Taking a position in favor of a candidate is not hate. Democracy is powered by civic engagement. People who professionally write bear a joint responsibility to be civic, to make cases, explain them.
Semi true. When both sides are engaging civically yes. If one side is acting partisanly or in bad faith, using demagoguery & deceit, civics is to call out the dis-ingenuousness & descent from reason.
> it pursues moderation and consensus.
Including moderation of bad actors & fanatics when necessary.
> Taking a position for or against a candidate (as in, not just e.g. a few policy positions from any given campaign) is the very opposite of actual, genuine civic engagement. reply
Obviously [insert explitives here]. Entirely bogus conclusion that in no way follows from some weak & very partial but slightly somewhat true origins.
And conversation here on HN is very restrained. When this news hits other social media, there will be more claims that Trump is stupid, Republicans are stupid, and any independent who is considering voting for a Republican is stupid.
So, yes, this article has unleashed a new wave of hatred in the world.
I have nothing against professional scientific writers writing a letter to the New York Times, or even writing an editorial there. In fact they should. I agree with you that it's good when they correct a specific claim with scientific evidence.
This is something else.
This is the whole Scientific American organization putting their stamp of approval on the idea that Republican voters are stupid.
> The group who names MSNBC as their main news source is far more likely than the Fox News group to answer correctly that the coronavirus originated in nature rather than a laboratory and that it will take a year or more for a vaccine to become available. On both questions, the portion in the CNN group to answer correctly falls between the MSNBC and Fox News numbers.
> About three-quarters (76 percent) of those who name Fox News as their main source are conservative Republicans and Republican leaners, while 57 percent who name MSNBC are liberal Democrats and Democratic leaners.
https://www.journalism.org/2020/04/01/cable-tv-and-covid-19-...
That hasn't been proven either way, and probably never will be.
And journalism.org's linked source is not scientific evidence, but rather a "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19". I guess they mean "answer politically correctly".
I'm not going to accept a couple of downvoted outbursts as evidence of a problem. it's hard to guess who might leave such comments & whether they are even authentic. I'm not even going to judge a lot of these people even if they are authentic & being mean. I don't know what they have experienced & perhaps they have some good reasons to be so upset as to have become uncivil.
> So, yes, this article has unleashed a new wave of hatred in the world.
That you don't like how they feel & seem scared of it is not what civics is about.
You are right though, that mentioning this kind of deeply politicized mistreatment of science will stir anger in some people, often anger people already harbored. Perhaps some of that hate is due. Perhaps uncivil forces are acting with greed & profiteering, destroying earth's resources & legacy, plundering our shared inheritance.
I must have misunderstood what you meant.