The police said that they the cost of revealing they can do this was worth paying given the potential prize of tracking this guy down. They made a trade-off.
It took you a long time to get there, but you did, by the end. There aren't enough trained linguists to capture the dying languages, and especially not when you consider the incredible richness of natural phenomena that many languages can describe:
"No, not *that* bug -- that's a wakapahita, you idiot. A wakapahita is good for women who suffer from shamadan during their menstrual cycle. What do you mean, what's shamadan? And of course you can't just eat the wakapahita raw -- you have to prepare it by grinding it with this special herb called tchatka, which is a particular shade of blue we call klest and looks very similar to this deadly herb called nargets. Tchatka is pretty rare nowadays because it needs the winter rains and they aren't reliable any more...". You get the picture. It takes an absolute age and an enormous effort to begin to capture this knowledge, and we just aren't bothering as a species, despite the potential value we are losing.
"You might argue that "prestige" doesn't capture the true essence of "mana", but I'd argue that you don't know the true meaning of "prestige". Unless you can articulate what's missing, you can't say there's a gap in the meaning. If you can articulate the diference, then you've demonstrated the English is perfectly capable of communicating the concept--- it just doesn't have a singular word for it."
There are plenty of examples of words that have no equivalent in English -- until they're co-opted into the language (eg gestalt, bungalow, oy vay, etc). While the ideas may be expressible in English, it may take dozens of words to get close to the meaning, and so at the least, there is a price to be paid in terms of inefficiency if we lose a language. And sometimes it will be impossible to describe the difference in English. A good example is how different languages treat colours. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language for more.
Finally, it seems a bit odd for you to exhort someone to RTFA while constructing an argument that ignores the article's central premise, which was that it *is* sad to see languages go extinct, because there *is* some unique value in having words to describe a concept. In particular, as the article pointed out, descriptions of local natural phenomena are lost, and we begin to see the world in undifferentiated terms, when local dialects that capture these phenomena go extinct. It might be true that we can re-create words to describe all the different types of love described in different human languages (eg platonic vs erotic from Greek), but we can't re-create words to describe the bugs, weather conditions, and medicinal plants in a locality without investing the hundreds or thousands of years of intimate knowledge that local residents had built up. This could matter in lots of ways, such as slowing the rate of discovery of new pharmaceuticals, a process which can sometimes piggyback off local knowledge.
You didn't push your analogy hard enough. Different communications protocols are designed to serve different processes, and it's true for languages as well. We are losing our knowledge of the natural world through the death of languages, a catastrophe that parallels our destruction of the heterogeneity of our planet.
It's your choice to walk away whenever you want. I'm not going to let your final word go unchallenged, though:
1) Rather than make assumptions about what you said, I quoted your very own posts back to you. 2) It's fascinating to know that you're prepared to continue to argue that you have the information you need to make a judgement that this chap is a lunatic, and exciting to see your allusion to your knowledge of additional facts about him that enable you -- a qualifed Slashdot poster, no less -- give an authoritative diagnosis of lunacy. Marvellous, you should be very proud of yourself. 3) Your third assertion is the best of all. I hadn't argued with you at all about this particular case -- instead, we'd been arguing about the treatment of mentally ill people in general. It's such a shame you won't be posting any more on this thread, because I'd love to hear your explanation of what law, exactly, this guy broke -- and especially whether you think he was breaking the law before the police dragged him away from the microphone, wrestled him to the ground, tasered him, and then dragged him out the hall. I suspect you thought that he broke the law because he didn't stop talking on the mic when the police officer asked him to. But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and thus countenance the possibility you had in mind something slightly less risible, a privilege you don't seem too keen to extend to him (or to mentally ill people in general).
Don't be silly. This isn't a bookshop, it's an archival store. You're buying not just the finished version of the book, but the associated working papers. The smaller potentail audience and high production costs account for the relative pricing.
"That's nice, but we're not talking about "many" lunatics, we were discussing this one particular crazy-ass individual, who is clearly not going to submit himself for treatment willingly." We might have started there but it's not where we ended. I stated a couple of posts ago: "While we're at it, I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people." And you replied "Because currently our only alternative is letting them run free. Given those two options, I deffinitely prefer to arrest them." Your use of the word "them" does not refer to "one particular crazy-ass individual", it refers to "mentally ill people" in general. Looks like I remember the thread better than you do. Incidentally, you have only very limited information -- agitated behaviour at a single event while being manhandled by a bunch of police officers -- and no training, to determine whether this guy is indeed mentally ill (a "crazy-ass individual"). Do you really think that his behaviour would have warranted his being sectioned?
Re your discussion of "arrest", you've just decided to define arrest to mean what you say it means, despite the obvious difference between placing someone in a secure health centre because they are ill and placing someone in custody because they're suspected of having committed a crime. Are you denying that this is a meaningful difference? Are you honestly trying to argue that when you read my statement "I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people", and responded by saying "our only alternative is letting them run free", you meant putting them in a secure hospital and not getting the police involved? I call bullshit -- it's clear from the context that you had the police in mind, not psychiatrists.
As for who said it was a crime to be insane, you argued that people who are insane should be arrested. I made the foolish error of interpreting that statement using the everyday meaning of the word "arrest", which involves the police, as opposed to your special definition that encompasses doctors too. And the police are only supposed to be arresting people suspected of crimes.
I'm ahead of you on two counts: I know something about how mental health services are organised (because I help to organise them), and I know what thinking is and am capable of doing it.
You clearly know fuck-all about mental health service.
Firstly, not all "lunatics" require being forced to have treatment. Many people with mental health issues willingly volunteer to have treatment, or can be persuaded. Secondly, placing someone in a secure facility may involve the police (called "sectioning" in the UK), but frequently does not -- doctors can arrange for it to be done, and it will typically involve a couple of beefy orderlys and potentially a sedative as well. Powers of arrest are there to be used by the police for criminal matters. It's not a crime to be insane, although insane people do commit crimes from time to time, of which a vanishing minority are serious (eg 50 murders a year in the UK committed by mental health service users out of a total of 700+ murders).
Our only alternative to arresting mentally ill people is to let them run free?!? Why yes, you're exactly right if you ignore the existence of all mental health care, including but not limited to primary care, community care, secondary and tertiary care (medium security, high security, forensic etc), plus various therapeutic modalities eg pharmacotherapy, psychiatry, expressive therapies (art therapy, music therapy) etc etc.
It sometimes pays to think before you type, y'know.
Well, they're free to ask the questions, and if they get no response, or the response is unsatisfactory, they can take their business elsewhere. Or lobby for legislation to make disclosure mandatory.
I'm all too aware of that, but you can either retreat behind the police and live in an authoritarian state, or have the balls to stand up to bad behaviour. I prefer the latter, and wish more people did too.
I prefer the good old days. If he pisses others off enough that they decide to chuck him out, or throw rotten tomatoes at him, all well and good -- and certainly better than involving the police.
While we're at it, I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people.
As the other poster pointed out, you appear to confuse "irritating" with "illegal". Of course it's rude not to allow other people the chance to question a politician, but it's ridiculous for it to be an arrestable offence.
I'm sure there are specific instances where that might be not appropriate, but it strikes me as a pretty good rule of thumb, yes. Can you suggest a general objection?
I'm sorry, but I don't follow the link. Just because someone's obnoxious and won't sit down and shut up when they're asked to, how is that any business of the state? It's not like he's endangering anyone's safety.
He didn't force them to pull him from the microphone. There was no need for the police to be involved at all. Time was, when people behaved in an unacceptable but not criminal manner, old-fashioned techniques like social opprobrium were brought to bear, rather than police officers and tasers. You know, like the crowd yelling at him to sit down and shut up, or Mr Kerry saying "you've had your say, let's let someone else have the same".
'There is no need to "regulate" [industry] per se so long imported products are inspected for safety and the information is passed on to consumers, the market will take care of the problem itself. Would you as a parent allow your child to touch any of those toys on the recal list with a ten foot pole? I think not and so those companies either clean up their act or go out of business. Companies pay attention when sales drop from millions of dollars to zero in the space of a day.'
Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? If safety inspections were enough to guarantee adequate quality of products, there would have been no need for a toy recall. Markets work on the basis of adequate, *timely* information. If you don't know in advance that the toy has got lead in it, then you can't choose not to buy it on that basis. The toy manufacturer may suffer loss of future sales, but that hasn't prevented the lead getting in the paint and potentially causing neurological damage in the first place, it's only lessened the likelihood of future problems.
I can't decide if you're being disingenuous or are just dumb.
1) C02 is a pollutant that causes an entirely different type of problem from heavy metals etc. The problem is different and has a longer timespan from cause to effect and is, of course, much more serious than other types of pollution. Go have the argument about whether climate change exists somewhere else. 2) Large chunks of developing world pollution and other environmental degradation, not to mention child and adult serfdom and slavery, exists because local companies are providing or finishing goods for US consumers at the lowest possible price. That's true in China (eg toys, computers, clothes), India (eg diamonds), Indonesia (eg palm oil), and Nigeria (eg oil).
There's another way of looking at this, though. We've all heard experts droning on interminably about the minutiae of their field of knowledge when called to discuss a news story. Experts are frequently unable to see the wood for the trees, and insist that you can only understand in issue if you have comprehensive knowledge of every last nuance. This is just as unhelpful to the interested lay reader as a journalist's story which, when simplifying, gets important facts wrong.
I think we should be clear about these things: "And any Human (whether Muslim or not) who kills another Human (unjustly), then Qur'an states that it's like he has killed all of mankind in the sight of God!" -- the Qu'ran is just quoting the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5: "For this reason, man [i.e. the first human being] was created alone to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as though he had destroyed an entire universe, and whoever saves a single life is as if he had saved an entire universe." (Lefikach nivrah adam yekhidi l'lamed'cha shehkol hame'aved nefesh ekhad ma'alah alav hikhtov c'ilu i'vad olam maleh...)
There are translations that attempt to get closer to the meaning of the original language. One of the best is by Everett Fox (it covers the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch or Chumash). It helps to convey the very remote nature of the people who wrote these books.
Funny you should say what you say about praying in an article referencing Israeli airline security -- El Al flights frequently have large groups of religious Jews praying at intervals throughout the flight.
As for the argument about preferring 1000 false positives to 1 false negative, that's all very well, but there's clearly a point at which the false positive rate becomes unsustainable and it stops being worth anyone's while to fly. This is exacerbated given the known issues in maintaining a clean no-fly / added-precautions list -- if all the false positives get added to this list, which seems quite possible on past form, you'll rapidly exhaust resources
And as you'd still have to explain the origin of the designer (where did God spring from?), you've not actually explained the origins of life by positing the existence of a designer.
1) Well, the people telling us to believe in global warming broadly = substantially all the world's scientists whose work covers climate change (ie atmosphere science rather than cellular biology). The people telling us not to believe amount to some mavericks, Michael Crichton, various right-wing politicians and some multi-billion dollar organisations who stand to face economic ruin if people start relying on less carbon-intensive energy sources. 2) You don't need perfectly corroborating data, you just need good data. And you don't need to actually see the data, if you are happy with the authority of those telling you about it. If a neurologist tells you that the evidence shows tPA is helpful for ischaemic strokes but not haemorraghic strokes, you'd be a bit fucking odd to doubt them and demand to see the raw data from the trials, especially when there's an absolutely plausible physical mechanism. 3) Well, it's true that some scientists may gain additional grants and even scientific prizes if their contributions to climate science are substantial. And I suppose Greenpeace may get some more members. But, come on, who are you trying to kid? Exxon's economic interest in a particular outcome is just a teeny bit larger, after all. 4) Bono may be a twat and a hypocrite. Al Gore may be a hypocrite. But they aren't sources, merely echoes of sources. The sources are the scientists who do the work.
Oh bollocks. Yes, he's putting pre-conditions on skepticism, but they're perfectly reasonable pre-conditions. Are you honestly saying that provenance makes no difference, and that a true skeptic listens to all sources of data equally carefully? Does that mean that you'll give equal weight to the thoughts of a paranoid schizophrenic in the diary they keep in their secure mental health insitution and the peer-reviewed conclusions of a Nobel Laureate reported in Nature?
I contend that you would have accepted the GP's pre-conditions if they had been suggested for any other realm of science (quantum mechanics; radiology; the behaviour of liquids under high pressure, to pick three random examples), and that the only reason you didn't accept them here was because you're all-too-aware that taking climate change science seriously could actually mean (horrors) that you suffer some personal discomfort. Well, time to take your head out of the sand (or your fat ass), because you WILL NOT avoid the discomfort. If it doesn't come now through the economic sacrifices of contraction and convergence, it will come later through the impact of substantially damaged ecosystems unable to support large human populations. It's happened to human civilisations before (eg Maya, Greenland Norse, Easter Islanders etc etc) and it's both pompous and idiotic to think that our problems may not be as severe as theirs.
Slashdot Mirror
The police said that they the cost of revealing they can do this was worth paying given the potential prize of tracking this guy down. They made a trade-off.
It took you a long time to get there, but you did, by the end. There aren't enough trained linguists to capture the dying languages, and especially not when you consider the incredible richness of natural phenomena that many languages can describe:
"No, not *that* bug -- that's a wakapahita, you idiot. A wakapahita is good for women who suffer from shamadan during their menstrual cycle. What do you mean, what's shamadan? And of course you can't just eat the wakapahita raw -- you have to prepare it by grinding it with this special herb called tchatka, which is a particular shade of blue we call klest and looks very similar to this deadly herb called nargets. Tchatka is pretty rare nowadays because it needs the winter rains and they aren't reliable any more...". You get the picture. It takes an absolute age and an enormous effort to begin to capture this knowledge, and we just aren't bothering as a species, despite the potential value we are losing.
"You might argue that "prestige" doesn't capture the true essence of "mana", but I'd argue that you don't know the true meaning of "prestige". Unless you can articulate what's missing, you can't say there's a gap in the meaning. If you can articulate the diference, then you've demonstrated the English is perfectly capable of communicating the concept--- it just doesn't have a singular word for it."
There are plenty of examples of words that have no equivalent in English -- until they're co-opted into the language (eg gestalt, bungalow, oy vay, etc). While the ideas may be expressible in English, it may take dozens of words to get close to the meaning, and so at the least, there is a price to be paid in terms of inefficiency if we lose a language. And sometimes it will be impossible to describe the difference in English. A good example is how different languages treat colours. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language for more.
Finally, it seems a bit odd for you to exhort someone to RTFA while constructing an argument that ignores the article's central premise, which was that it *is* sad to see languages go extinct, because there *is* some unique value in having words to describe a concept. In particular, as the article pointed out, descriptions of local natural phenomena are lost, and we begin to see the world in undifferentiated terms, when local dialects that capture these phenomena go extinct. It might be true that we can re-create words to describe all the different types of love described in different human languages (eg platonic vs erotic from Greek), but we can't re-create words to describe the bugs, weather conditions, and medicinal plants in a locality without investing the hundreds or thousands of years of intimate knowledge that local residents had built up. This could matter in lots of ways, such as slowing the rate of discovery of new pharmaceuticals, a process which can sometimes piggyback off local knowledge.
You didn't push your analogy hard enough. Different communications protocols are designed to serve different processes, and it's true for languages as well. We are losing our knowledge of the natural world through the death of languages, a catastrophe that parallels our destruction of the heterogeneity of our planet.
It's your choice to walk away whenever you want. I'm not going to let your final word go unchallenged, though:
1) Rather than make assumptions about what you said, I quoted your very own posts back to you.
2) It's fascinating to know that you're prepared to continue to argue that you have the information you need to make a judgement that this chap is a lunatic, and exciting to see your allusion to your knowledge of additional facts about him that enable you -- a qualifed Slashdot poster, no less -- give an authoritative diagnosis of lunacy. Marvellous, you should be very proud of yourself.
3) Your third assertion is the best of all. I hadn't argued with you at all about this particular case -- instead, we'd been arguing about the treatment of mentally ill people in general. It's such a shame you won't be posting any more on this thread, because I'd love to hear your explanation of what law, exactly, this guy broke -- and especially whether you think he was breaking the law before the police dragged him away from the microphone, wrestled him to the ground, tasered him, and then dragged him out the hall. I suspect you thought that he broke the law because he didn't stop talking on the mic when the police officer asked him to. But I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and thus countenance the possibility you had in mind something slightly less risible, a privilege you don't seem too keen to extend to him (or to mentally ill people in general).
Don't be silly. This isn't a bookshop, it's an archival store. You're buying not just the finished version of the book, but the associated working papers. The smaller potentail audience and high production costs account for the relative pricing.
"That's nice, but we're not talking about "many" lunatics, we were discussing this one particular crazy-ass individual, who is clearly not going to submit himself for treatment willingly."
We might have started there but it's not where we ended. I stated a couple of posts ago: "While we're at it, I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people."
And you replied "Because currently our only alternative is letting them run free. Given those two options, I deffinitely prefer to arrest them."
Your use of the word "them" does not refer to "one particular crazy-ass individual", it refers to "mentally ill people" in general. Looks like I remember the thread better than you do. Incidentally, you have only very limited information -- agitated behaviour at a single event while being manhandled by a bunch of police officers -- and no training, to determine whether this guy is indeed mentally ill (a "crazy-ass individual"). Do you really think that his behaviour would have warranted his being sectioned?
Re your discussion of "arrest", you've just decided to define arrest to mean what you say it means, despite the obvious difference between placing someone in a secure health centre because they are ill and placing someone in custody because they're suspected of having committed a crime. Are you denying that this is a meaningful difference? Are you honestly trying to argue that when you read my statement "I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people", and responded by saying "our only alternative is letting them run free", you meant putting them in a secure hospital and not getting the police involved? I call bullshit -- it's clear from the context that you had the police in mind, not psychiatrists.
As for who said it was a crime to be insane, you argued that people who are insane should be arrested. I made the foolish error of interpreting that statement using the everyday meaning of the word "arrest", which involves the police, as opposed to your special definition that encompasses doctors too. And the police are only supposed to be arresting people suspected of crimes.
I'm ahead of you on two counts: I know something about how mental health services are organised (because I help to organise them), and I know what thinking is and am capable of doing it.
You clearly know fuck-all about mental health service.
Firstly, not all "lunatics" require being forced to have treatment. Many people with mental health issues willingly volunteer to have treatment, or can be persuaded. Secondly, placing someone in a secure facility may involve the police (called "sectioning" in the UK), but frequently does not -- doctors can arrange for it to be done, and it will typically involve a couple of beefy orderlys and potentially a sedative as well. Powers of arrest are there to be used by the police for criminal matters. It's not a crime to be insane, although insane people do commit crimes from time to time, of which a vanishing minority are serious (eg 50 murders a year in the UK committed by mental health service users out of a total of 700+ murders).
Our only alternative to arresting mentally ill people is to let them run free?!? Why yes, you're exactly right if you ignore the existence of all mental health care, including but not limited to primary care, community care, secondary and tertiary care (medium security, high security, forensic etc), plus various therapeutic modalities eg pharmacotherapy, psychiatry, expressive therapies (art therapy, music therapy) etc etc.
It sometimes pays to think before you type, y'know.
Well, they're free to ask the questions, and if they get no response, or the response is unsatisfactory, they can take their business elsewhere. Or lobby for legislation to make disclosure mandatory.
I'm all too aware of that, but you can either retreat behind the police and live in an authoritarian state, or have the balls to stand up to bad behaviour. I prefer the latter, and wish more people did too.
I prefer the good old days. If he pisses others off enough that they decide to chuck him out, or throw rotten tomatoes at him, all well and good -- and certainly better than involving the police.
While we're at it, I'm not sure why you think it's helpful to arrest mentally ill people.
As the other poster pointed out, you appear to confuse "irritating" with "illegal". Of course it's rude not to allow other people the chance to question a politician, but it's ridiculous for it to be an arrestable offence.
I'm sure there are specific instances where that might be not appropriate, but it strikes me as a pretty good rule of thumb, yes. Can you suggest a general objection?
I'm sorry, but I don't follow the link. Just because someone's obnoxious and won't sit down and shut up when they're asked to, how is that any business of the state? It's not like he's endangering anyone's safety.
He didn't force them to pull him from the microphone. There was no need for the police to be involved at all. Time was, when people behaved in an unacceptable but not criminal manner, old-fashioned techniques like social opprobrium were brought to bear, rather than police officers and tasers. You know, like the crowd yelling at him to sit down and shut up, or Mr Kerry saying "you've had your say, let's let someone else have the same".
'There is no need to "regulate" [industry] per se so long imported products are inspected for safety and the information is passed on to consumers, the market will take care of the problem itself. Would you as a parent allow your child to touch any of those toys on the recal list with a ten foot pole? I think not and so those companies either clean up their act or go out of business. Companies pay attention when sales drop from millions of dollars to zero in the space of a day.'
Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? If safety inspections were enough to guarantee adequate quality of products, there would have been no need for a toy recall. Markets work on the basis of adequate, *timely* information. If you don't know in advance that the toy has got lead in it, then you can't choose not to buy it on that basis. The toy manufacturer may suffer loss of future sales, but that hasn't prevented the lead getting in the paint and potentially causing neurological damage in the first place, it's only lessened the likelihood of future problems.
I can't decide if you're being disingenuous or are just dumb.
1) C02 is a pollutant that causes an entirely different type of problem from heavy metals etc. The problem is different and has a longer timespan from cause to effect and is, of course, much more serious than other types of pollution. Go have the argument about whether climate change exists somewhere else.
2) Large chunks of developing world pollution and other environmental degradation, not to mention child and adult serfdom and slavery, exists because local companies are providing or finishing goods for US consumers at the lowest possible price. That's true in China (eg toys, computers, clothes), India (eg diamonds), Indonesia (eg palm oil), and Nigeria (eg oil).
There's another way of looking at this, though. We've all heard experts droning on interminably about the minutiae of their field of knowledge when called to discuss a news story. Experts are frequently unable to see the wood for the trees, and insist that you can only understand in issue if you have comprehensive knowledge of every last nuance. This is just as unhelpful to the interested lay reader as a journalist's story which, when simplifying, gets important facts wrong.
I think we should be clear about these things: "And any Human (whether Muslim or not) who kills another Human (unjustly), then Qur'an states that it's like he has killed all of mankind in the sight of God!" -- the Qu'ran is just quoting the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5: "For this reason, man [i.e. the first human being] was created alone to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as though he had destroyed an entire universe, and whoever saves a single life is as if he had saved an entire universe." (Lefikach nivrah adam yekhidi l'lamed'cha shehkol hame'aved nefesh ekhad ma'alah alav hikhtov c'ilu i'vad olam maleh...)
There are translations that attempt to get closer to the meaning of the original language. One of the best is by Everett Fox (it covers the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch or Chumash). It helps to convey the very remote nature of the people who wrote these books.
Funny you should say what you say about praying in an article referencing Israeli airline security -- El Al flights frequently have large groups of religious Jews praying at intervals throughout the flight.
As for the argument about preferring 1000 false positives to 1 false negative, that's all very well, but there's clearly a point at which the false positive rate becomes unsustainable and it stops being worth anyone's while to fly. This is exacerbated given the known issues in maintaining a clean no-fly / added-precautions list -- if all the false positives get added to this list, which seems quite possible on past form, you'll rapidly exhaust resources
And as you'd still have to explain the origin of the designer (where did God spring from?), you've not actually explained the origins of life by positing the existence of a designer.
1) Well, the people telling us to believe in global warming broadly = substantially all the world's scientists whose work covers climate change (ie atmosphere science rather than cellular biology). The people telling us not to believe amount to some mavericks, Michael Crichton, various right-wing politicians and some multi-billion dollar organisations who stand to face economic ruin if people start relying on less carbon-intensive energy sources.
2) You don't need perfectly corroborating data, you just need good data. And you don't need to actually see the data, if you are happy with the authority of those telling you about it. If a neurologist tells you that the evidence shows tPA is helpful for ischaemic strokes but not haemorraghic strokes, you'd be a bit fucking odd to doubt them and demand to see the raw data from the trials, especially when there's an absolutely plausible physical mechanism.
3) Well, it's true that some scientists may gain additional grants and even scientific prizes if their contributions to climate science are substantial. And I suppose Greenpeace may get some more members. But, come on, who are you trying to kid? Exxon's economic interest in a particular outcome is just a teeny bit larger, after all.
4) Bono may be a twat and a hypocrite. Al Gore may be a hypocrite. But they aren't sources, merely echoes of sources. The sources are the scientists who do the work.
Oh bollocks. Yes, he's putting pre-conditions on skepticism, but they're perfectly reasonable pre-conditions. Are you honestly saying that provenance makes no difference, and that a true skeptic listens to all sources of data equally carefully? Does that mean that you'll give equal weight to the thoughts of a paranoid schizophrenic in the diary they keep in their secure mental health insitution and the peer-reviewed conclusions of a Nobel Laureate reported in Nature?
I contend that you would have accepted the GP's pre-conditions if they had been suggested for any other realm of science (quantum mechanics; radiology; the behaviour of liquids under high pressure, to pick three random examples), and that the only reason you didn't accept them here was because you're all-too-aware that taking climate change science seriously could actually mean (horrors) that you suffer some personal discomfort. Well, time to take your head out of the sand (or your fat ass), because you WILL NOT avoid the discomfort. If it doesn't come now through the economic sacrifices of contraction and convergence, it will come later through the impact of substantially damaged ecosystems unable to support large human populations. It's happened to human civilisations before (eg Maya, Greenland Norse, Easter Islanders etc etc) and it's both pompous and idiotic to think that our problems may not be as severe as theirs.