Nevermind trying to prove their case using facts. That attempt has failed miserably, and the resulting "science" from these skeptics contain enough big words to fool the average FOX News zombie, but not much of anyone else.
When you don't have the facts on your side, arguments like this are what you have to resort to. This is no different from the e-mail "scandal" from a couple of years ago. Ignoring the facts of the matter and arguing "the facts are wrong because THOSE GUYS ARE BIASED! THEY DON'T AGREE WITH US! THAT PROVES IT!!!!!!" is really all the anthropogenic climate change skeptics have left to argue with, so that's what they use.
You know, the whole voting thing? The founding fathers debated among themselves as to whether the Supreme Court should be allowed to decide on the constitutionality on laws. Three of them flip-flopped on the issue. What they agreed upon was that the primary means of dealing with this kind of crap was informed citizens using the power of the vote. So yeah, there is a mechanism for punishing lawmakers who pass unconstitutional laws, but the flaw in this is that it doesn't work very well when a multibillion dollar propaganda machine (Fair and BalancedTM!) is actively working to misinform the public.
The matter of what is and isn't science isn't so cut and dry as people think. There are scientists and philosophers who do nothing by try to answer the question of what is and is not science. According to some who study this question, creation theory is a scientific theory, it's just a debunked scientific theory like luminiferous aether. According to them, creation theory is science because it is falsifiable and in fact has already been falsified.
America has spent the last few decades transferring massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. The middle class is shrinking, the ranks of the poor are growing, and we have reached the point where half of Americans are living on twice the poverty level or less. Many large corporations such as Best Buy have spent a lot of money to bring this about, and now that the middle class is shriveling, there are fewer customers with sufficient disposable income to purchase thousand dollar televisions.
This is hardly the only reason Best Buy is in trouble. It is but one of many. But many of those large corporations who have worked so hard to screw over the middle class are dependent upon the middle class having enough disposable income to buy their products, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
If someone points out that people who use certain words in certain ways are racist, that does not count as censorship, despite what they tell you to think on FOX News. You know what else? Pointing out that someone has said something racist is not "exactly as bad" as, say, arresting filmmakers for the crime of presenting opposing points of view.
The second amendment as we know it started out as an amendment forbidding the government to maintain a standing army in times of peace (many founding fathers considered standing armies to be a threat to freedom). The original wording was about maintaining militias to fill in for the lack of a standing professional army in times of peace. The wording got hacked down to what we see today. Heck, in their day, militia members didn't even store their militia weapons in their own homes; they stored such weapons in armories.
Guns should be legal because most citizens want them to be legal, but to claim that individual gun ownership should be legal because of the second amendment is a bad argument based on a lie.
You evilutionists can't fool me! Everyone knows diseases and infections aren't caused by "invisible tiny creatures", but by demons! You are just trying to fool everyone into buying your useless devices so you can raise more money to promote your atheist-satanic-Muslim agenda! Admit it! [/tongueincheek]
I assume many here like me engage in conversations with people who are... even less up on science than we are (and most of us here are very far from being actual scientists). This is a good opportunity to clear up a very common misconception I find among the less scientifically literate. Too many people think that once something has been published in a peer-reviewed journal that you can take it as fact, and this is simply false. Getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning of the peer review process, and one of the most important parts of that process is independent replication of results by other researchers.
If you participate in any other Internet communities, perhaps this article will provide a good opportunity to have that particular discussion about the peer review process.
Most pre-meds go on to become doctors. To be relevant, your comment would have to focus on those pre-med students who go on to become medical researchers. I'm as concerned about the current state of medical research as anyone, but I can't let this argument slide. I believe scientists would call this "bad sample selection" or somesuch.;)
Physicists get cranky if you show them research with p values higher than one in ten thousand, but medical research routinely produces p values as high as 0.2. On top of that, you have a large number of wealthy corporations who have powerful financial motivations to influence the results of medical research fraudulently, which probably doesn't come up as often in other fields. There has been a lot of news about problems with medical research lately, mostly because the medical research community itself is discussing these issues, which is a promising sign.
What is it about liberal ideology that makes us want to align with a group of large corporations to screw over large numbers of individuals just to line the pockets of said corporations? I thought liberals were bad people for doing precisely the opposite. Make up your minds!
Sweden was very successful in reducing the amount of prostitution by implementing a new strategy. They stopped arresting prostitutes, and started aggressively arresting their customers instead. Those found guilty of purchasing sex had their names published. I do not think such a strategy would work very well on consumers of porn.
If we lose bees, we do not lose all our crops overnight.
What happens instead is that the number of humans we have to devote to food production increases dramatically. Without bees or a decent substitute for bees, we would have to pollinate crops by hand, which is a very labor-intensive process. While this will not result in human extinction overnight, we are talking about a very drastic change in the kinds of civilizations we are capable of having. The less of your population you have to devote to food production, the more advanced your civilization can be.
If we had to suddenly devote a lot more human labor to food production, there would be profound effects for all of us for generations to come. We're talking about pretty scary stuff, but nowhere near as extreme as the complete loss of agriculture overnight.
This is very serious stuff, and I think we should err on the side of caution and ban these pesticides, but suggesting the instant loss of regular plant-based agriculture is a bit Henny Penny.
At least one professor was fired for publishing research that suggested that fracking is unsafe. Given that, I'm going to assume that most of these studies paint fracking in a better light than it deserves to be.
As long as those millions are out there polluting the dialog with those lies, we need to point out that they are lies at every possible opportunity. Yes, it would be preferable if these kinds of comments were not necessary, but they very much are. Just look at the fellow below who is making more or less the same argument I just lampooned.
Even after I pre-emptively mocked him for it.
Which brings up the point of my other comment about birthers. I did not make that comment to make fun of the birthers (that was a side benefit), but to mock rightists for their use of the "libruls are just as bad" double fallacy that they seem to pull out in every danged argument. Even if liberals really are just as bad (and they never are in the examples used), the argument still has a tu quoque fallacy at the bottom of it. I have found in other message boards that if you mercilessly lampoon the "liberals are just as bad" argument often enough, the number of rightists using that doubly fallacious argument decreases, but it goes back up as soon as you back off from mocking them using ridiculous starwman posts such as I made above. Of all the cheap rhetorical gimmicks they use, this one needs to be nipped in the bud more than any of the others because it's starting to spread to liberals, and that really p*sses me off.
How can global warming affect the efficiency of nuclear power plants when FOX News told me that global warming is a myth created by a vast international conspiracy run from an obscure school in the UK? Who are you going to believe? 90% of the scientists on the planet, or FOX News? Obviously, one of the two groups is engaging in bad science for purely political reasons, and it cannot be FOX News. They would never lie to me!
Also, liberals are just as bad because they believe Obama was born in the USA. How gullible! [/rightwingstrawman]
According to a survey, 90% of scientists from the relevant fields and 90% of all scientists ascribe to anthropogenic climate change. That is what we call a "scientific consensus", and you don't get a consensus that strong without an awful lot of data to back it up. I know, I know, the good pro-science guys at FOX News and on the Rush Limbaugh show and from the rightist think tanks keep saying this is "bad science", but let's take a look at the "science" the rightists use to make their arguments, shall we?
The most prominent, most cited, and most published climate change skeptic scientist is one Ross McKitrick, who is either an amazingly sloppy scientist, or someone deliberately engaging in fraud in order to promote a purely ideological view. I'll let you read for yourself: http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/.
This guy who either literally doesn't know a degree from a radian or is deliberately doing bad science in order to deceive people is the best of the bunch. The others are even worse. It is on the basis of work by men of this caliber that you conclude that 90% of the scientists on the planet, representing people from every conceivable walk of life, economic status, nationality, set of political views, etc. is part of a vast international conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? I was never entirely clear on what this vast, incomprehensibly complex conspiracy is actually supposed to do.
You rightists are the best minions the Corporatists could ever have asked for. Even after all that has happened so far, your only concern is "how can we transfer even more political power to the largest corporations?" Can we deregulate them further? Can we cut their taxes more? Golly, transferring all that wealth and power to them over the last 30 years has been such a resounding success, we'd better do even more of it, eh?
Well, I'm sorry if it's getting old to you, but if you want to complain to anybody, complain to the corporations who engaged in this particular marketing practice. Because this marketing practice was used, we can never be certain if a positive comment about ANY corporation is legitimate or not. Pointing out this uncertainty may be tiresome to you, but the rest of us need to be reminded of it from time to time. There's no point in trying to kill the messenger; if you're going to get angry at anyone, get angry at the corporations who created this uncertainty by using this marketing tactic.
Cars crash. It's a fact of life. I would much rather use that thorium in a reactor somewhere, then transfer the power from the reactor to the car. You know, on account of the fact that stationary reactors are much less likely to crash and spew parts everywhere.
The previous king was often the only voice of reason on matters pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He was the only one to criticize both sides when they deserved it. The current king was not the crown prince, but the previous king changed his choice of successor at the last minute. Thankfully, king Abdullah has continued his father's tradition.
King Abdullah did things in his youth that he probably would not have done were he the crown prince. Things like appearing as an extra in a Star Trek: TNG episode. I believe that makes him the only monarch on the planet ever to appear in a Star Trek episode. Clearly, he is more of a Star Trek fan than I thought, and good for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind trying to prove their case using facts. That attempt has failed miserably, and the resulting "science" from these skeptics contain enough big words to fool the average FOX News zombie, but not much of anyone else.
When you don't have the facts on your side, arguments like this are what you have to resort to. This is no different from the e-mail "scandal" from a couple of years ago. Ignoring the facts of the matter and arguing "the facts are wrong because THOSE GUYS ARE BIASED! THEY DON'T AGREE WITH US! THAT PROVES IT!!!!!!" is really all the anthropogenic climate change skeptics have left to argue with, so that's what they use.
You know, the whole voting thing? The founding fathers debated among themselves as to whether the Supreme Court should be allowed to decide on the constitutionality on laws. Three of them flip-flopped on the issue. What they agreed upon was that the primary means of dealing with this kind of crap was informed citizens using the power of the vote. So yeah, there is a mechanism for punishing lawmakers who pass unconstitutional laws, but the flaw in this is that it doesn't work very well when a multibillion dollar propaganda machine (Fair and BalancedTM!) is actively working to misinform the public.
The matter of what is and isn't science isn't so cut and dry as people think. There are scientists and philosophers who do nothing by try to answer the question of what is and is not science. According to some who study this question, creation theory is a scientific theory, it's just a debunked scientific theory like luminiferous aether. According to them, creation theory is science because it is falsifiable and in fact has already been falsified.
America has spent the last few decades transferring massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. The middle class is shrinking, the ranks of the poor are growing, and we have reached the point where half of Americans are living on twice the poverty level or less. Many large corporations such as Best Buy have spent a lot of money to bring this about, and now that the middle class is shriveling, there are fewer customers with sufficient disposable income to purchase thousand dollar televisions.
This is hardly the only reason Best Buy is in trouble. It is but one of many. But many of those large corporations who have worked so hard to screw over the middle class are dependent upon the middle class having enough disposable income to buy their products, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
If someone points out that people who use certain words in certain ways are racist, that does not count as censorship, despite what they tell you to think on FOX News. You know what else? Pointing out that someone has said something racist is not "exactly as bad" as, say, arresting filmmakers for the crime of presenting opposing points of view.
The second amendment as we know it started out as an amendment forbidding the government to maintain a standing army in times of peace (many founding fathers considered standing armies to be a threat to freedom). The original wording was about maintaining militias to fill in for the lack of a standing professional army in times of peace. The wording got hacked down to what we see today. Heck, in their day, militia members didn't even store their militia weapons in their own homes; they stored such weapons in armories.
Guns should be legal because most citizens want them to be legal, but to claim that individual gun ownership should be legal because of the second amendment is a bad argument based on a lie.
You evilutionists can't fool me! Everyone knows diseases and infections aren't caused by "invisible tiny creatures", but by demons! You are just trying to fool everyone into buying your useless devices so you can raise more money to promote your atheist-satanic-Muslim agenda! Admit it! [/tongueincheek]
I assume many here like me engage in conversations with people who are... even less up on science than we are (and most of us here are very far from being actual scientists). This is a good opportunity to clear up a very common misconception I find among the less scientifically literate. Too many people think that once something has been published in a peer-reviewed journal that you can take it as fact, and this is simply false. Getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning of the peer review process, and one of the most important parts of that process is independent replication of results by other researchers.
If you participate in any other Internet communities, perhaps this article will provide a good opportunity to have that particular discussion about the peer review process.
Those creationists who aren't young earth creationists may very well believe in evolution.
The operative word there being "may". There are quite a few old Earth creationists out there.
Most pre-meds go on to become doctors. To be relevant, your comment would have to focus on those pre-med students who go on to become medical researchers. I'm as concerned about the current state of medical research as anyone, but I can't let this argument slide. I believe scientists would call this "bad sample selection" or somesuch. ;)
Physicists get cranky if you show them research with p values higher than one in ten thousand, but medical research routinely produces p values as high as 0.2. On top of that, you have a large number of wealthy corporations who have powerful financial motivations to influence the results of medical research fraudulently, which probably doesn't come up as often in other fields. There has been a lot of news about problems with medical research lately, mostly because the medical research community itself is discussing these issues, which is a promising sign.
What is it about liberal ideology that makes us want to align with a group of large corporations to screw over large numbers of individuals just to line the pockets of said corporations? I thought liberals were bad people for doing precisely the opposite. Make up your minds!
Sweden was very successful in reducing the amount of prostitution by implementing a new strategy. They stopped arresting prostitutes, and started aggressively arresting their customers instead. Those found guilty of purchasing sex had their names published. I do not think such a strategy would work very well on consumers of porn.
"We're protecting the people from porn" is the same excuse the Chinese government uses for its censorship of the Internet.
If we lose bees, we do not lose all our crops overnight.
What happens instead is that the number of humans we have to devote to food production increases dramatically. Without bees or a decent substitute for bees, we would have to pollinate crops by hand, which is a very labor-intensive process. While this will not result in human extinction overnight, we are talking about a very drastic change in the kinds of civilizations we are capable of having. The less of your population you have to devote to food production, the more advanced your civilization can be.
If we had to suddenly devote a lot more human labor to food production, there would be profound effects for all of us for generations to come. We're talking about pretty scary stuff, but nowhere near as extreme as the complete loss of agriculture overnight.
This is very serious stuff, and I think we should err on the side of caution and ban these pesticides, but suggesting the instant loss of regular plant-based agriculture is a bit Henny Penny.
At least one professor was fired for publishing research that suggested that fracking is unsafe. Given that, I'm going to assume that most of these studies paint fracking in a better light than it deserves to be.
As long as those millions are out there polluting the dialog with those lies, we need to point out that they are lies at every possible opportunity. Yes, it would be preferable if these kinds of comments were not necessary, but they very much are. Just look at the fellow below who is making more or less the same argument I just lampooned.
Even after I pre-emptively mocked him for it.
Which brings up the point of my other comment about birthers. I did not make that comment to make fun of the birthers (that was a side benefit), but to mock rightists for their use of the "libruls are just as bad" double fallacy that they seem to pull out in every danged argument. Even if liberals really are just as bad (and they never are in the examples used), the argument still has a tu quoque fallacy at the bottom of it. I have found in other message boards that if you mercilessly lampoon the "liberals are just as bad" argument often enough, the number of rightists using that doubly fallacious argument decreases, but it goes back up as soon as you back off from mocking them using ridiculous starwman posts such as I made above. Of all the cheap rhetorical gimmicks they use, this one needs to be nipped in the bud more than any of the others because it's starting to spread to liberals, and that really p*sses me off.
How can global warming affect the efficiency of nuclear power plants when FOX News told me that global warming is a myth created by a vast international conspiracy run from an obscure school in the UK? Who are you going to believe? 90% of the scientists on the planet, or FOX News? Obviously, one of the two groups is engaging in bad science for purely political reasons, and it cannot be FOX News. They would never lie to me!
Also, liberals are just as bad because they believe Obama was born in the USA. How gullible! [/rightwingstrawman]
Well, OK, maybe not all Christians are like the poster you responded to. Just the ones that watch FOX News.
According to a survey, 90% of scientists from the relevant fields and 90% of all scientists ascribe to anthropogenic climate change. That is what we call a "scientific consensus", and you don't get a consensus that strong without an awful lot of data to back it up. I know, I know, the good pro-science guys at FOX News and on the Rush Limbaugh show and from the rightist think tanks keep saying this is "bad science", but let's take a look at the "science" the rightists use to make their arguments, shall we?
The most prominent, most cited, and most published climate change skeptic scientist is one Ross McKitrick, who is either an amazingly sloppy scientist, or someone deliberately engaging in fraud in order to promote a purely ideological view. I'll let you read for yourself: http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/.
This guy who either literally doesn't know a degree from a radian or is deliberately doing bad science in order to deceive people is the best of the bunch. The others are even worse. It is on the basis of work by men of this caliber that you conclude that 90% of the scientists on the planet, representing people from every conceivable walk of life, economic status, nationality, set of political views, etc. is part of a vast international conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? I was never entirely clear on what this vast, incomprehensibly complex conspiracy is actually supposed to do.
You rightists are the best minions the Corporatists could ever have asked for. Even after all that has happened so far, your only concern is "how can we transfer even more political power to the largest corporations?" Can we deregulate them further? Can we cut their taxes more? Golly, transferring all that wealth and power to them over the last 30 years has been such a resounding success, we'd better do even more of it, eh?
Well, I'm sorry if it's getting old to you, but if you want to complain to anybody, complain to the corporations who engaged in this particular marketing practice. Because this marketing practice was used, we can never be certain if a positive comment about ANY corporation is legitimate or not. Pointing out this uncertainty may be tiresome to you, but the rest of us need to be reminded of it from time to time. There's no point in trying to kill the messenger; if you're going to get angry at anyone, get angry at the corporations who created this uncertainty by using this marketing tactic.
Cars crash. It's a fact of life. I would much rather use that thorium in a reactor somewhere, then transfer the power from the reactor to the car. You know, on account of the fact that stationary reactors are much less likely to crash and spew parts everywhere.
Sometimes, self-censorship can be funnier than spelling it out the normal way, you [expletive deleted].
The previous king was often the only voice of reason on matters pertaining to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He was the only one to criticize both sides when they deserved it. The current king was not the crown prince, but the previous king changed his choice of successor at the last minute. Thankfully, king Abdullah has continued his father's tradition.
King Abdullah did things in his youth that he probably would not have done were he the crown prince. Things like appearing as an extra in a Star Trek: TNG episode. I believe that makes him the only monarch on the planet ever to appear in a Star Trek episode. Clearly, he is more of a Star Trek fan than I thought, and good for him.