned it promptly. It didn't bake on the pavement with all its guts inside for hours or days.
Sure! Which means he’s either a really effective covert operative, or just a crank. To be clear I’m not arguing in support of crack science. I’m arguing against him being plugged into some broader insidious agenda.
It’s a big jump to assume competence in targeting half of all science funding. As you saw in my link above they eliminated an entire graduate class of biomedical researchers. That’s a few dozen lifetimes of research that won’t be done now, delaying breakthroughs
What’s the alternative if you believe we can’t sustain the funding? Who is competent enough to decide whether “a whole class” of biomedical researchers are worth spending public money on or not? These aren’t easy questions with happy answers.
And if I am tuned in at all enough to take a guess at the impetus, it would be “why are we giving exorbitant grants to academic institutions where 90% of the money goes to support their administrative process instead of actually fund grad students doing research?” And the message from the government might be “cut the fat” and the response from the academic institution is either “no” and the students are collateral, or it’s “yes” and the college, not the gov’t, decided the specific grad program wasn’t valuable or important enough to retain.
This is happening concurrently with a 2.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class. So if your concern is with the deficit then maybe reconsider doing that.
The basic science research that’s being cut is responsible for the US being at the technological forefront. Cutting that pipeline will mean that industry will fall behind.
The administrative costs allow researchers to focus on research and not on administration. Also if that’s your issue then maybe don’t pull the rug from these institutions by canceling grants that were already approved. The financial urgency does not warrant it. You can have a conversation about admin costs that takes place over a year or two. That’s not what’s happening here.
The head of OMB pretty much directly said that science backed departments, like the EPA, are being destroyed/hamstrung so that they can't regulate industry, like our energy sector.
But that doesn't mean the administration is anti-science. It means they believe the situation is dire enough to justify drastic cuts. And that is a policy call regardless of your scientific beliefs.
In other words, one can reasonably take a position of “don’t publicly fund addressing an issue even if research supports it existing and even if that same individual espouses the conclusion of the research and might fund it privately”.
Call that what you want, but it is not a grand scheme to undermine science and replace it with fake propaganda.
The science projects are a tiny fraction of the budget. Cancel all of them and you won't make a dent in the deficit.
Add to that the administration's deliberate rejection of climate science and putting an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, and there is no way to avoid the straightforward judgment of "anti science". This is ideology and nothing else .
The Republican party has been trying to squash inconvenient science for a long time.
One of the signature pieces of Gingrich's "Contract With America" in 1995 was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The office had the unfortunate duty to communicate well researched facts, and these facts contradicted conservative policy positions. (OTA: The planet is warming. R: No it's not. Exxon says it's not.) So the OTA had to go.
There are a nearly endless list of these things over the last 30 years.
The fluoride thing alone wouldn't even move the needle or be too worth talking about on its own, but when you see everything that is happening and you know it's just the public things, it gives a distinctly different context around what is happening. You know we are overtly threatening Canadian sovereignty right? Countries are setting up travel warnings. Plain clothes officers have abducted people in public. People have been robbed of due process. The head of the office of management and budget said he wants to put government workers in trauma. Deleting public data sets... At least two second in commands to the entire US military have said he is unfit. A chief of staff said the president said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." At least 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in front of a crowd, including Bannon who did not put his hand over his heart first.
> question status quo institutional knowledge
I am in favor of this when its done in good faith, but good faith hasn't been established.
> It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to take over the world and install fascism” line.
I find it disheartening that people are in denial about it.
What does Canadian sovereignty have to do with even a broader picture argument that the right is using illiberal science to undermine and dismantle political institutions?
“Anybody who wants to debate me must first demonstrate good faith by espousing my political stance before we can continue.” Really now…
People can’t be in denial about something that isn't happening. That’s called crazy.
This is a direct quote from the guy running the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We are experiencing an assault on objective truth in the US in order to get scientific institutions to submit to political authority rather than the authority of reason.
So I agree with you, it is policy that should not be handled by politicians but by experts, which none of us are. Unfortunately science is being politicized.
The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason.
Defending scientific consensus is seen as an equally political act as denying it.