1mo ago

Frog's Gift

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This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.
Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”
But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits
The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking
- It's an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships' minds while ignoring all other cases
  
  I heard the explanation "conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result".
  If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.
  But if it's about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to "prove" that it's bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).
  
  This theory implies that conservatives think at some point, so I'm not sure.
  
  It's used by every group to deride anythign they disagree with, just oversimplify things until they sound stupid.
  
  I feel like the soul exception is sovereign citizens, which gets dumber the more I learn about them.
  
  I used to watch them on Youtube to see the stupid shit they'd do.... Sadly they got boring quick as all they really do is whine about being required to have a license and forward their bills to the US Treasury. They simply run out of ways to be entertaining quick.
  There are two camps.
  Those who are LARPing that they're tough and "know the real rules" and are "using them to fight in this grand rebellion!" - It boils down to them being hostile with police and then hostile with the judges, wondering why their magic words aren't working and blaming the Judge and cops for not knowing better. Weird how the movement is still alive when NONE OF THEM can find anyone in legal who will play along. Maybe it's slowly dying, like the Christian Science movement (which has nothing to do with Christians who are Scientists, Science told through a biblical lens, Science in general, or even Christianity....)
  Those who fall on hard times and are desperate for some "life hack" that makes it all easier, even though if there actually was one we'd all be doing it.
  The former is funny for a bit, but they run out of material fast, the latter is just sad.
  I will say that early on Soverign Citizens arguments actually worked, though mostly because part of the scam is bringing a shit ton of paperwork with you, giving it to the prosecutor when you're arrested, and hoping they'll give up because it's "Too much to go through and we have other cases."
  It worked in the begining, but as the SC Movement became more wildly known and more people went through the paperwork, these "papers" are usually just rejected out of hand as they're basically just the written word version of filibuster and filibuster doesn't really work in court. (Objection: Relevance)
- Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.
  "They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!"
  "They're looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!"
  I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked "pencillin was mocked as stupid" just out of interest. The third result (or first after "people also ask") on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
  Around and around and around
  
  The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats
  Pretty sure they cribbed most of that article from This Hank Green video from the same day. It's a message worth spreading though, to be fair.
  
  Oh, my bad.
  Thanks.
  
  Sorry, meant no criticism of you at all. I just wanted to share Hank's video because he goes into a lot of depth and really helps in understanding.
  
  Nono, my bad. I like Hank's videos, hadn't seen that, if I had, I'd have linked it as well instead of some clickbaity journalism that's just riding off of Hank's work.
- They don't want groundbreaking though, unless it's profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don't want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.
- The Game Theory was considered useless at the time.
  It prevented a Nuclear WW3 for so many years.
  And it will still prevent stuff from going nuclear until enough world government officials become foolish enough to be unable to understand it.

77 comments