1. OMG, The Earth Has Warmed For Reals
I know there are hardcore spectics out there that don’t think that warming is occurring but I think the vast majority of folks are more skeptical of the anthropogenic argument than the actual warming. “Proving” that warming is occurring or has occurred is just fine, the planet has done so many times in its history. And another thing: why would any climate scientist, given the checkered recent history of shoddy peer review and politicization, even think about deviating from the standard peer review process by doing what they have done and inviting fanfare and attention to their work prior to extensive peer review? Also, I thought this was settled science as of like 2008 or something. They’re still doing studies on this?
2. Google Gets a Gold Star
Great big gold star for Google, but while the requests they can disclose are a great thing, I’m really far more concerned about the more than 50,000 requests issued via “National Security Letter” or the other “requests” Google is forced to cooperate with thanks to the sweeping powers granted to the federal government to combat terrorism.
3. Can We Just Agree That Everyone Is Crazy?
The war over who is more anti-science continues to rage on. Kind of funny to watch. Still a plague on both their houses; religion and irrationality take many guises and can never be purged entirely from the human condition. It’s the folks who want to compel me to do something about their irrational beliefs that ought to be publicly derided.
@3: I'm not even sure what the point of this is. First of all, what kind of division is this? According to actual data and not this person's clearly biased perceptions, most university professors believe in a higher power.
ReplyDeleteCertainly there are people that have irrational beliefs about everything, but you get no where by slinging accusations of which side of an ideological divide is anecdotally "more" irrational. This is a ridiculous response to the equally ignorant and close minded pieces that come out on the left decrying religion as irrational.
Ultimately you have it right - people are free to believe what they want as long as they aren't imposing it on other people. It only becomes a problem when you have some climate fanatic in office trying to regulate business (Gore) or bigots in power trying to tell people there is no god and outlawing all religion (China).
3) "But what real-life problem is caused by people who believe otherwise? Does it affect any of their important behaviors in life? Do they not take their children to doctors? Do they oppose medical research? Do they reject scientific discoveries that affect our lives? No. Not at all." - Not one of these comments regarding young-earth fundamentalists is valid. Some do not believe in medical treatment (or in vaccination, etc). Some do oppose medical research (believing it against God, immoral, etc). And they definitively reject science that changes our lives (evolution, geology, etc). This is another case of the author smelling like a christian apologist who can't bring himself to decry the loonies among his ranks.
ReplyDelete3) @ Aurelius: "It only becomes a problem when you have some climate fanatic in office trying to regulate business (Gore) or bigots in power trying to tell people there is no god and outlawing all religion (China)." Or legislators seeking to bar same-sex unions at the federal level because ancient Jews said that it's wrong (when they weren't committing acts of genocide at the behest of their God, that is), or other legislators opposing partial birth abortion bans for reasons of liberal ideological purity, regardless of the survivability of the infant being terminated.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem with both of the extreme perspectives on this is that they assume the worst of one another (and of course have good reason to). I think a far better approach is to view religion or radical secular politics as a gateway drug to unbridled insanity.
There you hit the crux of the problem. They don't just think the worst of one another (one extreme thinking the worst of the other extreme)- the extremes think the worst of everyone that sits on the other side of the middle (and sometimes those that are on their own side but too close to the middle and thus not "devoted enough" to the cause).
ReplyDeleteWhether it be the religious fundamentalists or the leftwing analogue that demonizes all organized religion and politicizes science, the real irrationality lays not just in the arguments they espouse but in the willingness to define the entirety of their opposition by the views of the most radical. This essentially cuts those that are not extremely polarized out of the debate and makes intelligent discussion an impossibility.
They get the most press, but what we should be doing is ignoring the outliers on either side.