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Austin Ruse: Post-modern science hits the streets

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Running and throwing projectiles. From O’Leary for News at Salvo:

Family values activist Austin Ruse’s new book, Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data (Regnery, 2017), offers a look at a world growing increasingly hostile to evidence-based reasoning. We have not discovered better reasoning methods; rather, many people seem to have decided that reasoning is not relevant to our life together, and perhaps not relevant to the life of the mind generally.

For instance, as Ruse chronicles, gay activists have claimed that evidence from genetics justifies their demand for a ban on therapy to change unwanted homosexual attractions.6 But leaving aside the tenuousness of their scientific claims, one must ask, Why is the client—in only this one type of case—not entitled to seek therapy for his own purposes? Would the same activists also ban therapy to increase such attractions? What about the bisexual man who would genuinely prefer to just be gay? Or straight? The conveniently loose relationship activists have with science means that they won’t often be confronted with evidence that requires them to adopt a coherent position.

Transgender lobbyists, taking the opposite tack, claim that a person can belong to the other “gender” irrespective of obvious, genetically driven sexual characteristics, due to a concept of gender that could exist only in that individual’s mind. The lobby’s stance seems all the odder when we consider that most neuroscientists hold that the mind does not even exist apart from the biological, sex-specific brain. But the majority view in neuroscience is seldom raised as an objection to transgender claims. More.

What holds it all together is that people who have a great deal of social power need no longer be coherent or make sense.

See also: You’ve heard about fake news. How about fake science?

and

Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s not clear.

Comments
The only thing consistent about most leftist progressive positions is the rejection of biblical norms. The only desire is to call light dark and dark light, driven by an egotistical desire to exalt themselves above God.jcfrk101
December 13, 2017
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It is strange indeed to see the power of post-modernism at work in our world. Nothing is safe, not even science. No surprise that a/mat leftists are behind this increasingly irrational and dangerous movement.Truth Will Set You Free
December 13, 2017
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EDTA, judging by the already in progress march of ruinous folly and hate backed by cultural marxist agit prop and using slander and now street toughs and ruthless media manipulators as major tactics, hard times are a-coming. VERY hard times are a-coming. And the crash as our civilisation goes over the cliff will have terrible consequences. KFkairosfocus
December 13, 2017
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When people live in easy times, they can believe most anything regardless of whether it corresponds to reality, and not be immediately, directly harmed by that belief. They can and _do_. In less cushy times, you spent much more of your life doing things on which your life more directly depended. Therefore, there were more opportunities for your beliefs to be tested, and the things you believed about reality mattered more. At least some of us are still interested in checking whether our beliefs correspond with reality...EDTA
December 12, 2017
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