Vote. | Vol. 4 / No. 2.2

Vote | Photo: justgrimes, CC BY-SA 2.0

This is a post just for my American readers today.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t have any political opinions. In another year, I might even say it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just that you do get out there and vote.

But this year, if you’re a skeptic, there’s a pretty stark choice: on the one hand you have a candidate who shows evidence of deep-rooted conspiracy thinking, and on the other you have a candidate with a respect for evidence and an evidence-based policy platform.

On the one hand you have someone who thinks vaccines cause autism (or is happy to pander to that crowd), someone who demanded to see President Obama’s birth certificate for years, someone who’s happy to spread the myth that people could “rig” the US election and undermine democracy despite all evidence to the contrary, someone who thinks if he loses the election it’ll be because of an organized cabal of international bankers and not because he’s alienated basically every voting group that isn’t white and male.

And on the other hand you have someone who said this:

“After all, good decisions in government, in business, in life are based on evidence, rather than ideology or gut feelings, or anecdotes […] And that is especially true … when it comes to policies that will affect millions of people. You have to do the research, you have to run the numbers. That’s how we minimize risk and maximize impact.”

The choice is yours, America, but if as nothing more than as a skeptic, I know who I’d be voting for.

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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.