• tburkhol@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I used to wonder how Lysenko pulled all of that off. Like, they were backward days in a backward country, and the whole world was still just kind of getting the hang of science. But now, here’s RFK Jr who doesn’t even believe in germs, filling our science administration with lackeys, half the country cheering him on, and I’m thinking that university grant departments are going to be getting Political Officers soon.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        half the country cheering him on

        Half seems like a vast overestimation. Most of the people around me are checked out and get uncomfortable when politics comes up. Go strike up a conversation with a stranger, ask them about current events and what they think is going wrong. More than any other thing happening, the price of groceries is what’s actually on their mind.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        It was all politics, just as it is now. People already very much knew how to conduct proper scientific endeavors, but the Communist Party wasn’t going to do anything so “bourgeois” as practice actual science.

        I’ve long thought of Republicans talking about “true conservatism” sounding almost exactly like the Communists in their delusions, now we see the culmination of their ridiculous ideology and their efforts to inflict it on everyone else.

        They now have their very own Lysenko. Hopefully it doesn’t get to the execution of Bobby Brainworm’s opponents:

        The official support emboldened Lysenko and gave him and Prezent free rein to slander any geneticists who still spoke out against him. After Lysenko became head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, classical genetics began to be called “fascist science”[28] and many of Lysenkoism’s opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or executed, although not on Lysenko’s personal orders.[29][22]

        The sheer insanity did not confine itself to only genetics, either. Keep in mind this was in the mid-20th century, FFS. Killing who knows how many millions as a result…