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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Before attacking huge swathes of the population especially about their ignorance, try doing the tiniest bit of research yourself. NASA has always had high approval ratings--just below the CDC:

http://news.gallup.com/poll/121886/CDC-Tops-Agency-Ratings-F...

I think you will find that people's ignorance about budget particulars are reasonable--it's simply not a day-to-day concern of anybody outside of the GAO or similar bodies. But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong. People are fond of the CDC and NASA, and if NASA's budget was wrongly said to be 25 percent, it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).

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> Before attacking huge swathes of the population especially about their ignorance

Wait, what? I never did that! The closest thing to an 'attack' I can imagine anyone reading from my post would have to have been about

> Republican politicians

which is surely a few thousand people at the most, it has got to be like 0.001% of the population that I said something negative about.

> But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong.

Some people are. Some very important, prominent and influential people are in fact anti-intellectual and that is not wrong to say. Many Republican politicians are proudly anti-intellectual. They even say that. The GOP in some states like Texas specifically call out education as a problem in their party platform documents. They are, as a group, overall an anti-intellectual group. That is not a false statement, that is composed of their own words.

> it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does

Yes, that's my point. People have been brainwashed over decades to assume that the government does no good.

> (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).

I'm not sure I follow - I've never met a person in my life who thinks the government does good overall, certainly not more good than bad.

People of any party tend to be anti-scientific when the science in question contradicts their party line. Democrats are as guilty as Republicans.

> People of any party tend to be anti-scientific when the science in question contradicts their party line.

[citation needed]. That's just not true.

> Democrats are as guilty as Republicans.

More false words have never been spoken. You are incorrect. The current political situation should show that clearly. No Democrat has ever lied about so many things as the current Republicans in power: even simple, verifiable facts like crowd size are made into lies and distributed as propaganda by the current group of Republicans in power in the US House/Senate/Executive/etc.

> [citation needed]. That's just not true.

It's likely not true that the left is as bad as the right on this matter, however the left has some big black marks on its record.

The anti-vaccination and anti-GMO crowd is overwhelmingly dominated by people from the left.

You see a lot of pop anti-science, anti-technology crap come out of both the fringe and mainstream left. That has been the case for the entire period post WW2. Anti-GMO is mainstream on the political left as one example.

Is it the Democratic Party's position that GMOs are bad and so are vaccinations? I hadn't heard this before and I think it's completely untrue.

You took my quote out of context. I was saying that it is mostly Republicans and not Democrats who tend to be anti-science "when the science in question contradicts their party line."

There is no party line to speak of with the Democrats and vaccinations and GMOs. Yes there are crazy people everywhere. It is not that these people are told by Democrat politicians to hate GMOs! That does not happen like it does with Republican politicians encouraging their constituents to think that high school education leading to further education is a bad thing.

It's entirely unnecessary for it to be a party position. Anti-GMO is an extremely widely held belief on the left.

"There's also a political difference. Republicans divide evenly on whether genetically modified foods are safe or unsafe. Independents rate them unsafe by a 20-point margin; Democrats, by a 26-point margin."

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97567&page=1

"Republicans are more skeptical of the theory of evolution, though by a surprisingly slim margin with 39 percent of them rejecting it as compared to 30 percent of Democrats. When it comes to other scientific matters, the waters are even muddier. For instance, Democrats and Republicans believe in the false link between vaccines and autism at roughly equal levels."

"Only 45 percent of Democrats support expanding the use of nuclear energy, as compared to 62 percent of Republicans"

https://reason.com/blog/2016/07/15/are-republicans-or-democr...

"The poll also shows more Democrats (9 percent) and independents (10 percent) say the measles vaccine isn't safe than Republicans who say the same (5 percent)."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/he...

The anti-vax crowd is pretty well split actually, political extremism seems to influence those belief more than left vs right[0]. But those on the right are more likely to resist vaccination efforts.

A quote from the article: "As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.

Yet, other research suggests that it is in fact conservatives who are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism, that it is liberals who are more likely to endorse pro-vaccination statements and that the more strongly someone identifies with the Republican Party, the more likely he or she is to have a negative opinion of vaccination."

[0] http://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-fol...

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