There aren't that many scientists in any particular field. There are only small communities of people with personal, hands-on, in-depth work on the raw data indicating that the Cosmic Microwave Background exists, or that atoms have nuclei made of protons and neutrons, or that portions of general relativity hold up in the lab. All scientists "piling on" to every single aspect of modern science are "just laymen" with regard to the bulk of human knowledge outside a very specific sub-field that they personally work on
Large parts of science (physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics) are easily reproducible, there are numerous independent sources of raw data, and the data analysis is simple enough that any scientist can do it and do it correctly. In high school and college courses, I could verify for myself that quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution, and many other results work as advertised; I didn't have to believe or trust anybody, specialist or otherwise. None of that is true for climate science.
If not, why are your reasons different for denying plausibility to the community of climate scientists
Skepticism is not the same as "denying plausibility". Many things are plausible but nevertheless false.
Given that, unlike much of the rest of science, I can't independently verify climate science results, I'm much more skeptical of those results.
The judge disagrees that there is a distinction. Since the dozens of temperature reconstructions using different methods and different proxies all come up with the same answer it will be difficult to understand how Mann's work could be considered wrong, let alone fraudulent.
Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong. That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data, even if his results turned out to be correct later.
In response to someone accusing us small government types of hypocrisy, I said:
And you're right: there is very little the federal government spends money on that benefits me or most other people, therefore we want the entire federal government to be smaller.
I stand by it. It's a statement about spending, not civil rights legislation, today or in the past. It's not a statement about federal research funding, which is a drop in the bucket. Nothing you have said has any bearing on my point.
"An October 2010 Washington Post canvass of 647 local Tea Party organizers asked "which national figure best represents your groups?" and got the following responses: no one 34%, Sarah Palin 14%, Glenn Beck 7%, Jim DeMint 6%, Ron Paul 6%, Michele Bachmann 4%.[60]"
Ergo, the largest part of Tea Party supporters do not associate with any political figure, which is what I was saying. (In 2010, not even Sarah Palin was a politician anymore.) I.e., you proved my point.
Could you be any less specific and answer, or rather not answer, any more generally?
I accused you of being a partisan, and by repeating the standard caricature of libertarians by Democrats and US liberals, you proved it.
You don't like what I say and therefore I'm wrong is not a very convincing argument.
You're a partisan, not anybody interested in a debate.
So if I mention the fact that the Federal government (which supposedly never did anything good for anyone) ended state and local government and private libertarian enterprise run aparthied in the south as an major issue where the Federal government helped people, how is that race baiting?
Because it is irrelevant to what we are discussing:
When people talk about "smaller government", they mean "smaller federal government". And you're right: there is very little the federal government spends money on that benefits me or most other people, therefore we want the entire federal government to be smaller.
WTF does ending did civil rights legislation decades ago have to do with excessive spending today?
As far as your criticisms of the federal government are concerned. A lot of them are apt. I don't think deregulating private interests will solve anything though.
See, you're doing it again. We aren't talking about "deregulating private interests", we are talking about reducing the size of the federal government. Does reducing agricultural subsidies, reducing the size of the military, or cutting food stamp programs involve "deregulating" anything? No.
Getting the money out of politics through campaign finance reform would IMHO.
That hasn't worked anywhere else in the world.
But you're textbook Democrat: instead of having substantive political discussions, you repeat talking points and when all else fails drag irrelevant racial issues into it.
Either you have to admit that you are against these things or you have to concede that the Federal government has done a fair amount of good for "most people".
That's not what we are debating. This is what I wrote:
And you're right: there is very little the federal government spends money on that benefits me or most other people, therefore we want the entire federal government to be smaller.
Notice that refers to the present time and spending, not something that has happened decades ago, or how much good the federal government does or doesn't do.
You keep dragging irrelevant racial issues into this, and it's offensive. Stop it.
And they are one of the most virulent infections in American cities today. It's not surprising at all that normal people have had enough of these hipsters.
The irony here is that it is the hipsters in San Francisco who are protesting. The commuters in these buses are by and large simply Silicon Valley engineers.
The thing is that they were a class of their own. No simple label describes them adequately and "fascist" does not do the trick either.
Consider an economic position that is both anti-communist and anti-capitalist. A position rooted in support of private property but opposed to big international finance, the free flow of money, and the power of large corporations. An economic position that advocates strong regulation of corporations in order to make sure that they operate in the public interest, and implements changes to laws in order to favor "productive labor" over investments and "capitalists".
Does that sound like some economic positions from modern American political discourse? That was, in fact, the Nazi economic position.
The Nazis were not socialists, they were anti-capitalist. And their anti-capitalist message was pretty close to the anti-capitalist message of the American left (which, incidentally, also is not socialist).
The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences.[156] Nazi propaganda posters in working class districts emphasised anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."[163]
Strike the "Jewish influences" and you get political and economic views that closely match those of Occupy and many progressives.
They'll also use all kinds of logic-defying arguments, such as linking progressives to the Nazis, when in fact the Nazis were a RIGHT-WING dictatorship who hated the communists, unions, and pretty much everything the right wing otherwise correctly or not links progressives
The Nazis were both strongly anti-communist and strongly anti-capitalist. Their views on economics were supposed to represent a "third position": they advocated and implemented heavily regulated private ownership under state control, where the purpose of state control was to ensure that productive members of society would benefit from profits (as opposed to capitalists and investors), and that corporations acted in the public interest. As you can see, there is, in fact, a significant overlap with what passes for "progressivism" in the US, which simultaneously is anti-capitalist and refused to identify as socialist.
They believed in socialism all right--the kind of socialism where large corporations get the welfare and the people get screwed. Pretty much like what we have now
Yes, we do, in significant part to the bailouts, stimulus packages, subsidies, mortgage policies, and health care reformed... advocated and implemented by people who call themselves progressives.
There may be anti tea-party republicans but there are surely very few, if any, anti-republican tea-partiers.
You claimed that the Tea Party is largely identical to the Republican party, and that's bullshit. Tea Party views represent a minority of the Republican party. A large part of Tea Party supporters are politically independent.
Incidentally I am not 'blindly partisan', as you falsely assume.... I don't like libertarians either, for that matter, as their party stances lead to an impoverished low class, no middle class and the end of civilization as we know it today.
I assume nothing. You just told us everything we need to know about your political views in your last sentence.
If you think there is something wrong with historically unprecedented income and wealth inequality, if you fear for the future of democracy when 85 individuals control more wealth than 3.5 billion people [latimes.com],
You are one of that select group of people who control more wealth than 3 billion people, because half the world has no wealth at all. Don't you feel evil yet?
And do you know how that distribution has been historically? Of course not.
If you're doing anything tech related in the US, there's a good chance that your income is likely also in the top 1-5% of the world, you evil one-percenter!
A few individuals have vandalized buses, therefore an entire subject is off limits.
What do the wealth of the 85 richest persons have to do with how Silicon Valley engineers commute?
No further discussion necessary.
Well, obviously not with you! You have already made up your mind and won't let facts get in the way of your ideology or your bigotry.
you obviously have never taken up the sport, or you would soon see how it disciplines and trains the mind to meet everything else in life with more and better discrimination
I played chess in high school, and reasonably well, mostly because I believed such crap. I play Go now, because I think it's a more interesting game. I still don't kid myself about either game having any other benefit than enjoyment.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1750 in his article, The Morals of Chess
Oh, well, that settles it! Throw decades of psychological research out the window because Franklin stated an uninformed opinion in 1750.
The tea party is full of rebadged republicans looking for a new angle to come from - marketing, in other words and any damage to it's reputation has been done by it's own members.
And that's bad... how? The Republicans are a mix of Christian conservatives, libertarians, and other groups. Some of those want to distinguish themselves from the rest of the party.
To say that republican politicians consider the tea party to be a threat as they are very much the same people.
Bullshit. There are Tea Party Republicans and anti-Tea Party Republicans. You just refuse to make a distinction because you're blindly partisan.
Not that I would put it past the NRC to attempt to redefine the meaning of the word "nuclear", but you're misreading that. It says: "byproduct material" is "nuclear material (other than special nuclear material) that is produced or made radioactive in a nuclear reactor". It doesn't say "radioactive material... produced".
No matter what NRC pages say, the fact remains, the term "nuclear" does not refer to all radioactive materials:
By the way, ending Jim Crow laws the way the federal government did it ended up being a Pyrrhic victory, given how poorly African Americans are doing in the South.
I don't want to tell you what kinds of civil rights protection your community should or shouldn't get. By I did not and do not want federal civil rights legislation or federal hate crime legislation protecting me: I think it's not just useless and demeaning, it's harmful.
Your original claim was that very little of what the federal government does benefits "you or most people". That is the claim that I disputed. I believe that it is utterly false
We're talking about the size of the federal government in monetary terms. Only a tiny fraction of the federal budget goes to any of the issues you list. And even for those issues, in many cases, it is questionable whether seemingly positive outcomes of federal spending are actually positive outcomes, since it doesn't count the opportunity costs. The Apollo program and the railway system almost certainly were huge net losses and have held back development by decades. And a large part of our social problems are due to the government providing incentives for making choices that lead people into poverty.
I'm not sure how this is race baiting. Perhaps you could clarify.
Race baiting in contemporary political discourse also means that you use irrelevant racial issues to advance a political agenda. For example, the persistent claims by Democrats linking criticism of Obama to racism are race baiting. It's offensive. Civil rights enforcement has next to nothing to do with the size of the federal government, other than that it is one excuse progressives use to justify pork spending in unrelated areas, so you had no cause or justification for bringing it up in this context.
Do I agree with you that there is corruption in the government and it is a real problem (especially with regards to pork in various agencies spending)?
What you fail to grasp is that corruption is an intrinsic problem of government: the more government you have, the more pork spending, rent seeking, lobbying, and loss of civil liberties you get. It's not an ideological issue, it's simple economics: the more money the federal government hands out, the more return on investment companies get for spending money on corrupting the process. And the bigger you make federal agencies, the more need they have to create problems that justify their continued existence. Each of these problems aren't due to bad people in government, and you can't fix them by electing better people or choosing better bureaucrats, they are unavoidable and they exist everywhere around the world.
Note that state and local governments have far fewer of these problems because if they screw up, people simply move away. That's why many people consider subsidiarity an important principle of government.
Obama is a Nobel peace prize winning, Harvard educated constitutional scholar, and a minority member. He ran on a platform of restoring civil liberties, ending targeted killing, restore the privacy of American citizens, ending war mongering, and reducing government handouts. He has done pretty much exactly the opposite. If that kind of candidate cannot keep his promises, where are better, less corrupt politicians supposed to come from?
Those aren't "nuclear materials"; nuclear materials are materials related to atomic weapons.
All they did was lose a piece of "radioactive material". Dangerous, to be sure, but no more so than many industrial chemicals. There is no reason for the government to track radioactive materials.
Referring to radioactive materials as nuclear materials is scare mongering and FUD. Shame on you.
Chess is a very specialized skill, unrelated to pretty much everything that matters in life. Yeah, it's not surprising that an expert level chess player can win against a business tycoon. He'd probably also win against a Nobel prize winner or mathematician.
By whose definition? A free market is a market in which people have free choice about how they buy and sell goods and services. Nowhere does that require that the participants in that market can't talk to each other or even make agreements between them. Most of these arrangements are, in fact, self-defeating, and most of them are rooted in government-created barriers to entry.
When you think of a model of the "free market", think of hundreds or thousands of small merchants gathered in a town square hawking their goods, with many of them selling similar items.
And if a group of those merchants decides to try some price fixing, they are going to discover quickly that others are going to find it profitable to defect the arrangement and take their business.
Collusion among market participants can be a problem in some situations, but most of the time, it is simply irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Large parts of science (physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics) are easily reproducible, there are numerous independent sources of raw data, and the data analysis is simple enough that any scientist can do it and do it correctly. In high school and college courses, I could verify for myself that quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution, and many other results work as advertised; I didn't have to believe or trust anybody, specialist or otherwise. None of that is true for climate science.
Skepticism is not the same as "denying plausibility". Many things are plausible but nevertheless false.
Given that, unlike much of the rest of science, I can't independently verify climate science results, I'm much more skeptical of those results.
Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong. That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data, even if his results turned out to be correct later.
In response to someone accusing us small government types of hypocrisy, I said:
I stand by it. It's a statement about spending, not civil rights legislation, today or in the past. It's not a statement about federal research funding, which is a drop in the bucket. Nothing you have said has any bearing on my point.
Ergo, the largest part of Tea Party supporters do not associate with any political figure, which is what I was saying. (In 2010, not even Sarah Palin was a politician anymore.) I.e., you proved my point.
I accused you of being a partisan, and by repeating the standard caricature of libertarians by Democrats and US liberals, you proved it.
You're a partisan, not anybody interested in a debate.
Because it is irrelevant to what we are discussing:
WTF does ending did civil rights legislation decades ago have to do with excessive spending today?
See, you're doing it again. We aren't talking about "deregulating private interests", we are talking about reducing the size of the federal government. Does reducing agricultural subsidies, reducing the size of the military, or cutting food stamp programs involve "deregulating" anything? No.
That hasn't worked anywhere else in the world.
But you're textbook Democrat: instead of having substantive political discussions, you repeat talking points and when all else fails drag irrelevant racial issues into it.
Look at the literature. Here is a start:
http://scholar.google.de/schol...
Obviously. And I am pointing out that the poster is also a narrow-minded, ignorant bigot.
That's not what we are debating. This is what I wrote:
Notice that refers to the present time and spending, not something that has happened decades ago, or how much good the federal government does or doesn't do.
You keep dragging irrelevant racial issues into this, and it's offensive. Stop it.
The irony here is that it is the hipsters in San Francisco who are protesting. The commuters in these buses are by and large simply Silicon Valley engineers.
Consider an economic position that is both anti-communist and anti-capitalist. A position rooted in support of private property but opposed to big international finance, the free flow of money, and the power of large corporations. An economic position that advocates strong regulation of corporations in order to make sure that they operate in the public interest, and implements changes to laws in order to favor "productive labor" over investments and "capitalists".
Does that sound like some economic positions from modern American political discourse? That was, in fact, the Nazi economic position.
The Nazis were not socialists, they were anti-capitalist. And their anti-capitalist message was pretty close to the anti-capitalist message of the American left (which, incidentally, also is not socialist).
Here is the Nazi view of capitalism:
Strike the "Jewish influences" and you get political and economic views that closely match those of Occupy and many progressives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
The Nazis were both strongly anti-communist and strongly anti-capitalist. Their views on economics were supposed to represent a "third position": they advocated and implemented heavily regulated private ownership under state control, where the purpose of state control was to ensure that productive members of society would benefit from profits (as opposed to capitalists and investors), and that corporations acted in the public interest. As you can see, there is, in fact, a significant overlap with what passes for "progressivism" in the US, which simultaneously is anti-capitalist and refused to identify as socialist.
Yes, we do, in significant part to the bailouts, stimulus packages, subsidies, mortgage policies, and health care reformed... advocated and implemented by people who call themselves progressives.
You claimed that the Tea Party is largely identical to the Republican party, and that's bullshit. Tea Party views represent a minority of the Republican party. A large part of Tea Party supporters are politically independent.
I assume nothing. You just told us everything we need to know about your political views in your last sentence.
So working as an engineer for Apple, Google, Facebook, and the like now makes you a member of a "corrupt overclass"?
You need a reality check.
You are one of that select group of people who control more wealth than 3 billion people, because half the world has no wealth at all. Don't you feel evil yet?
And do you know how that distribution has been historically? Of course not.
If you're doing anything tech related in the US, there's a good chance that your income is likely also in the top 1-5% of the world, you evil one-percenter!
What do the wealth of the 85 richest persons have to do with how Silicon Valley engineers commute?
Well, obviously not with you! You have already made up your mind and won't let facts get in the way of your ideology or your bigotry.
I played chess in high school, and reasonably well, mostly because I believed such crap. I play Go now, because I think it's a more interesting game. I still don't kid myself about either game having any other benefit than enjoyment.
Oh, well, that settles it! Throw decades of psychological research out the window because Franklin stated an uninformed opinion in 1750.
And that's bad... how? The Republicans are a mix of Christian conservatives, libertarians, and other groups. Some of those want to distinguish themselves from the rest of the party.
Bullshit. There are Tea Party Republicans and anti-Tea Party Republicans. You just refuse to make a distinction because you're blindly partisan.
Incidentally, Cobalt-60 is often produced without a nuclear reactor.
Not that I would put it past the NRC to attempt to redefine the meaning of the word "nuclear", but you're misreading that. It says: "byproduct material" is "nuclear material (other than special nuclear material) that is produced or made radioactive in a nuclear reactor". It doesn't say "radioactive material ... produced".
No matter what NRC pages say, the fact remains, the term "nuclear" does not refer to all radioactive materials:
http://dictionary.reference.co...
By the way, ending Jim Crow laws the way the federal government did it ended up being a Pyrrhic victory, given how poorly African Americans are doing in the South.
I don't want to tell you what kinds of civil rights protection your community should or shouldn't get. By I did not and do not want federal civil rights legislation or federal hate crime legislation protecting me: I think it's not just useless and demeaning, it's harmful.
We're talking about the size of the federal government in monetary terms. Only a tiny fraction of the federal budget goes to any of the issues you list. And even for those issues, in many cases, it is questionable whether seemingly positive outcomes of federal spending are actually positive outcomes, since it doesn't count the opportunity costs. The Apollo program and the railway system almost certainly were huge net losses and have held back development by decades. And a large part of our social problems are due to the government providing incentives for making choices that lead people into poverty.
Race baiting in contemporary political discourse also means that you use irrelevant racial issues to advance a political agenda. For example, the persistent claims by Democrats linking criticism of Obama to racism are race baiting. It's offensive. Civil rights enforcement has next to nothing to do with the size of the federal government, other than that it is one excuse progressives use to justify pork spending in unrelated areas, so you had no cause or justification for bringing it up in this context.
What you fail to grasp is that corruption is an intrinsic problem of government: the more government you have, the more pork spending, rent seeking, lobbying, and loss of civil liberties you get. It's not an ideological issue, it's simple economics: the more money the federal government hands out, the more return on investment companies get for spending money on corrupting the process. And the bigger you make federal agencies, the more need they have to create problems that justify their continued existence. Each of these problems aren't due to bad people in government, and you can't fix them by electing better people or choosing better bureaucrats, they are unavoidable and they exist everywhere around the world.
Note that state and local governments have far fewer of these problems because if they screw up, people simply move away. That's why many people consider subsidiarity an important principle of government.
Obama is a Nobel peace prize winning, Harvard educated constitutional scholar, and a minority member. He ran on a platform of restoring civil liberties, ending targeted killing, restore the privacy of American citizens, ending war mongering, and reducing government handouts. He has done pretty much exactly the opposite. If that kind of candidate cannot keep his promises, where are better, less corrupt politicians supposed to come from?
Those aren't "nuclear materials"; nuclear materials are materials related to atomic weapons.
All they did was lose a piece of "radioactive material". Dangerous, to be sure, but no more so than many industrial chemicals. There is no reason for the government to track radioactive materials.
Referring to radioactive materials as nuclear materials is scare mongering and FUD. Shame on you.
Chess is a very specialized skill, unrelated to pretty much everything that matters in life. Yeah, it's not surprising that an expert level chess player can win against a business tycoon. He'd probably also win against a Nobel prize winner or mathematician.
By whose definition? A free market is a market in which people have free choice about how they buy and sell goods and services. Nowhere does that require that the participants in that market can't talk to each other or even make agreements between them. Most of these arrangements are, in fact, self-defeating, and most of them are rooted in government-created barriers to entry.
And if a group of those merchants decides to try some price fixing, they are going to discover quickly that others are going to find it profitable to defect the arrangement and take their business.
Collusion among market participants can be a problem in some situations, but most of the time, it is simply irrelevant.