The anti-science era – politicalbetting.com
The anti-science era – politicalbetting.com
“Trump revokes landmark ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health” read a recent BBC headline. The US Food and Drug Administration initially refused to consider a new mRNA flu vaccine for approval although they have U-turned after an outcry. With falling vaccination rates, the US saw more measles cases in 2025 than any year since 1991. Do Americans no longer trust the science?
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Oh, and first.
Are you Australia in disguise?
Oh, and did I mention? Australia didn't make it past the group stage.
Should these people be paid ?
I thought the Mayor of New York was a socialist not an exploiter of peoples labour ?
‘ NEW: Zohran Mamdani Calls on New Yorkers to Shovel Snow During Tomorrow’s Blizzard
“You too can become an emergency snow shoveler. Just show up at your local sanitation garage between 8am and 1pm tomorrow with your paperwork.”’
https://x.com/thechiefnerd/status/2025296287952699640?s=61
And yet SKS blocked him from standing in G&D.
(A colleague is a Lab councillor in South Manchester, and she has been pounding the pavements non stop during the campaign including today, so they must think they can still win).
Everything in science that is true is true regardless of anyone's beliefs
(obviously the science community from Galen and Archimedes onwards can hold beliefs that are thought to be true at the time but subsequently turn out to need amendment)
and
Everything that is true is true regardless of anyone's beliefs.
The genius on The Central Committee allocates *your* labour as *they* see fit
He stands in Gorton and loses.
He's resigned his mayorality to stand.
Labour lose that too.
At the time highly likely both would happen.
How often do we hear people say "the science says we must ..." [insert speaker's political opinion here].
No, the science does not say what we must do. The science gives us advice and choices with consequences, but politics must decide which choices are acceptable and which are not. So long as you are prepared to own the consequences.
The problem is increasingly people do not want consequences either.
✊️
Enjoy the Science
The man, like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage does have the common touch. That of itself should send alarms ringing.
They should be embarrassed, not boasting about it.
There is no law against running for elections. There is a law saying you can't hold both offices at once, but that means you need to resign one after winning the other.
It's true that our attention spans are all shot to pieces these days, and that doesn't sit well with thinking scientifically. There's also an issue that science has expanded so much that it takes a lot of study to get to the point where anyone can understand the questions, let alone the answers. (I'm pretty sure that it's going to be hard for anyone to do a Crick and Watson and just wander into another field and make a crucial discovery again.) But that doesn't explain the partisan split, unless one wishes to argue that the right are all just thickos, which I don't think is the case.
One guess is that the bubble of right-wing news/conservative evangelicalism/Republican politics self-reinforces in an anti-science way.
Another is that some of the recent outputs of science (including, but not limited to, climate and public health) are uncomfortable for many on the right. It's perfectly possible to emphasise the "conserve" bit of Conservatism, but that's not where a lot of right-wing thinking is.
Although in that instance, science was right, Meatloaf was wrong and ultimately science won by default. RFK Jnr seems to meet that threshold every day,only other people and especially their children, seem to win Darwin Awards on his behalf.
https://youtu.be/Alryavu9D5k?si=eGmOwJ2V75knYi2H
Thomas Dolby did the rest:
https://youtu.be/V83JR2IoI8k?si=ucJNDc-yy0LI7Yle
The GOP and Democrats have reversed positions and supporters on a lot of things in the past 50+ years.
I frequently say, much to her annoyance:
Scientists find problems. Engineers find solutions.
It's possible that what we regard as scientifically proven can turn out to be false, and some would argue that falsifiability is the whole point of the scientific method.
There are one or two quite impressive characters available and in Parliament to replace Starmer although they are being dragged down by Starmer and Reeves's U turns and inertia.
I keep thinking the Blair Government was better suited, because people like Dobbo, Hoon and Jacqui Smith were in the minority rather than running the entire show as they now appear to be so doing.
Mamdani's call evokes to me the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when we looked out for our neighbours and the world appeared to be contracting. People have always come together during emergencies and that's something to be praised, not ridiculed.
I worked with an engineer who was a Presbyterian from Northern Ireland. He maintained that the earth was only a few thousand years old, and, for example, God had simply placed fossils within rocks to make us incorrectly think that dinosaurs existed. And put the oil and gas down there for our benefit.
Trust in scientists by party affiliation:
Labour 93%
Conservative 87%
Reform 68%
Green 88%
So for now, it's a Stateside problem, but a warning light to be careful about what we import here.
(The top five, by the way, are Nurses, Engineers, Doctors, Teachers and Professors, which is a fairly strong pattern in itself.)
The Reform chart is sad in many ways. Lower-than average trust pretty much across the board, except for The ordinary man/woman in the street, Landlords, Estate Agents and Buisness Leaders. Some of those are understandable, but landlords and estate agents?
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/ipsos-veracity-index-2025
Hmm.
Science is a process of inquiry, a method
I'm afraid my mind jumped to illegal workers. Several alarm bells and behaviours went off.
SCIENCE!
https://x.com/RajivShah90/status/2025618742537781436
The basic problem with this argument is that it ignores that the putative Mauritius/UK deal is also liable to be undone by international law
If this really belongs to Mauritius anything other than us unconditionally giving it back is an agreement under duress
Both the current legal position and the proposed treaty are subject to legal risk, and the consequences of losing are far worse under the Treaty (since it already gives back the freehold)
In the short term it's probably true that the Treaty will hold but in 25 or 50 years time? The exact same argument will be made "the UK bargained with something it was never entitled to"
https://x.com/jacobkornbluh/status/2015507552541241766?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
The controversy is that he’s demanding two forms of ID to register, at the same time as saying that voter ID is racist and sexist.
https://x.com/rmlee100/status/2025597442838937992
... The US Food and Drug Administration initially refused to consider a new mRNA flu vaccine for approval although they have U-turned after an outcry...
Whatever the FDA now does, trust has been destroyed, and the lesson from history* is that it may not be regained.
Clinical trials can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and take years, and are of uncertain outcome. If you add to that an FDA which might refuse to even review a trial whose design it approved, then why would a pharma executive take the risk ?
Easier to green light the weight loss or cancer drug trials.
*Something similar (though less politically motivated) happened with clinical trials for novel antibiotics, a couple of decades back. It effectively ended pharma investment ever since.
But greenhouse gases are not injurious to health. Therefore declaring them as a threat to public health was surely a political gesture that fell outside the intended purpose of public health legislation.
Revoking that ruling seems to me to be returning to an objective approach and stepping away from an emotion/optics driven approach, not the other way around.
[disclaimer: I, personally, am a vegetarian]
https://www.italpassion.fr/en/ferrari/e4-million-ferrari-enzo-abandoned-in-dubai-airport-parking-lot/
- Introduce a “patriotic curriculum” based on Christianity to give children “more things to take pride in again”
- Stop churches being converted into mosques by granting them listed status and requiring planning permission
- Force police to search homes of everyone referred to Prevent to crackdown on “Islamic extremism”
- Launch outreach programme encouraging expats in Dubai and Singapore to return by pledging lower taxes'
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2025629386104549500?s=20
Cars get very dirty when left outside for only a couple of weeks, covered in sand even in the city.
New York regularly has snow. They should be paying people for the work. Do we expect people to grit the roads for free when we need it ?
Prevent seem obsessed with the Far Right, like the lecturer who showed a class a Donald Trump video, this was a class studying US politics. He ended up losing his job and was accused of causing his students ‘emotional harm ‘
“I am The Science” - Anthony Fauci.
2. If Christians don’t use churches and there is a risk of them falling apart it’s better they are used for whatever purpose, nightclubs, community centres, weather spoons or mosques.
3. Fair enough.
4. Absolutely right, not just expats, anyone who agrees to set up a business in the UK generating x in corporate tax and/or employing a certain number of UK people should be offered big personal tax incentives.
Democrats hypocrites. Surely not !!
I don’t wash chicken. I’m still here.
Time to put these Trots back in their box.
That said, if you like your chicken very soft and barely cooked, it probably doesn't do any harm.