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The Scourge of Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience
Todhunter, Colin
http://countercurrents.org/2020/05/the-scourge-of-authoritarianism-in-the-age-of-pseudoscience/Date Written: 2020-05-05 Publisher: Countercurrents Year Published: 2020 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX24840 Questionable science is being used to pursue policies that are essentially 'unscientific' - governments, the policy and the corporate media have become the arbiters of 'truth'. Abstract: - Excerpt: Following the court decision in the US to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson (exposure to Monsanto's Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference: The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers. Johnson's lawyers argued over the course of the month-long trial in 2018 that Monsanto had "fought science" for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product. Long before the Johnson case, critics of Monsanto were already aware of the practices the company had engaged in for decades to undermine science. At the same time, Monsanto and its lobbyists had called anyone who questioned the company's "science" as engaging in pseudoscience and labelled them "anti-science". Subject Headings |