Is liberalism becoming more anti-intellectual? (user search)
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  Is liberalism becoming more anti-intellectual? (search mode)
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Author Topic: Is liberalism becoming more anti-intellectual?  (Read 3842 times)
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CrabCake
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« on: August 14, 2018, 06:59:29 PM »

I struggle to even think of an equivalent to Jordan Peterson.

Maybe liberals don't need anybody to tell them to tidy their rooms?
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CrabCake
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« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2018, 03:06:14 AM »

There's an entire major political party in the US that denies climate change.

Don't lecture me about anti-intellectualism.
who is lecturing you?

"Liberals", as a group isn't anti-intellectual, but there are many that are.  Most anti-GMO stuff comes from the left, the same with anti-nuclear power.  The "gender" issue...really any time a field has both biology and social sciences together the left is often there to put to limits on it.

I mean, the right are far worse on the gender issue when it comes to ignoring science for the sake of their feelings.

Of course, the very worst example of anti-science sentiment on the left was the demented Soviet concept of Lysenkoism, which argued that Mendelian genetics were contrary to the doctrine of dialectical materialism and promoted a sort of neo-Lamarck sentiment in its stead. That was extremely mad.
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CrabCake
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« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2018, 08:22:06 AM »

The "snarky" attitude from crabcake and GoTfan are exactly what they are talking about. Instead of treating this discussion as a serious issue, they try to turn it into a punchline. Meanwhile the environment they claim to care so much about still gets polluted about carbon dioxide... but as long as they get to feel superieur, n'est pas? No, there certainly has been a decline on the left.

Um, I made a joke about Peterson, who is talented in his field but makes various hamfisted and plain wrong inferences about evolution to back up his theories on the nature of society, most notably about lobsters (mainly because your initial comment was glib and meaningless); then I have a literal example of when the left walked down a very stupid path to satisfy ideological requirements. Overall the Left is a lot better in terms of its acceptance of the Scientific Method than before (although non-maoist communist states often loved the idea of science, a scientific mindset of curiosity inevitably comes to question the "scientific" concept of dialectical materialism; and the New Left was incredibly mad).

Regardless, this whole argument strand is bizarre. There is an entire wing of the Right dedicated to demonising the entire concept of higher education, that characterises entire disciplines as "propaganda" without even bothering to make an effort to seriously consider their views. There is an argument strand that is broadly more popular on the Right than the Left that the concept of higher education is irrelevant compared to the "university of life". That to me is a far more anti-intellectual mindset than bursts of pseudoscience and waffle or excessive coddling on campus.

More broadly I feel there is an anti-intellectual sentiment that has been metastasising for a while that has a decidedly non-partisan origin: that of corporatisation and commercialisation, two trends that have invaded universities and turned them into Gradgrindian factories for "skills", demonising the concept of education for education's sake.
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CrabCake
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« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2018, 10:17:04 AM »
« Edited: August 17, 2018, 10:23:11 AM by ¢®🅰ß 🦀 ©@k€ 🎂 »

Well Beet thanks you Adam, an easy win for blue Beet.

..but I want to play too.

What part of the GMO fearmongering got to you?  Please say "because monocultures are bad", I don't think we've done that one here yet (or if we have, not very good).  If it's just the one Crabby likes (we just don't know, more study needs to be done, ya can't be too safe!) save your breath and search through past threads.

? I support GMO crops? The only thing I routinely say about them is that that each new transgenic organism should be carefully tested to ensure you aren't coding for potentially allergenic proteins (which is supported by all peer reviewed reserach that I know of), and that they certainly aren't the cure-all their proponents believe them to be? Plus that farmers should be given some for of economic compensation for the effects of Terminater mechanisms preventing them from using their own seed and forcing them to remain reliant on seed companies?

I honestly don't understand how you can argue that I've argued that "we don't know etc" in multiple occasions. If I've come across that way, I obviously haven't made myself clear enough so I'll say this: genetic engineering is no different (and in some ways quite a bit safer, especially if you're simply knocking out genes) than conventional plant breeding technologies.

(I also don't know why you're even talking about monocultures here: they aren't hugely relevant to this topic, given a cisgenic based acrosystem will also normally be monocultural, for better or for worse).
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CrabCake
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« Reply #4 on: August 18, 2018, 09:35:19 PM »

sometimes, but you're way softer on it than I remember
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do you want this for all new foods or are GMOs special?
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there is nothing stopping farmers from using their own seed now (they can even purchase new seed like this...they don't though....want to guess why?) and seed companies were operating under this model long before GMOs
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I must be missremembering, my bad.  Let Adam know though, k?
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the last few times I've hoe'd this row have been elsewhere and for some reason "monoculture:how bad it is and why the GMO companies invented it are all evil" have kept coming up.  Of course it's not bad (or at least not not good....what?) and existed long before GMOs.

I think the main issue is what you're basically implying here: the big issue isn't GMO crops, but agriculture in general. The economics of GMO is fuzzy, but I don't think there's a country in the world that remotely pays its farmers enough (or they pay the wrong people too much). In regards to Terminator seeds, it isn't just the companies being greedy - it would be an enormous help for those ecologists who fear transgenes entering the broader gene pool, which could create all sorts of messes (there are other uses as well), but it would kill a lot of smallholder practices. BtCorn is a good example - there's nothing inherently wrong with it being GM, but it is a bit of a Dodge of the central problem which is that America grows way, way too much corn that they don't even eat. Monocultures are also part of the broader problem with agriculture (possibly). I happen to believe that agricultural scientists that are mainly interested in monocultures are operating under the incorrect assumption that monocultures automatically promote yield, which (as the emerging field of agroecosystems seems to indicate) may not be necessarily correct.

I do think that conventionally breeded crops should be tested more, but the reason I believe that it's useful to especially be interested in certain GM crops is the ability to put completely novel genes (and therefore proteins) in. The one time this didn't happen that I know of is papya iirc, which luckily had no negative effects.
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