I have written several times about the decline of science publications into propaganda outlets.
Scientific American is example #1 because it veered so far into advocacy journalism that it gave up all pretense to care about science.
Four years ago the magazine endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time, ostensibly because Donald Trump was so anti-science that the magazine had to stand up for the beleaguered discipline. This is ironic in many ways, not the least of which was that Trump’s biggest mistake during his four years was trusting people with alphabet acronyms after their names.
San Francisco PRIDE- A man lies in an inflatable pool of urine in The Fetish Zone where attendees are encouraged to pee on him. pic.twitter.com/f8dMdfeVCn
—
Edwin
(@Nuked4Every1) July 1, 2024
America would have been much better off if he hadn’t “trusted the science” because the “scientists” were government bureaucrats with a political agenda utterly divorced from the good of the country and its people.
Jay Bhattacharya is right, though, in noting that not one person will be persuaded by the magazine’s endorsement because the only people left reading the glossy trash are Harris supporters already. The rest of us look at this virtue signaling and sigh, sad that a once-great magazine has fallen so low.
The collapse of @sciam under editor @laurahelmuth in a morass of partisan anti-science has been sad to watch. I used to love the magazine when I was younger. Autopsy by James Meigs in @CityJournal.https://t.co/BJ5MXK9Xjc
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) May 6, 2024
I’ve long known about Scientific American’s decline, but decided to write about it after a truly absurd piece in which the authors argued that sex was invented by White Men in the 18th century. It was so absurd that I just had to throw in my $.02.
Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body. (6/7) pic.twitter.com/x8KZ5rEaeW
— Scientific American (@sciam) August 24, 2022
Yes, human beings reproduced by sticking their appendages into random holes and were often surprised when babies came out. Nobody knew the difference between an anus and a vagina until 1783 or something, and once they noticed they made the mistake of believing that sex was a thing.
Uh-huh. Yep. Makes sense to me.
I seemed to recall something about the Bible mentioning sexual differentiation in Genesis, but since Scientific American doesn’t employ a single person who bothered to read the Good Book, perhaps they missed that.
It’s also striking that marriages throughout history just randomly happened to pair males with females, but once I read Scientific American, I realized that “males” and “females” weren’t real so that is an illusion.
It’s sad that every major institution in the West is busy destroying its credibility because there is a reason why those institutions were created in the first place. A good public health agency is useful. A good science magazine for the people is useful. A legitimate government holds society together. An apolitical military is necessary to the survival of the country.
But what we have now is becoming or has become trash.
