Tuesday 2 May 2017

New Scientist Admits: Liberals Are Biased And Deluded


Image courtesy of Becker1999, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).



Joel Kontinen

New Scientist has admitted that liberals are “just as deluded as everybody else.”

Reporting on several recent studies, NS concludes that liberals are anything but open-minded.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that like anybody else they were so “averse to listening to opposing viewpoints on hot-button issues, such as same-sex marriage [that]…they were willing to give up the chance to win money just to avoid the unpleasantness of hearing an opinion they disliked.”

The NS article uses expressions like 'the Regressive Left' and admits that American university culture is toxic and intolerant, thanks to "liberals".

NS also discloses that people who regard themselves as progressives and vote for Democrats, do not necessarily embrace science – even though they might march for it:

Consider Seattle, a city that voted 87 per cent for Hillary Clinton and is proudly one of the most progressive … in the US. A warm embrace of scientific reality doesn’t come with the territory: Seattle isn’t terribly fond of biotechnology, rejecting GMOs and even vaccines. Rwanda’s childhood polio vaccination rate is higher than Seattle’s. As for other vaccines, including MMR, only five US states have higher exemption rates than Washington State.”

We welcome the opportunity to agree with NS’ conclusions, as this doesn’t happen too often. (Here’s one noticeable exception.)

Recent weeks have provided us with empirical proof of how closed-minded liberals really are.

Bill Nye, for instance, would rather suck than explore the merits in alternatives to his godless worldview.

This is probably also true of men like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins.

Source:

Berezow, Alex. 2017. Liberals are no strangers to confirmation bias after all. New Scientist (28 April).