In any other year I’d probably advocate voting Rhinoceros | Image: This Week In Tomorrow, clip art by artbejo, CC BY 2.0
As the US presidential race continues apace, I find myself more and more often posting political things, if not on here, then certainly on the This Week In Tomorrow facebook page.
When this blog started, it was just supposed to be news about the intersection points of science, technology, feminism, futurism, and skepticism — it wasn’t supposed to be partisan. Some of the things we believe in here — most notably the equality in rights and dignity of all people, regardless of race, sex, gender, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, even religion — lead to some political stances more than others, of course. We will always take the side of a person’s rights over an idea’s rights (hint: ideas don’t have rights) and we will continue to point out the ways in which historical biases built into modern societies work insidiously to foster social and economic inequality. We’ll always be political — that’s what happens when you talk about the future — we just didn’t think that would mean being so partisan.
But first teaching evolution became a partisan issue, then climate change science, then vaccines, then science funding writ large (because it supported things like climate change science).
But this election cycle has taken the cake. Only one of the four remaining presidential candidates is prepared to say out loud that everyone should get vaccinated. Only one has expressed support for GMOs. Johnson equivocates on the anthropogenic part of anthropogenic climate change and Trump has outright labeled it a Chinese hoax. In defiance of reason and sense, Stein thinks wifi is bad for children’s brains. I don’t even really know what to do with this lunacy except to say this:
In the 2016 presidential race, if you’re a one-issue voter and that issue is basic science literacy you’ve got two options:
- Hillary Clinton
- A tinfoil-hat piñata full of snake oil and placebo pills
And that is why this site has gotten so partisan.
Man, I can’t wait for December.
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Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.