'Follow the science' means don't question me I'm on the side of science.
Quotes like 'I fucking love science.' belie a tendency to get caught up in science's many miracles such that one can be lead by corrupt institutions claiming scientific credulity.
The two quotes are used in the 'dark corners' you mention to mock naivety in the belief of purity in science.
It's equating a lot of positive attributes to being white, which is exactly what you'd expect to see from someone on the far right.
(And I am a traditionally left-leaning person)
When I was growing up the general idea was that there was a base reality and that we can perceive it to varying degrees based on our senses and other tools (e.g. electron microscopes). Postmodernism questions even the idea of a base reality and when you squeeze that lemon weird things shoot out like "lived experience" being more important than what actually happened.
Interestingly, to these same people if your "lived experience" is something you felt in church then you're just a moron who doesn't follow the science. But if your lived experience is within a set of approved narratives, it's 100% fact and we are allowed to riot over it.
At the time it was called just "science". Then new people entered the field, called the old things pseudoscience and started the cycle anew. I'd argue that not much improved, the social sciences was bad back then and are just as bad today and most of the things they preach today will be seen as totally wrong and ignorant and dangerous by the scientists of the future just like we view those of the past.
> Postmodernists like to respond [...] that both claims can be true because both are true relative to some perspective or other, and there can be no question of truth outside of perspectives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
[2] https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/philosophy/documents/f...
I wonder who the 'postmodernists' mentioned here are; for example, Foucault, who is often grouped under that umbrella, went to pains to say that just because multiple readings are possible, it does not mean that they are all valid from a single point of scrutiny.
It's also rather strange that the talk of 'postmodernists' is as if it's an academic movement rather than the state of the world today (e.g. see Azuma's analysis of otaku in Japan as symptomatic of the postmodern condition; the increasing reliance on trope and categorized personalities in modern media compared to the grand narratives of modernist literature). Theorists of postmodernism tend to argue four fronts: why we're living in a postmodern world, how we got here, and what that means for meaning (political, religious, cultural) and how to deal with that.
The people who usually decry 'postmodernism' are in general perfectly happy to live in the world that word describes, with its media and piecemeal, disconnected consumption and purchase of images and simulations lacking any real narrative. Even more absurd is the tendency for some of the same people to resist narrative (e.g. "no politics in video games").
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/965/960/38a...
I've seen nobody criticize the method in the abstract. I agree with the grandparent poster that that's troubling, if you've seen it.
What I've seen from the right is a skepticism of the institutions. I'll admit I share this sentiment to an extent, though my perspective is as a mostly ignorant outsider, trying to figure out who and what to trust.
I have seen criticisms of the peer review system, though it came from Eric Weinstein, not a right winger. And if I had to guess, he is concerned about climate change. I don't understand the peer review system well, but it makes sense to me that that if badly designed it could go horribly wrong.
I have a theory (I'm programmer, not psychologist) that with the pandemic there is a lot of emotions (fear, anxiety, anger, unknowns, etc.) floating around people's heads that get all jumbled up and they grasp for something that they can cling to which, however illogical to many, calms those fears to a manageable level. And then they find things online which support those ideas and they go deeper with them because it calms them to have "answers".
I see headlines of similar anti-vaxx, etc. things from US/EU and wonder if this is a western phenomenon? Are people seeing similar sentiments rising up in say Japan? Or other non-western countries?
Science isn't necessarily left but the left is scientific and the right is whatever the left isn't.
Yeah but is it? As someone who considers himself at least culturally left-leaning, I'm definitely seeing a worrying trend of moving away from the conviction that data, numbers, science, logic are valuable and desirable tools to interpret the world.
The fact that one of the catchphrases of the alt-right is "facts don't care about your feelings", as idiotic as that is, should really make you stop and think about what kind of worldview is being pushed.
My favorite example of some of the fallout resulting from this trend: the vilification and abandonment of nuclear energy by so-called environmentalists.
Of course nearly everything is politicized currently, and science has certainly been politicized in the past, (Galileo, Scopes Monkey Trial, Creationism in schools, etc.) but that doesn't make this latest round any less troubling.
I want to be clear here that I'm not suggesting that science is "left" or "right," or that the left is blameless here. (they're definitely not blameless) That said, I do think it's very interesting to see a strict attack on the scientific method itself, which is at least to my eyes seems new. For example in the old Creationism debates of the 90s and early 2000s, the certainty of specific scientific evidence is what was brought into question. Perhaps that was only because the debates had to happen in the public eye, and have some air of validity though.