• quixotic120@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    90
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.

    Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”

    But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits

    The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking

    • protist@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      It’s an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships’ minds while ignoring all other cases

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      2 months ago

      Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.

      “They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!”

      “They’re looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!”

      I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked “pencillin was mocked as stupid” just out of interest. The third result (or first after “people also ask”) on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats

      Around and around and around

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      They don’t want groundbreaking though, unless it’s profitable. They want people to suffer unless they can profit from their relief. They don’t want the government funding this sort of research. They want the government funding their companies that then perform this sort of research at a 5000% mark-up.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      The Game Theory was considered useless at the time.
      It prevented a Nuclear WW3 for so many years.

      And it will still prevent stuff from going nuclear until enough world government officials become foolish enough to be unable to understand it.