The Liberal War on Science!!!

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Crossroads Inc.
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The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Crossroads Inc. »

LINK
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Liberals pretend to be the advocates for science. President Barack Obama has repeatedly portrayed himself as the world’s leading advocate for scientific progress; in fact, he has consistently touted himself as the man who will “restore our commitment to science.” So why are liberals so ignorant of science?

Ignorance is the only possible way to explain a recent liberal program considered in the United Kingdom. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is discussing a plan drawn up by a teen sex “advice service” designed to increase the use of condoms by teens. Teens as young as 12 will be subjected to full-scale sex ed, then handed “condom credit cards” that allow them to pick up free condoms at soccer fields, barbers’ shops and “scout huts.”

The logic underlying this program and similar programs like it -- read: American comprehensive sex education -- is that adolescents can be trusted to make adult decisions. As former Clinton Administration Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders puts it, “Education is the best contraception.”

There’s only one problem: science shows that adolescents simply don’t have the brains to use condoms. Literally. According to virtually all scientific studies concerning adolescent neural mechanisms, teens are biologically incapable of inhibiting risky behavior. “(T])e major sources of death and disability in adolescence are related to difficulties in the control of behavior and emotion,” explains Ronald E. Dahl, Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Although adolescents’ brains have developed enough to allow them the capacity to reason better than children, adolescents are biologically driven toward risky behavior and sensation-seeking by their functionally mature limbic systems. And the part of the brain that generally controls such risky behavior -- the prefrontal cortex -- is not yet fully developed. In other words, despite the fact that teenagers are smart enough to recognize the dangers of risky behavior, their brains ignore the risks when things get hot. Thus, teenagers are morons.

Yet liberals insist that teens are fully capable of making informed choices on subjects ranging from sex to abortion to pot smoking. Even if the science doesn’t back them up, liberals say that we must assume that teenagers are logical, and that they will use discretion -- and condoms -- if told of the risks of unprotected sex.

This unscientific philosophy has created an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy, and the attendant teen abortions and teen suicides. At least, however, teens are not being grounded by their unhip parents. That would be uncivilized.

Leftist allegiances to disproved myths aren’t restricted to teen rationality. Liberals also ignore the science with regard to the early development of fetuses -- cell differentiation begins in days 18 through 24. By the end of the fourth week of pregnancy, embryos are already visible to the naked eye, and their brains, spinal cords, hearts, and organs have begun to form. During week 10 of pregnancy, the baby’s brain will produce 250,000 neurons each minute. No wonder abortion providers like Planned Parenthood have attempted to block the use of 4D ultrasounds in pregnancy clinics -- they don’t want mothers realizing that their fetuses aren’t merely a bunch of undifferentiated cells. Just another example of liberal ideology triumphing over science.

Want more? How about liberals’ bizarre insistence that men and women are identical, and that gender is merely a social construct? That entirely false belief is the basis for the gay marriage movement, which states that a child with two mommies has essentially the same upbringing as the child of a traditional mother-father coupling. The gay marriage movement also asserts that sex is the equivalent of race -- they say that the differences between men and women are equivalent to the differences between African-Americans, for example, and Caucasians.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Men and women have different brain structures, which have real effects on behavior and perception. “In mammalian species numerous sex differences in brain structure and function have now been documented,” writes Judy L. Cameron of the University of Pittsburgh Departments of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Cell Biology & Physiology. “Behaviors showing documented sex difference include behaviors associated with reproduction (mating and maternal behaviors), aggression, activity, and various cognitive functions including spatial cognition, verbal skills, and various aspects of learning and memory.” But this is science liberals don’t like. And so it is largely ignored.

For years, liberals have complained that conservatives ignore science. The truth is that mainstream conservatives often refuse to accept dubious science (e.g. global warming and population bombs). Far more often, it is liberals who ignore hard science in order to promote their agenda of irresponsibility, consequence: free living, and destruction of traditional family values.
The Irony meter is off the scale!
But really... This breaks down to "Liberals support icky sexual practices and want our kids to become sluts!" Once more we see, this isn't an attack on "Science" this is the far right attempting to use scientific means to further their own agenda. They have a right to try of course, but I don;t really see where Liberals are 'attacking' science...
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Darth Wong »

Why do you even quote anything from townhall.com? Townhall.com is just stormfront without the honesty.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Exonerate »

Even accepting his argument that teenagers can't control their impulses, I fail to see how any alternative short of chastity belts would change anything. If teenagers can't be bothered to use a condom, how could abstinence education (Or not even that, perhaps) possibly work? Do they honestly believe teenagers would be better off unaware of the risks? Do they think if they don't explicitly tell teenagers how sex works, they won't be able to figure it out for themselves? Fuck, I knew middle school kids who could write and reason better than this guy.

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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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Want more? How about liberals’ bizarre insistence that men and women are identical, and that gender is merely a social construct?
Interesting that the author of this tripe uses the word "gender," since that specific term refers to the social differences between the two sexes. That, of course, depends on the culture, since gender roles in cultures around the world are different from one another. The word "sex" on the other hand refers to the biological differences. That's why they ask you for your "sex" on official forms rather than your "gender." This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Plus, when he talks about science proving that adolescents have no inhibitions, I was half expecting him to cite some real figures, statistics, studies, or articles, and instead he gives us some vague quote by some guy and describes how teens don't have fully developed brains without any citations whatsoever. I'm not impressed with his "scientific" argument.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Alyeska »

A better title would be the Liberal War on Morality. Republican Morality has never had a basis in Reality or Science. Obama's views are backed up by scientific studies and comparisons of abstinence programs compared to safe sex programs. While undoubtedly Obama has torpedoed Good Old Fashioned Morality with these initiatives and certainly qualify as a War on Morality, it is anything but a War on Science. The Conservatives can't even get their own terminology right anymore.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Patrick Degan »

Alyeska wrote:A better title would be the Liberal War on Morality. Republican Morality has never had a basis in Reality or Science. Obama's views are backed up by scientific studies and comparisons of abstinence programs compared to safe sex programs. While undoubtedly Obama has torpedoed Good Old Fashioned Morality with these initiatives and certainly qualify as a War on Morality, it is anything but a War on Science. The Conservatives can't even get their own terminology right anymore.
Oh, they have their terminology right —after a fashion. They've just redefined it in their own terms: science which supports, or appears to support, "right-thinking" conservative views is "good" science; science which says they're full of bullshit is, of course, "junk" science (like, for example, global warming) and therefore of the Devil or liberals (used interchangeably, I suspect). It's all a matter of what conservatives (not all but a lot of them) screen through their mental filters for ideology instead of fact.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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Alyeska wrote:A better title would be the Liberal War on Morality. Republican Morality has never had a basis in Reality or Science. Obama's views are backed up by scientific studies and comparisons of abstinence programs compared to safe sex programs. While undoubtedly Obama has torpedoed Good Old Fashioned Morality with these initiatives and certainly qualify as a War on Morality, it is anything but a War on Science. The Conservatives can't even get their own terminology right anymore.
But is it a war on morality, or a war fought over the definition of what morality is?
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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I hate to sort of derail the thread; but when I read the title; I started thinking bad thoughts about what a Liberal war on Science meant.

I guess they meant the wars against aerospace science (ABM, and SST); and Nuclear Science (nuclear energy is bad! Yucca mountain is bad!).

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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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There’s only one problem: science shows that adolescents simply don’t have the brains to use condoms. Literally. According to virtually all scientific studies concerning adolescent neural mechanisms, teens are biologically incapable of inhibiting risky behavior. “(T])e major sources of death and disability in adolescence are related to difficulties in the control of behavior and emotion,” explains Ronald E. Dahl, Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Although adolescents’ brains have developed enough to allow them the capacity to reason better than children, adolescents are biologically driven toward risky behavior and sensation-seeking by their functionally mature limbic systems. And the part of the brain that generally controls such risky behavior -- the prefrontal cortex -- is not yet fully developed. In other words, despite the fact that teenagers are smart enough to recognize the dangers of risky behavior, their brains ignore the risks when things get hot. Thus, teenagers are morons.
Oh, I see. So instead of teenagers just doing risky sex as instructed by their testicles, they'll be foolishly doing it without the STD preventation instruction provided... to... them?
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Prannon »

Zablorg has a point. The author attacks the idea that "education is the best contraceptive" by saying that it goes against scientific evidence that juveniles don't act on knowledge but on their hormones. Ok, so you make that point, but how does that in any way solve the problem of teenage pregnancies? If that idea is wrong, and somehow constitutes a war against science, then you'd still have teenagers acting on hormones just the same, only now without any knowledge or contraceptives to battle teenage pregnancies.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Teebs »

I'm pretty sure there have been repeated studies showing lower teen pregnancy rates in places with better sex education, so the author is lying anyway. I've also never heard of any scheme in Britain for condom passports for 12 year olds, and why on earth would they be picking them up from barber's shops?!
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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MKSheppard wrote:I hate to sort of derail the thread; but when I read the title; I started thinking bad thoughts about what a Liberal war on Science meant.

I guess they meant the wars against aerospace science (ABM, and SST); and Nuclear Science (nuclear energy is bad! Yucca mountain is bad!).

....I know, I'll go back into my corner now.
If only you'd done that thirty seconds earlier? :)

Anyway, I didn't read past the hilarious conflation of 'liberals' internationally. Clearly, Barack Obama's commitment to science is best measured by ... a UK government program about ... sex.

Hmmm.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

Post by Oskuro »

It's just like the missing link evolution rebuttals, searching for flaws in an idea and subsequently claiming the whole thing is useless, with some attacks on the character of liberals (as if that had anything to do with it) thrown in the mix.

Your usual misleading drivel, hoping to bring people over to their side by having them reject the opposing side rather than accept their.
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Re: The Liberal War on Science!!!

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MKSheppard wrote:I hate to sort of derail the thread; but when I read the title; I started thinking bad thoughts about what a Liberal war on Science meant.

I guess they meant the wars against aerospace science (ABM, and SST); and Nuclear Science (nuclear energy is bad! Yucca mountain is bad!).

....I know, I'll go back into my corner now.
Shep, I would attribute the later to BANANA. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They might have had more luck with Yucca mountain if they had simply designated it by an alphanumeric code so it didn't sound like there was actually anything there.
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