Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.
Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.
It doesn't and yet it does. Primarily because big oil dumped a bunch of money into conservative media to demonize the EPA.
The EPA was originally put into place by richard nixon as was championed in a bipartisan fashion.
Because the right is trying to dismantle all those things
I suspect it's a minority of people on the right, and frankly, I've known people on the left (in Canada, at least) who antagonize science and various institutions for no other reason than gut feelings. People on extreme ends of political spectrums are problematic, period. They've always been present, but the Internet amplifies their mania to all of us like never before
Yes, extremes are problematic - marxism as left-left or fascism as right-right. At the moment though USA surely has a problem with the latter.
Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence. Humanity has many examples of this happening through millennia, it is widely documented...
> Conservative people tend to protect their believes, no matter how wrong they are based on new evidence.
You can replace the label "Conservative" there with just about any ideology or political leaning.
Kind of, but also, I've been watching my mainstream liberal friends update their beliefs about stuff, while conservatives still seem stuck. Certainly the point of being "progressive" is about being open to new ideas, and they don't entirely fail at their title. At least in America at the moment, I think the conservatives have it worse.
I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin.
I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.
The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.
> Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess
I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.
I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.
It's subtle at best in "vocal views". I'm getting this mostly from casual conversations.
Interesting point. I've generally intuited that the left would have carried on down that road were they to win the last election, but I could be wrong. And there has been a bit of a recoil from that kind of behaviour, so you're right about that.
They were already starting to pull back from the worst of the cancelly stuff starting a few years ago. It only took a few years before they realized that a lot of it was blatantly self-contradictory (e.g. broad representation in media is impossible if people are only "allowed" to tell "their own" stories). And they might also have gotten the hint that they were scoring a lot of own goals.
A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.
Likewise, I think a lot of the problematic stuff came from legitimately good ideas. They were just co-opted by bad actors, so to speak.
right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists. Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.
Conservatism as an ideology is intrisincally resistant to change. That's what makes it conservatism.
It surely seem like it's way more frequently the issue with right, rather than left. For example there are few if any examples of interfering with scientific work during the Baden administration, while there are many during the Trump one.
> protect their believes
Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..
In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.
This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.
Because the current right-leaning US administration (ok, some would call it far right - or rather, if you would go by the standards of pretty much any other country, you'd have to classify it as far right) is so fond of conspiracy theories and rejects science? But yes, in principle I agree that accepting scientific consensus shouldn't be a partisan issue...