She Scienced Me, We're Blinded

Anti-science conservatives are now the norm in the United States, and their trust in science has now hit a new all-time low.

It's not just the vitriol surrounding this year's upcoming election: More conservatives than ever distrust science, according to a report released Thursday.

Just 35 percent of conservatives said they had a "great deal of trust in science" in 2010, a 28 percent decline since 1974, when 48 percent of conservatives—about the same percentage as liberals—trusted science. Liberal and moderate support for science has remained essentially flat since 1974, according to Gordon Gauchat, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He published his findings in the journal American Sociological Review.

About 41 percent of Americans identify as "conservative," according to an August poll by Gallup, up from 37 percent in 2008.

Gauchat says conservatives' rebellion against the "elite" and the shifting role of science in society is to blame for the decline. He argues that the conservative minority has rebelled against science in the same way it has against media and higher education.

Gauchat has a real point here.  Anti-science, anti-education, anti-critical thought dogma makes control of the populace easier, as well as making them poorer.  Conservatives keep talking about how self-made billionaires are the greatest people on the planet -- Bill Gates dropped out of college! -- and that education is a fool's game for those who can't afford to pay cash.

For the wealthy of course, well they go to school.  Republicans want you stupid, pliable, and uninformed.  You're much easier to fleece that way.  Look at all the conservative media telling you college is for suckers, that evolution is fake, that science itself is fatally flawed because it can never be 100% proven, unlike faith in a higher power.

Leave it all to God, they shout.  And also give us all your money.  Or those smart people will end up being your bosses or something!  Stupidity is Freedom, my friends!

Take the percentage of people worldwide who believe in evolution.  How successful have the anti-science jagoffs been?  This successful:

Notice in America how 40% of us believe evolution is true, 40% believe it's false, and 20% in the middle aren't sure.   Science isn't politicized?  Judging by these numbers, science and politics are the same.