[golemotron]

That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.

The book Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice, by Alice Dreger gives a good survey of the terrain.

[enraged_camel]

>>That's a very convenient and self-congratulatory view of things. Science denialism happens on both the left and the right.

Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them. The right cheers its science deniers on and elects them to government positions.

[gambler]

The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter. The end result is roughly the same.

>Sure, but the left treats its science deniers with equal levels of disdain and does its best to marginalize them.

I haven't seen any significant scorn directed towards post-modernist views from NYT, WaPo and co. At least not in the last several years. In fact, they seem to implicitly welcome those views.

[dragonwriter]

> The right has religion. The left has post-modernism. One says science is false, the other says science does not matter.

Neither does religion in general statement that science is false, not does post-modernism in general say that science doesn't matter. Some religious views may either deny science generally or, more often, deny only that science that conflicts with the religion's axiomatic beliefs (which implies that the religion have axiomatic beliefs in the domain to which science applies, which not all do.)

And while post-modernism may, depending on the particular flavor, deny either the fundamental existence of or the accessibility of an objective root truth, it has no fundamental conflict with the utilitarian argument for empiricism and science (it conflicts essentially with the quasi-religious belief that science extends beyond being a useful means of predicting future experiences to being something that ultimately tells the root truth of the universe, but that belief is not essential to science.)

[spenuke]

Thank you for illustrating my point by conflating the political spectrum with the epistemological spectrum. :)

As for "self-congratulatory", I was responding to the old chestnut that mainstream media is too far to the left. Next time we talk about GMOs and anti-vaxxers, I'll have a chance to chastise the people who are more likely to be on my side of the political spectrum.