Dr. Strangelove or RFK Jr?

Guns and opioids.

 

DJT is magic. He’s turned pubs into pro choice, pro regulation, anti free trade leftists.

 

This makes no sense. Science is not a "pendulum". If people are worried about fluoride in the water in the year 2024, they are out of their minds. That isn't an opinion, but a statement of fact. Why, instead, don't people wonder about forever chemicals and other such actual man-made contamination that is harmful. The fact it is not safe to swim in many bodies of water in the US seems like a bigger concern than something that has been proven to have a net positive impact on health.

 

Populism lacks morals or details. Just broad talking points that are popular with 0 plan on how to implement them (thankfully, most are impossible).

 

See recess appointments thread. It is exactly what the plan is

 

We’re going to destroy the admistrative state!

Also we’re going to ban an additional 2700 food additives banned in the EU that weren’t banned before, I have no idea why, but Europe’s administrative state must know something.

 

The pendulum is not science but what government does….or does not do
Flint, MI
COVID
Government- as any human endeavor- screws up. The pendulum has swung from trusting anyone with a title and credentials to challenging their assumptions and conclusions. That’s part of the scientific method. Americans are tired of being told to shut up, bend over and take it - just because so and so graduated Ivy League. Well, so did Samuel Bankman Fried and Elizabeth Holmes (Stanford). If you cannot show me how and why it’s better for me maybe the reason isn’t because I’m a rube - maybe it’s because you’re full of it. (Not saying you - saying the current system).

 

The people to worry about are the ones with conflicts of interest. The corruption of science is a very real thing, just like the corruption of politics. Follow the money. I'm a true believer in capitalism. But when a study is "funded" by Exxon or something, that is generally when to be concerned about science. Look at who funded the plastic recycling studies and how that turned out. This is also why elections are so important. The population has to be educated in order to battle this corruption, and yet, it appears we are going in reverse and instead choosing ignorance over education.

 

What does Flint have to do with “science”, that’s more of a failing/aging infrastructure problem and a series of bad decisions by an inept local govt (and then a state govt that compounded the problem because the party running the state at that time gave no effs about its own urban population).

Not sure how Covid is illustrative of any “scientific pendulum” either (unless you believe it was an “engineered virus” or some nonsense). I think COVID spoke more to how people get their information (or misinformation) in the social media era, how people now will react to crisis. Some of it is because “science” can’t keep up and offer all the answers in real time. But the reality is social media lets people fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.

 

I was happy with my decision to get the vaccine, because I knew people hospitalized with it. But there is a real self-reflection needed about how they handled the messaging and also some conclusions they jumped to. Was an absolute disaster. Science was not always clicking with public policy. The emphasis on herd immunity when the vaccines weren't able to stop communicability at high rates for one thing. The fact they mandated it for low risk segments of the population was a dubious decision at best. Very real questions on conflicts of interest with big pharma.