The following excerpt from Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism] serves as one historical instance where politics and ideology decided what the research data "ought to be" in order to match the dictator's favorite ideology. In science, it is the experiment that generates data which in turn are used to construct an explanation for we observe in the real world:
"Lysenkoism - was a political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting.
More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biologica disciplines were harmed or banned."
The moron Trump wants to take America back to that time in the 1940s and 1950s: He thinks that little American peasants can be made to work on an assembly line by the thousands to manufacture his stupid MAGA hats (they are now made in China!). What he seems to ignore is that American peasants are not interested in that kind of menial job. They prefer to moonshine and get drunk while robots do all the work.
Back in the 1930s-1950s, the Soviets were screwing with the foundations of science for the sole motive of opposing the West. Whatever advances western science was making had to be opposed in spite and to prove that Soviet science is both "different" and better. But when you let politics and ideology take precedence over what the experimental data is taking you, your version of science becomes charlatanism and religion. Indeed, in religion, "faith" overrides "facts". Faith requires you to to suspend your thinking and your reason and to believe something for which there is no evidence.
Religion is ideology, and ideology is religion: You believe what your "leader" tells you because you have faith in your leader, regardless of whether his/her arguments are grounded in fact.
And that is precisely where Trump is taking the US: A Gulag where ideology precedes and negates facts generated by experminetal research. Just like Lysenko was made to do by his Soviet bosses. As you see, Soviet science went down the drain in the course of the next decades.
Trump is an ignorant idiot who doesn't believe in science because science is difficult and hard. If allowed to persist, his policies, just like those of the Soviet Union, will destroy a vast array of scientific fields in which American science has always been a leader. Don't forget that the seeds of Trump's backwardness with regard to science were planted a few decades back by the numskull charlatan "Creationist Evangelicals" who I am certain are all Trump adorers. The facts say that the earth is several billion years in the making, but creationists believe the fictional garbage literature of the bible that says that the earth was "created" by God some 6,000 years ago against every piece of scientific data.
Not to mention that persecuting and banning foreign students and researchers will have an immensely negative impact on innovation and entrepreneurship. If he thinks that his inbred mongrels from Appalachia with their bigoted devotion to God and religion will lift American science by forcing it to adhere to narrow and obsolete ideological precepts, it wouldn't be long before he sees the devastation he is wreaking on American science.
====================================
The Government Is Now Threatening Academic Journals
Frank Landymore
Sun, April 20, 2025
The Trump administration has slashed funding for universities and scientific research. Now, its lackeys appear to be escalating their tactics by menacing academic journals.
In a letter sent to the editor of CHEST Journal Peter Mazzone, US attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin, Jr. — a devout Trump appointee — insinuates that the publication is "partisan," presses it for an explanation on how it handles "misinformation," and asks whether it's accepting of "competing viewpoints."
In February, Martin sparked an outcry after he declared himself to be "Trump's lawyer," vowing "to fight to protect his leadership against entities "that refuse to put America first."
With anti-vax crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chosen to run this country's public health institutions, and a tide of "anti-woke" sentiment targeting scientists for acknowledging that climate change is real and that trans people exist, it's impossible not to read Martin's letter as a thinly veiled threat: stop being "woke," or face government scrutiny.
"The public has certain expectations and you have certain responsibilities," Martin wrote.
The letter was shared on social media this week by Eric Reinhart, a political anthropologist. MedPage Today reports that it's learned of at least two author journals receiving similar letters.
"A publication's editorial decisions are none of the government's business, whether it's a newspaper or a medical journal," JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told MedPage Today. "When a United States Attorney wields the power of his office to target medical journals because of their content and editorial processes, he isn't doing his job, let alone upholding his constitutional oath," Morris added. "He's abusing his authority to try to chill protected speech."
As part of its DOGE-effort to slash federal expenditures, the Trump administration has cut off billions of dollars in financial support for universities, terminated hundreds of research projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health, and cancelled nearly $3 billion in the agency's contracts.
It has also frozen every single research grant at the US National Science Foundation, one of the largest funders of basic research in the world, in order to review the grants' language for terms related to DEI. Some of the "woke" or "partisan" stuff that's been kneecapped by the sweeping cuts include cancer and Alzheimer's research. If the draconian measures were intended to be an out-and-out assault on the scientific community, it's working: with the money drying up, some of the nation's top scientists are starting to consider leaving the country.
But many are fighting back. In February, publications including the American Journal of Public Health said they would heavily scrutinize papers submitted by government scientists, after the Trump administration carried out a blackout of health administration data and forced CDC scientists to withdraw their work to remove language related to gender.
In response to this latest escalation — siccing a US attorney on individual publications — some in the scientific community are calling for solidarity.
"It is yet another example of the Trump administration's effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse — an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect," Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, told MedPage Today. "Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail."
No comments:
Post a Comment