• Five
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    27 days ago

    It’s important to remember Dave Van Zandt is not a social scientist, and is not qualified to run a ‘scientific’ political bias gatekeeping organization.

    DVZ identifies as an ‘independent voter’ but has an obvious right-wing political bias. To his credit, he understands the importance of reporting the consensus of the scientific community, rather than elevating fringe science and pseudoscience in the public consciousness.

    To DVZ, center-left means conservative Democrats, and center-right means Republicans. Every news agency, periodical, and lobbyist group he considers relevant he’s placed somewhere on his stunted spectrum, except for one category.

    Republicans have sought to defund NOAA, and attack science. Most Democrats at least acknowledge climate change is happening and many are trying to actively prevent it. Democrats are the pro-science party. Instead of placing NOAA and similar pro-science organizations on the left, he’s created a ‘pro-science’ category where publications exist outside the left-right political spectrum.

    Meanwhile, the scientific consensus is that LGBTQ+ people are not mentally ill or possessed by demons, they are people who deserve the same human rights as everyone else. The Human Rights Campaign is an American single-issue non-profit to promote the human rights of LGBTQ+ people in a non-partisan fashion. To wit, HRC has been criticized for occasionally supporting Republican candidates that support gay marriage, which is acknowledged specifically by DVZ. Instead of placing this advocacy group in the pro-science category, or in its own place elevated above the political spectrum, he has placed the non-partisan HRC on the out-of-center left of his political spectrum.

    LGBTQ+ people should not have the advocacy of their human rights categorized as a fringe political position, when other organizations for the advocacy of the consensus of the scientific community are above categorization. Lemmy.World’s !news and !politics mods are endorsing DVZ’s bigoted political beliefs by promoting his site as an authority in their communities.

    • @ayyy
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      627 days ago

      It’s important to remember that the bot is universally downvoted, so the mods had a thread asking how to deal with the bot and the users vastly, overwhelmingly agreed that the best action was to get rid of it. But the mods like how it pushes a right-wing agenda so they choose to ignore their community and push their own beliefs.