Mathematical, scientific and technical truth IS often one-sided. Our contemporary media like to pretend that “there are two sides to every story” because it makes their lives easier — and, when one of the sides is obvious raving nonsense, it makes for controversy, which is good for ratings/sales. They claim that this is “balanced” and “fair”, which is disingenuous and entirely self-serving.

That’s why (just about) every calm scientific debunking of, oh, let’s pick this Mayan calendar bullshit that many pathetically stupid people are buying into as an example, is bookended by some idiot with woo-woo pseudoscience claiming that no, really, it’s going to happen, mainstream scientists are suppressing it, it’s a conspiracy, blah, blah, blah. This is why you see morons arguing for creationism, ignorant assholes denying anthropocentric global warming, and con artists flogging the merits of astrology.

And this in large part is why, early in the 21st century, your average American is a mathematically/scientifically/technically illiterate bozo who lacks even the slightest trace of critical reasoning skills. (And why your average Congresscritter can get away with trumpeting their own profound ignorance of even the merest basics of how the Internet works.) As Isaac Asimov said, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

And this is why we have people who have never solved a partial differential equation, never built a linear amplifier, never configured an authoritative resolver with BIND, never worked through the Krebs cycle, never calculated the static load on a beam, never done any of the thousands of things required to achieve a baseline level of competence in biology or hydraulic engineering or network design, with the audacity to believe that they’re worthy to hold opinions — and what’s more, to impose those opinions on others.

In this particular case, there’s a reason why the experts have lined up as they do. They’re right.