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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>Americans Overwhelmingly Support Science

Considering on the average 7/10 people either voted for Trump or didn't vote, (with Trump openly stating that he wants to neuter universities) Americans "think" they support science.

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I read that as people support science, but not so much that they're willing to support academia along the way.

Americans think "supporting universities" is not necessarily the same as "supporting science."

I’d buy that if the winning party had presented a coherent plan fix the problems.

to be fair universities nowadays are more interested in supporting identity politics and liberal ideology than supporting science

Ok, there probably are folks who can't differentiate between the Physics department and the Sociology department. Or who can tell the difference but who attack both anyway.

The problem for science is those folks. Right? The universities are actually teaching and advancing science. They're not the problem. The Pol Pot types are the problem. We know this very well from history.

Many are doing a quick about-face on that stuff though. They just do whatever they are told so that the grant money keeps coming in.

I don’t see how you can make this claim when the budget balance at universities is extremely tilted towards stem. The budget for the kind of programs you seem to be complaining about come out to percents. Hard to say universities are “more interested” in very very small parts of their budget. What is happening now though is the federal government holds back billions of dollars in medical research grants, punishing, in some cases even killing patients, over “ideological” issues.

While i know better to argue with conservatives, I would just like to remind you that if the political tides ever turn, and somehow Democrats manage to take back control of the government, its going to be actually bad news for people like you. There are already several projects on the way compiling political associations (through buying advertising targeting data), and when it becomes socially acceptable to discriminate against anyone with conservative views, you are going to be in a world of trouble.

I support the idea of science, but absolutely not its current incarnation.

Too many ideas are now beyond challenge; flawed ideas are validated through violence and deception, not scientific rigor or reasoning.

It isn't Science anymore. It's Lysenkoism in all but name.

Examples?

On the average, 7/10 people also either didn't vote for Trump or didn't vote. Weird how framing votes in the favor of your argument works like that.

In a regular political cycle, where there is sanity, normally Im actually for people not voting when they don't know much about politics.

In this case, given how public all of Trumps things were prior to 2024, with him being a felon, him trying to coupe the government (even if you are completely unaware of that, you should at least know that the coupe happened under him), and all the other disgusting things he have done, non voting carries a different meaning. You either don't care if US falls into decline, or you are just as deluded as any MAGA in thinking that Kamala would have been worse - in both cases, you deserve no respect.

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