Actually, the plans for the Eastern European conquest were mostly about getting raw materials and arable lands. Social programmes mostly pay for themselves in social peace and better health of the workers.
Bullshit. No one lives in a vacuum: the needs and hopes of everyone are similar enough. The politics of the US are very recognisable from Europe. We have those parties, except one of them would never go even remotely close to power. Not since the last war...
And there is a resurgence in the socially-conservative nationalist right in Europe. And it is worrying. But they are still far from power, though they have started to gain influence again.
Crises are bad that way. From your politics, one would think that the US has been in a state of economic downturn/stagnation, for most the population for a long time....
Yes, more people need to know this. Hitler was never elected: the schemes of the ultra-conservative religious right put him in a position were he could seize all power.
Unlike the US, we actually got the whole continent in ruins during WWII, Had a whole generation wiped out WWI, had a pretty horrible ware in 1870, and Napoleon invented the whole concept of world war. And yes, we also did the whole colonisation and genocide thing.
Basically, historically, we are the worse bastards ever to grace this not-so-peaceful Earth. So we know, deep in our bones, all the horrible mistakes you can make. We've been there. You want an absolute yardstick of what not to do? Look at us. We are that absolute yardstick.
And if you are trying for worse, well, I sure hope you fail.
Yes, and I was also unfair to Hitler: he actually had a sensible social plank to his programme (not the part which involved indiscriminate torture and killing, obviously). In fact, aside from the classical liberals, of which there are representatives everywhere in Europe, no party in Europe would dare have the economic and social policies of the GOP.
BTW, the so-called "classical liberals" in Europe are for some reason always focussed much more on the "keep gvt out of business" side of liberalism, and much less on the "keep gvt out of the bedrooms" plank. They are all-around hateful jerks, and thus never get elected anywhere. I guess they could follow the GOP lead and go all the way to "have the gvt tell you very intrusively what to do with your sexual organs", and thus become mysteriously more popular, despite being even more hateful jerks.
Obama's politics place him -- from the European point of view -- somewere around Merkel, probably somewhat left of Cameron. Clearly to the right of Hollande. He is between the European Aliance of Liberals and Democrats and the Eropean Popular Party.
In Europe, to his left, you will find the German Socialist party, parts of the UK Labour, all the other members of the Organisation of European Socialist Parties. All the mainstream parties from the Nordic countries (except the nationalists, who used not to be mainstream).
Yet more to the left, and sometimes a significant force in national politics, there are Ecologists, Marxists, unreformed Communists.
Further to his right, basically, you have the fascists/ultra-nationalists. Which is where the GOP is.
So from the point of view of every one else outside the US, Obama is a somewhat right-of-center candidate, and Romney is basically Hitler. So yeah, we root for Obama.
No, sorry, we all live in the same universe, and you do not get to pick what is axiomatic truth. For example, I think the debate on health care in the US was so bitter because it attacked a fundamental tenet of truth in what you would call the conservative system: markets supposedly self-regulate.
Now this is a statement of fact, and can be explored experimentally [1]. But for a US conservative, this is axiomatic truth. Yet health care is the ultimate and definitive example of market failure. It is blindingly and obviously evident: there are countless examples around the world of working socialised system, and the US one is a dismal failure, no matter how you look at it. Yet as long as you can pretend that less regulations would fix it, you can hold onto your beliefs. If it were to be fixed by government intervention, this would challenge not so much cherished views about individual responsibility, but the very axis around which the conservative universe revolves.
When you debate with people, you must first make a compromise on what constitutes proof or evidence. You must agree on what is logic. You must decide on the meaning of terms. Finally, you must accept that there is no such thing as axiomatic truth, that is, that in the course of the debate, your entire worldview might be challenged and defeated based on the standards of evidence you have agreed to. Yet debating conservative always comes down to "X is true because X is true". You may call that another system, but I call that pure unadultered bullshit which should be pointed at with a mocking and accusatory finger.
[1] or theoretically, there is a formal proof somewhere that the efficient market hypothesis is equivalent to P=NP... Make of that what you will, but though I believe in capitalism, it is clear lots of interventions and rules are necessary to keep it on the straight and narrow.
The number of page of regulations? Seriously? Aside from the fact that it is a silly measure of red tape (interestingly, batshit insane ultra-right like it too in Europe), and that it is really hard to measure: one long federal regulation, may replace many special state rules, and the total is a net win, I will say [citation needed], and please, I would like a time series to at least the Carter administration.
"Bush was not a conservative", No True Scotsman, much?
Anyone who sees no distinction between Stalin and Hitler is an ignorant idiot. Not to say that both were not monsters, but the way repression was organised was different, and the way the economy was organised was different, and the social structures were different. Know your dictators: you never know which type will come up next time (in the US, the Hitler type is more likely than the Stalin type, but either would be a global disaster)!
Anyone who thinks that "how" government power is used is irrelevant to "how much" is an idiot. Seriously. Principled opposition to X on the basis that "X is X" is basically how we get bigotry, racism, extremisms of all sorts. It is an abdication of intelligence in favour of unthinking decision. It is Evil.
Anyone who sees no difference between Ed Miliband and Cameron, or Hollande and Sarkozy or Prodi and Berlusconi or Di Rupio and Geert Wilders is an ignorant idiot. Sorry, but this is true.
Ignorance is never a valid point of view, and all your arguments come down to "I refuse to know the difference".
Claiming that the debate is about "how much government" is denial of reality: you are asking "how much" of something which does not have a proper metric. It doesn't mean anything -- any measurable thing you can think of as proxy for the size of gvt, you will find is in fact down under Obama.
Claiming success depends on the individual is wrong, plain and simple: the single most important factor in predicting success is the wealth of your parents, in the US. It also denies chance: sometimes, you need to be at the right moment at the right place, and this does not depend on you.
Claiming Obama tries to expand the government is a lie: in the midst of a crisis, federal payrolls are down, which is unprecedented, and in large part responsible for the sluggish recovery. Also Bush expanded the federal budget by unprecedented amounts -- was he a socialist?
Even your claim that right and left are defined differently in the US is incorrect: no left-wing US person thinks Hitler is left-wing, but they will admit Stalin was.
Basically, all that you think is fabrication. You seem to believe it, which is to me astonishing, and illuminating. I did not know literate people had this Weltanschauung.
Sorry, but from a European perspective, Obama is a rather right-wing guy. In fact from a Republican-from-twenty-years-ago, Obama is pretty much were they stood in terms of implemented policy.
What Obama is saying is that taxes are necessary for your business to exist, because your business relies on the infrastructure of the nation. That if you think that your sole hard work and ingenuity are why you are successful, you are deluded.
And he is right, there are many hard working, clever people who don't make it!
If he were the socialist you paint him to be, he would have pointed out the importance of luck, but he remains an American politician, very much to the right of the World's mainstream. Instead he only pointed out to the importance of the support you get from the surrounding society.
So no, he did not say what you think he said. And in fact what he said was not very left-wing at all.
Thank you for illustrating the fact that for Republicans, "truth" is whatever delusion fits their particular belief about what their imagination makes them think ought to have happened.
You said it yourself: it is not what Obama said, but what you think he should have said to be consistent with the image you have of him. Truth is irrelevant.
Politifact's "lie of the year" was not a lie, or at best a lie for a very very narrow definition of lie. They had to pick this particular statement and declare it a lie, because otherwise, they would have had to admit that the other party's line was pure fabrication.
And that would have made them "partisan".
Party A: We should do X, which is completely different than Y. This is our worldview. Party B: Party A's plan amounts to Y
Either A is lying through their teeth, and their entire plan is a sham, or B's statement is a lie. If you are politifact and decide A is lying, you can basically resign, because you have declared their entire worldview to be a fabrication (which it is), and comparing a false worldview with the occasional fib is pointless, or you save face and declare B to have lied in this instance.
See, the Obama case is clearly a huge lie: the sentence was ill-constructed and ambiguous, but the meaning was clear from context. The Romney one? Not so sure: he was talking about firing people providing services to him, in particular insurance providers, but by extension all manners of service providers. No one "likes" firing people. At least those of us who are not psychopaths... No one thinks of changing insurance as "firing".
You are trying to be fair, and to pretend both sides are equally guilty: not so. Only one side will outright lie...
Except they try so very hard to seem neutral that they put on the same level enormous lies which deny basic reality from one side with inexactitude from the other. So if you want a tally, politifact ain't it.
A good thing WP did for online discourse is to emphasise the need for citations. The bad thing is that people end up thinking citations are what counts. Not true: they must be good citations, as in reputable. But also, if I say something and back it up with logic, I need not have a citation -- except perhaps for the basic facts underlying the debate.
If I am wrong, you can tell by finding my logic faulty, or my model of the world lacking. If some guy tells you that "the FED has been debasing the dollar" by printing lots of money, and someone else responds by pointing out that inflation is low despite a trebling in monetary mass, you might want a citation for the trebling of the monetary mass. You should have some idea about whether inflation is high or low. But the basic point is that one worldview fits reality and the other doesn't, and that is how you decide who is likely right.
You can usually tell who has the big picture right and who is strung up on details...
This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!
There are issues where there are two sides. But more and more, people fight over _facts_ and this means that one side is right and the other wrong, and if you claim otherwise, you are delusional. There is no middle ground to the debate on the shape of the planet. If you say that gay parents cannot raise a child, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me there is no global warming, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me that the gold standard is a good idea, this is a statement of fact, that reducing taxes will increase revenues, and so on, and so forth.
All things amenable to experimental verification -- and in many case which have been previously experimentally checked -- should not be debated. Journalists should just mock the politicians saying stuff which is obviously false.
This is not how activities work: applications are attached to a desktop and an activity. Thus activities can be used group apps together, in a way which is orthogonal to desktops.
Changing activities is like changing virtual desktops, except you are changing groups of VDs (and also the widgets on them, but this is nice but to me secondary)
Think of it a groups of applications and desktop widgets between which you can switch.
For example, I find it convenient to have, say, an IDE, a web browser a couple consoles and relevant apps in an activity, and in another activity the word processor, another browser, perhaps a drawing programme.
I could do that on virtual desktops, but I like each group of apps spread over 3-4 virtual desktops. This is like a way of organising (in my case) 18 virtual desktops in 6 more manageable groups. Also, I don't want the twitter feed on all of them, and I want different directories on my desktop for each group.
It is more than evidence, but "truth" was ill advised as a choice of word. "Search for truth" would've been better.
From the point of view of science, the goal is to establish theories, and this is done through trying (and failing) to find evidence to disprove them. To me theories are truth -- but truth until they get superseded. People frequently say "but science has been wrong so many times in the past", but this is not true: each time theories were demoted to "models" (sometimes still useful, like Newton's gravitation, sometimes not, like the epicycles describing the movement of planets).
The Earth is flat: if you map a walk taking into account the curvature of the planet, you are a crazy person! The Earth is round: if you consider it flat when piloting an intercontinental flight, you are a crazy person! The Earth is a weird-shaped blob: if you consider it to be a perfect sphere when programming your GPS satellite, you are a crazy person!
Evidence only has meaning when illuminated by a theory, otherwise, it is noise. So "search for truth" it is:)
Parts of linguistics are maths. Maths themselves are a language. Language is a method for expressing abstract ideas.
This is why any notion of "maths is hard", "students don't need this or that" is evil. Mathematics are perhaps one of the things which makes us Humans, and denying this knowledge to students is to deny them part of their humanity.
Also, maybe if people understood stats better, politicians would get away with less bald face lies and irrelevant data;)
Sorry, but there are "sides". Specifically, they are "truth" and "belief". You are harbouring the misconception that belief is altered by argument. It isn't. Real, deeply held beliefs are who you are, and they exist mostly as markers of the place you hold in society. I find it wonderful that you believe that you can convince people to stop being who they are in favour of reason.
In reality, there is no one who in good faith believes that they know better than the absurdly overwhelming majority of scientists in a field unless they either have not really thought about it, also believe that the scientific process is bunk, or that some crazy conspiracy is going on. Only in the first case can you convince people, but these are easily spotted: they don't ask stupid and/or made-up crazy shit.
Finally, scientific thinking is not about questioning everything and repeating all experiments in a fit of paranoia. Instead, it is about looking at the theory used to explain the experiments, figure out what else this theory predicts, and running _these_ experiments to attempt to either disprove or refine the theory. A blanket "you guys don't know stats, therefore your calculations must be wrong" to hundred of thousands of people in climate science was ridiculous, and indeed, he did find exactly the results which were the field consensus. Duh.
At some point, you might as well be abusive. Moon vs Earth temperatures is a good an example as any he could give. The difference between the two? Greenhouse effect. More Greenhouse leads to yet higher average temperatures.
The whole debate is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about people fighting for their right to deny reality in exchange for clinging to their religious beliefs or a fat pay-cheque. There is no merit in that. No moral principle. The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
In some sense, the fact that this study was conducted was a huge gimmick: the outcome was obvious, and any scientist (yes even a physicist) who thinks he'll get better results than the guys from a field he's not from has a clearly overinflated ego.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the plans for the Eastern European conquest were mostly about getting raw materials and arable lands. Social programmes mostly pay for themselves in social peace and better health of the workers.
Bullshit. No one lives in a vacuum: the needs and hopes of everyone are similar enough. The politics of the US are very recognisable from Europe. We have those parties, except one of them would never go even remotely close to power. Not since the last war...
And there is a resurgence in the socially-conservative nationalist right in Europe. And it is worrying. But they are still far from power, though they have started to gain influence again.
Crises are bad that way. From your politics, one would think that the US has been in a state of economic downturn/stagnation, for most the population for a long time....
Yes, more people need to know this. Hitler was never elected: the schemes of the ultra-conservative religious right put him in a position were he could seize all power.
But the reference would be lost on many. Papen is not nearly reviled enough for what he caused...
Unlike the US, we actually got the whole continent in ruins during WWII, Had a whole generation wiped out WWI, had a pretty horrible ware in 1870, and Napoleon invented the whole concept of world war. And yes, we also did the whole colonisation and genocide thing.
Basically, historically, we are the worse bastards ever to grace this not-so-peaceful Earth. So we know, deep in our bones, all the horrible mistakes you can make. We've been there. You want an absolute yardstick of what not to do? Look at us. We are that absolute yardstick.
And if you are trying for worse, well, I sure hope you fail.
And they like intra-vaginal ultrasounds. Keep telling yourself lies, buddy: the US right is libertarian like I am turnip.
Yes, and I was also unfair to Hitler: he actually had a sensible social plank to his programme (not the part which involved indiscriminate torture and killing, obviously). In fact, aside from the classical liberals, of which there are representatives everywhere in Europe, no party in Europe would dare have the economic and social policies of the GOP.
BTW, the so-called "classical liberals" in Europe are for some reason always focussed much more on the "keep gvt out of business" side of liberalism, and much less on the "keep gvt out of the bedrooms" plank. They are all-around hateful jerks, and thus never get elected anywhere. I guess they could follow the GOP lead and go all the way to "have the gvt tell you very intrusively what to do with your sexual organs", and thus become mysteriously more popular, despite being even more hateful jerks.
Obama's politics place him -- from the European point of view -- somewere around Merkel, probably somewhat left of Cameron. Clearly to the right of Hollande. He is between the European Aliance of Liberals and Democrats and the Eropean Popular Party.
In Europe, to his left, you will find the German Socialist party, parts of the UK Labour, all the other members of the Organisation of European Socialist Parties. All the mainstream parties from the Nordic countries (except the nationalists, who used not to be mainstream).
Yet more to the left, and sometimes a significant force in national politics, there are Ecologists, Marxists, unreformed Communists.
Further to his right, basically, you have the fascists/ultra-nationalists. Which is where the GOP is.
So from the point of view of every one else outside the US, Obama is a somewhat right-of-center candidate, and Romney is basically Hitler. So yeah, we root for Obama.
No, sorry, we all live in the same universe, and you do not get to pick what is axiomatic truth. For example, I think the debate on health care in the US was so bitter because it attacked a fundamental tenet of truth in what you would call the conservative system: markets supposedly self-regulate.
Now this is a statement of fact, and can be explored experimentally [1]. But for a US conservative, this is axiomatic truth. Yet health care is the ultimate and definitive example of market failure. It is blindingly and obviously evident: there are countless examples around the world of working socialised system, and the US one is a dismal failure, no matter how you look at it. Yet as long as you can pretend that less regulations would fix it, you can hold onto your beliefs. If it were to be fixed by government intervention, this would challenge not so much cherished views about individual responsibility, but the very axis around which the conservative universe revolves.
When you debate with people, you must first make a compromise on what constitutes proof or evidence. You must agree on what is logic. You must decide on the meaning of terms. Finally, you must accept that there is no such thing as axiomatic truth, that is, that in the course of the debate, your entire worldview might be challenged and defeated based on the standards of evidence you have agreed to. Yet debating conservative always comes down to "X is true because X is true". You may call that another system, but I call that pure unadultered bullshit which should be pointed at with a mocking and accusatory finger.
[1] or theoretically, there is a formal proof somewhere that the efficient market hypothesis is equivalent to P=NP... Make of that what you will, but though I believe in capitalism, it is clear lots of interventions and rules are necessary to keep it on the straight and narrow.
The number of page of regulations? Seriously? Aside from the fact that it is a silly measure of red tape (interestingly, batshit insane ultra-right like it too in Europe), and that it is really hard to measure: one long federal regulation, may replace many special state rules, and the total is a net win, I will say [citation needed], and please, I would like a time series to at least the Carter administration.
"Bush was not a conservative", No True Scotsman, much?
Anyone who sees no distinction between Stalin and Hitler is an ignorant idiot. Not to say that both were not monsters, but the way repression was organised was different, and the way the economy was organised was different, and the social structures were different. Know your dictators: you never know which type will come up next time (in the US, the Hitler type is more likely than the Stalin type, but either would be a global disaster)!
Anyone who thinks that "how" government power is used is irrelevant to "how much" is an idiot. Seriously. Principled opposition to X on the basis that "X is X" is basically how we get bigotry, racism, extremisms of all sorts. It is an abdication of intelligence in favour of unthinking decision. It is Evil.
Anyone who sees no difference between Ed Miliband and Cameron, or Hollande and Sarkozy or Prodi and Berlusconi or Di Rupio and Geert Wilders is an ignorant idiot. Sorry, but this is true.
Ignorance is never a valid point of view, and all your arguments come down to "I refuse to know the difference".
Claiming that the debate is about "how much government" is denial of reality: you are asking "how much" of something which does not have a proper metric. It doesn't mean anything -- any measurable thing you can think of as proxy for the size of gvt, you will find is in fact down under Obama.
Claiming success depends on the individual is wrong, plain and simple: the single most important factor in predicting success is the wealth of your parents, in the US. It also denies chance: sometimes, you need to be at the right moment at the right place, and this does not depend on you.
Claiming Obama tries to expand the government is a lie: in the midst of a crisis, federal payrolls are down, which is unprecedented, and in large part responsible for the sluggish recovery. Also Bush expanded the federal budget by unprecedented amounts -- was he a socialist?
Even your claim that right and left are defined differently in the US is incorrect: no left-wing US person thinks Hitler is left-wing, but they will admit Stalin was.
Basically, all that you think is fabrication. You seem to believe it, which is to me astonishing, and illuminating. I did not know literate people had this Weltanschauung.
Sorry, but from a European perspective, Obama is a rather right-wing guy. In fact from a Republican-from-twenty-years-ago, Obama is pretty much were they stood in terms of implemented policy.
What Obama is saying is that taxes are necessary for your business to exist, because your business relies on the infrastructure of the nation. That if you think that your sole hard work and ingenuity are why you are successful, you are deluded.
And he is right, there are many hard working, clever people who don't make it!
If he were the socialist you paint him to be, he would have pointed out the importance of luck, but he remains an American politician, very much to the right of the World's mainstream. Instead he only pointed out to the importance of the support you get from the surrounding society.
So no, he did not say what you think he said. And in fact what he said was not very left-wing at all.
Thank you for illustrating the fact that for Republicans, "truth" is whatever delusion fits their particular belief about what their imagination makes them think ought to have happened.
You said it yourself: it is not what Obama said, but what you think he should have said to be consistent with the image you have of him. Truth is irrelevant.
Politifact's "lie of the year" was not a lie, or at best a lie for a very very narrow definition of lie. They had to pick this particular statement and declare it a lie, because otherwise, they would have had to admit that the other party's line was pure fabrication.
And that would have made them "partisan".
Party A: We should do X, which is completely different than Y. This is our worldview.
Party B: Party A's plan amounts to Y
Either A is lying through their teeth, and their entire plan is a sham, or B's statement is a lie. If you are politifact and decide A is lying, you can basically resign, because you have declared their entire worldview to be a fabrication (which it is), and comparing a false worldview with the occasional fib is pointless, or you save face and declare B to have lied in this instance.
See, the Obama case is clearly a huge lie: the sentence was ill-constructed and ambiguous, but the meaning was clear from context. The Romney one? Not so sure: he was talking about firing people providing services to him, in particular insurance providers, but by extension all manners of service providers. No one "likes" firing people. At least those of us who are not psychopaths... No one thinks of changing insurance as "firing".
You are trying to be fair, and to pretend both sides are equally guilty: not so. Only one side will outright lie...
Except they try so very hard to seem neutral that they put on the same level enormous lies which deny basic reality from one side with inexactitude from the other. So if you want a tally, politifact ain't it.
A good thing WP did for online discourse is to emphasise the need for citations. The bad thing is that people end up thinking citations are what counts. Not true: they must be good citations, as in reputable. But also, if I say something and back it up with logic, I need not have a citation -- except perhaps for the basic facts underlying the debate.
If I am wrong, you can tell by finding my logic faulty, or my model of the world lacking. If some guy tells you that "the FED has been debasing the dollar" by printing lots of money, and someone else responds by pointing out that inflation is low despite a trebling in monetary mass, you might want a citation for the trebling of the monetary mass. You should have some idea about whether inflation is high or low. But the basic point is that one worldview fits reality and the other doesn't, and that is how you decide who is likely right.
You can usually tell who has the big picture right and who is strung up on details...
This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!
There are issues where there are two sides. But more and more, people fight over _facts_ and this means that one side is right and the other wrong, and if you claim otherwise, you are delusional. There is no middle ground to the debate on the shape of the planet. If you say that gay parents cannot raise a child, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me there is no global warming, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me that the gold standard is a good idea, this is a statement of fact, that reducing taxes will increase revenues, and so on, and so forth.
All things amenable to experimental verification -- and in many case which have been previously experimentally checked -- should not be debated. Journalists should just mock the politicians saying stuff which is obviously false.
Not the same: I have sets of widows, spread over VDs. I can switch independently between VDs and activities. For example:
activity Mail:
desktop 1 : mailer
desktop 2 : IM and image viewer
on all desktops, a folder view of important documents
activity Waste Of Time:
desktop 1 : slashdot and patience
desktop 2 : amarok
on all desktops folder view of cat pictures and twitter feed
Activity Writing Stuff
desktop 1 : wikipedia
desktop 2 : word processor and reference manager
on all desktops, sticky notes.
I could add to that tiling, but I never was convinced by tiling: I actually like overlaps ;)
This is not how activities work: applications are attached to a desktop and an activity. Thus activities can be used group apps together, in a way which is orthogonal to desktops.
Changing activities is like changing virtual desktops, except you are changing groups of VDs (and also the widgets on them, but this is nice but to me secondary)
Think of it a groups of applications and desktop widgets between which you can switch.
For example, I find it convenient to have, say, an IDE, a web browser a couple consoles and relevant apps in an activity, and in another activity the word processor, another browser, perhaps a drawing programme.
I could do that on virtual desktops, but I like each group of apps spread over 3-4 virtual desktops. This is like a way of organising (in my case) 18 virtual desktops in 6 more manageable groups. Also, I don't want the twitter feed on all of them, and I want different directories on my desktop for each group.
Does it make sense?
It is more than evidence, but "truth" was ill advised as a choice of word. "Search for truth" would've been better.
From the point of view of science, the goal is to establish theories, and this is done through trying (and failing) to find evidence to disprove them. To me theories are truth -- but truth until they get superseded. People frequently say "but science has been wrong so many times in the past", but this is not true: each time theories were demoted to "models" (sometimes still useful, like Newton's gravitation, sometimes not, like the epicycles describing the movement of planets).
The Earth is flat: if you map a walk taking into account the curvature of the planet, you are a crazy person! The Earth is round: if you consider it flat when piloting an intercontinental flight, you are a crazy person! The Earth is a weird-shaped blob: if you consider it to be a perfect sphere when programming your GPS satellite, you are a crazy person!
Evidence only has meaning when illuminated by a theory, otherwise, it is noise. So "search for truth" it is :)
Parts of linguistics are maths. Maths themselves are a language. Language is a method for expressing abstract ideas.
This is why any notion of "maths is hard", "students don't need this or that" is evil. Mathematics are perhaps one of the things which makes us Humans, and denying this knowledge to students is to deny them part of their humanity.
Also, maybe if people understood stats better, politicians would get away with less bald face lies and irrelevant data ;)
Sorry, but there are "sides". Specifically, they are "truth" and "belief". You are harbouring the misconception that belief is altered by argument. It isn't. Real, deeply held beliefs are who you are, and they exist mostly as markers of the place you hold in society. I find it wonderful that you believe that you can convince people to stop being who they are in favour of reason.
In reality, there is no one who in good faith believes that they know better than the absurdly overwhelming majority of scientists in a field unless they either have not really thought about it, also believe that the scientific process is bunk, or that some crazy conspiracy is going on. Only in the first case can you convince people, but these are easily spotted: they don't ask stupid and/or made-up crazy shit.
Finally, scientific thinking is not about questioning everything and repeating all experiments in a fit of paranoia. Instead, it is about looking at the theory used to explain the experiments, figure out what else this theory predicts, and running _these_ experiments to attempt to either disprove or refine the theory. A blanket "you guys don't know stats, therefore your calculations must be wrong" to hundred of thousands of people in climate science was ridiculous, and indeed, he did find exactly the results which were the field consensus. Duh.
At some point, you might as well be abusive. Moon vs Earth temperatures is a good an example as any he could give. The difference between the two? Greenhouse effect. More Greenhouse leads to yet higher average temperatures.
The whole debate is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about people fighting for their right to deny reality in exchange for clinging to their religious beliefs or a fat pay-cheque. There is no merit in that. No moral principle. The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
In some sense, the fact that this study was conducted was a huge gimmick: the outcome was obvious, and any scientist (yes even a physicist) who thinks he'll get better results than the guys from a field he's not from has a clearly overinflated ego.