Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).

Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___

  • Swedneck
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    5 days ago

    i have yet too se anyone provide a good reason why i should care about free will at all

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Very fair point and I am fine with the knowledge that I don’t have much free will, but I do still believe we can affect change on our world, it’s just not the kind of decision making we think we understand. It’s just not a black-and-white thing, nothing in the universe really is, everything has a spectrum and so does free-will.

      If everyone has even a tiny speck of actual cognitive ability to make a choice that impacts us all, even if it’s the teeniest, tiniest impact, if you can get billions of people to make this small change, you could potentially have massive effects on the whole world. You may not have nearly as much conscious choice as you think about things like, what you eat for dinner, where you live and what your job is, but we still DO have a world with causality and it appears we can do things that have cause and effect.