As is common with TIME, Joel Stein?s humor proves more enlightening that Joe Klein?s political commentary.
Stein?s latest meditations ? on vaccinations ? prove useful in a couple of respects. First, he reminds us that distrust of science is a bipartisan phenomenon:
[W]hile the far right gets a lot of crap about not believing in science, the left isn’t crazy about it either. Only instead of rejecting facts that conflict with the Bible, it ignores anything that conflicts with hippie myths about the perfection of nature. That’s why my neighborhood is full of places you can go to detoxify with colonics, get healed with crystals and magnets and buy non–genetically engineered food. We complain less about the liberal side of antiscience because the women who believe in this stuff are generally hot.
Later, Stein reminds us why a left-leaning media and left-leaning academic community can prove so dangerous:
What I do know is that I’m pretty confident in the way I get my knowledge. Even in the age of Google and Wikipedia, we still receive almost all of our information through our peers. I believe in evolution not because I’ve read Darwin but because everyone I know thinks it’s true. When presented with doubts, I don’t search for detailed information from my side. I go with the consensus of mainstream media, academia and the government. Not because they’re always right but because they’re right far more often than not. ?
