#pro-science

Merry Christmas!

"Christ entered the world to redeem the world"

"To celebrate Christmas is to be in conflict with abortion"

Daily Source Bias Check: TechXplore

PRO-SCIENCE These sources consist of legitimate science or are evidence based through the use of credible scientific sourcing.  Legitimate science follows the scientific method, is unbiased and does not use emotional words.  These sources also respect the consensus of experts in the given scientific field and strive to publish peer reviewed science. Some sources in this category may have a…

There are two things that people primarily remember about the 60's and 70's and those are peace and love. As the baby boomers came of age, youth everywhere were dancing to a completely different beat. That beat was free love, rock, and drugs with a massive push toward left wing social values such as gender and racial equality.

What doesn't come to mind about the 60's and 70's is that hippies, as they are affectionately known, spearheaded a social movement against science, intellectualism, rationality, and objective truth. Hippies didn't just question the standing social structure, the patriarchal authority, and institutionalized racism. They also seriously questioned the nature of reality and how one could come to gain knowledge about reality.

This movement was sculpted out of a large number of culminating influences, but there were two that were responsible for the majority. The first was widespread drug use. In the early 1960's very few college students reported smoking pot. By the late 60's a majority of students reported smoking. This shows the rise in casual drug use, but it was hallucinogens that triggered this fierce movement against reason. College professor Timothy Leary was known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD, especially among ivy league college students. The second major influence was the Esalen Institute. Located in So-Cal, this place was a literal Mecca for hippies and was disseminating new cultural ideas like STD's.

The primary philosophy that came out of Esalen and proponents of hallucinogens was that anything goes. A philosophy professor named Feyerabend, who I'll come back to, said "only one principle...can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes." (emphasis in original text.) What came from this new philosophy was new age spiritual beliefs, seances, psychics, tarot cards, telepathy, telekinesis, astrology, witchcraft, vision quests, flying saucer cults, glossolalia, faith healing, prophets, messiah cults, death cults, past lives, afterlives, out of body experiences, and countless more unprovable systems of nonsense. It wasn't that these things had never existed before, it was that there was a literal explosion of their popularity and social acceptance in society.

The flower children were not just anti-government when it came to war, bigotry, and other conservative positions. They became completely anti-establishment to the point that professional expertise in any area came to symbolize oppression to them. A French philosopher named Michel Foucault said that rationality was a "regime of truth" that was a form of oppression. The famous left wing figure Paul Goodman commented on the youth saying, "There was no knowledge...research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth." Charles Reich, a Yale Law student at the time, shared his observations of Esalen, and said, "Out here the atmosphere among the students is profoundly anti-intellectual."

In a bizarre dynamic, young people were taking in these anti-intellectual, anti-science ideas from crackpot academics would wrote books trying to discredit their own field of study. Through the 60's and 70's a large number of books were written that attacked rationality, science, and professional knowledge. Feyerabrend, who I mentioned above, was an Austrian who willingly joined the Nazi army and escaped to America to become a Berkley professor, published a book in 1975 titled Against Method: Outline of Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. This text focused on arguing that knowledge could be gained outside of the traditional rationale of facts and research and accused science of being a superstition. The Social Construction of Reality was authored by two sociologists who argued that reality is completely subjective and "what is 'real' to a Tibetan monk may not be 'real' to an American businessman. Thomas Kuhn, a Berkeley professor of science history, wrote a book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this text he argued that what is known by science is fabricated by great thinkers such as Einstein and "normal science" is just an effort to back up their ideas. Again insisting that science is equally subjective as the supernatural. A popular first hand account of the sixties, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe states that "ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telephathy...psychokineses, dematerialization, and the like." Another very popular book was The Secret Life of Plants, which claimed that all plants were sentient beings.

i’m finally getting my covid vaccine (not sure if it will be the one dose or the two dose; it would be safer for me to get the one dose because of my allergies/asthma, but i’m not sure i’ll have the choice). 

i’m conflicted only because i feel like i’m jumping the line. college faculty and staff are considered frontline workers in my state, and are eligible in group three.  

but i’m still working from home because i am high-risk, going in on occasional weekends to do work that i cannot complete from home. 

my state moved high-risk individuals from group two to group four in january with no explanation as to why the most vulnerable individuals were told yet again - in word and in action - that our lives don’t matter. 

we also don’t know how long immunity from a vaccine lasts, or how it holds up against the variants. 

but damnit, i want to be able to walk into a bookstore without worrying about dying or worrying that my actions will kill someone else.

(and as i typed this, my college announced an in-person commencement without knowing any of the answers to the above and other questions and i guarantee they’ll demand me back for it.)