• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The conservative education system makes a special effort to misinform/occlude information about certain natural facts of life for generations of people. So every graduation cycle or two, you’ve got a fresh faced cohort of brainwashed kids who have to find out about the gay penguins from 1912 for the first time, ten years after they’ve cemented their bias against homosexuality on “rationalist” grounds.

    We’ve been playing similar games with evolution since the fucking Stokes Monkey Trial. Identical debunked arguments showed up in The Panda’s Thumb over a century after they were ostensibly put to bed.

    You’ll periodically see this show up in regards to phrenology and eugenics, as well. All sorts of inane long-dismissed claims about how physiognomy clues amateur race-sleuths in to someone’s criminal intent or intellectual fitness or breeding capacity.

    Recycling pseudoscience and vaguely sourced gossip is also very popular in anti-abortion circles, giving us all sorts of zombie lies about pagan blood sacrifice of fetuses and elaborate plots to cull the white race.

    The dogmatism of western bigotry is baked into conservative ideology. You can find people dredging up the same old tired lies from the 19th century in arguments made before the US Congress and the Supreme Court to this very day.